Right now combat styles don't do a whole lot, and part of that is due to to-hit. It is hard to balance to-hit for a variety of reasons. For example, if it drops too low then knights become worthless, and if it gets too high then abilities that boost it become pointless since you can't boost past 100%. There are lots more than that, but I won't bore you with the details. We're considering a change to this and are interested in your feedback, primarily from knights. The hope of this change is to make it easier to adjust combat styles into something more meaningful. It also will make things even more different than other IRE knights, and make wounding abilities more meaningful. (Note that our intent with knights was that they be more reliant on wounds than on poisons.)

Suppose that knights had a fixed accuracy rate in terms of striking the target. To-hit, then, would modify your type of blow. There currently are several stages in a knight attack. First, it determines if you hit based on your to-hit score. This would be changed to a constant percentage. Then it determines if your opponent dodged, parried, or moved away to get only a glancing blow. Right now more to-hit decreases your odds of those happening, and that would remain the same. Next, if you do hit then it does the damage to your victim's HP and his targetted body part. If he is still alive, it finally fires off a chance of a wound based on how body part damage the targetted body part has taken.

Our idea is to also change this latter part, where it fires off a chance of a wound. We're thinking that to-hit would increase the odds of this roll. But since more limb damage means more odds, the way to get that effect is to change the damage formulas (the step before the wound dice roll) so that your to-hit stat modifies your body part damage while your damage stat *only* modifies your HP damage (rather than both, as it currently does). The explanation for this is that a more accurately placed blow will do more to disrupt a body part than a haphazard extra-heavy swing. Perhaps the accurate knight is better able to strike your spleen just right to make it rupture or to strike your femur at just the right location to make it crack than the knight who just heaves with all his might, striking where ever it may land.

This means that when deciding between damage and to-hit (either with weapon stats or combat style), the high damage knight will do more HP damage and cause the limb to take greater damage, but the high to-hit knight will have woundings fire much more often. Obviously there are some open doors for adjustment. What should the fixed accuracy be set at? How much should to-hit stat modify limb damage compared to how much the damage stat currently does to emphasize wounding? But I'd rather the focus of your comments be more on the concept as a whole rather than on the finer details like that, which can be adjusted easily as deemed appropriate.

Please comment.

i like the sound of tohit, but I think strength and weapon damage should still affect deepwounds, but the to-hit to affect the actual affliction chance. A massive heavy swing is still gonna smash a leg to bits, but an accurate one can hit the bone in the right place.

That way, a knight can have another layer of combat skill in the choice of weapons, IE do I use flails or hammers, I can knock their body parts doewn with flails and then i may have to change to hammers to actually get any of the afflictions to work properly, so I can do something else apart from a damage kill

I'll make a good balance between speed accuracy and to hit that knighs have to work out. so the knight thats just insane quick and resckless wont have the same finesse as the knight who comes in with accuracy and a bit of speed, or even a damage knight who knows where to place his blows. This added to more combatstyle modifyers would make the class so much more dynamic with the "z axis" of to hit added in, so to speak. The strategies are endless and you can sort of have a speed/accuracy or speed/damage or damage/accury or a combination of all 3 knights if the knight has the right weapon and race combnos and the ability to back it up with good afflictions and fighting skill.

I love it

if we're going to look at it like that, have dex affect something too.

Because i dont see a taedae being more accurate with shortswornd than an aslaran with raps

I will be funny for about 5 minutes to have shortswords actually be a viable tool for combat.

Ill come back to this a bit later when I have time....but i like the sound of it.

I think you missed the part about balancing out to-hit and damage whereas the main goal was to make knights more dependent on wounds not afflictions.

Balance > Realism on things like this

DEX is used for defensive; more DEX makes you dodge and parry better. As for the idea to make damage still modify your limb damage and make to-hit handle the wound odds, the problem there is that the wounding odds is calculated using your damage level. Seperating the two is not really possible. And since there are minimum damage levels to get certain wounds, the person who has good to-hit and lower damage will be less able to reach the wounding levels needed to do wounds, which sort of defeats the purpose. That's why I suggested to-hit do it all for limb wounds.

Yeah, I don't think it'd be great to have say, you, come along, swing twice for 2.5k damage and get bustorgans on the first hit.

