Post by Editor in Chief on Apr 21, 2008 0:33:40 GMT
Once again, the subject of weapons has popped up on the boards, addressed at me, crying about custom short swords, with some incorrect assumptions about weapons in general. So I'm going to answer all the bloody questions once and for all, and just list the link next time someone says something stupid. Hopefully this will give me more time in the long run to write sexually perverse comics.
QUESTION: What type of weapon should I use?
This is usually asked my newbies, and is perhaps the least moronic question to ask.
ANSWER: If your guild has only one melee weapon primary, use that. If you absolutely hate that melee primary, refresh and pick a different guild. Seriously. If you need to ask this question, you're basically a newbie, and it's best to take the easy option. Warriors, Assassins, and most Thief specialisations have at least one melee primary. Melee primaries are much easier for newbies to advance than are melee non-primary skills, and you really need that edge when starting out.
If you're already in a dancing or chanting guild (Witches, Wizards, Priests), and just can't stand to join a guild of grunters, pie-eaters, or panty-wearers, pick a weapon that works well with your stats. Or pick stats that work decently with your weapon and well with your desired spells/rituals. If your stats are pure int and wisdom, you'll have an equally hard time advancing all melee skills and go with what sounds fun.
Here's how the stat reliance for various melee skills break down [1]:
This is why dexterity based guilds (thieves, assassins) tend to go for daggers or swords. Warrior stats tend to be built around a melee skills due to all the melee options and lack of variety in other things they do, so pretty much anything should work fine. Wizards can use spells to do grevious bodily injury, and should be able to get by with whatever stat is most prevalant in the "type" (offensive, defensive, weird) of spells they want to use. Staves are perhaps somewhat popular due to their use in other wizardly areas. But dagger can be nice if the wizard is very low on strength, or even mediocre in strength, as they have quite a few components to lug around as well. Witches might prefer polearm as well, since they carry brooms around for riding, and it's convenient to whack stuff without additional inventory required. Again, daggers could be a low-weight alternative. Mace can be nice for priests that want to hit stuff with their rods, but they should resist the temptation unless they have a con-heavy rearrange (as a Pishe priest might). Again, daggers tend to be the lightest and most newbie-friendly weapons, especially in a typically low-strength guild (except for offensive gods like Sek).
One problem is that some weapon types are cheaper and easier to obtain than others. Dagger and sword are by far the most common. There's a decent selection of maces and axes as well, and flails are well-covered at lower-midbie levels only if you want to pay a fee to custom order (less than $50 I think). The other weapons can be very hard to find a sufficient variety of to be used at a range of skill levels. I would especially advise all players to avoid relying on the "misc" melee skill, since it's a hodgepodge of random weapons that don't quite fit into other categories. They're almost all newbie weapons, and are subject to being shifted to use another melee skill at any time a creator decides they fit better elsewhere.
QUESTION: I don't have any melee skills at all and I can't hit stuff. Help!
ANSWER: Refresh. Go back to the newbie area, and spend time in the combat rooms. Alternatively, check out the quest solutions linked to the homepage and do those until you can get decent melee skills. Resist the tempation to advance faith or magic straight away and focus on melee: melee gets you experience much faster.
QUESTION: I have 20 dagger bonus but I can't hit stuff with my thieves' daggers! They are teh b0rked!
ANSWER: Put down the daggers and step away slowly. Well, put them in your vault and leave them there for a very long time. Go to a general store. Buy the cheapest, lightest daggers you can find. These are typically called "knife" or "small knife". Get one for each hand (hopefully 2). Hold them both, and try again. If you still have trouble hitting, type: "tactics attitude insane" and hope the rats and cockroaches aren't reading this article too.
QUESTION: I am 2 days old now and my retribution isn't hitting much!
ANSWER: You're still a n00b. Read the answer immediately above this one. You're best off starting with lighter, simpler weapons. High-end weapons may look cool and impress the newbies pretending to be girls, but trying to use them at low levels is pointless. Well, it'll make the more experienced players laugh, so maybe that's good. If you're two days old and have been advancing your melee skill as much as possible, you're probably ready for something a bit better than an utterly crap weapon. The best indication is probably weight. Pick something a little heavier than the weapon you had before and see how it goes. Websites linked from the homepage might also give an indication of which weapon you should be using. If you want more precise information as too which weapons are fastest and slowest, you'll probably need to try them out yourself or get hired as a creator.
QUESTION: Creators suck! How do I know which weapon is right for my current skill level while I'm testing them out?
