Response to Brokkr

If you don't intend to fight, strength is nearly irrelevant as long as you can wear whatever you need to wear without getting encumbrance penalties. So if your plan is to play a non-combat miscreant, you can put strength last, or maybe second to last just so you don't roll poor and make it so you can't even carry the basics. Same goes for crafters, although if you're an indie, being a really weak crafter gets annoying because you have to carry more shit around than most.

There's another exception to the "strength>all" rule, though: elves. Elven strength caps so low that you'll need a literal max roll to get a damage bonus at all, and the most you can get is +1 at 15 strength, which isn't worth going for. 15 for an elf is like 19 for a human: the highest you can get before class bonuses, and you only have a 1.56% chance of hitting the max roll. If you do hit exceptional, you have no way of knowing whether it's 14 or 15, so you can't really go for a "strong elf." That means you might as well just try to get the lowest strength roll that has no damage penalty, which is 10, or 'good' for elves. That's pretty doable at #3 priority, allowing you to go agi end str wis to try to get an acceptable health/stun number. You can also go strength #2 just to be fairly sure you don't get <10, but then you're likely to get less than 100 health/stun.

The only reason to play a fighting elf is if you're going to capitalize on its high agility, so you'll be prioritizing agility first. If you get a top agility roll, the bonuses to things affected by agility are crazy high, but you never become truly scary in combat when you have no damage bonus. That's the unfortunate reality for elves. There are ways you can be deadly without strength, but those ways tend to be much more difficult, unreliable and skill-dependent, and usually someone with high strength would do the same thing considerably better. Like maxed backstab does approximately 50-100 damage, so an elf can certainly backstab someone to death, but the lack of power in their follow-up attacks means a low backstab roll isn't very deadly at all whereas a strong human or dwarf backstabber could kill with a low roll by adding 2x wounding hits immediately afterwards.

Melee damage is a relatively simple formula. It has six main components:

1) Weapon damage dice. Most weapons have damdice that's not so different from their D&D counterparts. A shortsword will typically do about 1d6, a longsword 1d8, a particularly big and nasty weapon like a halberd or greatsword might be 1d10 or 2d5 or something. Many also have a -1 modifier, which I think comes down to material, so a bone sword may be 1d8-1. That's the reason you can sometimes have blows bounce off of unarmored humans if you don't have a bonus from strength.

2) Strength bonus. See this thread for specifics.

3) Location. Every hit location has a damage modifier. I don't know what they are for sure, but my experience suggests that body is 150%, head is 250%, neck is 300%, wrists are 200%, arms/legs are 100% and hands/feet are maybe 80%. Waist very rarely gets hit but seems to be the same as body. Strength bonus is applied before the location multiplier, which is why hits to the head and neck are so dangerous. If you have +4 damage from strength and hit the neck, that becomes +10 damage.

4) Armor. It's a flat reduction, so a breastplate with 3 armor makes you take 3 less damage from any attack to the body. I suspect this is applied after location multipliers, which makes head and neck armor unimpressive and doesn't prevent those giant hits to those locations. You should still wear head and neck armor, but it only really helps against weak attackers.

5) Etwo bonuses. These are tied to strength. You get half your strength bonus on top when you etwo something, plus (str.bonus*etwo.skill)/100. So if you have +4 damage from strength, you get another +2 baseline and then (4*etwo.skill)/100, so at 50 skill you get another +2. If you have AI human strength and master two handed, you get a whopping +11 total damage when you etwo. That becomes something like +30 damage when hitting the neck!

6) Offense vs. defense can add a tiny bit of damage. It's very little. The formula is: dam+ = (your offense - their defense)/50. So you need to have 50 points more in offense than they have in defense to get +1, and I don't think you can really get +2 because you'd have to have 100 offense over them, which is only going to happen in cases like them being blinded and resting or something like that. I believe defense can reduce damage taken in the same way.

So let's say I'm a human with exceptional strength (+4), 75 in the two handed skill, and a 1d8 weapon. That gives me a base damage range of 1d8+9. If instead I had no strength bonus, my damage would just be 1d8. So 10-17 damage vs. 1-8 damage. That's an outrageous difference. The stronger character's average damage is more than three times as high and the minimum hit is ten times as high. If the strong guy hits someone in the head, that's 20-34 damage. For the weak guy it's 2-16. I hope this illustrates how fucking retarded strength is.

Eh. Max wisdom is almost completely worthless. It's kinda nice having a decent wis, but actually maxing it is only beneficial if you twink so hard that it's almost impossible not to get immslapped for it. If you have 16 wisdom (VG for humans), your base skill timer is 32 minutes and 64 for combat skills, plus a little bit for the skill's current level. With 18 wisdom it'll be 16/32 minutes. Past that there's no benefit because that's the hard minimum for skill timers. There's effectively no way to make use of such short skill timers, especially if you're in a clan where you just spar once per IG day. It's nice to have timers short enough that you don't effectively skip every other day, which takes around AA/good human wis, but a max wis skill timer is largely wasted.

