What country is that from? I used to have a teacher called Dr. Szewczyk that was pronounced "sheff-chik" so it seems weird to me that you could spell it phonetically...

That looks like Polish. Russian is usually spelled phonetically in English because it's transliterated from Cyrillic.

That's what I've heard. Internally, they just use Keyll Arrane, Cuirr Arrane, and Arrey Arrane.

It is Russian, not Polish. Shch is the closest English equivalent to the Russian letter Щ.

Edit: To clarify, Shch is how Belorussians specifically pronounce it. English speakers learn it this way most of the time as well, because it makes it easier for us to differentiate Ш from Щ

Does leather armor actually suck that horribly? I'm sure this question has been asked to death in the past.

Yes, because greatrobes are better anyway.

Then pray tell, why even have it in the game? If its just useless, weak, and not being used by the playerbase why bother having it?

Good idea fairy popped into someone's head.

With the introduction of Bards, there was this stipulation that you had to wear leather armor in order to trigger Acrobatics dodging, but that was proven to be untrue.

Aside from that, it's generally armor for novice warriors that can't afford fieldplate.

It's pretty much the same with all armor that's not either Greatrobes/Splendours or Fieldplate/Fullplate. It's there because of the legacy coding (I think?), but they're fairly useless because proofing and robe enchantments. Denust has a set of proofed 40-something ()/62 greatrobes and my Seren alt has like 20/28 leather right now.

I guess a monk or bard could spend the 50 silk it takes to bat leather armor and make it proof-able, but that's such a waste of silk and it doesn't solve the "leather armor still has worse defense than enchanted robes" problem.

That is a shame. I'd like the option of wearing some leather instead of swathing, cumbersome robes without sucking in combat situation.

Could we have something like fineleather(a more high quality version akin to greatrobes)?

It's been brought up before to somehow make leather in line with greatrobes, but I've never heard anything come of it.

On the subject of useless things, there's a special kind of shield in Forging called "GreatShields" but only warriors can use them. Except why would Warriors be using shields when they've got either two one-handers or a big two-hander? Unless this is another text error in the AB files, which wouldn't surprise me.

Also, Guardians can wear chainmail but you never see any of them walking around it.

Man, if we're going to talk about useless IG things, you may as well start a new topic on it. Don't want to flood Simple Questions.

Does no warrior ever use one weapon and a shield? I mean, I get that you would only get to hit once instead of twice, but wouldn't the shield add extra protection and let you shieldstun and stuff? (Remember, I'm not a fighter! )

I think Veyrzhul tried to hit/shieldstun for a while, but I doubt he stuck with it.

Yeah but that's what every guild does, shortest possible title. Though they don't really make all that much sense if you think about it. Translated literally, you're calling your gm "Forest Song".



I think there has been mention of a shield and sword spec somewhere

Way way way way back (when grandpa elostian was still a cute little ephemeral) there were mentions of a sword-shield spec, I believe this was part of Estarra's original Grand Plan™ and is on the same list as the polearm spec, ackleberry and jojobo.

We like to refer to it as the 'Maybe One Day'-list.

Yeah, the original forms got vetoed by Estarra because of being too short and not having an English part. What we ended up with is nonsensical and redundant ("Arrey" already means "guardian" so our GC is technically the guardian of the guardian of song, for instance). But even after Shofangi were allowed to have very short, non-English titles, we still weren't allowed to fix ours.