While not directly related to the issues already brought up about warriors in combat, I think its worth pointing out another issue that I've found is a huge turn off to new warriors - the cost of getting equipped.

The cost of armor is 250, 400 for weapons, and another 70 for greathelm. That's 720 commodities total to get equipped, most of which ends up being metals, I'll say an average of 100 gold a commodity (if you're good, you can get it cheaper. If you're new and buying out a village at once or a city commshop you're paying a lot more). In addition there's the steel for tempering if they can't find somebody with a mallet, a fairly sizable amount of tempering can be needed too - 100-200 steel is pretty common.

The short version of all this? Newbie knights who are the least able to earn money, they're underequiped and if they're true newbies don't know the game so well, have to pay out the nose if they want to equip themselves. When commodity costs of everything were modified, newbie warriors seriously got the shaft on forging comms getting doubled. This is a problem for player retention even, as I've seriously had people ask about other guilds after finding out what they need just for a set of master equipment.

Edit: Just noticed this is the combat guide section, maybe it should have been its own thread. Well, whatever.

Edit2: In short, comm costs on warrior weapons/armor costs are high enough to scare off newbie warriors. This isn't about artifact runes or the like.

Comm costs are all crazy to combat commune/city comm stockpiling.
Of course, since we don't give out those comms for free (and never will), it ended up just slapping high comm costs on all the newer players, hitting some trades pretty darn hard. I have lots of metals lying around, perhaps I should set up a charity fund or something.

Thinking on it a little more, one possible fix is if weapons were instead of having a massive fixed one time cost, to spread out the cost a little.

As it is, once a warrior gets a weapon, its theirs for good, with decay times of something like 250 IG months (I don't know the exact decay-times but that seems roughly right), a weapon stays nearly forever. Likewise, once its about to decay, they can smelt it for full comm recovery and get a new one made without having to buy anything new except tempering and whatever odd comms were in the design (gems, etc).

My idea is to half the commodities needed for master weapons/armor while at the same time halving their decay time, so around 120 IG months. In addition (and this is the unpopular part, and might be hard code-wise to do) change smelting to recovery a percentage of the comms as determined by decay-time left.

An example would be a newly forged weapon can be smelted for full recovery of comms, so smiths can still smelt/reforge for better stats like they are now.

But if a weapon was at say 60 out of 120 months, smelting would only recover half of the comms (rounded up or down for uneven numbers. Or alternatively give each commodity a chance of recovery of 60/120 assuming its at 60 of 120 months)

This makes it so for new warriors, they can get their weapons at half the cost, but later on when they're better able to earn gold, they'll have to replace the weapons and would have to do more than just smelt/reforge the same commodities, they would actually need to gather new commodities for the next weapons, spreading out the cost instead of being a one-time payment.

Update:

It is literally impossible to build wounds on a fullplated warrior while maintaining efficient poison hinder speed as a 17 strength Tracker Blademaster without using rapiers, even spamming lunge with 230 speed-tanked scimitars. Hopefully that gets cleared up soon, or I'm going to have to switch to max-prec to have a prayer of pinning/impaling someone fast enough to help establish room control in groups

You also have more stat points in damage with scimitars that could be better spent in precision/speed on a rapier. A 230 speed rapier with the rest in precision is still better than a 230 speed scimitar with the rest in precision due to this.

Edit: But warrior versus warrior combat is laughably boring to begin with. Not particularly fun at all.

Agreed on both points. I'm using a scimitar because I'm banking on the classlead going through and the Windhammer scimitars are sexy. I've got a design in mind for a sword similar to a Scottish Broadsword that I'll likely be submitting and using if the report ends up being accepted though.

Hm. I was wondering if getting rid of rub-rate and replacing focus poison with a lowered shrug rate or something would be warranted.

I'd frankly prefer focus poison being switched to a temporary damage mod or a chance of a random venom effect firing, but if rub-rate is removed we need something, and we probably need something anyway. The rest of Tracking is pretty useless solo above a certain might in my (currently limited) experience.

Note that removing rub-rate, while a good suggestion, is not a solution that the admin will be very willing to accept because it also affects other poison users, notably monks. A change in this regard will neccesitate a change in monks to maintain the status quo, unless you can justify how the change will fix an imbalance that exists in the monk archetype as well. There are other classes (telekinetics) that use poison as well, but those are less central.

Perhaps exploring a buff to a warrior-only skillset that gives only the warrior a way to remove (or reduce) rub-rate RNG will be a better suggestion.

He was talking about a change in the focus poisons ability in tracking I believe. Monks and telekinetics don't get that ability!

^ He was talking about removing rub-rate altogether, AND then changing the now-redundant focus poison skill to something else.

One issue that comes up also if rub-rate is removed is that it widens the already considerable might gap for effective combat.