Skill timers work like this:
- Find your 'learn' substat in the wisdom chart.
- Take 60 minus your learn substat. If the result is less than 8, it's 8 instead.
- Base skill timer is 2x that number, plus skill/7.
- Combat timers are 2x base.
- Psionic timers are 3x base.

It is kind of hilarious how fast you can raise certain skills with very high wisdom, though. Take a skill like climb which goes up by three points at a time and can safely be spammed without standing out as a megatwink. If you have the minimum skill timer (16 minutes + skill/7), you can take this skill from novice to master in like 8 hours. I've hit master hide in about 1d5h with EG human wisdom, that's the fastest I've raised a meaningful skill. Combat skills quickly reach the point where failing is too difficult to make use of very short timers. It doesn't take very long before there's no way you can get 10-20 misses every 20 minutes or whatever.

Max agility elves do become combat gods in every respect except for damage. You get +25ish to most combat rolls with that kind of agility, which is a huge amount, especially for skills like disarm and kick. It's fun to make a 'rinth elf fighter, get kick up to journeyman, then join the Byn and laugh as you reverse-flip Runners who try to kick you. But +25 to offense will massively hinder your weaponskill growth with the new combat skillgain system, and even though you swing every single combat tick, the lack of strength means you won't do very much damage. It's especially bad against armor, I've played a couple of elf warriors and it's just pitiful to fight someone in chitin where 90% of your attacks are bounces and grazes. But if your goal is to be a living sparring dummy, it's certainly effective. It's why the Red Fangs became such monsters at one point: they had Sirra and X-D sparring all day for months. That kind of training is basically never going to be available to anyone, though. It's a once in a lifetime experience.

Now, if you have a way to get your strength over the natural limit, elves are truly frightening. The Strength spell plus spice can add something like 5. You can also try to spec app an undead elf, they get strength somewhere between dwarves and muls, but I don't know if these are still allowed in the game. If you can get that 25+ agility and 19-20 strength, things start to get completely ridiculous. That's the absolute peak of mundane combat, but it's not readily available to most players. There was a few ghoul elves around back in the days of Quick but they were confined to the 'rinth where it's hard to get your combat skills high. A d-elf Rukkian Empowerment can make it work, but don't use spice too often or you will ruin your character completely with addiction. I had a character get addicted to Thodeliv once and it literally made him unplayable.

It increases three things that I know of: attack speed, defense, and strength bonus.

The attack speed is a kind of hidden roll that occurs during combat, and if the skillcheck succeeds, your attack speed is increased for x amount of time. That's how the skill actually goes up: by failing that hidden roll. From what I can tell, the code for attack speed is not included in the codedump. It has never been particularly noticeable to me, but the helpfile itself says it increases attack speed so it probably does.

The defense bonus I'm not sure about. There's a bit in the codedump where it suggests that it simply adds whatever your skill in two handed is to your defense, but that doesn't sound right. It would be way too good and it may be outdated/unused code. It does add defense in some way, though. It's nowhere near as much protection as you'd get out of a shield, but defense has other uses besides avoiding hits.

The strength bonus has two parts: half of your str_dam plus an additional (str_dam*skill_two_handed)/100. You only get anything out of this if you have more than +1 from strength because all decimals in the code are rounded down unless it says otherwise.

           // plus half str bonus if using etwo
           wp_pri = get_weapon(ch, &n);
           if( n == ETWO )
               dam += str_app[GET_STR(ch)].todam / 2;

           // two handed skill can add skill% worth of str bonus
           if( n == ETWO && has_skill(ch, SKILL_TWO_HANDED))
              dam += str_app[GET_STR(ch)].todam * get_skill_percentage(ch, SKILL_TWO_HANDED) / 100;


On top of this, I've always felt like etwo increases accuracy. Can't find anything about it in the codedump but it doesn't contain all of the game's code. Last time I had a character that used etwo, there seemed to be a clear difference in accuracy between ep and etwo. I was training combat skills on gith and rantarri and had got to the point where I couldn't miss at all with etwo, then I tried one-handed and got some misses. It may have something to do with the strength bonus. A lot of people swear that strength increases accuracy, even though I couldn't find anything about it in the code. If the increased strength bonus from etwo also increases accuracy, that would be it.

This is one of those cases where the codedump isn't very clear. Attack speed and accuracy don't seem to be in the leaked file, same as race bonuses and some other things. The damage bonus is accounted for, though, and appears to match up with in-game results. The character I had with the highest two handed skill was a dwarf with exceptional strength, and by the time he hit advanced, he was doing grievous body hits and unspeakable head/neck to gith with a Salarr two-handed axe. The damage was mindboggling. I remember killing some NPC elf in two hits. Not stun knockout but kill. Pretty sure that character could hit for about 40 damage on a good roll. Etwo is insane with high strength.