I'd just like to throw in that the wound ranges seem screwy to me. There are like 2-3 levels of wounds between 100-90% but like everything from 60-0% is critical. Shouldn't they be more divided out?

I think that were this to take effect, a lot of the knighthood affs would need to be modified to make them more viable, because currently, knighthood affs are just a distraction to keep them from sipping health, thus allowing you to kill them with damage. If youre going to do this, you will also need to update the effects of knighthood abilities.

All in all I think this is a good idea, though it doesnt matter how good you are at getting off wounds, if you stance legs, and adjust parry properly, while paying attention to rebounding, knights dont have a chance other than to massacre you with damage. No "skill" knights are currently successful. It is the ones that hit hard and fast enough to eat up the HP that rule.

I think that dex should also be made to have more effect, especially when it comes to stances and parrying. High dex races dont have the same oomph that the hard hitters have, but if you made the higher escalons of to hit & dex able to counteract the effects of parrying with feints, etc, it would make lower damage, highly skilled warriors viable. I also think that the same should apply to venom rubbing. The higher your to-hit, the more accurate your strike, the deeper the wound, the farther the weapon penetrates, the greater likelyhood of a venom entering the enemy.

Just my .02 USD.

The only problem with upgrading wound afflictions to be powerful is that you have to downgrade knight damage a lot. Currently, Murphy can actually deal wounds far faster than I can heal them by just applying health but -at the same time- do over 25-33% of my max health per combo. It isn't as if it is too much of an option to just start healing wounds with health elixir when you go down two to three rounds later with ease.

Okay so just to make sure I have this straight,

Damage Stat: Modifies Hp damage only.

To-Hit: Modifies the odds for getting a wound, limb damage, and the chance to get past dodge and parrying.

It does make sense and I would have no problems with it if it was changed, though it would compel me to change my weapons a bit. However, though I’m not sure if this is intended to fix the problems knights have right now, I can’t really see any way it would change the actual practice of fighting as a knight, except perhaps people will switch weapons mid-combat more often. Since if someone were to go all out on to-hit they would never do enough damage to prevent the person from just applying health since their HP damage will be so low (the same problem most knights have now, but it would be worse). And if someone went all out for damage, they’d barely ever get any wounds (thus making the current artified knights a lot worse). And if someone had a completely balanced weapon… well I’m assuming, but they’d probably be about the same as now except they do more low level wounds. The change would make sense from a reality point of view, but from a balance point of view it doesn’t seem like it would affect much, does it really matter if we see more severed arties and sliced forehead?

And please, just because Murphy is the loudest knight, doesn’t mean his damage is representative of the rest of the knights. What if they had made monks combo a limb 10 times before it broke just because Tranquility could snap a limb in one in Achaea, that would’ve been outrageous considering how the rest of the monks were during the last time I played (they were a PvP joke in case you were wondering).

EDIT: Sometimes I come off a tad negative but really, it makes me feel very good about Lusternia admins when they come up an idea that is not just some lame quick fix like "Up base knight damage" or something like that.

Murphy isn't the loudest Knight. Daevos and Ixion both do more damage than he does. Icarus is very close along with several others. Don't be mistaken, the freakishly high damage isn't rare - it is common place. Brood Viscanti with High magic can get like 22 strength alone..

You named 4, one of which I believe to be inactive (Ixion). I challenge you to name four more who approach that level, and this time you can't include people who have blown 1000 credits on their weapons.

I don't quite follow your logic. We should adjust combat towards unskilled Knights who are mediocre at best? I don't think so. We always need to be aware of what it going to happen on the other end of the spectrum so it isn't possible to create a character that is too powerful. Furthermore, elemental runes don't cost 1,000cr each. In fact, they don't don't 1,000cr combined. A mere 350cr per rune to change 50% of your damage to essentially unblockable and seize upon the most common elemental weaknesses available.

Furthermore, there are several knights who can deal the damage of Murphy and others although they are less skilled in general so they are not as noticed. However, two that come to my that are skilled and deal that level of damage are Marsu (now an Aquamancer but was a Knight for quite a while) and Lazul.

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And for the record, I believe Ixion is busy IRL and cannot be in Lusternia as often as before but he is not idle.