ANSWER: One great indication is that the weapon TMs fairly frequently while using it. This is especially important for faith/magic based guilds, as it can save them a ton of xp and money in the long run. If not concerned about TM rate, use a weapon that -hits- things you typically fight. It doesn't matter if it does 1000 hp damage when it lands a hit, if it only lands a hit once an hour. Get something that hits half the time or more, 25% of the time at the very very least. Again, it's whatever works best for what you want to do.
QUESTION: My weapon hits stuff fine, but doesn't totally DESTROY the evil NPCs when I use specials. How come?
ANSWER: Base damage is more important for specials than for normal attacks. Base damage is used to calculate how much damage the hit does, and because it's a special attack, that amount is multiplied. Hence differences between weapons that seem small when using normal attacks can get much bigger when using special attacks. some players solve this by carrying around additional weapons solely for specials. Or you just might have to live lowish special damage until your melee bonus is high enough to use a better weapon for both normal and special attacks. Yeah, you can't have everything.
QUESTION: What's the best sword?
ANSWER: Now -that's- the stupidest question. Congratulations! Hopefully you've read the above answers, and have started to grasp that there is no best weapon. There might be a fastest weapon and there might be a weapon that does the most base damage, but there is a large selection of weapons that combine those two in various quantities. However, the fastest weapon will NEVER do the most base damage. This is called balance. Suck it up. Your best option is to experiment and find the weapon that does the highest base damage while still hitting stuff often enough to kill it between reboots.
QUESTION: Why are custom short swords so sloooow? You suck!
ANSWER: Yes, I suck, but not nearly as much as your custom short swords. Haha! Seriously, the change to custom short swords was an emergency fix done to correct a HUGE OBSCENE UBER DISGUSTING imbalance in custom short swords. I had permission to make an emergency fix, but due to creator territoriality (they piss on folders, rather than trees), couldn't do the fiddling necessary to do a proper recode. So I had the choice between making them slower or making them do less base damage. For the sake of variety among short swords, and the expense of custom swords, I opted to make them slower while still doing very high base damage. Unfortunately, it turned out that most of the people using them were sucky n00bs, not Lanfear clones. And I didn't know how much slower they'd be, and didn't have the option of making further corrections when it became apparent. They're still slow now because creators suck and haven't recoded them. Cry me a river.
[1] These stat values were stolen from Sined's website ( beam.to/sined ) with absolutely no permission whatsoever. Yoink!
QUESTION: What type of weapon should I use?
This is usually asked my newbies, and is perhaps the least moronic question to ask.
ANSWER: If your guild has only one melee weapon primary, use that. If you absolutely hate that melee primary, refresh and pick a different guild. Seriously. If you need to ask this question, you're basically a newbie, and it's best to take the easy option. Warriors, Assassins, and most Thief specialisations have at least one melee primary. Melee primaries are much easier for newbies to advance than are melee non-primary skills, and you really need that edge when starting out.
If you're already in a dancing or chanting guild (Witches, Wizards, Priests), and just can't stand to join a guild of grunters, pie-eaters, or panty-wearers, pick a weapon that works well with your stats. Or pick stats that work decently with your weapon and well with your desired spells/rituals. If your stats are pure int and wisdom, you'll have an equally hard time advancing all melee skills and go with what sounds fun.
Here's how the stat reliance for various melee skills break down [1]:
Con Dex Str
dagger: 4 1
sword: 3 2
h. sw: 1 1 3
axe: 1 1 3
mace: 2 1 2
flail: 1 2 2
pole: 2 3
misc: 1 2 2
This is why dexterity based guilds (thieves, assassins) tend to go for daggers or swords. Warrior stats tend to be built around a melee skills due to all the melee options and lack of variety in other things they do, so pretty much anything should work fine. Wizards can use spells to do grevious bodily injury, and should be able to get by with whatever stat is most prevalant in the "type" (offensive, defensive, weird) of spells they want to use. Staves are perhaps somewhat popular due to their use in other wizardly areas. But dagger can be nice if the wizard is very low on strength, or even mediocre in strength, as they have quite a few components to lug around as well. Witches might prefer polearm as well, since they carry brooms around for riding, and it's convenient to whack stuff without additional inventory required. Again, daggers could be a low-weight alternative. Mace can be nice for priests that want to hit stuff with their rods, but they should resist the temptation unless they have a con-heavy rearrange (as a Pishe priest might). Again, daggers tend to be the lightest and most newbie-friendly weapons, especially in a typically low-strength guild (except for offensive gods like Sek).
