Human beings have been using things as weapons for about as long as human beings have had hands and needed to hit stuff. That’s just the simple reality. Most of those weapons are pretty straightforward, too. A big stick is useful for hitting stuff. A heavier big stick hits harder. If you replace the “stick” part with sharp metal, you have a sword. Simple as. But eventually you run out of all the obvious variants on weapons, and thus you wind up needing to get… odd.
This column is dedicated to the stranger weapons that various MMORPGs place in your hands. Some show up in several games, some only show up in a handful, but it is important to note first that we are only talking about weapons which are intended to be used to cause pain. If your character is a spellcaster and is thus casting spells to hurt things, it really doesn’t matter if your weapon is a staff or a paintbrush or an umbrella or whatever; it’s just a thing you hold before casting a spell. Don’t worry; there are still lots of options.
1. Scythes
Scythes are of a kind to chainsaws in that they win the all-time record for non-weapon that looks the most dangerous. But they’re not weapons. They are tools for harvesting crops and cutting grass. And you can tell that because the blade of a scythe does not point in anything close to a useful direction for using it as a weapon. The sharp edge is positioned so the wielder needs to pull it closer to cut things. Good for cutting plant stalks, not good for cutting anything else. I know why these things keep coming up, but they’re just not weapons. Sorry.
2. Glaives
World of Warcraft designed signature weapons for Demon Hunters, and they are incredibly stupid from a practical standpoint. I feel like they were kind of inspired by the Klingon bat’leth, which is also not a great design, but worse. Like, look at these things. Imagine that instead of a sword having one sharp blade, it’s all blade and you strap it to the back of your hand, thus basically only allowing you to spin around or run at something with it outstretched as a combat move. The only way to make it less practical is if you had one on your other hand… which is exactly what the game does. You know why these weapons aren’t real? Because they’re ridiculous.
3. Resonators
So in the abstract… sure. It makes sense that Wildstar would look for weapons for a melee healer and come up with this idea. Imagine if you could wield a pair of defibrillator pads while fighting! It’s just that then you think about it for five seconds and you realize that this isn’t actually how defibrillators work, which is why John Wick never uses them in four movies. And he kills dudes with a pencil. A pencil.
4. Guitars
It’s kind of impressive how few ridiculous weapons wind up in Skyforge’s lineup on a whole, but a guitar is a uniquely bad weapon. Like, if you’ve ever picked up a stringed instrument, you know that it looks like a nice hitting stick but it’s the equivalent of hitting someone with a pinata. It’s cool, don’t get me wrong, most of these are cool; it’s just not a practical weapon.
5. Warhorn
This is kinda an edge case, since Guild Wars 2 does not expect people to run up and smack anyone in the face with a horn. But it’s wild that this is even on the table, right? For a game that has a plethora of weapons with bespoke skills for various professions and specialties, it’s kinda bonkers to me that one of them is “and this is a horn you hold and play occasionally.” And it’s not just for spellcasters!
6. Books
You might also argue that this is an edge case because Final Fantasy XIV has books as weapons, but they’re for casters, and didn’t I say I wasn’t going to pick on that? And you’re right. I did. (Otherwise FFXIV would show up here a bunch more than it already does.) But you also use a book as a weapon in Warframe, a game in which you generally have weird-looking but at least weapon-looking armaments. Or you can just pull out a book instead of a pistol.
7. Pipe
Black Desert is another game when you would kinda expect to have more weird weapons, although its intensely stupid gender-locking does mean that it gets to reuse basically the same weapon twice if it wants to. But giving a little puff on your pipe as a secondary weapon is still pretty wild. Again, it’s cool, but the number of weapons that require a medical warning before using them is generally small. You know, aside from the usual medical professional advice. I asked my doctor about the safest way to get into a knife fight, and she just stared at me before saying that I shouldn’t be fighting with knives, I should not in fact be fighting with anyone, and being around weapons is deleterious to my health as well as that of anyone around me. But at least I wasn’t smoking.
8. Broom
Even though you can get some bizarre weapon customization going in City of Heroes, most of them still read as actual weapons. But one of your staff options is… a broom. A broom is a singularly terrible staff if you actually want to hit things because it’s got a big ol’ bristly bit on one end that’s going to slow your weapon down while actually making it hit less hard. It’s the worst of all worlds.
I realize, of course, that we are talking about a setting in which you have people made out of stone who spit fire, and so worrying about realism might seem ridiculous, but to me, that’s kind of the point. The biology of a stone person who breathes fire is so far out of the realm of understanding that trying to explain it ruins the magic. I don’t know how that works because it can’t work, and so I just suspend my disbelief. But hitting people with poles in order to hurt them is a real thing in the real world, and so you can apply real-world logic to it. Once you sever that connection, you have to wonder what else no longer holds true.
9. Gunblades
FFXIV is, frankly, lucky that it’s not some of the older games in the franchise, so it couldn’t possibly show up here with bells and dice. But even with the rules in place, it gets a bunch of entries. Which might seem odd because someone will be happy to point out that gunblades are real, which is… sort of true.
There are, in fact, guns with heavy blades mounted to them that were meant to basically act like the most jacked bayonets in history. This is true. But that is not what FFXIV’s gunblades that players wield are. Those are basically two-handed swords that have a trigger to produce a blast of energy. Go ahead and try to build one of these and see how it goes. Only don’t do that because then when you are in the ER because you built a shrapnel bomb in the shape of a sword, you will have to explain why you did that to a doctor, and it’ll be really sad.
10. Classified military documents
I don’t know who keeps using these as a weapon in War Thunder discussions, but I am begging these people to stop. Our timeline is dumb enough already.
Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at justin@massivelyop.com or eliot@massivelyop.com with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”
