Right.

Well. In my experience, I remember clanned PCs from the South constantly getting in trouble by journeying all the way up north to the Grasslands to hunt and train...Because they did not want to tackle gith, raptor packs or tarantulas. In fact, I've only known 2-3 people that were willing to train on tarantulas. Am I the only one that remembers the big drama about that, years back, with all the Houses and such forbidding travel past Luir's?

But yes, YMMV. What you're describing is certainly the ideal situation that I wish it was (absent Tuluk remaining destroyed for good). But it's not what it was like as I remember.

There was however, a familiar phenomena of people solo-training themselves up in the North (a warrior can easily branch his advanced weapons off skeet lizards) then come south, where they'd be king shit and train people down there. But if your experience was different than mine, I can only envy you.

Gith and raptors could not take you much farther than verrin hawks. Skeet lizards and tarantulas was the only logical next step, and very few people were willing to fight tarantulas. I only did it successfully on a half-giant, nomad/warriors or rangers that could stay mounted the whole time.

That's because tarantulas have a crazy effective bash.

With the exception of the Byn, there is no clan in Armageddon that can provide anywhere near enough training to compare to what you get from hunting (or alley-ganking) whenever you wish. This has always been one of the biggest failings of the game, and lies at the heart of many of the problems with Arm's roleplaying environment. Once in a rare while, one of the other clans go through a renaissance for a few months like Salarr did some years back, but none can consistently maintain the kind of roster that ensures reliable training. You're lucky to get to spar twice per RL day. A hunter or "assassin" can do it literally as much as they could possibly want, limited only by access to animals/beggars which is easily maintained by not finishing them off.

Being in the AoD, the Tor Scorpions, Kurac or anything else like that means you simply will not have access to as much sparring as anyone with the freedom to go where they want and do as they please. It's the main reason none of these clans ever really have enough players to seriously matter and to sustain activity in the long term. Nevertheless, staff staunchly refuses to do anything at all to remedy this problem despite the fact that just about everyone agrees that it's a problem that needs fixing, judging by responses when it has come up on the GDB. See threads like this, essentially 35 pages of people agreeing that it's needed. Five years later, nothing. Staff is still irrationally averse to the notion despite SoI having sparring NPCs for years without any issues.

On top of this, sparring against humans is just crap in general. 95% of warriors and rangers will plateau at a skill level where they're pretty good but not great, and never really get any better. When they're at that level, they can't miss attacks against eachother so are stuck forever at mid-journeyman or maybe low advanced weapon skills. You need to fight something with superb agility or defense skill in order to progress beyond this point. Usually there is no such player in your clan, but there's an infinite supply of suspiciously nimble animals in the grasslands, a zone that also inexplicably has the highest regen modifier in the accessible game world.

TL;DR: hunting small game around Tuluk is vastly superior training to being a soldier following a rigorous training schedule.

or it means that u will have access to sparring in a much safer environment than u would going it solo in the wastes. the exception to this is for the noob indies i mentioned before that start out in the less dangerous north. meanwhile the alleygankers are exposing themselves to a lot of ic risk for little reward (beggars? lol yeah primo raise material right there. and u may as well be wishing up for a negative animation if u make a habit of cruising the eastside to pick fights or get attacked over and over)see belowyeah its a great place to train up wep skills hunting and offensewell soldiers are limited by their life oath after the first year or so depending on the clan so of course at the midpoint theyre going to plateau with less options than the guy that left after the 1st year (or more if ur in the byn) and went on to keep skilling up his offense and wep skills on high agi mobs on his own time. depends on ur goals. fact is ull need to fight more than just animals if u want to have an edge in pvp, which ull have the upper hand at least up to the midlevels by fighting other skilled or quick ppl in clans vs attacking stilt lizard#9000. so u can balance them out by bynning it out at 1st and then soloing out to keep skilling up

pvp = skill against fighting pcs aka humanoids, so if you want to have better talent at doing that ull need to get ur chops in fighting other humanoids regularly for some time, and u may as well do that when ur more likely to get skillups and misses fighting them when ur 1st starting out. meanwhile u can always raise ur offense and wep skills later on high agi mobs and end up the better melee pvp in the lateterm (at the expense of being a bit behind at animal killing in the midlevels). unless u have quick elf or halfelf friends u wont be making those humanoid gains that u would by fighting them at early levels so u miss out on thatur an idiot for ignoring the quoted parts in my last post that str8 wreck ur kneejerk strawman. go read some more

not magically OP but enough to make a diff when uve both lived to max wep/off lvls. just depends on whether ur playing to stay or to burn out quickly lol ur ignorant of the 'fact' that 1. raising it in the rinth only leads to small gains for big risk and 2. i address this and the hunters thing in the last post. srsly read broif u mean a permaclanned lifeoath guy then definitely. if ur talking someone that stayed in for a time then left to pursue better, higher agi things, not quite as long

Yes, if you've been alive a very long time and have nearly maxed everything, having that bonus is better than not having it. Very rarely do characters reach that point, and we obviously have different expectations and experiences in terms of what's viable and what's not... So at this stage, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. You think the south is an easy grind for mid-high comms? Cool. I'm saying the north is quicker and easier at all stages, but have a good time. I won't raise a finger at the idea of southerners staying in the south. Killing spiders all day? A lot cooler than stomping on redic fast lizards unrealistically.

I'm going to bring up Elrum again... Why? Because he was one of my most combatant characters and most recent one so he's the best example!

Elrum was a bard, he began his combat career in the Tuluki training yard. He could go toe to toe with people who could beat up carru but whenever he went to do it he almost died (multiple times). Even when he went with his warrior lover who sparred very well against PCs. His training schedule was probably every other IG day he'd spar if he was online and the rest he'd be off barding.

It wasn't until Elrum was banished from the circle and as a ranger/bard setup the obvious way to survive is become a hunter. So with my knowledge of the northlands I quickly began grinding him up. It was during this period that he started the citizens call and volunteer patrols. Elrum trained on Bahamets / Stilt / Raptors / Kryl. Let me tell you what you want some high risk high reward training go fight kryl. Some of them have very high agility and you will almost always get the multiple opponent debuff.

By the end of Elrum's career the only thing that threatened him was higher tier warriors and fighting 2-3 people at once in the arena. Why? Because as an indie he was able to hunt all he wanted but due to the public training RPTs going on everyone got as much humanoid skill raises as they could handle. Another contributing factor to why Tuluk won so hard in the Volcano RPT fighting. Also just FYI both the north and south have humanoid options for indie hunters. Gith in the south and Magera in the north. Both are classified as humanoid with Gith being the better option because they scale higher and magera being kind of crummy but at least it exists... So you don't even need to be clanned to get humanoid skill raises anyway.