Optimal PvE build

Agility is pretty lousy for humans when it comes to combat. The combat bonus caps out at +10 if you roll 19 which is the second half of the 'exceptional' range, so you don't even know if you got 18 or 19. 18 is +5 to 'react' which is a flat bonus to a bunch of combat rolls as well as defense and offense. 19 agility gives +10. It's not nothing, but when you compare it to the way high strength can completely change a character's entire playstyle, or how much a difference of 20 hp/stun makes for survival, a small bonus to off/def and disarm/kick/etc is shit. Wouldn't hurt to have it, but unless you're into stealth, it really doesn't matter.

Also, there's no age bracket that hasn't got a penalty to either strength or agility, so to get 19 human agility without a stealth class, you'd need to take a strength penalty. That's just never going to be worth it. Agility does affect attack speed, but noone seems to know how much, and I find that offense and weapon skills mostly dwarf this. I haven't really noticed any serious difference between, say, very good and exceptional human agility when it comes to attack speed, and once the character is skilled, agility seems to stop mattering.

For elves it's a little different. If you get 25 agility (smack in the middle of elven exceptional range) you get +25 to those rolls. That's a serious amount. Also you can check if you got 25 agility because that's the threshold to carrying 12 items in your inventory, so there's no uncertainty. The +25 is particularly noticeable with skills that cap low, like disarm which warrior capped at 70 and is probably the same for the heavy combat classes (two of which have to branch it). When you have +25 to a skill that noone has more than 70 points in, it has a huge impact. The bonus to defense is also significant, especially when it comes to dodging, so elves are hilariously desirable in the Byn even though people have to RP hating them. Same goes here as for disarm: while defense doesn't cap low, most people probably get stuck around 40-60ish, so +25 is a lot.

Unfortunately for elves, the +25 to offense is a massive disadvantage in raising combat skills, and even though it's a big bonus, it still doesn't come close to the power of strength. For elves, strength pretty much doesn't exist; they can't get more than +1 damage from it, and they need the upper end of exceptional for that. Elven exceptional strength is 14-15 so you can't even tell if you got the +1. You can have exceptional strength as an elf and get no damage bonus! Elven 'good' is enough to have no penalty. It's kind of tragic that good and exceptional can be the same. At elven values, it doesn't even affect carrying capacity that much--10 vs 15 strength is a difference of 30 points of weight, while 15 vs 20 is a difference of 150 weight. WTF?

Mul and half-giant obviously comes out ahead, but they're such special cases with so many RP obligations that they aren't worth discussing. A half-giant would be most people's idea of a combat powerhouse, but few actually want to play them because the race is garbage for everything other than hitting hard and having lots of health. You do have to actually RP the character some of the time, after all. As such, let's say the optimal PvE build will be a human or dwarf. Dwarf is statistically best because they get more strength, but at that point it's not so important whether your average hit is for 20 or 22 damage. Capped human strength is enough, the granularity of damage is such that a little more is unlikely to result in a better 'number of hits needed to kill a dude' factor. Being a human means you don't have to deal with annoying shit like terrible sneaking speed and staff pestering you about your focus, and there will be no social obstacles for a human in case you end up wanting to join the militia or fuck a noble. If you don't care about any of these things, go dwarf.

But what class and subclass? If it's purely for PvE, I'm assuming the ultimate goal is to kill the biggest beasts and tank all the gith and stuff like that. So we're not looking at backstab and poisons, we're looking at raw DIKU combat prowess. The only classes that qualify are the heavy combat ones: enforcer, raider and fighter. We can kind of rule out the enforcer since it's a PvP class. When it comes to killing mekillots and gith squads, they just don't really get anything useful. Neither does the fighter; hack and riposte are pretty terrible and not worth lagging yourself for. Riposte only triggers on parries, and once you have decent combat skills, you'll dodge or block 90% of the time in PvE. Riposte is more of an arena skill. Raider gets master archery which certainly has its uses in PvE, and they get the wilderness utility skills for free without the need to spend a subclass for ride, climb, direction sense, etc. Raider wins.

Subclass pretty much has to be one of the magick ones if we're talking about a min-maxed PvE build. The two that stand out in this regard are Rukkian Protection and Rukkian Empowerment. Last time I checked, the Empowerment suite included Armor and Stoneskin, so I'm not sure what Protection could have that's better. Probably weird shit like Burrow that we don't care about. What you really want is Strength and Godspeed (which is mutually exclusive with Stoneskin), and that's Rukkian Empowerment. If you got a high agility roll, Godspeed can bump it up to elf levels and give serious bonuses, as mentioned above, without saddling you with the disadvantage of having those bonuses permanently and struggling to raise your skills. This is something humans have over dwarves. If you wanted to be some kind of weird paladin, you could also take Vivaduan Healing, but that's kinda gay.

If the character has to be mundane, it's a little harder to pin down the optimal subclass. There actually aren't any that do a whole lot for the raider, in terms of PvE combat. You could take wastelander for wilderness quit, rogue for pick, or slipknife for poisoning. None of these really improve your ability to kill the hardest things in the game, but you might run into situations where these abilities will help you in other ways. You could also just take one of the subclasses with skinning so that there's an actual reason to go around killing mekillots and silt horrors. If you opt out of magick, you may even want to play something like enforcer/outdoorsman just so the character is optimal in PvP as well.

