Hi there, I'm a new comer to MUDs and Lusternia in particular. I've more or less gotten the concept of it fairly well, and now have myself a system installed.

I'm very intrigued by lusternia's combat system even if I don't really understand it. I want to become a good combatant and while I understand that fighting a lot will help me, I have found that I really only end up getting killed over and over again and not learning very much at all. So far, warrior vs warrior combat seems to be the least challenging for me, because from what I see a lot of it involves standing around and swinging away (while parrying and stancing and curing of course) and also strategic use of poisons and building up useful wounds.


The thing is, I have no idea how to fight certain classes like monks and bards (or any others really). Can someone provide me with perhaps some general strategies that most monks, bards and other archetypes go for and what are useful counters or measures to take as a warrior?

I know for example that when fighting bards one must eat earwort constantly but beyond that I know nothing of their abilities. The only ones I really picked up on are perfectfifth which apparently stops you from moving, and death song which kills you if you don't run away. I honestly have no idea how to even deal with bards.

Another thing is monks, I've had the experience where I'm landing a fair number of hits on a monk, they're doing hitting me as well, though not as hard it would seem, and then BAM all of a sudden they're taking me into the yellow. One person told me something about never letting them build momentum. What does this mean then? When I'm fighting a monk am I suppose to occasionally just step out of the room for a while and come back in, even if I don't feel the immediate danger??

Sorry if my questions are extremely nooby. I'm really just trying to get a basic hang of this so I can actually start winning fights against my peers (or atleast not die without putting up a fight)

The impression I get with monks, from the forums mind you, can best be summed up this way. YMMV.

You can think of monks as a steam-powered locomotive. We'll call it the Lame Train. In the beginning, there's not much pressure, and the Lame Train doesn't really move much. You're tied to the tracks, but you have a little button (if you're lucky) which, when you push it, help relieves the pressure in the Lame Train's engines. So long as you never let enough pressure build up, because you keep knocking a whole in the attempts to build up steam (hinder their offense, some would say, in more scientific times). However, if you're not constantly pushing that button, then the Lame Train builds up steam, and it will run over you.


Granted, that's just the impression I've gotten from the forums, and may have no actual bearing on how things -really- are. But it may give you an idea of what it is you're signing up to hear.

What client are you using currently? Do you log all of your fights?

Currently, I'm using MUSHClient, and whenever I spar or go into the arena, or even go to village revolts, if a fight breaks out and I die and feel like I could have done better, I save the log in HTML (I log all of the time that I'm on, but logging in HTML is nicer to look at) and look at it later, and pour through it constantly. I typically go through arena spar logs about 10 times, re-reading, taking notes, and learning where I did well and where I didn't. If you don't currently log your fights, I suggest you do so. To view them in HTML you can just open them up in the web browser of your choice, which is pretty nifty.

The best way to learn combat is to prepare yourself, then fight, then study the fight after it has happened. When you spar people, you'll learn first hand what strategies they go for, and the things the people on the forums left out. That's probably the best advice you'll get: prepare, fight, log & study.

Monks are nominally built around momentum level 5 to 4 for most specs. What this means is this - Each time a monk lands a blow on you within a form they gain momentum. This starts at 0 and goes to 5. Most monks start getting dangerous around 4-5 momentum, where they can normally apply regeneration cures and cycle at the high ends of momentum to keep those afflictions up. The best way I can equate it for a newbie is that it's sort of like maneuvers, only instead of relying on my opponents condition it relies upon my own. This is a large sweeping generalization, but until you learn some of the finer points it will do for now.

To fight a monk, ideally you want to hinder their forms to limit the amount of damage they can do or speed at which they can gain momentum. Monks have a lower base line for stats compared to warriors so if you can keep reseting the momentum your superior wounds and health will eventually turn the tide. I don't know what spec you are, but blindness, proning, paralysis, hemiplegy, ect can all limit a monks ability to keep up the speed on their offense. Also, you want to make sure you are never ever prone against a monk, especially in the 4-5 momentum tier range as monks get bonus damage against prone foes.

