I think that warrior novices are absurdly underadvantaged in bashing until they gain their specialization.
Using an Igasho fresh out of newton, with 17 strength and 18 constitution, and a 107 140 155 mace, and maxed out knighthood, it takes roughly 50-60 swings to kill a turtle in balach swamp. With iron clubs it takes to the tune of 75-80. Granted with the racial bonuses and scalemail, tanking the turtles is no problem (except for the bleeding which quickly overstraps low level igasho mana recovery).

Fighting a single turtle tends to drain a full health vial at least, and a fair bit of mana to make up for clotting. If Balach is intended to be a bashing ground for those fresh out of newton, this incredible imbalance in warrior novices needs to be recognized. Perhaps the growth curve for weapon accuracy and damage needs to be decreased slightly, as taking three to eight minutes to kill a single turtle is, I believe excessive, especially considering the novice in question has the second highest possible strength for a novice, and the highest constitution.

Also in terms of economic viability, the vial of health costs 400 from Bob, or 170ish per refill, and the single turtle that it was used up fighting will drop at most 50 gold, and even then only rarely drops it.

If anyone else has thoughtful comments to make concerning this, or an idea that might help reduce this anomolous imbalance in bashing ability please let me know.

I would be fairly confident the damage of each swing is reasonable for the level of your skill... is it possibly just accuracy that needs improving? Maybe making your accuracy against mobiles twice that of your accuracy against players?

There really isn't any fair way to balance it, save for the novice knight to spend 24hours reading, interacting, and learning.

At max knighthood it takes 3 sucessful dual hits to kill a fink. Damage is a large issue to, because a guardian with 15 lessons into cosmic can kill the same fink in a single hit.

What level were you when you killed turtles? It sounds to me like you were a very low leveled novice... and aside from lowlevel knights, most classes would be instantly slain by those turtle... at least you could kill em

Are you sure about the damage being subpar? I know that warriors do a hellova lot of damage to me when they hit, much more than my nature curse does.

Warrior attacks do far more damage to players than mobiles for some reason.

And Narsrim, the Igasho I was using was level 21, with the same level mugwump, I can clear out the entirety of balach without being hit a single time, and use about the same number of vials as the Igasho used killing two turtles.

The strength of a knight's attack is based on his level of knighthood. So a novice is stuck at just below master level.

I did that too but that's a rare case because -only- Mugwumps have the eq to perfectly time such. Anyone else would get torn apart.

Turtles do 400 damage max to an unprotected person without any cutting resist, alligators do 650ish. Alternating rounds attacking shielding, any cosmic or elemental user can easily take down all of balach swamp.

Hey, I managed fine...

Though, I did trans six or so skillsets outright. Nevermind.

I don't really think the younger knights dealing less damage is too much of a problem (as I doubt it would be ridiculously small), because it is more than made up for when they are older. Also, physical attacks take into account small size, right? So they have an advantage against smaller races that magic attacks totally ignore.

I would say the only issue is in how many times you actually hit the creature. I'm not sure how the strength of the mobile affects a knight's accuracy, but maybe that could be looked at?

All he said was that Knight novices have a hard time. Its a fact.

I often suggest to novices that they wait to kill things outside of newton untill they are no longer a novice and can train thier specialization.

A novice knight with 100% adept knighthood and high damage weapons takes at least 5-6 times more blows connecting (not including the innumerable misses) to kill a fink than a guardian or mage with 15 lessons into cosmic or elementalism.

Judge for yourself whether or not this is rediculously small.

Why are they using 'high damage' weapons? They -should- be getting some cheap, massive to-hit weapons. No kidding a novice won't be able to handle a 100/140/whatever mace. Get them the shortsword already

Knights/warriors have it fine here, really. Compare to Achaea where they can't even use two weapons until they hit skilled - that's hardship.

Oh, I agree something should be done about novices from what you have said. And -maybe- about damage if it is one tenth of a magic attack. I think you need to weigh up the advantages against the disadvantages when you compare things, which is why I focused on accuracy... but *shrug*, I'm not a knight.


Is that directed to me? Or you just felt like stating the obvious?

Just noting that at Lvl 9, I found that punching was 2x as effective against finks as using 2xIron bound clubs. i.e. I would take only half the amount of damage when punching a fink to death than if I used the clubs.

It just seems a bit ridiculous to me that using two weapons were half as effective as punching. It was just frustrating as a novice, so I ended up switching to a different character.

Actually with the mace im fairly accurate, the issue is with clubs (same as shortswords) they may hit every time, but they do half the damage of maces, essentially taking a LOT longer to kill something with than maces. The maces hit, oh Id ballpark it at 70%ish of the time, at twice the damage stat of clubs, thats quite the improvement in kill speed over clubs. Accuracy for novices isnt that bad, its the damage that is truly horrendous. Accuracy only needs a slight tweak to it, while damage needs a MASSIVE increase. (at least double current damage, or triple if you want them to be on par with mages and guardians in novice bashing)

Edit: and yes, its only at about adept knighthood that weapon usage becomes better than kicking. At adept its about even with it.

So for twenty-four hours of playtime you're complaining that knights do too little damage?

Might as well ask for all melee attacks to connect with denizens, and the damage statistic be null when in combat with denizens, but unfortunately that won't happen (It'd make rapiers godly for one).

I don't know. If this really is an issue then all player-to-denizen damage ought to become uniform, despite skill rank, and skill only be taken account for when in combat with other players. (Not advocating this. Just being sleepy and saying something completely random to gauge reactions. )

I have an alt who, within about 1 minute of starting to learn, had a skill that killed in one hit things that would take minutes for a knight to kill. I wasn't even super intelligenced. I don't know what it is like at higher levels, and yes knights have some defensive advantages, but low level knights seem to get pretty hosed.