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joedobo

Suggest combat tips for my no armor PvE goal?

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I have a goal to fight without armor. This is for casual PvE adventuring and I don't' plan to do rifts or uniques.

 

 

Please share any tips you know. It would be great if you could note why a tip is so: Wurmpeia link, you just think it's that way, you looked it up in WU and what Class.methods, you did some combat/event log study and a link to the experiment's documentation.

 

Here are some tips I believe in:

  1. Body strength increases give increased damage reduction %. https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Body_strength
  2. Path of insanity, shield of the gone. https://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Shield_of_the_Gone#Shield_of_the_Gone
  3. Shield quality, shield skill, and to a lesser extend shield type explain blocking frequency. Wurmpedia and my opinion.
  4. The more skill the better for these skillsshield, weapon, fighting style, fight skill. my opinion.
  5.  Using higher quality equipment is better. my opinion.
  6. Life transfer is essential here. my opinion.
  7. My CR is for the most part vastly better then the mobs I fight thus nimbleness isn't as useful as speed enchants. my opinion.
  8. Mobs don't have stamina so anything that focuses on giving mobs a disadvantage by draining stamina is useless. my opinion.

 

 

Here are some questions and added information:

  1. Do mobs get hit with penalties when moving like players do?
  2. I almost always fight from a vehicle (wagon or L.cart). This makes it hard to move around a lot and there is the CR nerf.
  3. What weapon is best for my goal? I lean towards swords and they have the highest parry rate. Is it smart to focus on defense so short sword + shield and defensive fight? Or go more middle of the road which would be medium mall + shield and normal fighting?
  4. Cloth armor has high evasion and does this mean no armor has an equal amount of or even more evasion?

 

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Below are strictly what I experienced fighting against mobs (PVP is a totally different story).

 

Wagon is quite a terrible choice to fight from - fights otherwise straightforward can go very cheesy that way. I would recommend to have an extra horse on lead and jump over to it when you engage into combat.

In my experience an LT med maul is a very nice middle ground to have parries and good damage against mobs. Go for as high shield skill as possible in your chosen shield type and use a very high ql weapon/shield.

I'm not convinced if mobs have flanking penalties but still worth trying to get behind them.

High specific weapon skill is a good thing to have but you will be quite solid above 50 or so already.

 

Sometimes I forget to put on my helm even if I'm tanking against uniques - usually it does not really matter as the most important skill is shield skill / shield ql if you are in a tanking position (defensive stance). I feel to  block much more against bipedal enemies than others (my unofficial experience again).

 

Also - Oakshell is a good idea.

 

Edited by Jaz

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I don't think we can lead creatures while embarked as commander That is passengers. Can we unhitch a creature from the vehicle while in combat? I know we can embark while in combat.

 

I don't have access to creature targeting spells like Oakshell, nor access to moon metals, stuff from uniques or stuff from rifts. 

 

I do agree that attacking from a vehicle isn't good but that is how I travel.  So is it better to just disembark and fight on foot?

Edited by joedobo

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40 minutes ago, joedobo said:

I don't think we can lead creatures while embarked as commander That is passengers. Can we unhitch a creature from the vehicle while in combat? I know we can embark while in combat.

 

 

You can embark but you cannot start to lead while in active combat (but if the horse is tamed you can still ride it I think as you don't need to lead it before - never tried myself). You need to break combat to have a chance to lead - possible but may be risky. I better lead a riding horse when commanding a vehicle as I can just disembark then jump on the horse even during combat.

If everything fails you may be in a better position jumping off the vehicle and fight on foot - if things go badly (you run out of stamina) you can still jump back on the vehicle and try to escape.

 

Oakshell is a spell on you working like an armour - even like an AoSP armour if spell power is high enough.

 

 

 

Edited by Jaz

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16 hours ago, joedobo said:

So is it better to just disembark and fight on foot?

I used to just hop off my cart and fight on foot due to the CR penalty on carts. All the hopping on and off gets to be a bit irritating after a while though so if the CR penalty isn't much (looking at it) I just stay on cart.

 

Normally I wear cloth armor and can kill everything except Trolls with my 2hand sword that has LT on it. I like cloth because I still get some protection while suffering no movement speed decrease, even when dragging carts. So I can run around just as fast as I could without any armor on at all but I am not really "unarmored" as your goal would be.

 

Since you prefer swords I would say a longsword with LT and some type of shield would be best since with decent shield skill it will help provide a lot of protection in place of armor. Kind of an odd goal to wear no armor at all, so I would suggest that you would be better off wearing some high QL cloth armor as I do. People are strange though. *grins*

 

=Ayes=

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I normally use good quality cloth armor and a 2H weapon such as Huge Axe, under the old adage that the best defense is a good offense.  Fighting either from horseback or cart for strategic "retreating" at times to heal up and return oi the fight.  

 

I really don't care for how sluggish my character feels in armor. 

 

 

 

 

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20 hours ago, joedobo said:

I have a goal to fight without armor.

 

What goal is this one?

 

 

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32 minutes ago, JakeRivers said:

 

What goal is this one?

 

 

There isn't a WO personal goal or achievement for this. I just want to fight this way.

