Is that limb damage is cured with health vial, not a salve with its own balance. With it being cured by health vial, we have to make knight wounding come at a slow rate for most knights. Jelaludin does 4 limb damage average per swing, which comes out to 30 connecting swings before I can get a limb to 0 and have a chance at a kill.

This just isn't fun. Monks are more fun because it's 2 combos or attack rounds before you get something done, 30 attack rounds is ridiculous. And I know it's less for knights with more strength and the other option, aslaran, has its own advantages, but being a race besides a high strength one or aslaran should be workable.

Anyways, I think Lusternia's knights should take a page from the tested and true way of how monks work. Average it out to make it take much fewer blows to reach the various wound states, a number small enough that I can count it inside of my head so that it's actually an entertaining thing to do instead of watching my status bar go from 24 to 26 and then oops, they applied health vial. It doesn't have to vary much for high strength characters but anyways, I really don't think the health vial balance system for healing wounds makes for a good game.

Now, I'm one of those 'other knights' that has a good strength, but I certainly get 'something done' before 30 attack rounds. No, you won't get a behead in two rounds, but really, no one seriously thinks it should work THAT way. You can start getting afflictions pretty fast if you aren't hitting parrying and stances.

It may be that an increase in wounding combined with a minor decrease in PVP DAMAGE ONLY would make sense. As it is, some people can do pretty crazy damage. I'm not at the Ixion or Murphy level, but I can still do 1600 in two swings at night, without geburah or fortuna helping strength. BUT, as it is, the only way you get wound damage (not wound afflictions) to stick, as slow as it can be, is by doing enough damage that people need to sip health and not apply it. If the wounding rate were increased, then the massive amounts of damage would not need to so obscene. As it is, many people die to straight damage before they need to heal wounds, and that's cool I guess for me, but seems to waste such a complicated system.

On a related note, I think that hits against more damaged areas should have a greater chance of passing along a venom. This would give even more reason for people to actually heal limb damage, instead of just hoping they don't get hit with behead or brainbash and healing damage.

I don't mean behead in two hits. It should take like 6-10, not 30ish. They could greatly increase regeneration salve balance and have it heal wounds, take out health vial healing it, and change the head damage from falling while flying to requiring 1 application instead of 2. An aslaran level strength could take 10 to behead, above that 8, high strength races six. That would be unreasonable with it taking health salve balance but not on a longer regeneration salve balance that doesn't prevent you from applying other things.

Before my really cool weapons, I could bring a limb down to 0 in 10 hits. Critical stage is at 60.

The point of having health heal the wounds is to force people to prioritize healing wounds and damage. If you put healing wounds on a different balance, you really, really hurt damage knights. And frankly, you don't really help other knights, since now they can tank your damage AND heal your wounds at the same time.

I know that's the point, but I don't think it's worked out well. I guess it just sucks to not be a high strength race or an aslaran.

Personally, Blademasters just need some worthwhile afflictions.

I had started to write a knighthood specialization for polearms.. maybe I'll finish that to post examples of what people might want.

What do you want? A killer fae knights? Knights are strength and damaged based things. Mages are magic and intellegence based things. Ofcourse a knight would be a high strength, or very fast race....

I am -sooo- going to have a faeling paladin one of these days, just for the fun of it. Of course, surge would be a necessity, as well as lowmagic so as to squeeze out every last bit of health possible.

And strangely, I'll bet it will hunt in the astral better than Eldanien.

But yeah, blademasters need stuff.

Personally, I'd like to see blademasters go faster/more afflicty than bonecrushers. That way, people can have their speed knight or their damage knight, as their personal preference lies. Just make sure they're both viable and balanced well, both between themselves and other classes. That's the trick, of course.

Break away from the other IRE models a bit and stop trying to justify what you want by saying X IRE game had it and it was cool so Lusternia should. I understand where you are coming from but the Admins really want (from what I have seen and heard) something different (and better, of course).

Heh Everyone is complaining about how knights need to be boosted, probably cos we do.. from other topics I think that main things we need are:

1) Give chervil its own balance
2) Improve blademaster afflictions
3) Lower the stunning time for bonecrushers
4) Make haymaker better
5) make afflictions afflict 75% of the time.

Anyway this is what i think.

If you increase the base venom afflict rate, what happens is, you make strength knights less viable, and start to see speed knights as having the advantage. I believe the concept in Lusternia was to get away from the speed knights, that were the only choice in other realms, making strength knights a viable choice, how it should be.

I think an increase in poison efficacy could make the ideal thing, one where both speed and strength knights are viable.

What blademasters need more than any single thing is simple. Change our afflictions so that they mess you up, and so that they're not trivial to cure.

Right now most of them don't really impair you if you don't cure them, and if you want to, they're trivial to cure. Until we address that, all the other things like chervil balance are kind of besides the point.

