Revamping melee weapons:

1. Slashing (swords, axes) and blunt weapons (maces, flails) deal about the same base damage.
2. Swords’ main advantage is that they have a high chance of inflicting bleeding. Blunt weapons have a very low bleed chance but armor reduces their damage a lot less.
3. Bleeding steadily decreases the HP of the bleeding creature. It’s debated whether this should remove a few HP per turn (which would require increasing the HP of everything by a factor of 10 or so) or whether there should be a random chance (around 10%) of losing 1 HP on a given turn. (Possibly an algorithm that makes a monster lose 1 HP on one turn in every 10 - but the exact turn of HP loss isn’t predictable. For instance, if hash(monster id + (turns / 10)) % 10 == turns % 10, lose HP due to bleeding on this turn.)
4. Certain monsters are immune to bleeding, notably undead, golems, elementals, and others that don’t have vitals of any sort. These tend to be better killed with blunt weapons.
5. Bleeding can be fixed (or at least stanched) with bandages. Cloth items can be torn up to make bandages.

Ogresmasher doesn’t need bonuses versus ogres, or confer beneficial properties. It is simply an oversized sledgehammer with such terrible crushing power that it splatters anything it’s swung at. On top of modest damage bonuses, it has chances to instakill sufficiently small monsters, and may inflict negative status effects on large monsters like stunning or slowness (or bleeding, if that is implemented). Probably better if war hammers are made into two-handed weapons.

Attempting to move healers out of the petmastering role: they now have skilled medical knowledge that enables them to hit monsters in melee with a scalpel or knife to inflict a “bleeding” status effect which will cause the monster to lose HP continuously. Any role is able to do this with a scalpel, but the effect is much more limited than it is for Healers. This means that for a Healer, combat now consists of hitting a monster to make it bleed, then disengaging and keeping away from it in the hope that it dies on its own. The Staff of Aesculapius no longer drains, instead it heals the damage it would have dealt (unless the Cyclops has it, in which case it drains life like normal.)

Additionally, the Staff of Aesculapius no longer has level-draining powers. Instead it has a drain HP attack that heals the wielder.