Point of boxing

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You'll notice that chart doesn't have defense skill listed. It doesn't have the opposite offense skill listed either

Those hidden skills show bonuses you have against certain things which you get by fighting specific things with the specific weapons you've been fighting it with. This is why when you play a warrior, even if you use only one weapon, the moment a newbie comes and you switch to a weapon you've never trained before, you will still not get hit by them (defense) and you will still obliterate them (offense skill) despite never having used that weapon before. Equally as a warrior you spend your time doing nothing but fighting humanoid pcs for a year but once you head outside, even if you are using another weapon you've never touched before you will still obliterate most wildlife. This is because your overall offense skill and defense skills have been trained, which aren't shown on that chart.

Again the hidden chart above showing that you would definitely be somewhat better at fighting whatever it is you've been fighting with the specific weapon you've been fighting with. To answer the OP question, yes boxing is useful for warriors, and anyone wanting to train offense skill and defense skill. Which everyone, even merchants and mages are allowed to train to 100. And a bonus as shown by the chart above, boxing also makes you a bit better at fighting (hitting) humanoids when you are bare handed. However, if you train offense skill real high, it can be a pain to train different weapon skills later on because you will just not miss at all. That is why some people prefer to train weapons skill first, and only begin boxing late in their career.

This is my understand of how it works and by having played a warrior or two, it seems to make sense. There are some people here who have a much better understanding of the code though.

People can figure this out themselves easily. Go fight an animal, see how you perform with weapons. Then join a clan and do nothing but box the dummy for several days then go fight the same animal. See if there is a difference in regards to hitting them. If you were right about offense there would be little to no difference.


Having done this I've found a huge difference, but other people can decide for themselves. That said, other classes with high enough offense score do surprisingly well with weapons they don't even have skills with. Anyways this is stuff people can figure out themselves, those charts are just hidden bonus, as I said defense, and offense skill aren't listed on them.

Necro-alert!

There are three layers to offensive accuracy, as well as an additional fourth layer based on stats.

1) Weapon skills. No explanation needed.

2) The basic offense skill. It's hidden, and it has a chance to go up anytime you miss an attack, much like weapon skills.

3) The hidden x vs. y skills, e.g. slashing vs. reptiles. I'm not completely sure how these are increased. I had assumed that it was similar to weapons and offense, but some have claimed that they can be raised on blocks and parries. It's nearly impossible to test as a mortal player.

And then 4) agility and strength both contribute to offense if high enough. I don't have the exact numbers for strength, but I've posted the table for agility before so look around. Basically, if you're very strong or very agile (or both), you'll get a bonus to offense. In extreme cases such as half-giants or very agile elves, this bonus can be huge and will present you with serious obstacles in training.

The point of boxing in the past was to raise offense and defense. Before the Big Change (explained further down), any missed attack or any hit taken had a uniform chance to increase these hidden skills. Once you got them high enough, the only way to get a meaningful amount of failures was to fight unarmed because this gives big penalties to offense and defense. To my knowledge, there is no 'hidden weapon skill' for unarmed, i.e. no 'punch vs. humanoid,' and so the only thing it did was raise the base offense and defense skills.

It was always difficult to raise weapon skills and offense because there are more layers to accuracy than there are to avoidance. Your accuracy is based on your weapon skill, offense, hidden x vs. y skill, strength, and agility. Your avoidance is literally just defense and agility. This means that even if your target has the same amount of defense as your offense, you might struggle to miss against them since you're adding all those other layers to your accuracy.

Then in 2016 or something, they introduced a new piece of code: the offense vs. defense calculation. I don't know the details of it, but the long and short of it is this: if your target's defense is lower than your offense, the chance to gain in accuracy-based skills is lowered by a factor relative to the difference in off vs. def. If their defense is higher than your offense, the reverse is true. Unless someone provides inside information, we have no way of knowing the actual numbers, but classes have different coefficients in this regard. The higher your class is on the "combat spectrum," the more lenient this calculation is. In other words, a fighter has a higher chance to gain against someone whose defense is 10 less than your offense compared to a miscreant who might not be able to gain at all in that situation.

