Note that damage done by a sword is supposed to be half of what others do, because you hit with two swords at the same time. Also, damage goes down with the max health of your target, as does their healing. This is universal. I don't like it, but we inherited it from Achaea. So if you test damage, do it on the same exact person. Also, weapons have some randomness factor to it. If you hit someone three times with the same weapon you get three different damage amount. I did test this with someone who was complaining about this. I used his character on my development server and turned him into a Nilhilist after measuring what he did with a knighthood strike. He was able to do more damage than the cosmic fire vs. the same player. This is not to say I'm convinced it's balanced, but I think it might not be as bad as you think.

Roark, did the target have a decent amount of defs up against physical and magical for the two tests? Without armour or defs, I can easily believe that without defs they are very close. However, as there are MANY more defs against physical, I have to doubt that they are balanced. No such type of rebounding is provided for magic either..

oh lets see what defs I can think of off the top of my head.
Physical
draconis (which is VERY effective against phys damage)
armour or greatrobes
rebounding which can be triggered to be used about 90% of the time
shield stun
shield parry.. stopping here; whole combat skill
weaponparry
resilience skill
toughness

Magic defs
resistance
magic skill
(one or two I forgot probably)
........
.......proved a point I think

The thing with knights, is you have to completely overpower them at medium-end combat (people that have transed a few skills), to enable them to barely compete at high-end combat (people with most skills transed). Because there are so many strategies and skills that render a knight completely useless, they have to be upgraded in such an insane amount to be able to beat people that know what they're doing, that they will seem rediculously beastly to people that don't know what they're doing, this was, and still is, the same problem as in Achaea. Everything a knight does can be countered and nullified, but if you don't know how, you go "splat", and the people that go splat cry overpowered, thus knights get nerfed and become more and more frustrated, another consequence of that is knights being forced to spending hundreds of thousands gold and loads of credits just for equipment (armour, weapons, venoms, enchantments) that enables them to become as good as those that don't spend a single coin on equipment...i.e. the magic-using archetypes. The only way to balance knights to the other archetypes in my opinion is to overpower them completely, then emphasis on teaching people how to defend against their attacks (use of rebounding, shield, reflections, resistance skills, how to slow down knights, etc). If you make knights equal to the average joe that fights once in a while, they become worthless, as is the case in achaea now. A knight there spends 5K credits on equipment and skills, just to get obliterated in mere seconds by the first best newbie magi with virtuoso elementalism. I hope this will not become the case in Lusternia. (I'm a geomancer by the way) They're the -warrior- archetype, they're not spiritual like the guardians, or scholarly like the mages, they're -warriors-, they're sole purpose is to fight, it's all they can do with their skills, they can't freeze doors shut, or walk on water, or spy, all they can do is fight... and just for that reason, they should be much stronger in _single_ combat than the other archetypes, not much weaker. If you get a sword hacked into your neck, or a huge mace the size of your chest slammed into your head, it should hurt, and it should hurt badly, whatever your skills, resistances or whatever. There's plenty of ways to even never get hit, but when it hits, it should hurt... also, missing at all should only come into view if you're fighting someone with high combat and high dexterity, how hard can it be to hit a motionless cow? Even a child with a poking stick won't ever miss it.

Thorgal, absolutely the most astute analysis of the problem thus far, well done.

You know, one would think that getting hacked into pieces would hurt...

Agrees completely.

Yeah.. Right now I'm just praying I can cause them to bleed enough so that something happens, damage is basically a pipedream.

I think that the main advantage the warrior archetypes has is that we can use envenom.....of course with allhex that is virtually eliminated but when you combine venoms with massive bleeding damage and pretty good actual physical damage, life isn't so bad.

You seem to forget venoms only work 50% of the time.

Even less if fighting a trans resilience person.. I think venoms that go off actually land on me about 25% of the time.. So you're looking at a total of about 12.5% against trans

It works half the time because you do wounds, which give afflictions. If it worked 100% of the time then you could often times give out 4 afflictions in one round!

Like all the other archetypes! That wouldn't be fair now . I cracked up when I saw Daevos and Valek testing weapons damage yesterday, they were working on a report for You. Valek was the testing dummy, he removed all his armour, but put up all his defences. Daevos was a lich with 20 strength and a broadsword of 145 damage, and was hitting Valek for 80 damage a blow, quite funny.

I have to add, speed and accuracy seem perfectly balanced right now, it's a joy using blademastery, even if the damage is low.