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theres a bunch of very, very weird things you can do that dont make any sense and you should never recommend to people.

one of them that ive looked at ages ago and dont remember too clearly was one of the bigger ships giving you so much height advantage when embarked as commander that you instantly max out the available height difference and footing bonus, so you could drive around a ship transporter and unload the specific ship whenever you want to fight something.

would that work? yes.

would anyone ever do it? no.

 

from my experience, you just gotta go dig and mine for a while. at mid 70s body strength i sometimes forget to put on armor but just wearing a high LT weapon is more than enough to take care of trolls. hell hounds are a bit annoying tho.

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From what I understand its very hard, if not impossible to get flanking bonus when you fight solo. It has something to do with how the server is acting much faster then the what I see in the client. I can run behind a mob to attack it. Afterward, it may seem like I'm attacking from behind but the server is updating mob orientation instantly. This basically means using the defensive combat style isn't good for me. I believe one of the stronger points of defensive is to remove movement penalties and try to get flanking bonuses.

The next question is whether the aggressive style damage boost is better than using the normal style for better parry and block.

 

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From someone who was almost killed by a rat when I wandered off the deed with no armour:

 

1. Get a five speed horse with high woa gear and don't travel without it, and

2. Run.

 

Edit: Forgot about another friend who dies regularly without armour, so will add third tip:

3. Don't AFK.

Edited by Fairyshine

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kill the opponent faster than it is killing you. If you are able to deal enough damage with a huge axe using aggressive then stick with it. if you need to block and parry, then I feel for you when that troll bonks you in the noggin the first time and you get the red tunnel. Best of luck to you 

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I think I'm at three final choices.

- longsword or short sword. Mauls looks nice but I'd have to start from almost zero skill.

- normal or aggressive.  Not sure about damage increased versus reduced defense.

- Aim for head or use the defensive stances to counter any aiming a mob does.

 

How would I go about analyzing combat log to answer these questions? I'm assuming the answers to those questions are mostly opinion based.

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They aren't opinion based. It's able to be tested and it is determined by you personal skills and equipment. Short sword would be the last thing I would suggest out of your choices. As stated above mobs have no stamina so using a dedicated defensive weapon has zero advantage over dealing more damage.

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___________________________

WEAPONS

 

1H

Large metal shield 80ql with 60+ Nimbleness and 60+ Life Transfer (if you get attacked by more than one mob from different angles LMS is the best out of all, it has the best block rate and block angle, but I doubt you will get shot by players, choose as you wish tbh)

Longsword 80ql with 60+ Nimbleness and 60+ Life Transfer 

 

2H

Steel Staff or Two Handed Sword with LT/NIM 60+

 

(60+ Nimble is a requirement as every 30 power on the cast is +1cr, so 90nim would be +3 cr, which is equivalent to 15fs levels extra)

 

Dragons demise / Animals demise enchant is useless do not bother with it

___________________________

 

ARMOR

I'm assuming you want the account to craft with, that means Oakshell is out of the window

 

Leather or Chain is your best bet, it is both easy to create and maintain.

 

If you don't want to wear armour prepare to get fisted by all mobs excluding wildcats, wolves, mountain lions, and sometimes spiders. There is no way around the damage they can do and thinking otherwise is simply not true, factually speaking, the combat system is literally a roll of the dice, one minute you can wreck anything in front of you (dependent on skills also) and the next you get trashed by the same mob.

 

___________________________

 

Fighting on carts / wagons / ship transporters will lower your CR, deal with it emotionally or get off and ride a horse - which gives you more CR and the freedom to run away as you please at a speed that does not make you want to gouge out your own eyes and eat them.

 

Skills wise these are considered the "bare minimum" for not getting 100% destroyed by mobs

 

70 fight skill

70 large metal skill

70 weapon skill

40+ stance skill (USE NORMAL FIGHTING) the higher the stance skill, the more CR you get from being in that stance.

 

Body control is really important for evading when you enter combat, people stress about strength but body control is actually an extremely overlooked stat, that no one seems to mention. If you are looking to be able to evade / dodge / parry / yadda yadda etc etc against mobs it does not matter so much but there ya go

 

 

Don't use the shortsword, it has garbage damage, annoying glance rates to hit with, and is actually only decent at blocking with

 

 

 

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LT weapon, SoTG, mounted on a horse, I suggest the crowbar, but LT huge axe makes things deader quicker, the longer stuff beats on you, the worse off you will be.

 

You are going to die many times though if you are going to be actively hunting, as you can not control how many things are going to be piling up on you. A few hell hounds or a troll coming in from behind and you going to be red tunneling faster than crap through a goose with no armor.

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Strangely enough, my ~70ql short sword (60 skill) seems just as good as my ~70ql longsword (77 skill) or even the 95ql crowbar (6 clubs). The great thing about the crowbar is I can make a 95ql one now. I wouldn't need to grind weapon smithing anymore (I only use stuff I can make myself).

 

I am considering using cloth instead of no armor.

 

I'd also still love to hear some suggestions on setting up a good experiment to test this stuff. I can write code to parse the logs.

 

@armyskin I don't want to argue with people because any advice is good advice at this point. But I do want to point out any claim that isn't backed up with documentation is an opinion.

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