But I honestly have no idea what skills would help me fight better anymore. I've already got all my buffs really.

Unless it's dramatics.

post your AB then? so we can see exactly where you are at

I would say without a doubt to trans discipline before anything else. More power regen means more lunges in combat, which can never go wrong.

Edit: Also just noticed you have forging. I would train more in that too before getting any weapon runes. Once you get all the +stat runes, its like getting the level 1 stat arties but a lot cheaper.

finish off Athletics too, Surge, Boost, Consciousness, and Immunity are all good skills to have

See all those non-trans skillsets that aren't aethercraft or dramatics? Yeah, all of those.

Your elephant makes me sad

I was actually thinking of transing discipline before I bought any runes and getting up to consciousness in athletics. I suppose there's a billion great things in high magic as well....

I just want to be more effective now in combat though. I hit like a feather :/

I've gotten the precision rune in forging, other than that, I'm not sure if the other runes are worth it... masterarmour is nice though...hrm...

From way earlier in the post concerning leg pins stopping/not stopping parry: Correct, they don't. But impale does! If you can get an impale on someone you are free to hack down until the sun goes down against your opponent until they writhe.... which will be pretty soon, but if you get it with full balance you do have a chance for that one behead attempt. Also, most people are much less paranoid about protecting their gut compared to their legs, so you have a lot higher chance on getting that as a regular throw in to your attack cycle.

You want to include a pretty good amount of stuff in your maneuvers, but there are in fact things you probably don't want to include. As you quoted someone telling you, there are some things like scalp that are less effective than sliceear to get with your hack down.

Others might disagree as scalp isn't the worst afflict you could get, but honestly there isn't much for purgative afflictions you can give so it's not like you're going to be sticking anything with it. For this same reason I dis-include septicwound from swinging maneuvers that might hit the gut. At least opengut has a chance to make them slip and prone (another good hackdown moment!) if they are too busy taking care of other herb cured affs. Septicwound is really only going to achieve making someone stinky.

Now on to venoms!

Less experienced people with not-so-awesome curing can really be confounded by dulak, but on the higher end of things good luck getting it to do much.

Mantakaya is still good to put on, not only because it can slow your opponent down (though not a whole lot) but also it causes them to be prone (parry doesn't work etc.) If your mantakaya hits on your first hit, your second hit has a greater chance of getting through (wheeee! hack down!).

Senso is also a great one. Most of the lower to mid level blademaster affs are herb cures. Slickness is going to be way higher priority than those affs to their curing since it ruins health applying etc. so you can get your arteries, open guts, sliced ears etc to hopefully stick for just a second longer. Don't get too excited with the prospect of overloading herb affs though... I've tried senso+niricol on my swords before with all herb affs on my maneuvers, and while you can probably herb-curing destroy smaller people with lesser curing/low resilience (shrugging) it didn't seem too effective on the larger people.

After this post I realized why I wasn't get collapsed lungs no matter how I tried, and I made a new maneuver and now I can hit it pretty consistently. The thing that I want to ask though is how to make use of it. I figured endurance drains would work wonderfully against a few classes like monks, but whenever I hit a number of successful collapse lungs, they come out of the fight claiming that they noticed no endurance drain at all. I'm just wondering what I'm doing wrong.

I know that it works because I heard of a fight where an axelord did their equivalent and drained someone enough that they couldn't attack them back, and then managed to turn the tide of the battle at the last minute.

I know that collapselung needs to stick, and that it's a regen cure so just hitting it repeatedly SHOULD stick it enough to drain some endurance... I'm just wondering how you guys usually go about it.

Also, thanks for the tips Shikha! I generally don't go for the gut at all though. For some reason I've found impale gut to be harder to get than a pinleg and I can't seem to explain why.

I'm still experimenting with poison combos, but mantakaya has definitely found its usefulness in bypassing parry in those crucial moments.

I'm not exactly sure what everyone else has posted but this is what I've got:

Lunge the legs to get past parry, stance, and rebounding - however, it doesn't remove the rebounding so be careful. Once you have pinleg, you should hold it if you're in a group. Just keep getting that pinleg. That'll be the best thing for your entire group. Pinleg spammers are my favorite people.

The goal is to get tendon, and in turn go for the slitlock. I've got a few things to say about that though.

Something cool that I've noticed is that if you can tendon both legs, you're set up for a haymaker to the head with nearly no chances of them greening out. It'll set them up with 8 wounds plus slickness and stupidity. I'm going to assume those are the only two poisons you use (sometimes less poisons can be more effective).

Just as well, you can do the good ol' "lunge left leg and hack down when you get a pin/tendon" technique. <- self explanatory.

Another thing that works really well, and is often under estimated is lunging/striking the legs and striking the chest to get a few heartpierces. Though it may seem an unorthodox tactic, I've noticed that when you spar most warriors or monks, they'll always parry or stance both the head and legs. Which makes it really difficult to get a slitlock combo. It's true that you can paralyze and prone to get push parry aside BUT that's much more tedious. When you're striking the chest, you should rend every time you get pinleg. If you're rending every pinleg, and landing heartpierce, the enemy will get behind sip-wise. He'll need to sip mana because of the clotting, sip health because of the heartpierce damage, and if he doesn't apply healing to chest, then he's going to suffer a heartpierce almost every time. - The only reason I recommend this method is because most people don't parry chest because they're lazy and auto parrying can be a pain if the coder doesn't perfect it, and because they increased the damage done by heartpierce.

I'm not sure how much sense this makes (I just woke up and I can barely see straight) but you should get the general idea.

If you have the power to do haymaker, just do 4 lunges.

That works, yes. But you can create an alias do to envenom with 5 different venoms, then do the haymaker. Also, lunges don't slit throat. Or at least, as I can remember.

Haymaker is useless.

Yeah, that's why I recommend using the other two combinations.. But I've seen it done really nicely once.