Response to Brokkr

well there werent really rpis around and arm wasnt an rpi when the system was implemented but for muds in general yes

u had muds where ur stats were rolled once and randomly and that was that, then u had ones where u could see the stats at chargen and then reroll more than once (arm was a hybrid of these because u could request a reroll after u logged in and saw ur stats), and then some had pt allocators which removed ur ability to get really shitty or really great overall stats

Is Friday made a good post on the gdb, which echoes sentiments made by delerak on this very board, years ago. You don't need high strength to be a PvP god. Yes, having high strength is amazing. But poison, throwing knives, high backstab, a good bow and arrows, and having a bunch of friends are all just as good.

That being said. I don't like the current system, I think a lot needs to be done to improve it. A SLIGHT NERF to the higher ranges of strength would be a great start. But certain poisons and spells are just as gamebreaking. They are just less common and in-your-face. Removing elements of the code that support this whole 'one-shot deaths are realistic, code equals roleplay' mentality that has been fostered in Arm community will go a long way to improving the standard of roleplay and conflict that we're faced with today.

That includes removing half-giants from the game and putting dwarves behind a karma restriction/barrier. +1

Thing is that even with all of that in mind, strength is just so vastly superior to all other stats that it's silly. If you roll high strength, pick a class that isn't totally inept at combat and grab a decent weapon, you're as deadly as someone who puts twenty times the effort into one of the aforementioned methods. Sure, poisons can be nasty; sure, locking someone into an apartment prevents them from fleeing. But the strength stat carries such an amount of in-your-face deadliness that it's objectively gamebreaking. Pointing out alternatives is meaningless when you can use those on top of strength.

A top strength roll does more for you than any of those things, and it takes zero effort, just chargen luck. If you got some medium strength roll, you can use one of those other methods to win fights, but they're difficult and unreliable, and they take a whole lot more effort. On the other hand, if you got high strength, you're deadly right from the start, able to do so much damage that it's fucking bizarre. I've seen it in action enough times to know. None of the other stats even begin to come close to the kind of bullshit you can pull off with a max strength roll.

To use poisons effectively, you have to first obtain peraine, then have it applied to your weapon, then land at least two or three attacks on your target. You could get lucky and the first hit procs the poison or you could get unlucky and it takes five or six hits. Ever try landing five or six hits on someone with master parry? But one or two hits with a bludgeoning weapon will do just fine, if you have max strength. Poisoning is not as easy as having access to the substance itself. Max strength just lets you flat out kill the target in the amount of attacks that corresponds to the statistically expected number required to land poisons, and there's only one poison that straight-up wins a fight on the spot: peraine. Forget about heramide, terradin and so on. They mostly only work if the target was already going to die anyway. When you can attack someone and they're still an available target thirty seconds later, it didn't matter if they were unconscious from heramide by then. But with strength you can end it in five or ten seconds.

And the two aren't mutually exclusive. You can use poisons and locked doors all the same for even greater advantages.

We pretty much know what the stats do. If you prioritize agility, you'll have slightly better attack speed and some minor bonuses to offense and defense. If you prioritize endurance, you'll be able to survive one or two more hits. But if you prioritize strength, you'll double or triple your damage output over those who didn't do that. The difference is so stark that if this were any other genre of gaming, this kind of grotesque imbalance would have been patched out in the closed beta. But Armageddon, it's just part of the game for over two decades.

I've played so many fighters. So fucking many. The ones without top strength are always a shrugworthy affair. Even if you max out your combat skills, or as close as it's realistically possible to get, you're nothing special. The ones with top strength are unbelievably deadly and can use all the same tricks that are mentioned as viable alternatives. When it comes to combat, quite frankly, there's two classifications of characters: those who had the presence of mind to prioritize strength first and those who didn't. There's no such distinction for any of the other stats. You don't look at a fighter and say wow, he must be really agile or tough. But strength is immediately visible and everyone knows exactly what it means when they see some recruit doing grievous damage with a sparring weapon.

People are so inexplicably obstinate when it comes to the strength stat. For years now, retards on the GDB have been clinging to this imbecilic insistence that there's nothing wrong, that the other stats are just as good, that there are things you can do to make up the difference. None of that is true. You get a peak strength roll and you simply double or triple your damage output, and you get to wear whatever armor you want and use weapons meant for muls and half-giants with inflated damage rolls.

They don't need to put dwarves behind a karma gate. Half-giants I don't care about, I have never seen one played by someone who wasn't a dogshit roleplayer. What needs to change is the fact that strength is pretty much the end all and be all of combat. Fucktards like X-D and Is Friday should not be listened to. I'll bet money that they're the kinds of players who will sit there all day insisting that there's nothing wrong with strength and it shouldn't be changed, and then they prioritize strength on all of their characters, hoping to keep the advantage it brings.

The amount of added damage gained from strength is completely out of proportion with anything else in this game. You can prioritize strength and deal brutal wounds with a bent spoon or you can prioritize agility and swing slightly faster for four damage with a razor-edged mastercrafted sword that a Salarri ejaculated on. This does not belong in any game where PvP and permadeath are hailed as key features.

It isn't even a matter of realism. Imagine you have a battleaxe under your bed. Now take that battleaxe and go slam it into your roommate a number of times. Are you a bodybuilder? Probably not. Do you feel like you would have to drive that battleaxe into your roommate ten or more times in order to defeat him? Probably not! But on Armageddon you do, if you thought you could become a deadly fighter with medicore strength. Melee damage is trash without prioritizing strength, and that's a design flaw that has inexplicably persisted for the entire history of the game, and continues to do so because self-serving liars insist on claiming that it's totally fine and you should just use poisons instead.

Only if you're killing unarmed aides who are stupid enough to wander into your apartment. In any other context, strength rules supreme. The difference in skill required for a character without noteworthy strength to beat one with max strength is totally broken. Believe it or not, most PvP does not take place in apartments, it takes place in the 'rinth and the desert, and being able to kill someone faster than they can act is a key component. Strength is the number one factor in that regard.

People need to stop mentioning obscure roundabout ways as equal alternatives to the simple act of choosing strength as your first prioritzation. Can you imagine if that applied to any other aspect of the game? Like if rolling AI agility gave you master backstab from the start or something? That's just about the magnitude that we're talking about when it comes to the strength stat. You roll high strength on a heavy combat character, etwo any storebought mace, and you will knock someone unconscious in two blows. That's just the way the combat code works. No amount of bullshitting about locked doors and political power gets around the fact that this is utterly gamebreaking and is used time and time again to fuck this game in the ass.

What exactly is the rationale behind defending this state of affairs? Who gains from keeping it this way? If it's not the players who know that this is the case and use it to their advantage, I don't know who it is. I wager that if we had access to the statistics, we would see that 90% of succesful fighters had strength prioritized first. It's about as powerful as starting out with two extra levels in your chosen weapon skill. And once you're at the point where combat skills plateau, strength wins every time. Of course, X-D will tell you some anecdote about how his elf with below awful strength routinely killed trios of half-giants with one arm tied behind his back, but only idiots will listen to that.

balancing other combat factors

backstab and sap lag at %50 of whatever backstab is when it missed
%25 the lag when it succeeds