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FAQ: If we’re “Fencers”, why do we use Knives and Blunt Weapons?
This is because the term “Fencer” is somewhat of a misnomer. When the names for the various melee professions were being thought up for SWG only one was fully detailed in the Star Wars storyline, and that the Teras Kasi.
The developers knew that they wanted all Elite melee professions to expand out from a Basic melee profession, which they simply decided to call “Brawler.” Obviously Teras Kasi would need to spring forth from Brawler, so one of the branches in Brawler would need to address their particular form of fighting. This wasn’t difficult since the Teras Kasi fought with their bare hands (being the “Steel Hands”), so this branch of Brawler became classified as “Unarmed Specialist.”
The developers then summed up the all various other melee fighting weapons that they had observed or seen detailed in Star Wars, and divided them up as best they could based upon certain commonalities. The only real commonalities were that some weapons only required one hand to use, some required two hands but only had a single attack point, and some required two hands and had two attack points. Based on this the names for these Brawler branches were fairly simple to come up with: “One-handed Specialist”, “Two-handed Specialist”, and “Polearm Specialist.”
The next step wasn’t as cut and dry. The Teras Kasi already had a name. However, there were no such grounds for providing advanced names for the other 3 professions. They sat down, did some quick brainstorming of settled upon the generic names of “Fencer” for the one-handed weaponry, “Swordsman” for the two-handed weaponry, and “Pikeman” for the polearms. No, they weren’t the most accurate of names, but they did express the basic concepts behind each classification of the Star Wars weapons they wanted to include in the game. They also knew that most of the players that would be joining SWG that would be attracted to the non-Teras Kasi melee professions would be coming from fantasy MMORPGs. They wanted to use names that these players could identify with so they felt a little more at home… even if it wasn’t exactly what they thought it would be.
Therefore, the name “Fencer” wasn’t chosen first… and then given a bunch of unrelated weapons. They already had a bunch of weapons pre-existing in the Star Wars universe, with only one common element… that they were used in one hand. “Fencer” was just the closest name they could come up with. To my knowledge, there just aren’t that terribly many “real/authentic fencer weapons” in the Star Wars stories. Although, there are one or two we don’t currently have that I wouldn't mind seeing.
Personally, I think that some of the intermediate titles in the Fencer tree might have been a better final name. For example, perhaps “Duelist” might have been better than “Fencer”. I’m sure many of you could have found more accurate names for “A person that specializes in the use of a bunch of unrelated one-handed weapons found in the Star Wars universe.” Another way this might have been prevented is if all the bladed weapons were included under one profession, and all the blunts under another. It might have been easier to come up with more deserving names.
Additional Note: The Developers are aware that we want to have more weapons than we currently do. They are also aware that most of us want more “sword-like” weapons. They know we would like a craftable version of the Rantok. They have been told we want new (better) weapons with higher levels of certification. They are even aware of the… er… “more unusual” weapon requests some of you PM to me. They also realize we only have one weapon with any AP on it, and that it’s only AP1. So far their response has been that they like the idea of producing more weapons for us, but they wish to address a few other more critical issues first. One of the issues being that the current database is already bulging at the seams, and cannot handle even more weapons in the system. Hopefully, this and other issues will be handled in a timely manner and we can wield some cool new weapons soon.
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