Stats explained

That right there is the biggest reason people don't like the Arm staff. People get angry when you lie to them.

It's not even that, really. Armor just doesn't make that much of a difference. It reduces damage by a very small amount, even silt-horror plate doesn't do a whole lot to change the outcome of a fight. You might as well wear some armor because anyone can at least manage to wear a helmet, collar, body armor and bracers, but the only time I even bother to wear more than that is if I'm playing a character with really high strength and the armor is more of a fashion statement than anything.

In this game, big chunks of damage is what kills you. Armor doesn't scale with anything, it's just a flat damage reduction, and even heavier armors don't shave off more than like 3 damage or something. If something hits for so little damage that that amount of reduction makes a difference, it's something that isn't a threat to you anyway. The things that are dangerous are the things that can hit you for 20+ damage consistently, and in those cases, even heavy armor is unlikely to change the number of hits you can survive. If something hits for 30 and you have 100 hit points, taking 2 less damage per hit doesn't really change anything for you. If something hits for 7, it's not dangerous to anyone.

I always thought they should make armor more effective but give penalties for wearing it. The game is set in a brutally hot desert world where running out of water is (in principle, at least) one of the most likely ways you'll die. Make armor matter more but make it something you have to seriously consider the pros and cons for. Everything that costs stamina should cost considerably more of it if you're wearing heavy armor, and it should make you thirsty much faster. It should be nearly impossible to travel and move quickly in heavy armor, and then they can double or triple the amount of protection that armor gives, because in the current system it does almost nothing in the situations that matter. It might do quite a bit when some poor-strength elf is hitting you for 1d6-3 damage, but that elf is never gonna use melee damage to kill you with, and armor does nothing whatsoever against backstab, poisons, magic, etc.

Such a change would of course have to come with some nerfs to strength, but for some reason, staff refuses to touch the stat system. It's like there's some secret policy of never adjusting stats no matter what. I don't think they've touched the stat code since they nerfed c-elf wisdom and d-elf endurance something like two decades ago.

IMO the "Hit-Location Multipliers" could be changed or dropped.

Less realistic, but you could have armor affect the whole body and give flat damage reduction like most normal games.

I mean, if you're gonna compare a dwarf with average agility and an elf with top agility, of course there's gonna be a noticeable difference, but nowhere near the kind of vast difference you're implying. Try and compare the combat performance of an average strength elf and a mul, the difference in damage will be even bigger than the difference in attack speed between a slow dwarf and an elf. Most people aren't going to do high-end fighting on dwarf PCs with average agility, anyone sufficiently experienced with the game to where they're doing anything that warrants scrutinizing the code to this extent knows not to roll up a dwarf and prioritize agility 3rd or 4th. And unless you have novice skills, you most certainly will not be delayed for 30 seconds. Once you're at the combat skill plateau, agility makes a fairly modest difference. From my testing, I'd estimate that for every 5 points in agility, there's like a 10% difference in attacks per minute, and it tapers off at higher skill levels as skills eventually overtake agility's impact. There's a reason it's dwarves that the PK-fiends choose, not elves.

With high strength and two-handed skill, your accuracy becomes so obscene that you can frankly hit even long-lived fighters. The etwo code is ridiculous, which is why I advocate using it. If you go up against Mr. 58 Days dual-wielding, you're probably not gonna land enough hits on him. With etwo and an actual two-handed weapon, and high strength, you legitimately can. And you can sap him if he's on foot. I've played a couple of enforcers with AI human strength and maxed sap, and once you have the skill fully maxed and a good two-handed maul, it's basically a guaranteed OHKO that completely ignores all the target's skills. I'm serious--once I had the skill maxed, I literally never saw it not knock somebody out. I'm pretty sure it deals like 150 stun damage at that point. And if you should happen to miss, which is exceedingly unlikely at master, any swing with an etwo bludgeoner at high strength is also a potential OHKO. And if you're reasonably skilled, you absolutely can land hits even on long-lived warriors.

