Reincarnation and Bashing Help

Drianna

Greetings everyone. Im a new knight and ive decided i want to focus a lot of my time on bashing, hopefully becoming a dragon at some point. Wehn creating my character i chose atavian just because it looked cool at first, but also because it said the race was not permanent. I have been reading a bit on forums and there seems to be a consensus on some things regarding bashing, which make it clear that atavian isnt an optimal race for a fulltime basher. Im looking for something optimal, i can adjust my RP if so needed.

So, a few points I think i understood are:

• More crits is better: more dmg, things die faster.
• More attacks means higher chance for crits, so again better.
• Faster attacks means more dmg/crits so it is usually better.
• Higher strength means things  die faster.
• Survivability is important: sipping + higher health + damage reduction help.

Now, I know many of these things can be achieved or further enhanced with artifacts. I might invest in them at some point, but for quite some time im probably gonna depend on what i find to buy and my race/class. So my question is mainly how can I cover most of these things as a knight (infernal now but probably change to runewarden) and with which race. To elaborate, it seems humans are optimal: provide some of these good bashing bonuses, and it can be tweaked with race specialization and traits perhaps even further (better sip/health/strength, nimble, lucky?). They could become even better with ring, pendant and such artifacts i think, and focus on strength could help with knight tankiness. But what if i chose dwarf with strength spec, or xoran with str/con spec? Could that be better? As a knight, also, dual blunt and dual cutting seem to be better because of two attacks vs one of the other specs, so more crit chances. And what about weapon choice? Slower weapon with more dmg or faster with lower but more attacks/crits again? 

 Any help to get me started will be appriaciated! 

Sena

Any race will do fine. Dwarf (for the higher con and resistances) or troll/xoran (for the higher strength) will generally be the best for a knight. Other races have advantages though; atavian is useful for the ability to fly, mhun is useful for the movement bonus, human isn't a bad choice for the critical bonus (though +1 strength is generally worth more than the critical bonus). Horkval, grook, tsol'aa, and siren will be significantly weaker than other races, horkval because they can't wear armour and knight's fullplate is a lot better than horkval's natural resistances, the rest because they have low str/con and not much to make up for it as a knight. They won't be crippled though, if you really like those races go ahead and choose them.

For specialisation, strength or constitution are both good choices. Con will make it easier to survive and let you more safely bash tougher areas, strength will let you kill things faster and thus gain exp/levels faster. If you have a poor connection (so you lag or disconnect a lot), I'd recommend con so you're less likely to be killed by your connection. If you plan on buying bashing artefacts, I'd go with strength, since it's a lot cheaper and easier to boost your defence with artefacts than your offence. Otherwise, it's mostly just up to personal preference; slower, safer hunting (con) or faster, riskier hunting (strength). Personally, since knights have good defence already, I'd go with 15 str and 13 con (troll/xoran with str spec and con trait, or dwarf with str spec and str trait), or with defensive artefacts I'd go with full strength.

For traits, definitely take nimble and either con or strength, and if bashing is your primary concern then take lucky (slightly increased crit chance) or aim to kill (increased crit damage) as your third major trait. Minor traits don't really matter for bashing, take whatever sounds good to you.

It's probably still too soon to say which knight spec is best, there's likely to be some adjustments still. Dual cutting, dual blunt, and sword+shield all have two attacks though (sword+shield uses the shield for attacking as well), so the only one I'd avoid for bashing is two-handed (though they may end up getting something to compensate for the poor speed).

For weapons, you should probably go with speed over damage unless the DPS is significantly higher on the more damaging weapon. I don't have enough information on damage/speed to say exactly which weapons (and shields for sword+shield) you should use.

Theris

Some thoughts from me (though I know little about knights):

• Human is good for bashing, because of the crit bonus. However, in terms of maximum optimization of stats, you may be better off picking a race that has lower dex or int in favor of con or str. You don't need to be thinky or dodgy, you just need to be smashy. Thus, troll/dwarf/xoran might be better. However, crits become a really big deal at higher levels, and I'm not sure of the extent to which the human racial trait amplifies that.
• I generally hear people saying you should choose the constitution race specialization. Strength has diminishing returns in terms of damage scaling as you increase it past 12, while con doesn't in terms of health. You don't want to have to run much, and you really don't want to die much, if you're going for dragon. That being said, it's much less expensive to buy artefacts to improve defence than it is to buy artefacts that will improve your offence for bashing, so consider that if you do plan to buy those.
• You may want to be cautious about which weapon specialization you choose. You'll probably hear that dual blunt turns you into a denizen-smashing monster, but given that weapon stats were recently normalized, and the admin have been trying to balance bashing between classes lately, we can probably expect some upcoming changes that will even out the bashing DPS for the different specializations, at least a little. If this does happen, you'll probably want to choose whichever specialization allows you to attack the fastest. With DPS held constant, as you pointed out, faster attacks and double-attacks are preferable because they give you more crit opportunities, but they also give you more opportunity to disengage if you get in over your head. Keep in mind, that sword and board lets you do double-attacks, too, and on top of that you get the tankiness of a shield (and the potential to use a shield of absorption, which is great for bashing), although I don't know how its damage stacks up to other specializations.
• You definitely want nimble, and probably lucky too, as traits. For your final major trait, I'd recommend either robust (+1 con) or receptive body (+5% health sips).

Sena

Theris said:
Human is good for bashing, because of the crit bonus. However, in terms of maximum optimization of stats, you may be better off picking a race that has lower dex or int in favor of con or str. You don't need to be thinky or dodgy, you just need to be smashy. Thus, troll/dwarf/xoran might be better. However, crits become a really big deal at higher levels, and I'm not sure of the extent to which the human racial trait amplifies that.

Just looking at average damage, +1 str is always better than the human crit bonus. Without arties (specifically str gauntlet and crit pendant) and a high level (>90), +1 strength is a lot better.

Theris said:
You definitely want nimble, and probably lucky too, as traits. For your final major trait, I'd recommend either robust (+1 con) or receptive body (+5% health sips).

For bashing (since denizen damage doesn't scale with max health), you should always pick robust over receptive body. The extra con will usually increase your sip by more than 5% anyways.

Drianna

Thank you all for the info! I'll stick with the shortsword then for now and hopefully some good data on specs and changes will be up soon. I'll just have to lose 100 lessons only for changing spec though, so unless I buy any of those expensive artifacts until then (which i prolly wont, defensive ones seem better!) i should be fine...