Spears and Reach weapons

[Silver Snow]

After having used spears for a while on Elhokar, I've come to the bitter conclusion that they're far more dangerous to the wielder than to the enemy. The AI's love of running around due to shoddy NWN pathing makes a spear wielder run halfway across the room to try and hit someone if that AI maneuvers around one of your allies. This leads to many unpreventable AoOs and the spear wielder caught very often in the middle of groups of enemies. While I've been aware of this for a while, I've tried practicing careful play and avoidance but it hasn't helped much. I don't get the same issue with weapons that are not meant for reach. It feels as if the AI gets to get the best of both worlds, as trident wielders can make you stagger run towards them and give AoOs, and yet with the spear I've never seen that happen with an enemy.
What I'm trying to get at here is that the "reach" mechanics are not terribly viable with standard NWN AI and give nearly no advantage to the wielder, imposing far more disadvantage unless you're an NPC.
I don't know if there's a fix, or if those mechanics are best simply abandoned (I don't know of too many characters that use weapons with reach). I would also not necessarily say that this is a bug, but it is an unexpected outcome.

[Ostheim]

Chiming in to support this, as it seems to only benefit enemies you fight with reach weapons rather than PCs. They seem designed to make running gung-ho into reach weapons a bad idea, which it is, but in practice they'll get maybe one AOO off if you're not careful and then get more as your combat AI jukes you into running after them as they back up to continue hitting you from reach range. This, as said, leads to a lot of unavoidable AOOs due to NWN's weirdly janky combat shuffle AI. There's no such thing as a five-foot step in NWN, and though you can probably walk into range to prevent this, there's never enough time to actually do that in the time it takes for all of this to occur.

The idea is a good one, I just don't think it works well given NWN's issues with pathfinding and how combat generally works.

[Feronius]

Perhaps making the range a little bigger would make a difference? Not a true ranged weapon, but just enough to out-range AoO's.

That way you might be able to stay out of the AoO range of your main target most of the time. And you would have a bit more time to respond to the situation or cancel/ abort your character's actions where needed, when you are being lured into another enemy's range.

Maybe even then it still won't make enough of a difference, NWN pathfinding can be painful, but it might at least be worth testing.
The idea is really cool and could lead to some truly noticeable (not just stat-wise) difference between all of NWN's melee weapons.