I'd think not knowing about the "use best attack" checkbox would have turned more people off after they kept slapping people with a giant battleaxe. Lol, I tried to leave that unchecked but it was just stupid
It's fun in theory but being tied to movement instead of something else is the main issue, and it just compounds the problem of Long and Short Blade being the best weapon skills since they're well-rounded enough that landing any sort of attack will do decent damage. Spears for instance require you to move in a straight line at all times since it's impossible to Thrust if moving left-to-right, diagonally or even while standing still. It was obviously supposed to be similar to Daggerfall originally where you would attack while moving the mouse and that would influence the type of attack you did, meaning that you'd perform best while calm and level-headed and then do worse when you were panicking and just trying to use any attack to get away from something big and scary that was in your face. I wonder if it had to be changed to just clicking combined with movement direction because of the Xbox port.
Yeah short blades were kind of the best weapons, not that it mattered much because everything died pretty fast regardless. But none of that has anything to do with progression or the combat changing as you progressed further.
Things die quickly because the vanilla game is too easy, but the combat does obviously change a lot as you progress because you're not just doing more damage as a result of better gear and enchantments, but you're also hitting more often. This is a direct result of increasing your weapon skill and Agility, but also of increasing Strength, Willpower and Endurance which give you a bigger pool of Fatigue. With a bigger pool of Fatigue, you're more likely to hit since attacks are draining relatively less. Compare swinging a Battle-Axe in the early game to doing it with a Level 20 character. It's actually a huge difference. Oh, Strength also directly increases your damage output as well. Then you have all of the spell effects like Fortify Attribute, Skill, Attack and even Fortify Fatigue which make you more likely to hit things in combat.
Lol are you accusing me of not really playing morrowind or something? It's been a while, but my memory is not so bad that I think it was a deeply tactical affair.
As I pointed out, it's not supremely tactical and it doesn't have a lot of depth in the action game sense, but an understanding of the underlying formulae for all actions lets you know what's most effective and how many factors actually affect everything that you're doing. I think a lot of it also comes down to balancing issues. You could do things like casting Fortify Fatigue to make your character marginally more effective in combat, or you could just save that Magicka for blasting enemies in the face with a fireball. A high level Fortify spell that substantially affects combat for a decent amount of time costs the same amount of Magicka as a spell that does 300 damage and therefore nukes just about anything in the base game.
Once you get a feel for them, have enough skill to reliably hit and the speed to back peddle fast enough (easily acomplished by boots), spears can actually stunlock most enemies. Morrowind's combat is fine in most areas (all weapons feel different, character skill still matters, very few HP sponges) except for the fundamentals of accuracy (and AI). An OpenMW mod that made it so misses that connect still did 5-10% damage (rather than always make everything hit, which makes too much stuff pointless) would be enough to make things way better.
I finished a Spear playthrough just a week or two ago and they are definitely useful for stunlocking enemies, which actually is a diegetic reflection of their use on Vvardenfell. Spears are used to avoid diseases when fighting Blighted monsters, and since Blighted versions of creatures (and all Sixth House enemies) are so slow, you can very effectively use a Spear to kite and stunlock even really strong stuff. Highly recommended for a combined Redoran+Temple playthrough.
Games are exactly for that.