I see you cannot name 4 other people, and the people you did name did spend extra money on stat modifiers as well. You could have named Marcalo, Lazul and I believe Druthalas, and then you would have run out of people. Where are these other several people who haven't blown money on credits? 350 credits is NEVER mere, especially when the damage is only unblockable until proofs are fixed. (Are you forgetting that?) It costs 105 dollars at the 1000 credit package price just to get that single rune.

BTW the people you did name did shell out extra money to get stat/wounding runes as well.

Are you trying to tell the warriors who A) don't have time to bash up 1.5 million gold or B.) don't have the extra money to throw down for a rune don't get a chance, because we have to compare the archetype to those who have that much extra time or money?

Sounds a little fishy coming from someone who is in the guardian-like archetype who doesn't have to buy, or even have the chance to buy offensive artifacts.

I'm not going to tell you to stop arguing your points in a topic that Roark requested input from warriors. But I am going to tell you to get real.

I do disagree with Narsrim that that damage is COMMON. I haven't come across that many warriors that are ridiculous like that.

That said, it does exist, and upgrades to warriors as a whole have to take them into account, because unlike with, say, guardians, a good warrior's advantage is statistical.

What needs to happen is that Runes need to be looked at before warrior upgrades. However, I doubt that will happen. If nobody else has to buy their offensive capability, neither should warriors. The offense of the archetype needs to be taken more away from statistics.

I'm not a knight right now, though I've been one.

Frankly, I think your limb damage system is complicated to the point of not being fun or tactically viable. On other games, you land 8 slashes and it breaks. It's *always* 8, you can count it in your head, get it to 6 or 7 and start working on another limb, etc.

Here, your chance to get wounds is random and the amount of damage you do is random, and is different on EVERY opponent. Plus there are more areas to keep track of. Trying to calculate it even with automated system type stuff and status bars is a waste of time since they can heal it before a break. Fighting as a knight would be fun if it was a set number of slashes, not effected by the statistics of your target but only by your own, before you start giving wounds of a certain level, because then you could plan things.

Honestly, no offense intended, but the best word to describe the 50% chance for a venom to land is "retarded". No point in using anything but charybdon and the occasional paralyse.

You guys tried to make a completely new system, it's interesting, a good attempt. But it's nowhere near as good as what IRE originally had. Not even 1/10th as good. Just accept that you can't improve upon perfection and backtrack a bit.

Look at Terenas. He is a Merian Serenguard. He's right up there in the top 3 best Knights there are and does the least damage. It can be done. You need talent to do it, however. Don't claim you don't have a chance when in fact, you just don't have the system or personal skill to use what you have.

Furthermore, stat modifying runes mean so little when compared to elemental runes. As for 350 credits being mere, I need 300cr to get trans Influence for -1- skill that will be of use to me: charismatic aura. That's 50cr short of an elemental rune and I assure you, elemental runes > charismatic aura could hope to be. And as I said, you don't have to buy runes to be good. However, they are relatively cheap to drastically increase a knight's offense (compare them with the 3200cr you'd be spending in Achaea for that much improvement).

And if you are trying to imply you have a great grasp on combat than me, you need to get real. I may be far below the expertise of some, but last time I checked, you couldn't cure aeon.

If I could pay 350 credits to change half of my damage to something else, I'd pay it and consider it a bargain.

To get anywhere near the same increase in damage warriors get from elementals runes here, on any other mud, I'd have to spend thousands of dollars.

Saying that elemental runes aren't a bargain is just stupid.

I whole-heartedly agree.

I'm not saying that the runes aren't worth it. At this stage they most certainly are. I'm saying that to many many people they are simply unaffordable, and probably should be. Terenas either fights for a really long time, or uses moonburst.

Using the influence argument is just silly. You don't need your aura defense even remotely as much a knight needs damage modifiers, considering you can drink love without worrying except against two classes.

"And if you are trying to imply you have a great grasp on combat than me, you need to get real. I may be far below the expertise of some, but last time I checked, you couldn't cure aeon. "

What the hell are you talking about? I might have implied you don't know what you're talking about since you're not a warrior, but I never said anything like this. And I can cure aeon...