Human is still just better, though. Anyone fully buffed with Ruk spells will shred faces, but the Strength spell gives up to what, 4 or 5 strength, and the strength stat scales linearly up to 25. An elf with natural exceptional strength would end up at around 18-20ish after the buff, which is good but not even as much as a strong dwarf. A human would get mul-level strength. And that's if you made an elf with strength prioritized, which would suck ass anytime you aren't buffed. Meanwhile, agility basically stops scaling at the upper end of the natural elven range, so they don't really benefit from going above their natural range whereas a human will get huge bonuses from going into the 20s.

The elven stat ranges just don't line up real well with the stat buffs. To get the full benefits, you would need an elf with a max strength roll and like VG agility, and that character would be pretty crappy anytime they aren't spelled up. If agility continued to scale linearly into the 30s, it would have been a lot better; but as it stands, it's kinda like casting Strength on a HG. There may be character concepts that can go fully buffed 24/7, but for most players that won't be an appealing playstyle. Humans (and dwarves) are the ones that have the best stats unbuffed and get the most out of the buffs. The fact that strength doesn't hit diminishing returns until after 25 is just a testament to the stat's brokenness.

So let's say for the sake of argument that Strength and Godspeed give +4 to strength and agility. Can't remember if it's exactly that, but it's thereabouts. It's not a fixed amount but that's about the most you can get out of these spells.

If you take an elf with Very Good strength (12) and Exceptional agility (25), they have:
+0 damage, +25 to combat rolls

Cast Strength and Godspeed on the elf and they have:
+1 damage, +30 to combat rolls (the hardcap for agility's 'react' bonus)

If you take a human with Exceptional strength (19) and Good agility (15), they have:
+4 damage, +0 to combat rolls

Cast Strength and Godspeed on the human and they have:
+8 damage, +10 to combat rolls

And if the human has a higher natural agility than that, they get even better combat bonuses from the buff whereas an elf with higher agility just sits at the cap. Meanwhile if the elf has just a little less strength, the Strength spell might not even result in a damage bonus at all. In order to become a hard hitter, their natural strength would have to be near the top of the range, which requires some weird statrolls that don't do shit for you without those spells active. The human, on the other hand, is both a better fighter without the buffs and gets more out of the buffs.

That would work fine as well, but if the dwarf has mediocre agility, the agility penalty from Stoneskin might drop the stat so low that it becomes problematic. I much prefer Godspeed over Stoneskin and you can't have both on at the same time. In most cases, the best defense is a good offense, because ending a fight faster is probably going to be just as safe as having better defenses in a longer fight. That buffed dwarf will probably take on most anything if he's skilled, but I don't think it's optimal compared to a human with a decent enough agility to hit AI with Godspeed.

Agility is not a weak stat on its own, the reason it's "bad" is that strength is so much better, so you never want to prioritize agility on a combat character, and humans/dwarves can't get high enough natural agility to hit the levels where it's good. Godspeed changes this. If you roll EG agility on a human, Godspeed could bump it up to a level where the stat really does a lot for you. The reason elves suck is that they can't pair their agility with high strength.

Dwarves are kinda better than humans, but not so much better that you'd have to feel bad about playing a human. Dwarves have some annoying disadvantages such as shitty bash, slow movement speed (especially while sneaking; they pretty much can't shadow elves), and just the whole focus thing and the fact that people don't really take dwarves seriously. Dwarves are best on paper but they aren't universally better. I wouldn't play one even if my goal was to just kill things optimally.

Strength makes a huge difference when going from not-so-great to great strength. Once you already have great strength, another point or two won't matter all that much. Now and then it'll let you kill something in three hits instead of four, but the vast majority of fights will turn out the same, you're just finishing the opponent off with an 18 point overkill instead of 12. If there were things in the game with thousands of hit points, this would be different.

Say you're swinging a 1d8 sword. Weapons on Arm tend to have D&D-like dice values.

If you have no strength bonus, that's 1-8 damage, average of 4,5.

If you have 19 strength, you get +4. That's 5-12 damage, average of 8,5. That's pretty much double damage.

If you have 21 strength, you get +6. That's 7-14 damage, average of 10,5. That's like 20% more.

If you buffed those strength levels by four points, the difference is even smaller.

If you could have those two extra points of damage without any disadvantages, that'd be great. But the lower agility, crappy bash, slow movement speed, inability to ride certain situationally useful mounts, and the social stigma against dwarves that means people just don't want to RP with them as much, it ends up not being worth 20% more damage when you're already hitting like a braxat and spraying blood everywhere with your killing blows more often than not.

EDIT: Oops, just read the second page of the thread, seems this point has already been made but I'll keep this here in case I go digging in the code later.

I might bring up the numbers and facts later on, but I remember digging through the codedump a lot to figure out how the dwarf strength/agility trade off actually looked.

I remember being pleasantly surprised (at the time) that the loss in combat timers due to agility weren't that bad (I'm unsure if this was because of some cut-off effect or if the timers vary continuously with agility with the overall impact still being "meh")

I also remember that the strength effects were INSANE, because of the multiplicative effect of the strength bonus with two-handed and bludgeoning. And I mean absolutely fucking ludicrous.