I do mine manually. Systems are great and all, allows you to focus more on offense, but I don't like having a system that can be out-maneuvered. It's not hard to pick up on parrying systems and how to get around them.

In groups, a system would be good. In 1v1 situations, I prefer manual.

I get a lot of different opinions on this. Feel free to post your reasoning on why a particular technique sucks/doesn't suck.

My first poll so I hope it doesn't blow up on me.

I managed to code a way to stance with all the stances, including left, right, vitals, middle, etc, and to split my parry automatically amongst body parts. I keep track of a series of body part hits (configurable history length) and use the last several hits to calculate where to stance or parry. I'm happy with the way it works, and that's all I really care about.

I created a weighted-average system that focuses on limiting my wounds to insure that I can heal all of what I receive in a short amount of time. Since it was developed to take into account the wounding I took as a mage, it normally works extraordinarily well now that I am a warrior.

Food for thought:

After testing, I found that the more advanced stances suck (I can fathom no juse for them).

For example, "vitals" covers various areas, but the chance it provides to dodge is actually split between each area. Thus, stance legs >>> stance lower; stance head >>> stance vitals. In the end, you are likely going to want to heavily shield one area more so than mariginally shield several areas.

To each his own. What works well for you may not work so well for someone else. That's the beauty of the system, eh?

I actually found that when I did assay as a warrior on someone marginally, minimally parrying every body part and using stance vitals, that vitals would fluctuate that parried area by 10-20% every few seconds. So theoretically, you could be parrying every body part 30% of the time during certain seconds of combat. Food for thought. I think Zarquan has his logical mind in the right place. You could always weight certain areas more than others if it starts getting brutal.

I'm rather sure Assay is just bugged and gives random numbers.

Too many bugs scuttling across this mud.

Not really, consider how much new stuff the gods put out, the constant combat balancing with constant envoy stuff, SHIP system, before achaea had it. Minor bugs in skills nobody really uses? Whateva!