I haven't actually used etwo extensively with meh strength so I can't say if there's an inherent damage bonus besides the ones associated with strength. It seems like there ought to be but there's nothing about it in the codedump. If there isn't, dual wield would probably be better.

IMO high strength is exceptional. It's pretty easy to get exceptional if you pick a heavy combat class and an age that doesn't get a strength penalty. I wouldn't say you should always etwo, dw is pretty good too, but the way armor works makes it better to hit as hard as possible than to land more attacks. I suspect that if you land every attack, dw might do more damage, but I'm almost sure that etwo improves accuracy. If it does, and the attack speed bonus is significant, etwo might be equal or better in cases where you don't land hits so easily.

The secondary attack with dual wield doesn't employ your weapon skill but uses the dual wield skill to determine accuracy, so if your skill is low, the attack has awful accuracy. On the other hand, it can end up being better than your primary attack since dual wield is much easier to raise than weapon skills. I've mastered dual wield on a few characters but never a weapon skill.

If you're using poisoned weapons, definitely dual wield so you can hold up two poisons. Dual wield is also safer against disarm. You get a parry bonus from dw but I have no idea how it matches up with the defense bonus from etwo. Also, if you want to use a shield some of the time, dw might be more practical since you just switch your secondary weapon with a shield. The best weapons for etwo are two-handed only, so switching to a shield means you also have to sheathe and draw a different weapon. You really don't want to sheathe a two-handed weapon and leave yourself unarmed when something is hitting you. Sheathe has a delay as well which seems to depend on weapon weight, and two-handed weapons are heavy.

Due to the way the etwo strength multiplier appears to work, it doesn't kick in until you have +2 damage from strength which occurs at extremely good for humans. I think I would go with dw if I had any less. After all, your strength bonus is also doubled with dw in theory, assuming you hit with both attacks. Dual wield is also said to give a small offense penalty but I haven't looked into that because the code lingo for dw is difficult to search the codedump for since the keyword is "ES." Easier to search for "ETWO."

Both styles are fine. I don't think one stands out over the other, but the analyst in me suspects that dual wield has the higher theoretical damage output while etwo is more effective in practice if you have high strength since it gives a wider variety of bonuses. The main annoyance with etwo is that skillgains depend on an invisible check so you have no idea if you've failed or what might affect the chances. I've never hit master two handed, and according to Brokkr, the skill is subject to the new offense vs. defense skillgain code while dual wield is not. That may prevent you from raising two handed past a certain point.

I personally know of three verified cases where a random no-name dwarf that nobody had ever seen before walked in and attacked someone without a word. Two of those happened in the Gaj, the third I'm not sure where. All happened within a few days of eachother. I heard an additional two or three cases mentioned during the week it was happening but I didn't hear enough to know if it was done the exact same way. It happened enough times that staff ran a fucking mini-RPT about dwarven murderers in order to justify the IC reactions to it.

If you think multiple players happened to make kamikaze dwarves during the same week, as opposed to one guy doing it repeatedly, that's your prerogative. I just think that sounds idiotic. Saying it happened once is an outright lie. I personally witnessed two of them and was told about a third one, and it was the exact same thing: unknown dwarf jumps a random person without warning inside the city. How is it a logical conclusion that it wasn't the same person? How can you even claim to know it that? It's one of the more bizarre claims you've made.

It all started and stopped inside a short span of time. Sounds to me like it was some moron with a VPN, not a fucking collaborative effort between numerous players. If that had been the case, you'd think it would have happened a few times since. No?

There's a few problems with a point buy system for stat allocation. Middling stats would be a newbie trap. Newbies would put a few points in strength, agility and endurance thinking that VG stats are very good when they're actually barely better than average. Optimum stat building would just be maxing out one stat like strength, getting endurance at passable and sacrificing wisdom. Stealth and crafter builds would have the same build except with max agility. It would be a situation where everybody has the same stat build except newbies.

Another problem is the design and implementation of a new system without pissing off the remaining player base. This is the main reason that the system never gets fixed. Over the past year 1/4 to 1/3 of the player base quietly disappeared. There wasn't an outcry on the GDB about why they're leaving, probably fear is why it happened so quietly. It would be catastrophic if Arm lost another chunk of the playerbase like that.

I think the best way to redesign the way stats work is to make it so that they have a minimal rather than significant impact. Have stats be standardized within a small racial cluster so that half giants are still very strong and elves are still very fast. Take for example a human with AI strength might do 5 more damage on average compared to a human with average strength.