To build onto this... do people tend to use color-coded highlights or echoes to help track the wall of text in solo/group combat situations? What's necessary to highlight/echo... and at what point does it unnecessarily add to the wall of text?

Also... logging every fight? Hrm. Never considered that before. I'll give it a try.

Bards - The Class
Pros:
- Great Passives
- Access to an instakill
- Great damage if appropriately setup; great roomwide passives rivaled only be demesnes.
- Decent survivability, dependent on tertiary

Weaknesses:
- Relies heavily on enemy remaining stationary.
- Primary skillset and passives made void by earwort.
- If Glamourists, have to juggle two separate offensive mechanics - Afterimage and Earache.
- Very power-intensive.

How a Bard will kill you, two possibilities:
1. Instakill. Pending excruciating circumstances (group combat) or potential bug abuse awkward mechanics (maybe it's working as intended), you should never die to a Bard's instakill 1v1. It's too slow, even with the slight Earache timer randomization. (Caveat; may be untrue if enemy is Mugwump, but nobody is Mugwump anymore).

2. Discordantchord. This skill will only gib you if you let them set up. If you have to take a single lesson out of all of this, do NOT let a bard set their crap up.
Skills needed:
AURIC AFFLICTIONS:
Manabarbs - All mana consumed is duplicated as health reduction. Effects categorized as 'health reduction' are unique from damage, and as such will not wake you up if you're asleep.
Egovice - All ego consumed is duplicated as health reduction.
Achromatic Aura - 10% weakness to magic-type (source behaves differently) damage. Not a threat in and of itself; part of the big finish.
Powerspikes - 2p to use. For every 1 power you use, you lose 500 health. Yeah. This hurts; but even then it's still just a part of the big finish.

ACTIVES:
Tritone/Egovice-afflicting skill/etc are a given
Minorsixth - Drains mana and ego from you. Remember the whole 'mana/ego loss duplicated as blah blah' thing? Yeah, this is where it comes into play to start. This will translate to roughly 1500 health loss, on average. Formula has weird scaling.
Discordantchord - Costs 2p for every aural affliction on the target. Deals strong health damage that scales with the aural afflictions you have. If you have all 4 auric afflictions on you, Discordantchord will consume half of your mana and ego. At the worst, this means you lose upwards of 3000 health just from the mana/ego loss. This doesn't count the initial health damage.

Likewise, this doesn't count the sizable stun that comes with the chord. This allows the bard to slip in two Minorseconds (health damage) or Minorsixths (mana/ego drain - with tritone and egovice still on you) and if you're not dead by then, you got really lucky.

SETUP:
Setup for Discordantchord is a two-part thing.

Octave - A 3p room effect. While it's active, everyone in the room cannot cure aural afflictions unless they're deaf. It's a given how easy it is for Bards to keep deafness down.

Saving grace: If the Bard leaves the room or changes elevation, willingly or otherwise, the Octave fades instantly. Again; don't let the Bard set their stuff up.

Perfectfifth - The main exacerbation of the problem, as you know all about already. 3p cost. Prevents you from leaving the Bard's room. Easy to cure; when deaf, move out of the room. As soon as you separate yourself from the Bard, the effect fades and you can move freely. This can easily be done just by sheer button mashing in a single direction, making the Bard waste power.

See how it all flows together? They hold you in Octave, build the aural afflictions and then blow your head off. Problem is, you're expected to just sit there for this to work. And you have to, too, since they need to bomb 6 power at the least on setup, followed by painful auric juggling and powerspikes costing 2p. You probably have to be held down for around 40 seconds, assuming the Bard has trans discipline, before they can pull off a max-strength Chord. So: Don't do that. You've got a few options to make sure Bards don't set up their crap:

1. Kill them first.
2. As a warrior, once you see them drop a stationary room effect like Octave or Pfifth, tackle them out. Pfifth provides some forced movement resistance, though.
3. As anyone, but a gust enchantment. Movement resistances are broken atm, so you can just go 'Nurrrrrh point gust @target @dir' and waste 6power of effects.

