Yup, it's an inconvience. That's something they'll have to live with being they need weapons to be a knight. Note that it is now LESS of an inconvenience to become an effective knight (i.e., select Knighthood) rather than a mage (learning until they get blast). In other words, a knight need only select Knighthood and get weapons to be effective. A mage has to spend some time learning to get blast.

In any event, I'm wondering how novice knights fare with the new changes. They should be as effective as any other archetype now.

Less of an inconvenience, you mean?

I've been neglecting my novice knight. I think I'll dust her off now.

My experience as a Novice knight is that I was punching way better, then any forging weapon
then my battleaxe, then I gained 2-3 hits a kill, with punching like 4-5 punches on normal finks..
I dont want to even mention how many it did to take down loliprin.. or smoke mountain..

If I used two swords/clubs I also ran out of endurence _realy_ quickly, basicly had to sleep along
time after I even killed 2-3 of them..

And yeah, I havn't bashed a thing almost, I just ignored it and did alot of pilgrimage to level..
normaly it took me one health vial from bob to kill a rockeater..

And that was way to expensive for me, so I skipped it..

I did have a mage alt, and yeah.. Knights arn't tankier until later, cause mages could blast the thing
in two hits, while warrior goes 4-5 rounds versus a moderate/light monster in newton..

Can't remember how many rounds I needed for Smoke Mountain..