I'm not bothered too much by the fact that they're chaotics, I just really don't like having 3 melee weapons and only 1 weapon for range and mage. Balacing the three styles within the same tier is already way too much trouble and adding varying amounts of weapons for each style only makes it more difficult. The difficulty in balacing these weapons to all be useful is something I thought would result in one or two of the melee weapons being complete garbage and boy was I might have been right.
The weapons:- Rapier - +92 attack +82 str 2.5s attack speed
- Longsword - +108 attack +92 str 3.0s attack speed
- Maul - +139 attack +123 str 3.0s attack speed
- Longsword & ddef - 128 attack +103 str 3.0 attack speed
From stats alone we can already see longsword has it rough in terms of competing with the other two melee weapons. 0.5s attack speed is a huge difference, rapier will most likely outdamage it. It's on the same speed as cmaul but even with a dragon defender the maul flat out wins in terms of stats.
Let's compare cmaul to anger battle axe since they're both 2h weapons around the same tier.
- Maul - +139 attack +123 str 3.0s attack speed
- Axe - +140 attack +95 str 3.0s attack speed
There may be a considerable strength bonus between the two, however we're not counting the axe's special effect. This gives it a +11 maxhit versus giant monsters, which is 7 higher than cmaul's maxhit. That difference is very comparable to the cmaul's effect that'll only work on slayer monsters, but the key difference between the two is that anger weapons don't require cash to repair. Cmaul is not entirely useless, but it's not entirely worth the repair cost if you're after giant monsters. So, maul doesn't seem all that useful either.
Chaotic crossbow and staff have the same stats as hcb and sol. It offers ironmen an alternative to those two items which is kind of nice actually.
Kinda get the feeling this was rushed out, but the rest of the update is alright.