You might ask 'well gee, isn't that a bit cheap?'. Sure, I guess. So ask yourself in return; do you enjoy living? If so, don't stand in Octave. At worst the fight will taper out into a draw; and guess what? Outside of the arena, you technically won because you didn't die. That's a good thing, at least in the world of e-peen.

(Disclaimer: This is just a generic 'What EVERY Bard class can do to you' overview. Each of the guilds has some flexibility with their overall strategies, along with some other viable kills. Tertiaries also come into play too, but most of the time it'll lead down to these two kill methods.)

Some people omit lions to replace them with their own simplified output. Eventually, I just learned how things 'flow' on the screen. Certain sized blocks of text with Sidd's name in them means there's probably a Pureblade in the room. If I see the word 'shadow' being thrown about in my brief glimpses I know someone's going to choke. If I keep attacking and I'm not seeing my coloured balance/eq recovery message, I'm probably hindered. If I'm mashing into web/tendon/pinleg then I know I'm hindered and will probably have to tumble out.

There are nice things to have big screaming flashing warnings, though: instakills in particular, and all their stages. Aeon messages, too, so you know to let go of the keyboard or pause/tumble out.

It depends on your weapon specialisation. Since warriors mostly go without any passive afflictions/hindering, the moment you get locked down enough to stop your offense is the moment your enemy can beat on you unhindered, pretty much. So that is what you don't want to happen. That generally leaves you with the option to come up with enough of an initial burst attack yourself to prevent the enemy from building any offense at all, or you can cure well enough (and can take enough of a beating) to be able to maintain an offense long enough to build wounds and kill. The former will probably work best as a pureblade; once you're able to bring on sliced tendons (or even collapsed nerves on top) reliably, you can keep people down for long periods of time or even until they die. Outcuring their offense without passive hindering is (close to) impossible against certain classes, although not everyone has the perfect race for their class and not everyone uses their skills to their full potential.

Against monks, as an easy start, don't be afraid to retreat when you notice them build momentum. If a monk hits you 3-4 times without getting hindered properly (not hitting you for 5 seconds or more at a time), you're about to get into trouble, so just run and wait a bit. You could also have them beat on you and train how you can survive longest (tumble, green/gedulah cures from low-/high magic or other power cures which let you cure even when your curing is otherwise locked down, shielding if you can, passive curing if available).

Against bards, get a gust enchantment (better yet, a beast with gust and gust in beastmastery) or learn to tackle, so you can get rid of the octave and possibly perfectfifth. Get love potion and keep it up (it works best to have your system do that automatically for you). There is a workaround for love potion for bards (keeping up paranoia on themselves while deaf), but only a few people use that. For both, monks and bards, you may have to cope with balancing, which lets them remain standing even if they'd be knocked prone normally. If you follow a pattern in your offense that relies on them being prone at some point, you want to make sure balancing doesn't interfere (it has a chance to drop on each usage, although they can get it up again), or if it does, that you notice and can adjust accordingly.

Against mages, you want to get up love potion, too. Depending on their specialisation, mages may use the paranoia workaround for that, too, but for some specs, that's not really convenient, so you'll probably not encounter it often here.

To Janalon: You should highlight or otherwise get your attention to anything that you must not miss, for either building your offense (e.g. when your target is prone as a warrior/monk, when you get certain key afflictions like slitthroat, aeon, when your target does certain things related to key afflictions, e.g. you try to get a lock to stick and highlight them eating, when they tumble or move in general) or for staying alive (when YOU get locked, sprawled, aeoned/sapped/choked, an insta started on you or others, terrain changed, illusoryterrain removed, sapling chopped) or just generally important information in room descriptions (terrain type, room conditions like shadows). Tons of things, although it is probably a good idea to find out what matters most for yourself and not lose track in an overload of highlights.

Semi-easy way of logging fights in mudlet if you forget to before the fight starts. Though if you don't know html, it's pretty hard to edit it, since it takes your entire buffer and saves it.

That's what she said.

