The First Spear

S1 · Say what nothing can stop

data: free attacks carry parry and dodge flags only; the four single-target glyphs carry dodge alone; no polearm attack carries the block flag

Every polearm hit in the game ignores shields, and no tooltip says so. Push, Pull, Leg Sweep, and Skewer can only be dodged; Spinning Attack can only be parried; nothing a polearm does can ever be blocked. This card puts one honest avoidance line on every polearm rune and free attack: "Cannot be blocked. Avoided by: dodge." The school's single most distinctive property becomes something a player can learn by reading their own hotbar.

 A piercing strike that
 ignores armor.

 Deals 74 to 96 damage.
 Bleed: 12 damage every 2 sec
 for 8 sec.
 Healing received reduced
 for 18 sec.
 Bleed and heal reduction do
 not affect Undead.
 ---------------------------
 Cannot be blocked by shields.
 Avoided by: Dodge only.
 ---------------------------
 Requires: Polearm
 Focus: 8    Cooldown: 5 sec

Seen in: Elden Ring's Impaling Thrust, where shield-piercing is a headline feature, and Ultima Online's Armor Ignore, a named and advertised special. Trihugger named "can't be blocked by shields" as the school's only benefit in July 2017, then he and Cryodacry dismissed it; no thread since has surfaced it as the anti-tank identity it is.

S2 · Every rider on the label

data: Push's 30-second dodge debuff appears nowhere in its tooltip; Skewer carries an always-on 15% heal cut; Defensive Positions' value is silently capped

Push applies a thirty-second dodge debuff its tooltip never mentions; the community wiki lists it, the game does not. Pull's text says "dodge" while the effect is damage avoidance. Skewer quietly carries a healing cut on every hit, root or no root. Defensive Positions' damage-resist value is capped by a scaling curve nobody can see, so its raw number overpromises at every level past the knee. This card puts every real rider, and the real capped value, on the label.

Seen in: the Tactics page's tooltip-honesty card, applied here to polearm-only content. The players' wiki has maintained a truer manual than the game ships for years.

S3 · Range numbers that tell the truth

data: all four polearm weapon archetypes display range strings from an older balance era, 40 to 60 percent below the live values

All four polearm weapon archetypes still display range strings from an older era of the game: the two-hander shows 2.5 where the live value is 4.0. Meanwhile the Reach innate, the entire reach fantasy, shows a percentage with no anchor. Fix both: derive the weapon's displayed range from the live value, and make Reach's tooltip say what your reach actually is right now, in meters, with the innate's share broken out.

Seen in: the 2014 to 2017 reach whiplash, first feared as overpowered kiting, later dismissed as worthless, never once understood, because nobody could see the number. A 2020 release touched only the tooltip's wording.

S5 · Name the hidden strikes

30 days live: the Vile and Supreme execute strikes logged zero casts; the trident's triple hit logged 60,351 across 14 players

Polearm weapons carry a family of distinct free-attack behaviors: the trident's triple hit, the execute strike on Vile and Supreme weapons, the Sol halberd's stat drain. Three of them have no localization rows at all, so the game literally cannot name them, and two of those logged zero casts in thirty days; the weapons that carry them are absent from play. It is hard to want a weapon whose signature the game never mentions. Add the missing strings and put each weapon's free-attack signature on its item tooltip.

Seen in: Ultima Online, where every weapon's special moves are named, listed, and browsable, and that legibility is the itemization hook. The trident itself was a telethon ask.

S6 · Pin the machine

data: the school's mechanics are one hundred percent data, thirteen specialization terms across five runes, and no school-wide test suite exists

Before any card below changes a number or a shape, pin today's behavior in a test suite: the thirteen specialization terms, the avoidance flags on every rune, Pull's point-blank damage gate, Spinning Attack's specialization-gated bleed, Leg Sweep's absent terms, the radius and target-count expressions. Every later card then lands as a deliberate diff against a pinned baseline instead of a silent drift.

Seen in: the Subterfuge school's shipped balance suite and the Tactics page's planned one; this is the pattern's third school.

S7 · Wilhelm teaches the doctrine

census: 96% of players touch the root skill; 5.7% ever take it to level 40

Wilhelm of Jaanaford, by his own reputation truly a master of the halberd, currently teaches skills and says nothing. Give him a short doctrine conversation: why nothing blocks a polearm, why you fight at the tip, how the control ladder chains from push to pull to sweep to skewer. The funnel says the school's problem starts at comprehension: nearly every character touches the root skill, and almost none learn what the school is for.