One problem is that some weapon types are cheaper and easier to obtain than others. Dagger and sword are by far the most common. There's a decent selection of maces and axes as well, and flails are well-covered at lower-midbie levels only if you want to pay a fee to custom order (less than $50 I think). The other weapons can be very hard to find a sufficient variety of to be used at a range of skill levels. I would especially advise all players to avoid relying on the "misc" melee skill, since it's a hodgepodge of random weapons that don't quite fit into other categories. They're almost all newbie weapons, and are subject to being shifted to use another melee skill at any time a creator decides they fit better elsewhere.
QUESTION: I don't have any melee skills at all and I can't hit stuff. Help!
ANSWER: Refresh. Go back to the newbie area, and spend time in the combat rooms. Alternatively, check out the quest solutions linked to the homepage and do those until you can get decent melee skills. Resist the tempation to advance faith or magic straight away and focus on melee: melee gets you experience much faster.
QUESTION: I have 20 dagger bonus but I can't hit stuff with my thieves' daggers! They are teh b0rked!
ANSWER: Put down the daggers and step away slowly. Well, put them in your vault and leave them there for a very long time. Go to a general store. Buy the cheapest, lightest daggers you can find. These are typically called "knife" or "small knife". Get one for each hand (hopefully 2). Hold them both, and try again. If you still have trouble hitting, type: "tactics attitude insane" and hope the rats and cockroaches aren't reading this article too.
QUESTION: I am 2 days old now and my retribution isn't hitting much!
ANSWER: You're still a n00b. Read the answer immediately above this one. You're best off starting with lighter, simpler weapons. High-end weapons may look cool and impress the newbies pretending to be girls, but trying to use them at low levels is pointless. Well, it'll make the more experienced players laugh, so maybe that's good. If you're two days old and have been advancing your melee skill as much as possible, you're probably ready for something a bit better than an utterly crap weapon. The best indication is probably weight. Pick something a little heavier than the weapon you had before and see how it goes. Websites linked from the homepage might also give an indication of which weapon you should be using. If you want more precise information as too which weapons are fastest and slowest, you'll probably need to try them out yourself or get hired as a creator.
QUESTION: Creators suck! How do I know which weapon is right for my current skill level while I'm testing them out?
ANSWER: One great indication is that the weapon TMs fairly frequently while using it. This is especially important for faith/magic based guilds, as it can save them a ton of xp and money in the long run. If not concerned about TM rate, use a weapon that -hits- things you typically fight. It doesn't matter if it does 1000 hp damage when it lands a hit, if it only lands a hit once an hour. Get something that hits half the time or more, 25% of the time at the very very least. Again, it's whatever works best for what you want to do.
QUESTION: My weapon hits stuff fine, but doesn't totally DESTROY the evil NPCs when I use specials. How come?
ANSWER: Base damage is more important for specials than for normal attacks. Base damage is used to calculate how much damage the hit does, and because it's a special attack, that amount is multiplied. Hence differences between weapons that seem small when using normal attacks can get much bigger when using special attacks. some players solve this by carrying around additional weapons solely for specials. Or you just might have to live lowish special damage until your melee bonus is high enough to use a better weapon for both normal and special attacks. Yeah, you can't have everything.
QUESTION: What's the best sword?
ANSWER: Now -that's- the stupidest question. Congratulations! Hopefully you've read the above answers, and have started to grasp that there is no best weapon. There might be a fastest weapon and there might be a weapon that does the most base damage, but there is a large selection of weapons that combine those two in various quantities. However, the fastest weapon will NEVER do the most base damage. This is called balance. Suck it up. Your best option is to experiment and find the weapon that does the highest base damage while still hitting stuff often enough to kill it between reboots.
QUESTION: Why are custom short swords so sloooow? You suck!
ANSWER: Yes, I suck, but not nearly as much as your custom short swords. Haha! Seriously, the change to custom short swords was an emergency fix done to correct a HUGE OBSCENE UBER DISGUSTING imbalance in custom short swords. I had permission to make an emergency fix, but due to creator territoriality (they piss on folders, rather than trees), couldn't do the fiddling necessary to do a proper recode. So I had the choice between making them slower or making them do less base damage. For the sake of variety among short swords, and the expense of custom swords, I opted to make them slower while still doing very high base damage. Unfortunately, it turned out that most of the people using them were sucky n00bs, not Lanfear clones. And I didn't know how much slower they'd be, and didn't have the option of making further corrections when it became apparent. They're still slow now because creators suck and haven't recoded them. Cry me a river.
[1] These stat values were stolen from Sined's website ( beam.to/sined ) with absolutely no permission whatsoever. Yoink!