This had the following consequences:

1) More than ever before, offense is your enemy. If you let it go too high, you block further gains. While this was always the case in a roundabout way, since high offense made it harder to miss, it might now mean that even the misses you get don't help. This was probably the main intention of this code change as it prevents maxing out weapon skills on animals that can dodge due to high agility without actually having high defense.

2) Once you've raised one weapon skill pretty high, you will be almost completely unable to raise any other weapon skills because your offense got pretty high as well in the process of raising your first weapon skill. The only exception is if you can spar regularly (and I do mean regularly, as in more than once per RL day, consistently over a long period of time) against someone whose defense is already so high that you were able to raise your first weapon skill to the desired level.

3) There are now entire segments of the gameworld that are basically useless for combat training. Very few NPCs have high defense. The ones that do are usually either so dangerous that you can't really "spar" against them, or hidden off in far-flung corners of the world where you can't easily justify going. If you make a typical human raider and just hunt in the lands around Allanak, you will find that no NPCs have enough defense to even take you to journeyman.

4) The heavy combat classes start with very high offense, higher even than the old warrior guild did. You may be unable to gain anything against most wildlife, as most animals have very little defense. Meanwhile, the classes lower down on the combat spectrum can quickly catch up to the heavy combat classes since a lower starting offense means you can gain, even if your defualt gain coefficient is lower. Enforcer in particular feels like it starts with abnormally high offense.

5) The tricks that people used to employ in order to surpass the plateau no longer work. Fighting in darkness will make you miss a lot, but if the target doesn't have enough defense to let you gain, what's the use? Sparring against someone with etwo and/or high riding skill will make you miss more often, but again, the same thing applies: only their learned defense skill matters. If they have enough defense to where you can gain, it's useful if they do things that let you miss more often; but if they don't have enough defense, it's pointless.

As a side note, this calculation is in effect only for the following skills: all weapons, offense, defense, and dual wield. Not for two handed, and not for anything like bash, kick, backstab or archery. If you're in a situation where this code hinders you, you should focus on the skills that are not included in the offense vs. defense calculation.

You can absolutely create situations where you're able to miss, e.g. blindfighting or off-hand swinging against a riding+etwo target, where you're able to miss but their base defense skill simply isn't high enough for you to get anything out of it. All these random tricks that make it harder to hit someone have been nerfed by making it so that you need to not only miss but also miss against someone whose defense skill is high enough compared to your offense.

I understand the principles behind the off/def calculation. The point was to make it so you couldn't master weapon skills by blindfighting snakes and shit. It makes sense. However, in the process of making this change, the coders made it so that entire categories of characters became borderline unviable. Want to play a 'rinth assassin who learned how to fight in the mean streets? Good luck being stuck forever at apprentice weapon skills and offense. Renowned raider from Red Storm? Same thing. Any character concept for which it isn't really feasible to spend an extended amount of time in one of the few sparring clans is now unable to raise combat skills to the point where they're impressive. Except, of course, for the OMEGALULPWNED skills like sap/backstab, bash, archery, blowguns, etc. As a result, people resort to these because nobody wants to play the Guild hitman who first has to spend six months in the Byn pretending to have fun. Cue the one-shot meta.

The coders didn't provide good enough alternatives to the Sparring Clan Experience, and as such, we have a situation where people focus on the one-shot bullshit of sap/backstab/poisons/spells because conventional combat skills are gated behind a playstyle that largely prevents you from actually doing anything that anybody cares about, i.e. plots and conflict between player characters. While the methods used to circumvent this issue in the past were admittedly dumb, it did allow for characters to become skilled in combat without having to be pigeonholed into a select few concepts for which it actually makes sense to join one of the few sparring clans.