Seen in: the Tactics page's trainer teaching card; the same pattern, this school's teacher.

S8 · Leg Sweep learns the discipline

census: the smallest-learned active, 2,595 buyers, but 94% of them reach level 40, the best conversion in the school

Polearm specialization touches five of the six actives. Leg Sweep, the school's iconic control verb, the cheapest glyph in the tree, the one whose buyers commit hardest, is the one it skips entirely: not one term in its expressions reads mastery. Add the natural pair: knockdown chance and knockdown duration scale with specialization. The players who invest most in the school's signature move should be the last ones it forgets.

Seen in: every sibling active's specialization riders, and Ultima Online's Paralyzing Blow as the spear lockdown standard. In the January 2022 specialization thread, nobody, including a polearm-build poster, could name what polearm specialization does.

S9 · A knockdown that means it

30 days live: Leg Sweep 15,578 casts by 29 players; the knockdown cannot touch flying creatures and the tooltip does not say so

Three honest fixes to the school's signature control. First, Leg Sweep cannot affect flying creatures today and the tooltip does not say so; say it, until the day that changes. Second, give the sweep one clean condition worthy of its legend: against a sprinting or fast-moving target, the knockdown cannot be resisted. The sweep that catches you mid-charge is the one that puts you down. Third, knocked-down enemies should actually stop acting; players have reported for eight years that swept enemies keep striking from the flat of their backs. A multi-target variant is flagged as a balance option, not promised here.

Seen in: Bradamante's golden lance in Orlando Furioso, which unhorses any rider it touches, no contest, and Ultima Online's Dismount niche. Requested by jammaplaya (2017, the knockdown that does not interrupt) and Cryodacry (2017, multi-target).

S10 · A bleed without a toll gate

data: the bleed chance expression is twenty times mastery, a literal zero for everyone unspecialized; the self-debuff is nested inside it

Spinning Attack's tooltip promises a bleed and a defensive rider. For everyone without specialization the bleed chance is a literal zero, and the rider is nested inside the bleed, so it can never fire either. The tooltip advertises effects the majority of the school's players can never see. Convert the gate to a gradient: a modest baseline chance for everyone, multiplied by specialization, and un-nest the self-rider so it triggers on its own terms. Specialization should multiply what a skill does, not invent it.

Seen in: the Tactics page's finding that boolean specialization gates read as broken to everyone on the wrong side of them; this is the polearm instance. Cryodacry called Spinning Attack the best melee ability for crowds while its rider sat hollow for the unspecialized.

S11 · Push that keeps them on the point

30 days live: Push 13,592 casts by 38 players, the school's second-most-used glyph

Push can shove a target beyond the pusher's own melee range: the polearm politely removes its victim from its favorite place, the tip. Cap the knockback distance at the pusher's current reach, weapon range including the Reach innate, so a landed Push always leaves the target standing exactly where every polearm verb works best. The innate that lengthens your spear then also lengthens your shove.

Seen in: the spacing truth from Mordhau and Chivalry, where the spear wants you at the tip, never past it. Requested by Cryodacry, twice in one 2017 thread. Mugly Wumple's Push-into-Impale duo play survives the change; the target lands closer, not farther.

S12 · Pull finishes what it starts

30 days live: Pull is the least-cast active, 8,560 casts by 21 players, despite its bread-and-butter reputation

Pull is the longest-reaching melee opener in the game, and the pull itself tickles: its damage only fires if the target was already point-blank, the one place a Pull is pointless. Make the glyph honest and give the yank a payoff: a pulled target arrives off balance for a few seconds, briefly unable to dodge, so the glyph you land next is the reward for the fetch. The tooltip states plainly that Pull is a positioning tool with an arrival debuff, not a damage skill.

Seen in: World of Warcraft's Harpoon, the fetch that starts the kill. Requested by Cryodacry, who called Pull the school's best ability while asking why its damage never mattered; majoria70 liked Pull enough in 2014 to ask for it in another school.

S13 · A capstone within reach

census: Skewer is the least-learned active, 2,010 players ever, behind a prerequisite that demands both branches at 40

To learn Skewer, the school's finisher, you must first take both branches to level 40, because Leg Sweep demands Pull 40 and Spinning Attack 40 together. No other melee school makes its capstone a two-branch toll booth, and the census shows the tax working exactly as designed: Skewer is the least-learned active in the tree, and the players who do get there cast it constantly. Relax the gate to either branch at 40 and let players reach the finisher through the branch they actually play.

