Although the monsters have been made much more challenging by the removal of the 44 slash swords, there still is a rather large descrepence between the hit points of the typical player and the hit points a typical monster. Since the players tend to hit really hard to make up for the monsters having high points, when players challenge other players to duels, the duels are often decided by who gets the first hit. Although this may be what the developers intended, it does not make for very interesting duels.

My suggestion would be to increase the hit points of the players by about a factor of 5, and increase the damage the monsters give by a factor of 5 as well.

Not being able to attack NPCs is something that happens every now and then. Yes, it effects everyone. All you can do is try again later.

I\'ve found that if the monster is attacking you and your character isn\'t fighting back even though you have a bloody stance selected, try stopping the fight(the X just to the right of full defensive button) and then re-selecting the bloody stance, or aggressive, or whatever.

Keyaz, those are nice looking models, but I\'m curious as to what the polygon counts are.

Here\'s a chinese style polearm I made, it is fairly rough, but it only has 68 polygons.