The truth about skilling up:This is a long ass post, but don't expect a tldr. If you're the type of person who wants to know this shit, you'll suffer through it and be thankful.I've taken a half-giant ranger from novice slashing to advanced in around thirty days played. So you can listen to me, and know that I know what I'm talking about. I've taken numerous other characters to mastery in around 9-15.
Most every skill in the game only requires one miss, and you're good. The exception is weapon skills.
Weapon skills tick up a very tiny fractional percentage with EACH miss. Like .07%. The exact percentage is wisdom based. When you accrue enough misses, you go up and the skill goes on cooldown. So it's possible to get like 13 misses, and get up to .93%, and stop. Then go out and get one miss, and instantly raise your skill, but then be on a timer...and the other 12-15 misses you get after that are wasted.
As a half-giant with only above average wisdom, I got around 10-15 misses each time out, and like I said...it kept ticking right up. I would have eventually mastered it.
The trick was blindfighting and fighting in darkness. There is a set chance to miss, no matter what your skill, when fighting in darkness. So in order to keep getting misses on my half-giant (despite his strength/offense being so huge), was to fight in the gortok den, and to go after spiders, and attacking them while they were a shadow. It would've been a much bigger pain in the ass to get misses, if I didn't have scan.
This is also how warriors get their advanced weapons up. Blindfighting. But most don't have scan, so they have a shittier time of it. And also, their Defense vs critters will NEVER get as good as a ranger's.
You have to be careful though. Lots of people have died in the gortok den. Because they will rip your asshole open if you're not nearly invulnerable to them. My giant had such a high defense, and absolutely incredible endurance and the best armor money could buy. So everything bounced off me. In fact, I often went around just fighting critters with my barehands, including raptors and gith, cause they could not hurt me through my Defense and armor. It was too dangerous for fully armed opponents to spar my half-giant, even with him barehanded. He routinely one-punched people.
I could solo kill silt horrors, meks and bahamets easily.
And I did it by fighting the 10-12 gortoks in the den, and by attacking hiding spiders...once I had exhausted every other possible creature that could still give me a dodge, like stilts and whiprats.
I also did it by brawling all the time. But that's more easily done with a half-giant strength, 225 hitpoints, and top-tier armor. But I also did it with a human ranger, and there's a log on this forum of my human ranger slaughtering a 100-day plus half-giant warrior in an straight-up fight, and I didn't think twice about it. That human ranger got to his pinnacle of ability by getting so good with weapons, that he was forced to train others with his bare hands. And that was eventually his downfall. Because I would put myself in a position where I'd want to get hit, to tick my Defense. And eventually, after letting a half-giant recruit whiff at me like 80 times, he critted my head, and then I was murdered while unconscious...and with a Salarri family member PC standing right there. Because people thought he had like 10 rings. (He only had one, and it was a weak-ass agility one).
I also didn't know at the time that the off-hand weapon has a miniscule chance to connect/crit someone's head, no matter what your relative skill levels. If you take a newbie and have him dual-wield, and attack the best warrior in the game...His offhand will eventually connect. I did not know this 5-6 years ago, or else I'd have never let the giant dual wield.
This is all to say that I know exactly what I'm talking about - even though raising weapon skills isn't really an
exact science - because the details are fungible based on your wisdom, opportunities, gear, and other factors like your base Offense. But essentially, this is how you become a monster. Blindfighting NPCs, and then brawling armed PCs with your bare hands. But you have to get to the point where people would be slaughtered by you with weapons, and so want you to fight bare-handed, and still lose to you then.
You'll just look super stupid if you insist on brawling them, and then get your ass reamed with a bone sparring sword.
Weighing yourself down is stupid and unnecessary. It mostly only affects your Defense these days, and barely your Offense at all. On the other hand, fighting in the dark or swinging at stealthed creatures give you an automatic chance to miss, no matter what your skill is. It also helps to fight spiders (who are better than stilt lizards/whiprats, IMO), if you can hack it, first mounted...where they can't bash you. And then when you're king shit, fight them while sitting down. They can't bash you then either.
I used to go in the spider hole and sit down right away, because the only way I could die would be by being bashed. So long as I was sitting, I could bugger off when I needed to.
No matter what your Defense or Bashing, spiders have roughly a 1-50 chance to successfully bash you. Just like you have a 1-50 chance to critically fail a disarm no matter what. It could be Amos the Byn runner, and you could be a fully maxed 100 day warrior. You'll have a 2% chance of dropping your weapon when reversing his disarm. Lots of warriors die to spiders because they dismount (because they're bad riders), then get bashed, and 2-3 more spiders amble in and bite your head.
I'm only posting this because I know I'll never play again.
P.S: There is a cap to sparring weapons, but not to EVERY sparring weapon. To be safe, assume that past Apprentice, no sparring weapon will ever benefit you. That's why Red Fangs 'sparred' only with real weapons. Also. Sparring weapons only do a couple points less damage than most normal shitty weapons and are a completely artificial construct mostly designed to screwing over twinks in the Byn because some staffer, at some point, lost their shit about Byn runners sparring and getting higher weapon skills than their mudsexing bard alt.
P.S.S: Dual-wielding gives a roughly 10% malus to Offense, that getting better at dual-wielding will eventually nearly negate. It also gives a tiny bonus to parrying.Two-handing gives about a 10% bonus to Offense and Defense. That's important to remember. Dual-wielding increases your PARRY skill. Two-handed increases your BASE DEFENSE. Which means you will dodge more effectively while two-handing, but will NOT parry better, except inasmuch as Defense affects it. This makes two-handing much much better than dual-wielding, for defensive purposes.