Seen in: the single-track prerequisites of every sibling weapon school. Katu skipped Skewer entirely in 2018; Cryodacry told believers to train it to 110. The believers pay the toll, everyone else walks away.

S14 · Reach worth its levels

data: Reach grows at 0.3125% per level, half the Ranged school's rate; census: Reach is the most-learned non-root skill in the tree, 6,536 buyers

The Reach innate is the reach fantasy: the weapon's base range matches a two-handed sword, and only the innate separates them. It accrues at half the rate of the Ranged school's equivalent, eighty levels for a quarter more reach, the deal players called worthless in 2017, and they were doing the math right. Two shapes, both or either: bring the per-level rate toward parity with Ranged, and give the innate a second payoff, Reach also extends Pull's grab range through the stat that today exists with no writer at all. The innate that lengthens your spear should lengthen your hook.

Seen in: the whole 2014 to 2017 arc, Sunswords' out-kiting demonstration against Cryodacry, Nikko, and Toadster's worthless verdicts; Numa's defense that medieval polearms ran five to sixteen feet is the fantasy's advocate. Bowen Bloodgood's dual-mode idea is answered instead by S20's sweet spot.

S15 · Block, reborn as the Haft Guard

data: a skill named Block has sat in the school's routing since the beginning, an identifier with no skill attached

A skill called Block has sat in the Polearms routing table for years, a ghost in the tree. Revive it as the Haft Guard: a held self-buff, take the haft in both hands and gain avoidance against melee while it is up, and Puncture can be thrown without dropping the guard, at a damage tax. The polearm becomes the weapon that jabs from behind its own shaft. This is a guard state, not a reaction window; if the game-wide reaction program ships its maneuver pool, the Haft Guard registers as the polearm entry rather than a rival mechanic.

Seen in: Elden Ring's spears, the only weapon class there that attacks while guarding, beloved and eventually taxed, and the tax is the lesson; Monster Hunter's lance wall. No player asked for this one. The code's own ghost did.

S16 · Set against the charge

census: the school's most common pairings are Tactics and Heavy Armor; the frontline audience already lives here

The oldest truth about spears: a set spear receives a charge with the horse's own momentum. Brace is a short readied state, plant your feet and level the point, and the first enemy who closes on you while braced takes heavy bonus damage and a knockdown. Hold the brace past a few seconds and you become the bridge-holder: a small aura that makes nearby attackers hesitate, dealing less to you, for as long as you stand your ground. Standing still on purpose, for the first time in the game's melee.

Seen in: the phalanx, the Swiss pike square, and the tabletop set-versus-charge rule; Zhang Fei alone at Changban Bridge and Benkei's last stand at the Koromogawa are the held-brace's card. Trihugger called the school the tank weapon tree with no practical application; this is the application.

S17 · The barbed wound

30 days live: Skewer 21,091 casts by 33 players; the delivery verb is already in hands

Myth gives the spear one property this game has never shipped: the wound that will not close. The Gae Bolg opened into thirty barbs; the only way out was to cut the flesh away. As a specialization-era upgrade, Skewer against an already-rooted or knocked-down target leaves the Barbed Wound: a bleed that cannot be cleansed, that cuts healing received while it runs, and whose early removal costs blood of its own. The school that owns control finally owns the consequence of being caught.

Seen in: the Gae Bolg of the Ulster Cycle, and Ultima Online's Mortal Strike, the no-heal window that defined spear dueling for twenty years. Bow Vale, the school's one PvP-positive voice in 2017, valued polearms precisely for the healing debuff.

S18 · First Spear

data: the only weapon school with no damage, speed, or crit-chance innate; the innate ledger has an open slot and a stated identity to fill it

The third-innate answer, and the strongest statement available that reach is territory: First Spear, a new innate. The first enemy to enter your polearm's reach every several seconds is automatically struck by the point. At low levels a graze; trained, a real hit. Your reach stops being a number and becomes a toll: the ground your spear covers is ground that costs something to cross.

Seen in: the Polearm Master and Sentinel feats of the tabletop and Baldur's Gate 3, the one mainstream implementation where a polearm controls space by rule; players describe the build as playing a tower. Requested in spirit by Cryodacry's 2017 drumbeat for a third innate and mass's new-passive proposals in the same thread.

S19 · The cast that cannot miss

data: polearm crit multiplier is half the blade schools'; the guaranteed hit is the school-flavored answer to the crit builds it cannot join

Odin's spear had one property: thrown over the enemy line, it did not miss. Gungnir's Cast: a long-cooldown hurled thrust at mid range. The spear leaves your hand, and the strike cannot miss, cannot be dodged, cannot glance, and, being a polearm, cannot be blocked. It also finally answers a ten-year-old fantasy: the spear you can actually throw, as a strike, not an ammunition system.

