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[Pan]

So I just read that lashers are actually as powerful as Jedi with lightsabers. Perfect. Any other crappy features certain weapons have that I should know about?

[Jelle]

Actually, lashes are only good against relatively small targets susceptible to pain. Against a large beast I don't think they are quite as effective.

Anyway, if you think that's a crappy feature then I hope you haven't met a forgotten beast yet that can't be fought through conventional means, since it's foe would instantly rot to death by getting near it.

[Gergination]

Warhammers or maces made from cotton-candy are about as dangerous as a feather duster right now.

I'm pretty sure that in order for lashers to be stupid dangerous they need to use Scourges since they're basically super small, super fast warhammers.

[Anathema]

Actually, lashes are only good against relatively small targets susceptible to pain.

Which notably includes Dwarves.

But to answer the OP's question.. there are a lot of oddities, like knives puncturing armor better than spears, silver making better blunt weapons than steel, mining picks supposedly beating axes/swords/any other conventional melee weapon, and so on. These are small differences though, trivial compared to weapon/armor material, craftsdwarfship, or training. Whips/scourges are the only horribly broken weapons, because they have a small contact area (correct), move very very fast (correct), and put the full size of the entire weapon into the blow (wrong!!). Nerfing the weapon size by a factor of 100 or so is an easy fix in the raws, if you get tired of watching no quality copper whips go through masterwork steel like butter and shatter bones.

[Sutremaine]

Warhammers or maces made from cotton-candy are about as dangerous as a feather duster right now.

That's not a bug.

[Anathema]

Yeah the blue metal was deliberately made extremely light, it's meant to be similar to Tolkien's mithril. It's intended that this makes it terrible for blunt weapons - more of a quirk than a bug.

[lanceleoghauni]

the reason silver makes better warhammers is because it's heavier, which is what matters, so it's also not a bug.

[Girlinhat]

Silver warhammers will make sense when we get weapon and armor damage.  A silver hammer would get in a few good hits, then be warped and twisted into being useless.  Then it would need to be re-smelted into a shiny new silver mace.  A steel mace, while not as strong, would survive endless battles.  Silver is not a strong material, it makes terrible weapons because any force exerted on it will destroy it.  But right now weapons only exert force, they do not receive recoil.

[lanceleoghauni]

Quite.

[Gergination]

I'm aware of why cotton candy blunt weapons are so terrible but it seems a bit nonsensical.

Imagine being able to swing something that is extremely hard essentially as fast as your arm can move.  Remember that kinetic energy is m(v^2) so you gain more force from an increase of velocity as opposed to an equal increase in mass.

I spose you could argue that cotton candy is SO light that you're wasting kinetic energy because the dwarf doesn't need it that light in order to swing at max speed.  Fine, throw a small core of lead in a blunt weapon.

[Quietust]

For a point of comparison, adamantine is about as light as cork.

[Girlinhat]

Coring a weapon doesn't happen (yet) and you seem to fail to grasp the concept of fast and light.  Compare a hollow alluminum baseball bat with a steel rebarb.  Now imagine that the bat is so light it floats in water without air pockets.  Candy is so light it should float, if DF respected this.  That gives it a weight comparable to balsa wood.

Adamantine has a density of .2g/cm³, while the lightest wood, which in raw terms is 200 solid density.  Featherwood has a density of 100, at the lightest material available, and Cedar at 380 is the second lightest.  According to google, balsa wood has a density of 1.6g/cm³.

For those unfamiliar, balsa wood is a common novice woodcrafter's wood, because it's so amazingly light and easily cut that you can break solid blocks with your bare hands, and it makes for easy carving.  It feels like styrofoam.  Which, according to google, heavy styrofoam weighs .2g/cm³.  This mean that adamantine would hit you as if it were aluminum-covered packing peanuts, if not weaker.

I really cannot stress enough how unbelievably light adamantine is.

[Anathema]

My point is that the game treats silver as a good hammer material just because it's heavy, disregarding silver's malleability which makes it unsuitable for weapons. Silver makes a poor weapon material in real life, but the game thinks it's great, I'd consider that a bug.

Consider on the other hand a hypothetical material harder than steel with the weight of balsa wood, i.e. Adamantine - if we could make such a material in real life, it actually would make for a great knife but a terrible hammer. In this case the game is doing a decent job of modelling how such a hypothetical material should behave in real life; I don't see that as a bug, not in the same way that ignoring some properties of silver makes it into a great weapon material.

[Girlinhat]

Again, I repeat, "weapons incur no damage".  Until you start seeing XXSilver MaceXX then it's density all the way.  Once weapons DO start to degrade, then you'll see obsidian swords and silver hammers with short life but good use.  Your a rich man's weapon, you'll see silver maces used for 1-2 battles and then discarded, while steel maces will outlive your soldiers.  At this point, dwarves who like maces will become invaluable, as they'll make the rare platinum maces that don't get damaged because they're artifacts.

Until then, silver (platinum if you can mood it) makes the best blunt weapon.

[darkflagrance]

In my experience, scourges have actually not been that effective on armored targets due to the poor edge penetration.

Still good on fleshies though.