The only thing really lacking for blademasters is the synergy that the Bonecrusher skills have. At the moment, a Bonecrusher is a Tier 1 deck, with no real weaknesses and the ability to thwack down any other deck in the format. a Blademaster on the other hand is definitely a Tier 2 deck, for while it has a couple of good bombs and combat tricks, the deck just lacks synergy and a much needed smoothing out of the mana curve.

Someone should try a new knight strategy and meta-game against the field.

Wow, that's a great idea. No one ever thought about trying new strategies before. We've all, every one of us, just been hitting the same targets in the same places with the same weapons in the same combinations over and over and over since the game started.

Hey, guys, think we should try hitting the right arm instead of the left? All in favor say aye.

No offense but you aren't exactly anywhere near the best of Knight fighters. There certainly are strategies you could learn and in doing so be far more effective. Furthermore, those people who did think about new strategies and using various types of weapons tend to be rather effective fighters (Daevos, Valek, etc).

While that is a fair assessment of Gwylifar, that doesn't negate the point he made through exaggeration.

Here is my deck analysis for Blademaster.dec Ethelon, I hope you enjoy it.

One of the most powerful cards in this deck is Rend (just released in the latest expansion), but thats shot down by the silver bullet Chervil that every deck in the field is packing as many as they can grab hold of.

Disembowel and Behead are our biggest bombs in the deck, but the chances of drawing one in a game isn't anything you want to count on, and then there is as Terenas pointed out that nasty rebounding aura counter-tech where you get hit with your own Disembowel and Beheading.

Scalp, Arm and Leg Arteries are just plainly sub-par cards, with minimal effects on the opponent, so much so that they are only counted on by the most rogue players in the field.

SliceForehead, PierceArm, PunctureLung, WeaponParry,ShieldParry and Coule are situational, really only any use against Bonecrusher.dec or in the mirror match, and the skills are in general easily countered unless your opponent has a bad draw.

Against a deck which relies on a lot of Runners/Flyers, you have the cards OpenGut, PierceLeg, PinLeg, SliceEar, and Impale - with the exception of PinLeg and Impale, these cards seem a little bit weak though more playtesting against these decktypes before this can be confirmed.

Our best card against Munsia.dec is definitely SlitThroat, mainly for the fact it inhibits speaking.

This leaves PunctureChest, collapselungs, OpenGut, SepticWound, SeverNerve, and LegTendon for us to play with, and there may be some definite winners in this pack, though that mainly depends on what venoms are in your sideboard. It will be hard for the other sideboard cards to beat the sheer power inherent in using Charybdon and Mantakaya.

As you see, while we do have some interesting cards, the synergy between the cards themselves is somewhat lacking, giving you a somewhat tough first game until you sideboard in the appropriate venoms for the second and third game.

I personally think I'm one of the more creative knights in that I don't go for pure brute damage the majority of the time. But you have to admit BMs need some looking into. For those not familiar with knight fightings, there are two types of attacks, swings and jabs that can result in different types of afflictions. Swings will not always hit the desired limbs, but has higher chances of hitting the desired limb if you target within the area. For swings there are hacking down, hacking up, slice left/right, swipe left/right, and slash left/right, and for jab there is striking.

So hacking down at someone could hit head (more likely) or chest (less likely). Jabs will always hit the desired limbs, but you can't get swing afflictions. Swinging afflictions are much more powerful such as Behead and Disembowel whereas Jab's aren't as good, punctured chest for example. And of course there are some afflictions that can be done with swing or jab, sliced arteries for instant.

However, there is no incentives for BMs to use swings on chest, arms, or legs, which make up 5 out of 7 possible limbs to hit. All the afflictions related to chest are from jabs, so are all the ones for arms and legs. BMs need to get more afflictions that can result from swings since all the ones from jabbing are quite frankly useless, aside from Pinleg, however, contrary to what the AB BLADEMASTER PINLEG file says, it is at critical leg, not heavy.

Some suggestions I thought could be added on top of what have been suggested so far are-

1) Increased bleedings for all heavy and critical BM afflictions.

2) Slit throat- makes you unable to eat/drink, change the cure from yarrow (not sanguine like the help file says) to applying mending to head. Seriously, how do you eat something with a slit throat?

3) Sliced Arms- new critical affliction. Lets BM cuts off your arms which makes you unable to use that arm until regeneration is applied. Able to pick up arms as trophy too, just like ear and scalp! If you have both arms cut off (very rare since you'd need both arms in critical stage already) you are unable to apply any salve at all, only people that can get out of this are Celestines or Moondancers that can heal regeneration (if it worked).

4) Sliced Legs- New critical affliction. Cuts off one leg and lets you save it as a trophy as well, but more importantly this will make your opponents stumble to the ground, allowing BMs to get past parrying for the moment.