If I were a Demigod or high-level player with the massive strength they get going against another Demigod or high-level player, the deciding factor would be the my skill compared to theirs, not the weapons. Weapons definitely make a difference, but I have never seen them as the deciding factor in any fight I have seen. An noob will always lose to someone with skill, regardless what weapons they use.

At the highest levels, where both sides are extremely skilled, you're right the better weapons will give you the edge. For the vast majority of fights, it doesn't matter as much as people are implying. If you want the edge at the most extreme level of combat, you should be willing to pay extra for it.

It's even more entertaining when you don't have a forging hammer.



If you see holes in your own reasoning then why are you even arguing? To test if we're as smart as the almighty unpaid employee? And I am thinking rationally - in fact, I think most of us are, which is why most of us disagree with you.



You can quite easily address my argument. You don't need to have Big Blocks O' Text - it's actually easier to break things up in a forum discussion, because you can't stop someone in the middle of their argument with a counter. It's not too hard. Try it.



What exactly is the benefit to the playerbase of disconnecting someone who is forging in their manse, when they would otherwise be offline, as some have done? There's nothing negative happening to anyone else by leaving them there.



I went at you with top-of-the-line weapons (you forged 'em ) and trans PB (I think), and I still didn't get very far...and you weren't even attacking back. Hell, a warrior would have a hard time with mediocre weapons even against a midbie that can cure well. Really, weapon stats are very important, and arties seem to be necessary in some cases. But we all should know this already.



But if you had weapons that weren't some of the best, you'd lose.

You against Geb, if you had top of the line weapons and his were mediocre. You think you would beat him just because you have better weapons?

EDIT: Or even Ixion against Geb, to make things more fair. No offense to Ixion, he's done very well for himself, but Geb is just a better fighter. Give Ixion better weapons, give Geb mediocre. Geb will still win, because he has more skill.

You see, warriors kill by building up wounds (and very rarely through damage.)
Most people build up wounds by forcing people to sip and doing more wounds than the enemy can apply. If you use mediocre weapons, people will be able to use scrolls and sparkles to cure the damage, and apply every turn. This will make it nearly impossible for a warrior to kill another archetype before he himself is killed, and against field/fullplate it will be pretty much impossible to even put too many dents in.
Skill matters, but, to take extreme examples, you can be as skilled with a sword as you want, if you try to destroy a tank with it, you'll fail.

Me, specifically? No, I can't PvP worth due to my connection and very few credits.

Someone with a similar character and internet connection to Geb's, with top of the line weapons and a popular system, while he had mediocre weapons and his system? They'd stand a pretty good chance at victory, I'd say. At the very least, they wouldn't lose horribly, like they would with the weapons he has now.



That reply explains why.

To take my spar against Geb as example, way back. He used some crappy weapon, I used my usual weapons. We timed out eventually. He did build up wounds, but because he up my curing with his illusion staff. Without that, I don't think he'd have gotten me anywhere.

Basically, in the old muds, you used to have people who botted. They never played, just sat there making stuff, or bashing, or mining or whatever. They would flood the market with things they made, and since it was just a bot, they felt not connection and thus didn't care about profit levels. The player just became another npc whom you couldn't interact with.

Also, just because a person is in thier manse doesn't mean you can't contact them, or know they are there.

They basically ruined the economy and game for other players because of that.

basically, what I am trying to show by example is that the forging system is fine.

Its the commodity things that might be an issue.

You keep using Geb as an example but if Geb could just wander around destroying everyone regardless of the quality of his weapons, then he would not have been all that concerned about how good they were right?

Yet his weapons had artifacts and he paid me something like 70 to 100 credits to forge him an extremely good weapon. I won't mention how long that took.

Now maybe Geb just likes having nice weapons and they are not much of a factor in his offensive success but I think you are really underestimating just how important every point you can get on a weapon is, regardless of how good you are at combat.

The standard statement that you must have top tier runed weapons to compete against top tier fighters is not a lie. To compete against mediocre to good PvPers you need top tier weapons. Now of course, if you're fighting people who just aren't very good, you can go with lesser weapons.

This is independent on a warrior's actual skill at PvP.

I don't think we really have to worry about that here, especially if the forging system were to be changed.

You say it like it's a bad thing.

The holes didn't occur to me until after I posted.

Unless someone waltzes in and kills them, causing increasingly massive experience loss as they sit unable to pray.

Oopsy

A suggestion that comes up decently often, both IG and OOCly in my experience. Might be worthwhile to... I don't know... add it in?


