ANNOUNCE NEWS #614
Date: 8/6/2006 at 20:16
From: Roark Libertas
To : Warriors
Subj: Maneuvers

A new skill is in place for warriors: maneuvers. It does not provide new
attacks or afflictions, but it should dovetail into existing skills by
giving better control over how you execute your existing attacks. Check
the AB file for full details.

EDIT: Bah, I thought it was a new skillset. Turns out it's just a single skill. Nevertheless, looks like it could be instrumental in altering warrior combat.

Maneuvers? Surely 'manoeuvres'?

Now I'm curious. Can someone post here the AB file? Or, if it's against the rules (but it's a common skill after all, in Knighthood - isn't it?), send me it in a private message?

Yes, this is the final upgrade from the warrior summit. It will most likely be a fairly hefty change to warrior combat and required a lot of tricky coding (thanks be to the Roark!). As it is a new addition that really completely revamps warrior combat, it will take some time to gauge its balance and may be tweaked in the future.

That's the final upgrade? Now I'm double curious.

Looks very interesting, the skill isn't in Knighthood but it's not that far into the specialization. The only thing I don't like is now I don't have Cleave anymore (Maneuvers bumped all the other skills up). I'm not that knowledgable about Warriors but it seems like it's going to help a lot with the randomness factor.

Syntax: MANEUVER CREATE
MANEUVER LIST
MANEUVER DROP
MANEUVER DEVELOP ACTION
MANEUVER DEVELOP WOUNDS
MANEUVER SHOW
MANEUVER PERFORM

You are now able to develop your own fighting maneuvers. You start with being able to develop a limited amount of maneuvers and gradually increase the number of maneuvers as your training increases. Each maneuver consists of two variables: the action and the wounds. The action is the attack verb (slash, smash, strike, etc.) that will be executed during the maneuver. The wounds are a list of the specific wounds you are attempting to inflict. (Please note that it does not determine if you are able to execute the action or inflict the wound until you perform the maneuver.)

When you perform a maneuver, you will focus all your mental attention on the wounds specified in the maneuver. This has two benefits. First, you will only inflict wounds from that list. So if you want to always inflict a lower level wound even if the target body part is in critical condition then a maneuver consisting only of that lower level wound will do just that. Secondly, provided your wound list is small, you will be able
to concentrate more than normal on perfectly executing the attack. This increases your chance of exeuting that wound. Thus if you use a maneuver that consists only of a critical level wound, you lose the ability to do the lower level wounds, but in exchange you increase the likelihood of successfully making that critical wound happen.

Incidentally, MANEUVER FORGET doesn't seem to work.

Wow. This sounds dangerous to us non-warriors.

Yeah that was really bugging me because I thought I was spelling something wrong so I kept rewriting it over and over again.

This sounds almost too good, but it sounds awesome enough that I don't really care. Great for most warriors, but now people like Ixion and Daevos are going to be absolutely disgusting...

The AB file says to use DROP, not FORGET. Originally it was FORGET, but I opted to change it in the off chance someone typos it to not have the MANEUVER word in front of it and somehow puts a skillset name after it.

Apparently Daevos is landing one-hit tendon slices. Let the chaos begin.

Ah it confused me because when you just type "Maneuver" it shows the syntax list with MANEUVER FORGET instead of MANEUVER DROP.

EDIT: Whee it's fixed now, that was quick!

Maneuver is hard to spell either way, adding letters is just asking for annoyance.

Is it supposed to only use one word as an action? For instance, we can only use "hack" as the action and we have to use "maneuver perform testmaneuver down @target" to get a hack down, or any of the slashing attacks.

Seems that way. So that you don't have to use as many manuevers, maybe? your hack manuever can have wounds for hack up and hack down, rather than using up one for each?

This looks MASSIVELY overpowered at first glance. Since a single lunge combo from Ixion pushes anyone without plate into critical, doesn't this mean he'll get one-combo pinlegs every attack?

Maybe it will improve attacks in Demesnes or something like that...

I'm sure Roark will tweak as needed.

It seems very interesting, but also has the potential to be incredibly powerful. I'm going to withhold my comments for a while.

Where's Murphy...something tells me he'd love this new change...