When holding a weapon in my right hand, and a non-combat item in my left hand, the non-combat item is being used in the coup messaging.

e.g. with a whip in my right hand, and a silver mug of rum punch in my left, its the mug of rum punch that gets used to finish off the critter, although it draws messaging from the blunt weapon pool.

[Roll result: 177 (open d100: 39) Bonus: 25]
You lunge towards the Ivasian inciter, intending to finish him off!
You slam your rum punch into the back of his head with all your might!
Brain matter now decorates the walls!
A supple Ivasian inciter begins to mouth a desperate prayer, but death stifles him.
A supple Ivasian inciter loses its focused look.

Its an amusing way to punch critters, but probably not the intended messaging.

...

Trained in brawl and twc but not blunt if that's relevant to why this happens.

Messaging for using the shield in coup ought to exist, but it ought actually to be shield messaging not scimitar messaging.

Negative open rolls is the EBP equivalent. It may not annoy you as much when you see a -75 die roll as when you just see a message about EBP, but its not that different a failure rate.

I don't think its worth it mechanically, but it is a lot less costly to get the messaging than it used to be and I do use it more and have added an extra rank as a result.

You can't apply coup until the critter has been set up. EBP might be 30% on some of my targets if I open without setup when I walk in on them, but not when they are ready for coup. Crit and location randomisations are far more important at stopping my normal kill shots than EBP is. Its the balance between those and the critter still having too much blood or recovering from the stun in the lag between me issuing the coup order and the game processing it thats important. Thats shifted quite a bit in favor of coup as a result of the RT change, but not enough for me to consider it efficient.