offense/defense 2

I will not be lulled back into this conversation. Will. Not. Must...resist.

I've played a few 'rinth fighters. First long-lived one was Hekro, who was actually a regular 'nakki commoner who moved to the 'rinth (people lose their fucking minds if you do this, it's like nobody can comprehend the concept of moving there due to poverty or legal troubles). It's pretty easy if you know how to swing it.

I'd say it takes around 6-10 days of solid grinding and then you can school twitchy and toothless pretty handily if you have proper stats. It actually tends to be a fairly sudden shift, like nearly overnight, mostly because you eventually hit the benchmark for reversing their disarms and become largely immune to that. By day 12 or so, Hekro was destroying twitchy in a few rounds without taking a single hit. However, NPC skills will increase when you fight them. If they ever seem absurdly powerful, moreso than can be accounted for by the random variance of their stats and skills when they generate after a reboot, it's likely that someone's been sparring them for a couple of weeks.

By day 15-20ish, if you've been maintaining a good grinding routine, you should be at the point where nothing in the 'rinth that can realistically be fought can dodge your attacks anymore. You've pretty much capped out your potential here, unless you're willing to do some fairly extreme things like getting drunk and waiting for dark nights and blind-fighting the toughest elves while sitting down. I'd say the odds of surviving this are too low to be worth risking a character.

Skill levels weren't visible at the time so I'm not completely sure exactly how badass Hekro ever really got, but it was at the level where I rode to the mantis enclave and slaughtered a bunch of them to get spiked bracers. Kharad Tor once tried to assassinate me in the Barrel and I utterly annihilated his guards, and him, and then disengaged with him at poor condition and fled because I didn't want to kill him (he was pretty cool).

Subsequent 'rinth warriors have led me to the conclusion that you'll generally plateau at mid-journeyman weapon skills in there, with the potential to maybe hit advanced if you go at it long enough to occasionally find elven NPCs with max agility rolls that can dodge one in twenty of your attacks. Unfortunately, you end up getting to the point where you just obliterate these fuckers in seconds and start to attract too much attention. The 'rinth is a great sparring ground until you get to that stage where the only way to wring out misses is to carve a path through entire neighborhoods, and that'll make you a target.

All the non-weapon/offense skills are pretty easy to max there. You should cap parry at 5-6 days or so, and your block should be maxed long before that. Dual-wield is something I never really bothered to use extensively but I'd assume it can be brought to 70ish before you start struggling to find opportunities to fail anymore. Disarm, bash, kick can be maxed fairly easily since bash fails well on elves and a few notable NPCs have really high disarm. Defense is generally easy to raise, it's just a matter of time as it's trivial to force hits on your character. Offense is like weapon skills, except you can fight unarmed.

The trick to training a 'rinth warrior (or ranger; I'd love to play a ranger/thief in there) is to be anonymous as long as you fucking can, and don't attack NPCs until you can no longer train on the NPCs that will attack you.

Staying anonymous is largely a matter of not RPing with anyone. If you do, and become known, people will fuck with you when they find out that you're sparring the NPCs. If you can spend the first two or three weeks of the PC's life in obscurity, that's the most useful thing you can do to give yourself a good start. You also want to keep an eye out when you're fighting, and if you see a PC approaching from adjacent rooms, just run away. Don't let people look at you. Don't let people wonder who you are, because people in the 'rinth are bored out of their fucking minds and will make it their mission to stalk you just to find some excuse to murder you. 90% of 'rinth players aren't there because of the diverse and abundant RP, they're there to PK people and will wait for an excuse to do so on the thinnest possible pretense of necessity.

There are two types of NPCs that will jump you. By default, nothing out in the open 'rinth is aggressive. In fact, nearly nothing in the whole area is. Don't enter the building southeast of the Mantis, and don't sneak into the back of the elven basement bar. Other than that, I don't think a single NPC in the 'rinth is natively aggro. However, there are the scripted muggers ('nuthin wurth takin') who will try to gank you if you have anything worth 100+ sid on you, or thereabouts. The other type will attack you without warning for somewhat less, I wanna say the threshold is something like 70? This comprises twitchy, dirty, toothless, various elves, and a few of the roaming humans. If you're wearing truly worthless shit and stay out of obviously private areas, literally nothing will attack you.

As such, the trick is to wear rinth-safe stuff (shit like the hard black leather shirt isn't safe) and then carry something in a pocket that will get you jumped. When you're ready, go to the NPC you want to fight and wear that thing. Let it attack you. It's way, way harder to get in trouble for defending yourself against an NPC that attacked you. Only if someone catches you routinely doing that for extended periods of time will staff have real grounds for reprimanding you. But PCs will always assume that you attacked the NPC and treat you as if you're on a murderous rampage, or at least become obsessed with finding out what you're up to.

By the way, avoid killing the NPCs as much as you can, flee when they're at poor condition. You won't need the loot and don't need the hassle of being found out as a murderer, nor do you want to run out of NPCs to fight as they take a couple of hours to respawn. NPCs kill eachother plenty for you to loot their shit and sell it. You don't need much money to play the 'rinth game, and the gear you need for that area is cheap.

Whenever you're done fighting something, run to some spot where you're least likely to be encountered by other players. They've added some new shit to the area since I played so I'm not sure anymore, but I liked places like that dark attic in the abandoned building between Hathor's and the Folley. Bear in mind that some of these places are also hideouts for other PCs, but I still found it much more secluded than trying to play it cool in a bar or something.

Stay the fuck out of the sewers. Rats will give you plague and reduce your stats, and mages will fuck with you. Take a subguild with climb if your main guild doesn't get it. Stay away from any down exit you aren't familiar with, and don't climb around until you have high climb skill. Get poison cures as soon as you can and familiarize yourself with them. People love to use knockout poison.

The nice thing about training a fighter in the 'rinth is that you automatically raise your hidden vs. humanoids skills. People training in the wild don't do that unless they take time out of their routine to fight gith, and even then it's not quite the same. While stilt lizards and gortok dens are good for maxing your weapon skills, a character who used these things as their sole source of training will be pretty shitty against a 'rinth scrapper who has only ever fought people. It's a nice little bit of realism and metagame in one.

If you're gonna make a career of fighting in the 'rinth, focus on piercing and bludgeon weapons. Raising these skills will also increase your defense against them, and those two skills are almost exclusively what will be used by PCs in the 'rinth. Most NPCs use piercing, and the ones that use slashing aren't worth worrying about anyway. PCs using piercing will mostly be assassins, and bludgeoners will be warriors, often dwarves and HGs who you really don't wanna get hit by. A few bludgeoners will be assassin/thugs, but they aren't really anything to be worried about. If you can fit it in, consider also raising chopping weapons and using that as your own weapon of choice, although it can be difficult to raise so many weapon skills. If you can, however, it'll be the most effective in that place as few will be using it.

Training throwing in the 'rinth can be a bit of a bitch because the NPCs will pick up your throwing weapons. However, after a while their inventories will fill with random bandanas and polished bone hoops and whatever shit they loot off other dead NPCs, and then you can safely throw knives at them. After reboots, consider finding an elf that rolled high agility and fill its inventory with balls of dung from the stables, and then miss a throw against it once an hour. Don't spam-throw, it isn't necessary.

Dude, sometimes Twitch gets a MAD stat roll. Before I left the Byn with that PC I was wrecking EVERYONE.