The 32.1 release notes say: “Only players without weapons can punch with their offhand.”. There’s no mention elsewhere, but I assume that that means that the Claws mutation also only works for Demonspawn using Unarmed Combat?
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Only players without weapons can punch with their offhand.
means that you no longer get an offhand punch if you are holding a something in your main hand.
It’s true that the claws mutation only effects unarmed combat. That was the case even before this change.
Oh, I see what you mean I think. Claws has a small damage boost to offhand punch too. Offhand punch did extremely little if you weren’t using UC anyway. It was removed from weapons wielders because it already did basically nothing unless you trained UC.
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/f76145dc59456266282f855b8e336355176957ea
Most people seemed to assume they already were, so there’s a strong
intuitiveness argument, and they are vanishingly rarely relevant
with weapons.
Thanks for the replies. Since posting the question I tried an experiment: I used a Demonspawn until I got the Claws mutation, then dropped my shield. In combat, the “slash” message did come up occasionally, which I assume refers to use of the offhand claw… So it seems that there is an offhand-punch effect for weapon-using Demonspawn – though doubtless only a minor one, as you suggest.