This is the core argument. What's beyond me is that people keep bringing in things like "market economics" and "making a profit" into the fray, which are not the subject of debate, at least not in my eyes.


You have NO idea how true that is. Well.... maybe you do. But I think most people miss the point: As Ashteru said, it's not about the money. If I want money, I go kill stuff for it. Or influence or do quests (yay quests) if I'm in a nonviolent mood. The argument is about what the admins consider "balanced" and how ridiculous it is to base balance on extremes that are borderline unreasonable to expect. Of course, if warriors were balanced around anything else, you'd have too much variance with some people being horrendously ineffective and underpowered, and others being able to mash the "swing" macro and kill regardless of skill.

I'd also like to make a point of comparison of what happens to combat viability at trans guild skills (or wherever getting the shiny new weaponthing comes in).

Bard: Virtuoso instrument
Guardian: Symbol, angel powers
Mage: Staff
Druid: Cudgel
Wiccan: umm.... I'm not sure. But I do know that they can summon their offensive capabilities.
All of these are creatable/summonable in... let's be pessimistic beyond belief and say 15 minutes and 20 power.
Costs beyond this: Free.

In comparison:
Monk/warrior: Weapon not summonable. Relies on highly erratic and unpredictable system that on average takes roughly 200 hours to produce something considered "balanced", and the craftsperson often does (or at least should) charges something on the order of 100cr. If the weapon remains unruned, it will eventually decay, forcing the hapless warrior to shell out another exorbitant amount to remain in the "balanced" category.

My plea repeated is thus: Either make everyone else take 200 hours to summon their weapons (plus or minus a factor of 100) or eliminate the extremes for weapons and make time invested directly proportional to quality.
The problem is not economics! The problem is remaining viable in combat! Yaarrrrghibble.

And for the people who spend over 200 credits on their weapons, without getting runes on them... and the people who spend RL months forging already. Do we say, "too bad!"?

edit: or in my case, where I have thrown runes, and customized weapons that aren't top tier, because I just didn't want to spend the 3 months forging, but now with the change, I can easily reforge and get top tier weapons... do I get to change the stats of my weapons? Do we remove weapon stats completely and make each type of weapon act the same no matter what?

I think there's a problem with mitbulls' and Fain's statements that "people will just deal with weapons that aren't as good" coupled with the general consensus that combat is balanced around exceptional weapons (assuming that that's true). If that's the case, then people can't settle for sub-standard weapons.

However, the fact that the smiths will be reimbursed for their time is irrelevant to the discussion. The topic is purely concerned with the amount of time that smiths have to spend at the forge to create a weapon and that the only way someone can realistically spend that much time forging is to be AFK. The fact that the smith will be reimbursed for his time doesn't have much impact - if you can't be AFK at the forge and you need to spend 20 hours (a conservative estimate) forging to create a weapon that someone actually wants, you could easily be spending an entire week logged in all evening doing nothing but forge. You could charge a million gold an hour and that would still make for a crappy game experience.

Just because I'm tired of seeing the recurring "Deal with lower quality weapons!" argument...

A 5% boost in stats doesn't mean a 5% boost in offensive progress.

If a weapon causes 650 damage per swing, they sip for 900, and you get three swings in the time you get two sips, your gross offensive progress is 50 damage per swing.

If you get a 5% boost, you start dealing 682 damage per swing. Your gross offensive progress is up 64%, even though your net damage only went up 5%.

If combat is balanced around weapons 5% away from the max (which is a fair assessment), ekeing out that little extra is a huge deal.

Now, consider that the lower quality weapons can be 40-70% short of the desired targets. What happens when you start plugging numbers on those? At that point, it becomes 100% impossible to beat someone with respectable curing. Your ability to fight shouldn't be based on the incompetence of your opponent.

If combat became balanced around the mean, the people with outlying weapons would plow down fields of fleshy crops like Ixion's prenerfs. Except worse.

I know you're joking, but... If they die, that's their fault, like how Narsrim killed Sybl who was afk in her manse - felt bad for the person, but that's nothing they can issue over. AFK + something happens to you = your fault. So, is that why we have a no AFK rule? To reduce the amount of issues the adminds get?

And I think praying was changed, so that if you're a soul too long you're sent on your merry way to the portal.

I'd also like to note, yes, my customer example was awful, but I was running late to my job and didn't have time to think of anything better

Ok, this thing about Geb, got me laughing. Geb is a great warrior, and knows combat. His weapons are all maxed artied if I remember correctly. It isn't just Geb's skill alone that makes him great though.