Yes, echoes are very important. I substitute any important information that I need to know for lines of text that I recreate with colors by myself. For instance, instead of seeing this trigger for aeonfield ending:



I substitute that with:



It's much cleaner, and the system name that I have is in red, brackets in grey and text in white. It's informative, clean, and doesn't detract much from my attention. But I do need to know that. I rarely highlight anything on my own, because I find it to be mostly useless nowadays. I used to highlight things, but recognizing different line structures is time consuming and tedious - why not just have short substitutions?

Another example of echoes/subs is keeping track of my enemy's wounds count on every line, like this:



With the markings being bright purple with white brackets/pipes.

Adding more than one line of text is what I find to be unnecessary. For instance, this is necessary:



MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT - GET OUT ETC
MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT - GET OUT ETC
MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT - GET OUT ETC
MASSIVE WALL OF TEXT - GET OUT ETC

That's fine, that lets you know that death is imminent. However, this is unnecessary:




>>>> REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING <<<<
>>>> REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING <<<<
>>>> REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING <<<<
>>>> REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING REBOUNDING <<<<

Yes, that draws your attention to it. In fact, it draws so much attention to it that you'll probably literally forget what you were going to do, because now you think you need to raze or you die. I have a system that helps me track rebounding a lot easier than that, and I suggest that instead of anything too flashy and gigantic.

The bottom line is sub where you can afford it, echo where you have to. Subs will dramatically increase how much information you draw from a fight in an instant.

You don't have to log all your fights, just the ones you want to learn from.

Logging I've found really useful. I have logs from early July - it's good even just to see your progress, and what issues your system has.

Thanks for all the tips guys.

I don't know how I managed to forget to include this in the OP, but I'm a blade master.

So far, I find myself to be just about worthless against everyone. I just can't mount any sort of offense or get any kills at all.

I usually try to go for pinleg when I can and attempt to put them in a sleep lock, unless they're parrying a lot, then I usually just aim at a random body part and hope for the best. I just can't seem to build up enough wounds as everyone seems to stance and parry me even when I move around my attacks. I just don't know how to usually go about it.

I have tried going for a double-hemiplegia with morphite, but that doesn't seem to do much for me at all. I'm considering trying it with dendroxin instead to see if that's any improvement.


Against monks, I usually try to hinder as much as I can, slicing ears off, and using dulak and mantakaya. But stronger people tend to parry and stance everything I throw at them and then maul the hell out of me. Sometimes I can't even run from them. It's just really annoying.


I really want to get better at this game, but I just feel as if I'm remaining more or less in the same place I was when I started.

If it helps, I only just got leg-tendon and can't behead anyone yet. While I've heard from some guild members that I won't be doing much without behead in 1v1's, I care more about helping out during raids and team battles more than anything.


Also, how the hell do you deal with people who spam aura warp and mana draining attacks? I can't help but have to run from them.

First, more lessons spent, especially in Knighthood and Combat, will help boost your effectiveness. Omnitrans may be a long way off yet, depending on how easily you acquire credits, but focus your lessons on the right skills and you'll see a difference over time. Your choice of trade skill can have a fair impact on combat, too, with the dwarven runes from Forging or the poison resistance from Poisons.

Second, raising yourself up to be fully effective in combat can take many months, even years, so try not to get discouraged and just realize that your long-term goals may be a ways off yet. You're competing against some individuals who have a lot more vested in their characters than you have so far.

Third, there are so many little known/used methods for boosting one's health, mana, ego, and general resilience that you really need to do a lot of digging to come up with all of them: certain quests, karma blessings, teas and brews, moonwater potion, enchantments, etc.

Dealing with mana-based kills usually means two things: prioritizing mana sipping a little higher than usual (though, obviously not to the point you die from loss of health) and using less mana. The former is something you have to learn through experience to find what thresholds work best for you. The latter can be done through alternative means, such as using magical salt to put up a shield or eating merbloom for insomnia, or simply by focusing mind/spirit for fewer afflictions, if any.