Balance level matters for bashing, but very little. Look at it this way: In PvP you'll be using damage or wounding weapons that will generally hit at 4 - 4.5 seconds with neutral balance. When bashing, you use speed weapons that hit at around 2.8 seconds neutral. A level one balance penalty is about 7.5% slower. Now, for which type of weapon will that 7.5% matter more for? This is why Ashteru can bash as a tae'dae.

Think it was changed so it weighed 3, yeah.

And yeah, I generally bash at around 2.9 seconds fully deffed, and PvPing, I am at around 4 seconds, I think. But that's with 200 speed flails.

The lesson here is that Ashteru is the exception, not the rule.

Thanks for the info all!

Except that anyone else can be like that, too, with a wee bit of effort and/or a lot of money. See: Ash's Guide to Being Like Ash post.

Commune warriors should go low magic, since yellow is more useful than gebwhatever due to the stat weighting, right?

I gave someone a free max-speed klangaxe once. They just put it in their nexus because they didn't care for the design.

I wish dwarves weren't so horribly nerfed. I would love to see a dwarf Axelord rampaging around and cutting off heads of faelings, furrikin, and other dwarves, since those would be the only races whose heads a dwarf could reach. Hell, I'd love to see a good dwarf, period. One who doesn't have a cutesy accent with omitted vowels and/or unnecessary apostrophes, and doesn't make incessant use of words such as "laddie" or "boyo" or "yeh". But alas, somebody filled the dwarves gene pool with Everclear and lead paint, so we get what we get.

Right. The only time stacking Bear and Geburah will do any good is if you have a truefavour or herofete. Besides, lowmagic has serpent.

Though, looking at it from an endgame combat standpoint, yellow isn't that useful either, since weathering plus con platter is +2 already... *shrug*

So how would you play a Dwarf, Arix?

I'd make a Magnagoran (undead) dwarf who'd toil in Angkrag all day.

I'm completely 100% serious here. As serious as the idea to wear scalps as hats. Hey, he could even do that!

I recently switched over to Tae'dae for bashing and found that,even though my swings maybe slower than when I was Aslaran, I kill things much more quickly. I even gain my experience faster than when I was human as well. So far I'm loving the Tae'dae strength in bashing. Also fun to be able to tank 5+ links at a time.

Once you hit Titan, human is the better bet again, thanks to crits I kill faster, and I still can tank as much as usual, since what I bashed never was influenced by my resists. (Except on prime, where nothing deals more than 200 damage anyway)

Not grave digging, but chiming in late.

Dwarf, as most have already said, is probably one of the worst races ever. In exchange for resistances to just about every kind of damage, they get crappy stats, the only decent one of which is Con, a respectable 15. You still have lvl 1 penalties on balance and equi, which completely sucks. Your strength score isn't high enough, even with all the buffs possible to make up for the fact that you swing less often, and your dexterity is so low that you'll need a maxed out precision greataxe to even consider getting high level wounds, even with the racial spec.

As for what races make top notch Axelords, I'd have to say lvl 50+ Humans and Loboshigarus. Both have respectable scores in every area that matters: Str, Dex, and Con, and no penalties on equilibrium and balance.

I do have to admit, however, that I like being an Aslaran Axelord. My natural dexterity and quick balance recovery coupled with a decently high speed score and a near perfect precision score greataxe can get me to heavy wounds in one sweep on anything below fullplate. When fighting in groups, I have one role: to keep the main target on their back. As such, I've made a maneuver that focuses on getting Knockdown, Kneecap, and Amputateleg, and it's relatively simple to spam that and do exactly what I'm aiming to do. When it comes to one on one fights and spars, I like to switch between targetting legs and sweeping at the chest, digging for Crushchest or Openchest, both of which are nice afflictions if you can stack poison afflictions, and can cause massive bleeding. If you use , you can include Severspine in with Knockdown and Amputateleg for a chance to cause paralysis.

When fighting lower level squishies, I pull out a high damage waraxe with high speed and just go to town on their gut and legs. No runes yet, still trying to figure out exactly how it is you people make the money for artifacts But when I do +bleeding and +wounding on the greataxe, and +stats and +bleeding on the waraxe, and maybe a few elemental damage runes.

Thanks for the insight Bashara! Good luck with your artifact weapons!

I'd like to chime in that, although Dwarf indeed sucks, it isn't because of his low dex. Dexterity isn't important for warriors AT ALL. If Bashara thinks wounding for warriors is affected by dexterity in any but the most negligible ways, it means he didn't conduct any research and should do so instead of basing his opinions on hearsay and HELP files which often do not tell the whole truth.

No, wounding isn't based purely on Dex, but it helps. The racial makes up for it somewhat, and the measly 13 Str score (which admittedly can be buffed up to 15-16) can pick up the slack. And no, I'm not a combat expert, I'm just working off what I've learned from others and reading the files.



P.S.:

My axes:

wp waraxe
Damage: 360 Precision: 297 Speed: 191

wp greataxe
Damage: 188 Precision: 494 Speed: 162

Yes, it helps...Barely.

Cuber is more or less right. You'll only notice the effects of dexterity when you have an extreme score (very low or very high). Hell, from what I've seen, it doesn't affect wounds dealt at all. It does, however, slightly influence the affliction that the wounds cause...which is what most people are saying, these days. As a tae'dae, it can occaisionally take me a while to get the higher-end affliction that I want, but that's certainly not for lack of wounds.

Wounding is affected by dexterity for warriors. However, the increase is very, very small. Think 10 wounds/dex point against an UNARMORED target.

And saying you didn't conduct research isn't an insult.

Also, Aslarans make decent warriors, but not because of their dex. It's the balance bonus that helps.

Hurray for being able to attack twice before most people can recover balance/equilibrium from their first attack