I think people overestimate how much offense and defense characters generally have. In the past you could keep raising these skills forever by just fighting unarmed+sitting, so it wasn't hard to max defense out, merely time-consuming. Then they changed the code so that in order to gain, you have to get hit by something whose offense is high enough compared to your defense that you qualify for skillgains. I'm pretty sure that if you look at some of the best fighters in today's game, they don't have much more than like 50-60 defense. If you have 40ish offense, top-tier strength and etwo, you can land hits on characters like that. Those who are in clans and spar don't generally get super-high skills anyway because sparring sucks, so the few characters in the game who do have really high off/def tend not to spar with eachother. Their defense stagnates around the point that you can raise it to against anything that you can safely get hit by repeatedly on a regular basis, i.e. things like gith. You can't really practice bareknuckle boxing against a silt horror, after all.

The people who go into PvP dual-wielding swords and axes are silly. Indeed, you will never kill anything but a newbie that way. Etwo bludgeoning is a different story, as is enforcer sap. I once had an enforcer with like 3 days played, barely raised bludgeoning and offense from the starting point because all I had done until then was train sap and etwo off of animals that can't dodge you even as a new enforcer. So I had AI strength and like advanced two-handed skill but apprentice bludgeoning and a similar level of offense. I got attacked by an AoD corporal and sergeant duo after carrying out an assassination for the Guild. I killed the corporal and knocked the sergeant out. They may not have been extremely high-skilled, but they were certainly way above the starting level for an enforcer. My point is that with the right setup, you will land hits on skilled opponents.

Of course, if you have access to peraine, you can potentially kill anyone. A 5-day elf could shoot a poisoned arrow at Mr. 58 Days. However, if the poison doesn't land, that elf is probably dead meat. Against an experienced PvP player, it's very risky to pull out a ranged weapon and start shooting because now you're standing there unarmed. Peraine is very effective when it works, but it doesn't always work, and there's also the fact that once you have paralyzed someone, you then have to actually kill them. Every hit that lands on a paralyzed target has a chance to break the paralysis, and an elf might have to hit someone 15-20 times in order to kill them. There's a very real chance that it just isn't going to work. When you're dealing with high-strength characters, it's extremely risky to do anything that lags yourself out, and doubly so with a bow or blowgun in hand.

When it comes to killing someone in PvP, there's only really two ways to do it: deal crazy amounts of damage in a very short time, or prevent them from doing anything. I don't think peraine is that much more effective than just doing enough damage to kill somebody before they have time to enter any commands. When any one of your melee swings is a potential one-shot, it's almost impossible to fight you. While poisons are certainly very effective, that 5-day elf is so vulnerable to melee combat and so reliant on that one trick that if it doesn't work, he's pretty much fucked. Contrary to popular belief, poisons frequently just don't trigger. I've landed multiple melee hits with a poisoned dagger without proccing the poison on a number of occasions, and the same goes for ranged attacks. It's surprisingly unreliable, you just never hear people talking about that time somebody shot them three times and they simply didn't get poisoned, because in many cases the arrows just disappear and you never knew they were poisoned arrows.

Like I've been saying, there's a reason the avid PKers tend to resort to HGs and dwarves, or the magick classes that buff strength or sling fireballs. It's not the only way to kill someone, but it's the most dependable and the one that's always available to you, unlike all the PvP tricks. Can't sap/backstab/bash/subdue someone who's mounted, can't use ranged attacks against someone affected by one of several spells, can't always rely on poisons to work, can't arrest someone who doesn't stand around in the city, etc. But melee combat with high strength is always effective no matter what, it isn't a situational gimmick. The only meaningful counter to it is to have even more skill and strength yourself, or spells that basically nullify combat altogether. If the CIA knocks on my door today and gives me a secret mission to create a new account on Armageddon and PK someone, I'm not making an elf. I'm making a dwarf enforcer if it's in a city or a raider if it's in the wilderness. If I could use my karma, I'd take the Rukkian Empowerment subclass, but it'll work fine without, as long as I use a bludgeoning weapon.

Your mission, if you choose to accept, is to kill FME Borsail....

This way will self destruct.

That red and gold spice boosts STR. One could does up on about 6-7 sniffed pinches of spice before they will overdose. And each pinch sniff is what... +2 or +3 STR? This will put an elf with average STR at about 20 STR.

However this also goes for anyone with already high STR, making them even STRONGER.