Seen in: Gungnir of the Prose Edda, hurled over the host to open the battle; Elder Scrolls Online's Piercing Javelin as the thrown-spear verb. Requested by Ent (2015, throwable spears) and Tsumo2 (2017, new glyphs).

S20 · Fighting at the tip

data: the school has no critical-chance source anywhere; 2017's measured gap was a 10 to 15 percent polearm crit rate against sword builds at 38 to 41

Every game that models spears physically arrives at the same truth: the spear wants you at the point. Sweet spot: polearm hits that land in the outer band of your reach, roughly the last fifth, strike true, gaining bonus critical chance, the one thing the school's innates never grant. No penalty up close; punishing players inside a melee scrum is a tax, not a skill. A small at-the-tip flourish on the hit makes the band learnable. Reach stops being a stat and becomes a place you try to stand.

Seen in: Mordhau and Chivalry's tip-range discipline, Monster Hunter's lance spacing. Bowen Bloodgood proposed dual-mode range play in 2014; Sunswords asked for a close-range penalty the same week. This is the gentler descendant of both, a carrot with no stick.

S21 · Momentum

data: the school's focus costs already ladder from 6 to 30; the sequence has a natural economy waiting for a mechanic

A spear fights in sequences: beat, thrust, sweep, finish. Momentum: each different polearm glyph you land builds a stack, capped at three, on a generous timer. Skewer and Spinning Attack consume all stacks for a scaled payoff, a longer root, a wider circle. The deck game the school never had: play your verbs in variety and the finisher remembers.

Seen in: Guild Wars 2's 2024 thief spear, lead skills that empower a finisher, the best modern spear-combo shape, and World of Warcraft's Mongoose ramp; Nioh's rhythm imported without its stances. Requested in spirit by null2 and Tsumo2's 2017 combo asks.

S22 · Combos of our own

30 days live: the school's only two combos, both borrowed through Water magic, were used by five players each

Twenty-nine combos exist in the game; polearms appear in two, and both require Water magic's Ice Fist. The school cannot combo with itself at all. Three intra-school pairings, authored in coordination with the Tactics combo program: Push and Pull make To the Point, the shove that snatches them back onto the blade. Puncture and Skewer make Impalement, both riders, extended. Leg Sweep and Spinning Attack make the Reaper's Round, the low circle that sweeps the already-fallen. The school's verbs finally speak to each other.

Seen in: Ultima Online's combinatorial move-hand, identity from combinations, never new systems. Requested by null2 (2017, "Blades also has a ton of combos") and Tsumo2 (2017), in a thread that treated polearm combos as a punchline, which was itself the finding.

S23 · The phalanx

census: the school's top pairings are Tactics, Heavy Armor, and Earth, a population that already fights in the front line

Alone, a spearman is a duelist; in a line, spears become a wall, the one truth about polearms every century of warfare agrees on. The Phalanx innate: a small bonus to damage resistance and avoidance for each nearby ally with a polearm or shield drawn, capped at three. The first group-play identity any weapon school has had. Bring spears together and the front line becomes a fact.

Seen in: the phalanx and the Swiss pike square; Mordhau's second-rank spear play is the digital version. Elder Scrolls Online's planted-spear group tool taught the lesson that a spear school can serve the group.

S24 · The vault

data: the school's actives are 1.30 percent of all skill use; a marquee verb is the recruitment poster it has never had

The most iconic spear verb in modern games is the leap. The Vault: plant the haft, swing over it, and come down point-first, a short gap-closer with an area landing. Melee players have said for years that the school with the longest reach has no way to arrive. The vault is arrival as spectacle, and the one expensive card in this catalog, priced honestly.

Seen in: FFXIV's Dragoon jump, a decade of affectionate memes and still the class everyone screenshots; World of Warcraft's Harpoon. Requested by Tsumo2 (2017), whose tongue-in-cheek pole-vaulting glyph was the ask wearing a joke, and Kpopgurl (2018) on melee's missing gap-closers; Cryodacry's rebuttal list of the game's gap-closers contained zero polearm skills.

S25 · An answer for bone

30 days live: Puncture is the school's most-cast glyph, 44,813 casts by 49 players, and both its riders are dead in every crypt

Skeletons do not bleed, correctly, since the undead-immunity fixes, which leaves the school's signature Puncture a hollow hit against a third of the game's enemies, and players have grumbled about polearms against undead for nine years. Do not reopen the immunity; convert it. Against the undead, Puncture's bleed becomes Shatter, a brittleness that increases physical damage taken, and Skewer's root becomes a pinning that does the same. The spear that cannot make bone bleed can still crack it.

