Leveling combat skills

[cdmoreland]

I'm looking at it from the view of a new player. What if one wants to be a warrior? I doubt they would want to pick flowers. I can give my alt everything that is needed from glyphs to armor to tria but a new player doesn't have that. Someone new to the game is greatly handicapped. Potions are not free until you can kill gladiators and rogues but the question remains, can a new player do it? We say we want new players but kill incentive before they can get a good start.

[bilbous]

A new player unwilling or unable to talk to anyone will be at a decided disadvantage. Anyone willing to speak up in gossip or in main is liable to find help, heck you can learn a lot just by listening to other people. I haven't gone through the tutorial lately but I think the current iteration is fairly helpful. The thing about picking flowers is that it is free money that you can hardly avoid seeing if you travel outside the city. In a way I think it is unfortunate that all of the flowers in the secret garden are unpickable as it could give a newcomer the wrong idea about resources elsewhere available. It is true that the people who buy these items are not as obvious as someone could get discouraged trying to find them. It might be an idea to tweak the descriptions to list actual uses and type of merchant who might buy them. It might be a bit obscure to a newcomer.

[Calmus]

I started a new character with much agility. At level 10 Light Armor and 91 agility I can easily train armor. Currently I can train with creatures like Frost Arangmas and Jade Clacker and loose only very little health in Defensive stance with a shield.

Seeing your stats I suspect the new armor training might be harder for players with little agility.

[cdmoreland]

The problem is that armor training STOPS with mobs that are weaker. When you reach lvl 10 in MA you will get no training even though it still takes a while to kill a clacker.

If the same rules applied to armor making one would no longer get training once you could make 300q gloves, then it would stop again when you could make 300q boots, etc.

[Dilihin]

the speed of Light armor training is okay.with Medium armor it's pretty Bearable too. But Heavy armor is too slow,i get to level 2 from level 1 in about hour.maybe practice points per hit should be chanced to higher.

[bilbous]

I am currently trying to gather enough pp to buy sufficient strength to be able to wear the heavy armor. In the meantime I am wearing 4 pieces of light armor, 2 enchanted of high quality, a looted mercenary helm and a stock pair of boots, and two pieces of stock medium armor. I am wielding a dark club and a looted reinforced shield.  You can see me here . I am fighting gladiators at ~20 pps and one greater potion of healing per. I am training LA, MA, BD, M&H, and SH at a fairly reasonable rate. Once I can wear the HA I expect to train with 2 pieces of that too.

As you increase your stats your training rates are altered. It used to be said that intelligence increased your learning rate, but higher stats generally lowered your pp generation.

One problem that might be affecting your HA training rate is the general increase in your character's robustness -- more hit points due to BD, greater ability to overmatch your opponent due to greater weapon/shield skill. It may be difficult to compare armor training rates due to these factors and possibly others I have not considered.

[Hurik]

Maxing armor skills vs rats feels a bit odd indeed. I have not made it so high in armor so I don't know how it is on higher levels. However fighting trepor armor will not raise above 15. It felt a bit low but instead of complaining about that, I thought that maybe it's possible to have some kind of efficency coefficent. Like fighting rats, up to level 10, you gain 100% armor practice. After that it gets lower up to level 20 for example where you will gain 0%. Numbers are just examples

 If you feel that a mob is too though to practice on, you can go back and fight something else, though with slower gain. This would add more flexibility as you can fight more mobs for training, higher lvl for faster or lower lvl for slower gain but it would still be a limit so you can't max out at low level mobs. Any thoughts about this?

EDIT: For example, at 15 Heavy armor I can't gain anything vs trepors or tefusanglings. My option is to move on to gladiators but they will damage me for over 30hp with each hit which means there is not much gain before one has to stock up with more potions. Judging from how much the bar has moved it will be an hour or two just to get from 15 to 16. I can't imagine how much time one has to spend at higher levels since one also has to fight more powerful mobs.

[cdmoreland]

Yes, leveling armor sucks. Ellis Warfang is only 17 in light armor (200 HA) so I tried him. Tefusangs are too tough and Tefusanglings give no training. Trepor Warriors give him training but in 1 hour of training I got only 1/2 of a level. Some of that may be his stats, none under 300. Trepor Warriors half kill Ellis but his health is 1288. Can a new player survive without a ton of tria for potions?

[Zunna]

Has decided following the last Dev Q&A, tests have been made about armor training.
I've tested Ligth Armor, like you mentioned, with the exact same skills as your "new" character and had 1280 Health points. Within 5 minutes, changing of beasts and tweaking my acessories (items I bought to Harnquist, everything 50Q), I found a way to level up my Light Armor which was at level 17. It didn't even needed the use of healing potion at all.
So basically, it is possible and not even problematic as far as i saw. Of course it is slower then before but this is legitimate.

Like I told you in game when you made a petition about it, you need to make experiments, see which beasts suit your skills and if one big is too hard then maybe several small are better ? I will make further tests with MA and HA but so far, it's working just fine.

[cdmoreland]

Zunna, the real problem as I see it is that a new player will get discouraged before they even get a good start. Once a player hits level 20 in armor he will need to fight mobs that cast spells. Waesed and Ellis needn't worry about it. A new player starts with about 400 health and will die quickly.

Is the real goal to make it so hard to level that only role-play is left? Why even bother with the mechanics of a 3D game?

[gonger]

I've tested Ligth Armor, like you mentioned, with the exact same skills as your "new" character and had 1280 Health points. Within 5 minutes, changing of beasts and tweaking my acessories (items I bought to Harnquist, everything 50Q), I found a way to level up my Light Armor which was at level 17. It didn't even needed the use of healing potion at all.
So basically, it is possible and not even problematic as far as i saw. Of course it is slower then before but this is legitimate.

Zunna, you certainly can do it, but we should keep in mind that you are not exactly our average newbie, who is still lacking your experience.

Just my two tria,

Gonger.

[Zunna]

I totaly understood you guys worries, and I continu driving test like I said with the skills and stats at the level precised by cdmoreland. I will let you guys know

Also how did we learned to train ? Wont it be the same path for newcomers ?

[cdmoreland]

Zunna, a new player might not even notice that they are no longer leveling.

It's been my goal to help new players so when we get an update I create a new character  to test and learn what has changed. I used Ellis, who was my original character from EZPC, to test if it made any difference with higher stats.

If the same rules applied to magic I would get no practice from any spell below realm 5 as Waesed, but I do even for realm 1 spells like Rinse and Flame Burst. My whole point has been that training should not stop regardless of level or apply it to everything.Then you would have all the crafters screaming.

[Dilihin]

I believe it's bossible to train armors if you make enough experiments,but i see other broblem that can cause even more frustation.
You need strenght a lot to wear heavy armor,and newbie might not get in those Levels in a while.This causes several broblems:

1) If you first train other armors,your weapons get trained too.This means you need to chance weapons while chancing to HA.If you don't,you kill mobs too fast.And more powerfull mobs kill you cause of lack of armor skill.This forces to train other weapon skills too.

2) Your stats get too high, which causes you deal more damage.This means you kill NPCs too fast.If you chance to more powerfull NPCs, your armor isn't enough to keep you alive.

Is there anything that can be done to this?

[Rigwyn]

Weapons do loose power as the quality decreases. A lower quality weapon will do less damage. There are also weapons and items that will lower various stats. This can be handy in some cases.

Different mobs have different attacks and resistances. Perhaps take this into consideration when selecting a mob or group of mobs.

Lastly, its pretty hard to just train one skill in isolation. I would say select a few skills that will compliment each other and work from there.