Please modify the weapon and armour repair/wear mechanics to bring these skills in line with other skills and remove one of the major boring unnecessary grinds new melee characters have to endure.

The current repair weapon (and armour, and probably tool) mechanic forces a huge redundant grind on new characters and is a significant barrier to new players. Currently, to become reasonably self sufficient, which is required if you play on off hours or if you want to RP a self-sufficient character, you must go through a hugely boring cycle of rats and chickens.

You start with clubs, because that is all you can repair. You have to work up your club skill until you can kill them in less than a game hour per rat, meanwhile selling their meagre treasure to buy hugely expensive repair kits and pay exorbitant training costs. The price to train club is reasonable, but the price to train repair is horrendous. And every repair is s l o w.

So after hours of grinding, I can finally kill a rat with a club in a reasonable amount of time, and can repair my club. What's next? Repeat the whole miserable cycle with a dagger, but this time with increased costs because I need to get repair from 2 to 4, which costs more than 0 to 2. Rats don't drop better treasure, by the way.

So finally after many more hours of grinding, I can kill rats with daggers and repair them. What's next? Repeat the cycle with sabres, starting from skill 0 again, and still on rats and chickens because that's what I can kill with skill 0 sword.

So finally after more hours of grinding, what's next? Repeat the cycle yet again, still with rats and chickens, because that's all I can kill with level 0 axe. Only now leveling repair takes forever, because the number of points to get to rank 10 (out of 200?!) is ungodly. And those rats still don't drop any better loot. Oh, and by now my armour is shredded so I have to start leveling repair on that too, and undoubtedly the cycle will repeat training heavier armour, but at least I'll be able to move to tougher opponents if I haven't died of boredom.

I have some specific suggestions to improve this, and realistically all or most are needed, though a few to start would help considerably.

1) Make weapon repair work on all weapons starting from rank 1. Let it repair only a little damage per use if you must, but let it repair whatever weapon fits your character concept. If I start my character as a woodsman, I should use an axe and be able to sharpen an axe right from the get go. Like Novocadian's smith alt, leveling repair would be part of normal character "life" not an out of character grind to satisfy quirky mechanics.

2) Make weapon repair kit usage be proportional to amount of damage repaired - If I only restored 10 points I only use 20% of a kit. If I repair 100 points, I use 2 kits. This makes the cost proportional to a character's ability to pay - higher level characters with Q300 swords use more kits than lower level characters with Q50 daggers. Right now it's worse than equal, it's actually backwards!

3) Make weapon wear proportional to damage dealt - or better still, (damage-hardness)*wear factor because let's face it, if you gave Andre The Giant an axe and told him to hew a bison to death, he'd put more nicks in the blade than if you gave Pewee Herman a Sabre and told him to kill some chickens. Even 100 chickens. Probably 1000 chickens. Poor chickens. Poor Peewee.

4) Make weapon repair time short and constant (5-10 seconds real time per repair?). If an experienced and invested player wouldn't put up with 4 minutes to make one repair pass on a weapon what makes you think a new character would? And if it is going to take 20 passes to repair a club, they must each be short enough to manage - you're still getting 4 minutes to repair the club (which is still too long IMHO) but you are making progress along the way and you can do a bit now and a bit later, rather than being stuck staring at an unmoving screen for 4 straight minutes.

5) Lower the training and practice requirement for repair to bring it in line with other skills, at least for the lower levels. I don't care if you think it's realistic to take more training to sand a splinter out of a club than it takes to learn to make puff pastry (I've done both, by the way, and it's not), it's a game and something as simple as being able to maintain your gear has to be accessible. If you make the game too much like the real world people will prefer the real world, because at least there you don't have to worry about network latency and if you meet a nice girl she probably actually *is* as girl and ...oh, well, anyway. (BTW - that's just a joke, I'm trying to make the Wall-O-Text at least amusing)

If all, or at least most, of these suggestions were implemented it would greatly improve new player retention and enjoyment for a large segment of new players, and probably existing players as well. And would do no harm to the players it did not help. Some of the changes would require non-trivial work, and temporarily adjusting wear rates and/or repair costs would be a good stop-gap measure.

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my proposal
Tlok