Learning how to fight

Nilith

I need some help with combat. People have taught me a couple of locks, but when I see a combat-related forum post it looks like a lot of gibberish. And the only combat experiences I have had are bad. Do you guys have any suggestions to a newbie about combat? Especially performing well in raids, etc. Raids always seem confusing to me, I'm in party chat and grouped, and we'll move around a bit, and then I'll attempt to understand where we are and where the enemy is but I'll never find out, and then I'll get instakilled by an arrow or something. How do I make sense of the spamtext in a battle? And is there any way to be actually good in combat without buying lessons/credits? I went in the arena, once, as a level 55, and I attempted to venomlock some guy, and he just sat there and oneshot me. This is a serious issue for me, because I want to be somewhat good at PvP but I can't find a good guide on how to.

Addama

When you join a House, they will be able to help to at least point you to a good combat mentor.  I know I'd be happy to give you some pointers, but if you want a decent Serpent to teach you more, Siduri would likely be that person.

Vaehl

Uhh I wouldn't particularly suggest her as a combat mentor. Try ummmm.. Terra.

Xith

Nilith said:

...and then I'll get instakilled by an arrow or something. How do I make sense of the...

Don't give the Garden any funny ideas.

Makarios

I'd recommend checking out AB VISION TUNNELVISION. Its very customisable and should help you significantly cut down upon the amount of text in raids.

Kresslack

Makarios said:

I'd recommend checking out AB VISION TUNNELVISION. Its very customisable and should help you significantly cut down upon the amount of text in raids.

Thanks for reminding me about this, because I couldn't remember what it was called. Still need to set mine up.

Tharvis

holy <censored> that's a thing? I really need to pay more attention to all those skills

Santar

It's an ability that pretty much one person begged for to be implemented for like a year, and nobody uses.

Jovolo

I guess it could be good for entry-level people using the HTML client, but it seems more efficient to just manually gag whatever you need client-side. Developing a beginner's level knowledge of coding in your client can go a long way. Figure out how to gag lines (remove them), echo/highlight, and some basic aliases. It literally takes a couple of hours max to do this, and it will make your ability to fight increase tenfold. 

The single best thing I personally believe you can do when starting off is to find somewhere you can "Log*" all of your fights. Be it pastebin, pastehtml, or just saving a file as a txt or html extension. As long as you can read through it after the fight, it doesn't matter. From there, it becomes a strategical game of looking through to see what your opponent was doing and then finding ways to avoid dying to that in future, and likewise with your offence. Look at what mistakes you made and learn how to rectify them.

If you struggle, then upload these logs to the forums in the combat section and ask for advice. You'll get it.

*Log = Just a copy/pasted version of the fight from your buffer placed on a more permanent medium. pastebin.com and pastehtml.com are good, easy-to-use online versions for this. 

Bronislav

Serpent has kind of a high learning curve in comparison to some of the other classes - between that and the Serpents that are considered the masters of combat having a tendency to avoid discussing specific tactics like a rancid 18-year-old sexalt, and there's bound to be a little frustration. Not to mention going about the coding - I remember poking Iocun as a younger Serpent, and my head exploded (figuratively - it's what I get for trying to understand that enigma that is Iocun.  ). Participate in King of the Hill events in arenas - they work really well in getting you acclimated to defending or attacking a spot en masse.

A lot of the advice that's been presented is really sound, and about the same as any other class having trouble with combat: talk to the prominent Serpent in your city (They're usually much less reluctant to give specific combat advice to citymates), try to record logs and learn from them whenever you can, and try to cut down on the amount of spam that comes with combat, especially in raid/raid defense. If all else fails, send a tell/message to Bronislav - he usually tries to be helpful when he's reasonably sure that the student isn't going to murder/pickpocket good people (Which very much includes Cyrene, no matter how often Targossas tries to stick the label of 'neutral' on them!).

Bronislav isn't some master paragon of combat (I'm learning! ), but at the very least you'll have a general idea of how to go about things. In either case, good luck!

Jinsun

I'm kind of late to this but I hope it's still helpful advice is to pace yourself and set goals. A house can help a lot with that. My house forced me to do certain things before I fought the combat head. He whipped me then assigned me spars. They were adventurers who were all significantly better than me so it really was a goal. I eventually won my arena spars and then occultist class changes happened. It was very frustrating because I was still learning when everything changed. What I did was I got someone else's offensive combat system. That may seem like copout and it sort of is if that's where you stop. What I did was to try jumping random people in underworld. I did that until I knew how that system worked. I understood what the keys triggers and tables did. Then I joined mark as required for me to advance. At that point I started tweaking. It's not healthy to think you're going to write or program the perfect offense in one day. I like to take a few days during Christmas and summer to clean up my code and brainstorm improvements. Once you're a mark people will look for you the fight will come to you. You'll want to duel and fight marks. A long standing mark has generally seen some combat time and will attempt to shred you. Set a list of what people you want to defeat and a timeline. Once you've done that you'll be pretty on your way. This is pretty much the path that I followed and I was the combat leader in my house after about an OOC year coming from relatively no experience.

Aepas

I think that when you learn combat, you should know that there is never really any shame in losing. Join rampages, keep fighting. Even when you know you are going to die. If you use a client with a logging ability, log every fight, even if you know you are going to die. Try to stop caring about XP, don't care about your rep. Fighting is not everything, even if it gets the most attention.

Study study study. When I first started learning how to fight, I was a serpent and would doodle in my notebook how to make possible locks. I did this during school. Achaea is way more important than real life, you should also understand that.

Always be willing to learn from people. Always understand that one tactic will not work on all people. Be ready to adjust and adapt. I guess these are all things that helped me as a serpent. serpent is, or was the most difficult class to learn, but don't let that discourage you. If you do learn serpent and become good as one, you'll pretty much know 90% of achaean combat from that experience alone.