Battle, weapons, and you

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Vaarna
Child of the Light
Posts: 19
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2009 2:55 pm

Battle, weapons, and you

Post by Vaarna »

Combat on the MUD has many different kind of factors to it. There's many kind of different weapons in the MUD, weaponclasses and they all have different kind of functionality in one way or another.

Combat consists of normal 'attacks' and special maneuvers. Special maneuvers are skills that you learn from different kind of mobs or learn through other means.

Normal attacks and their 'damage' is determined by your posture (1 does the lowest damage, 3 is pretty much normal and 5 adds some extra) but at the same time, your defensive abilities go down in the same scale. Your attack speed is also determined by your posture, you'll only attack once every twice rounds if you're in the posture 1, but in 3 your attacks execute normally once a round. You can also change your 'target' so that you will try attack a certain location of the body with your normal attacks. Targetting the head is the most common, as that does the most damage, but other positions such as the torso may be easier to hit, or, they might be less armoured somewhere else.

The speed of your weapon is determined by the weight of the weapon and your character's strength. While strength cannot be really measured in any certain way, it does affect combat a little. Weapon weighs vary, but in general medium blades and staves are weapons almost everyone can use with one attack a round while in neutral posture (3). One normal attack per round is the maximal value one can have.

Wether you land a attack or not depends on the defensive abilities of your opponent, as well as what kind of position you are, and where your opponent is in. Weapons like daggers can only really hit people who are in front position and while you are front yourself as well, while long weapons such as polearms excel at landing attacks from the rear against rear opponents. Medium weapons, such as medium blades or axes, seem to work the best from middle. Only by testing out and combatting can a player find what seems to benefit them the most.

Some weapons have 'special' perks to them, such as flails will hit multiple opponents if they are attacking you, and staves giving you a lot of better defensive capability when fighting against two opponents and hitting them both. Some weapons have their own special attacks, such as with daggers one can do backstab, and with medium and long blades, bladeforms.

Special attacks that are common to all weapons; Kick and bash. Let's begin with bash. Bash is a skill that will knock your opponent to sitting position if you land it, and causes extra damage on the next hit if they don't manage to avoid it. To bash a opponent, you'll need the skill, as well as any type of shield. Bucklers do just fine, as well. When you are bashed, you cannot do a 'regular' attack unless you can stand up right after the bash, and it may interrupt you from doing certain moves, such as bladeforms, if you are still sitting when it should go off.

Kick is another special skill. Kick is independant of all other skills, and as such, you can use it even if you had no equipment. You can use a argument with kick, such as kick head, in which case it will interrupt your foe. Kicking someone to their legs will make them lose moves, and kicking someone to the torso will cause them to move backwards in position against their will. You can also kick hands to disarm opponents, if they are using one handed weapons. You can view the locations where you may kick by typing 'target'.

So what is the most efficient weapon, posture, and position? That's a question where there's no real answer. For defensive type players, rear and full defense (posture 1) seems to be quite good, but you do very little damage in such. Also, 'status', while it displays your defensive values, doesn't take to equation your posture. If you are full offense and front, even if you had 100% dodging bonus and 100% parrying bonus, expect to be hit often. Same applies otherway around of course. Weapons usually go in the same way, weapons that weigh less usually support the style of defending better, while heavy weapons deal more damage and may affect your defense in a negative way.


I hope that this post can help others in their way of learning how the combat on this MUD works. If anyone has something further they'd like to add or comment, please, do so. I may have forgotten something.

P.S. I left bladeforms out because they are a bit 'special' in the way and are more of a advanced form of fighting. This is more about basics.
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