I have fought Geb head on solo. My sword was with a level 3 wounding. It took him a while to kill me, we had a long chat about his techniques, my techniques, what was good about both, bad about both. But in the end. The weapon meant alot. This does not mean he is not skilled at all. But the additional wounding he can do factors greatly into where he uses his skills. If he had a subpar weapon, he would not have been able to amputate limbs or get other critical afflictions needed to outpace my curing. So, by saying it is skill alone. That may be the case with non warriors and now possibly non monks (since the use a weapon stat setup, but it doesn't rely as heavily on the stats). But for a warrior to do well in any battle. It takes GREAT weapons to start with. Then comes the skill. The skill to know what can be done with the weapon you are using in the least amount of time possible.

There is no way Nico would have ever been able to get bashbrains on somebody if he was using 2 20/100/110 hammers. The wounding is just way too low while the speed is too slow to keep up the wounds fast enough. There is no way Geb would be able to pull off rapid amputations or slitthroats with a 160/280/140 greatsword. Same reason.

It takes a great weapon, then it takes the skill on how to successfully use a great weapon to inflict the most amount of wounds/damage in the greatest amount of time. If Geb were to use a Katana full time, the stats would have to be at the very least 420prc and 250+ speed. To compensate the lack of wounding with an increase in the amount of swings he could inflict in a given time.

Skill is a very important factor. But skill = nothing for a warrior without the proper tools to use the skill to its fullest. Now remember, I am speaking warriors only (and possibly monks), all other archetypes that do not have stat weapons that are their archetype's defining feature, well skill IS the most important aspect to them.

Yes they are. When you (collectively) designed warrior combat so that only the very high end weapons are viable, you forced us to sit there and forge.

In the example I gave about Yrael, the time it would have taken me to forge him his single hammer (because of excessive deviations) was 78 days at 4 hours per day. For it to be a viable comparison to what I could have made in the same time by bashing and questing (not even including experience/karma/etc), I would have had to at *least* charged him the equivalent of 5 credits per day - and the weapon I gave him wasn't even quite the stats that he wanted. Expecting forgers to charge someone nearly 400 credits for a single weapon is ludicrous in the extreme - its more than learning to forge yourself costs, and in that you get a free suit of fullplate.


What a load of horse manure. There's no such thing as "special" weapons, because apart from grunts EVERY single warrior is forced to use these so called "special" ones to even hope to have a chance of killing someone - and the way that the system is currently designed, it puts an huge burden on the forgers to go afk or the like. If you *really* want "special weapons" then decrease the randomization between weapon stats, balance combat around that and then put in an extremely low chance of getting something special. Sure, there will still be the forgers who sit there for three months to get one item, but at least everyone would be able to compete fairly without requiring a ridiculous amount of time spent at the forge.

Yes it is - if you are crafting the sort of weapon that was gifted to kings or generals, but the rank and file just got average swords you pumped out by the truckload - and they still worked nearly as efficiently. In Lusternia unless you have one of the 5% weapons, in a fight against anyone even remotely competent you might as well go off and make a cup of coffee while they are violating your eventual corpse.


Not always. I'm fairly sure I've been booted while forging in Deepnight before - but in general its good.

I do not remember using my illusion wand when I fought you with my bashing katana. I do remember saying that I would not use an artifact weapon nor illusions for the spar. I may be wrong though, so if you happen to have a log could you post a blurb of an illusion I used?

I agree that very good weapon stats are needed by warriors to get the most out of the warrior combat system, essentially to allow for the largest range of possible options when it comes to killing. Though those stats may not be in the exact portions conventional wisdom says they should be, they do need to use up as much of that possible stat pool as possible to allow the person using the weapon to get the most out of his/her skills.

Oh and Ildaudid, when I was a warrior I did move away from the greatsword to the katana full time. For me, I've found speed had far more benefits for my offense and defense than brute wounding power. I still needed good wounding, but I did not need extreme wounding. I figured it out by using the bashing (unartied) katana as my sparring weapon. That katana was still a very good masterwork weapon though, with stats of 90/320/272 or 110/356/282 when someone placed dwarven runes on it. The speed made up for the deficiencies in wounding, when it came to fighting non-plate wearers. It ended up in the end that a lot of top end fighters ended up doing more wounding per hit than me, but the speed at which I was able to respond to certain situations allowed me to make up for it over time.