Seen in: the genre's whole undead-design convention, inverted into a polearm answer, with a nod to the Lance of Longinus, the spear that wounds what cannot be wounded. Trihugger flagged the school's undead problem in 2017; the immunity masks fixed this year made the riders correctly dead and the school's answer correctly absent.

S26 · The grip decides

data: one-handed and two-handed polearms exist in every data table and play identically through every glyph; the free attacks already differ, 2 targets against 4

One-handed and two-handed polearms exist everywhere in the game's data and play identically through every glyph. Split the identity along the grip. In one hand, the spear-and-board fantasy players have asked for since 2015: the school jabs, a faster Puncture, stronger single-target riders, the mage-killer's tempo. In two, the halberdier owns the arc: a wider Spinning Attack, more free-attack targets, the crowd's answer. The split already half-exists in the free-attack data; finish the thought in the glyphs.

Seen in: Guild Wars 2's proof that one weapon hosts many identities; the jab tempo is Elder Scrolls Online's flurry, the arc is the guandao of Dynasty Warriors. Requested by Ent (2015, "one handed spear with a shield, very fast and nimble, a mage killer"); Numa fought spear-and-board on record, and Cryodacry's guide blessed shields as extremely viable.

S27 · Monsters that know the school

data: the three creature polearm attacks are byte-identical plain hits; the kobold's leg sweep does not sweep, its spinning attack does not spin

Three creature attacks are named for the school's moves, Pierce, Leg Sweep, Spinning Attack, and all three are identical plain hits. The kobold's leg sweep does not sweep; the spinning attack does not spin. Give creature polearms the real verbs, gently tuned: a knockdown that teaches you to keep your feet, an arc that teaches you to spread out. Players learn a school fastest from the receiving end, and the game's spearmen currently teach nothing.

Seen in: Monster Hunter's entire pedagogy, where the monsters demonstrate the movesets. The crowd learns to respect the arc by standing in it once.

S28 · Is unblockable on purpose?

data: no polearm attack carries the block flag; the sibling melee schools all do; nothing anywhere states it either way

The catalog's one true owner call. Every polearm hit lacks the block flag; shields are inert against the entire school. If that is doctrine, and this page argues it should be, it is the school's sharpest surviving identity, then S1 prints it on every tooltip, Wilhelm teaches it, and the sibling weapon-school pages inherit the pattern when they are written. If it is an accident, the flag lands quietly through a balance changeset and this page's identity chapter is rewritten. Either answer is fine. The unwritten middle, where the game's most distinctive weapon property is invisible and possibly unintended, is the only wrong state. Two adjacent questions park here for later coordination: whether the bypass should ever extend to magical shielding, which brushes another school's territory, and the open oddity that offhand polearm swings can be blocked, which belongs to the Tactics offhand program.

Seen in: the series' owner-desk idiom. The 2017 dismissals are what a confirmed and advertised doctrine would finally overturn.

S29 · Spears with names

data: the game's shelf already holds a Halberd of the Sun, a Darkstarr Spear, and a Silver Serpent Spear; eighty artifact weapons sit outside any progression ladder

When the new verbs exist, the artifact shelf can carry the myths themselves: a barbed spear with a chance to leave the unhealing wound, a cast-spear whose sure strike returns sooner, an ash spear that only a master's hands can use at full strength. This is a coordination card. Artifact itemization belongs to the weapons program; this page contributes the polearm-flavored signature effects those rails can carry, and nothing else. One design rule, learned from the Halberd of the Sun's hidden drain: every signature goes on the tooltip.

Seen in: the Gae Bolg, Gungnir, and Achilles' Pelian ash spear, which no other Achaean could lift; Ultima Online's artifact meta as the shelf that carried its move vocabulary into legend.

S30 · The complete spear

The kit, played as one fight: you read your weapon and it tells the truth. You fight at the tip and the tip rewards you. The first enemy to cross your ground pays the toll; the one who charges you meets the set point; the one who reaches you meets the guard. Pull fetches them off balance, the sweep puts them down and means it, and the skewer leaves the wound that will not close. Your verbs chain, your line holds, and when you need to arrive, you vault. Rank thirteen of twenty-one, fifty casters a month, a school everyone respects and nobody reads, because until now there was nothing to read. Section 4 shows the fight.