Basic Combat

I've been considering getting into combat here, and only a long learning session between me and Kavaya stands between me and transcendant TwoArts.

So what should I work on next? I'm reasonably sure there was another post here that said transing Twoarts was a good first step. What would be a good next step?

I'm up to Alleviate in Striking and...that's about it! I've been sacrificing lessons on the altar of TwoArts up until now.
I have 150 Lusternian credits that I'll trade over for Achaean ones. Let me know if you're interested!

Comments


  • If you want to get into combat, you're going to want to get tri-Trans before getting into anything technical.  You can of course get involved in group combat and might occasionally fighter over a UW respawn or something, but I would strongly recommend that if you want to get into combat, you should bash up to at least level 80, which gives you the health, lessons, and bound credits you need to participate in combat in anything but a superficial way.
  • edited January 2015
    OK, I'll work on that. I guess I coudl've been  a little more specific, but basically I wanted to ask about how it all works - what I'm supposed to be doing in a fight. I'm a Lusternia native, so I understand (kind of) how not to die, but I'm not sure what I should be going towards besides a damage kill, which is probably ineffective. What are some good hindering strategies, maybe, or other tips that you could give someone new? I haven't touched IRE combat at all before, so anything is good.

    Another thing I wanted to ask, while I'm thinking of it, is: How can I best practice combat? That is, where can I find people to have meaningful fights against that aren't just top-tier combatants looking to splat me and then afterward say something vague about 'do more attacks, get hit less'?

    Sorry if it's a lot of questions; I've got like half a dozen threads I'd like to make but would feel self-conscious about being spammy.
    I have 150 Lusternian credits that I'll trade over for Achaean ones. Let me know if you're interested!
  • edited January 2015

    There are two tenets I try to focus on when I'm training new people in game:

    1)  Never make the same mistake twice.  Review your spars and fights, isolate problems in your curing or your active strategy and find solutions.  Recognizing your own mistakes isn't enough though, a lot of people know what they did wrong, but do it wrong the next time anyways.  If you can embrace this mentality, your learning curve is going to be accelerated rapidly.

    2)  Do not look at combat as one skillset.  Realize that combat is a combination of several different skills, with the big ones being: Offensive strategy, Defensive Strategy, knowledge of enemy classes, ability to watch your opponent carefully, while also watching yourself carefully.  Instead of just practicing "combat", you should determine what your strengths and weaknesses are, and specifically practice (or script) the things you are weak at.  While you should put a training bias on offense (it's easier to learn 1 class than to learn 15), you should still train hard on the basics that apply to all classes (learning when to tumble, when to use rebounding, which to focus on offensive hindrance, when to use things like fitness/shrug/numb, etc.).  

    It's much easier to never lose than it is to always win, and once you learn how to not die, you find yourself with a lot more opportunities to win that you wouldn't have had otherwise (you can't win fights if you're dead).

  • edited January 2015
    Katsuragi said:
    OK, I'll work on that. I guess I coudl've been  a little more specific, but basically I wanted to ask about how it all works - what I'm supposed to be doing in a fight. I'm a Lusternia native, so I understand (kind of) how not to die, but I'm not sure what I should be going towards besides a damage kill, which is probably ineffective. What are some good hindering strategies, maybe, or other tips that you could give someone new? I haven't touched IRE combat at all before, so anything is good.

    Another thing I wanted to ask, while I'm thinking of it, is: How can I best practice combat? That is, where can I find people to have meaningful fights against that aren't just top-tier combatants looking to splat me and then afterward say something vague about 'do more attacks, get hit less'?

    Sorry if it's a lot of questions; I've got like half a dozen threads I'd like to make but would feel self-conscious about being spammy.
    You will also want focus in survival.

    As for real basic blademaster stuff, you can infuse an element before every slash and follow every* slash with a strike. Each of the fists in striking have some detrimental effect that falls off after some fixed duration with no message to you, and you can only have one. Hamstring is basically the same, but you can have it with an elemental fist. 

    I think the super basic strategy is to hit their legs until they break (you won't see the break), impale, impaleslash, blade twist as much as you can, brokenstar. That probably doesn't work as I've written it, you might need to figure out how to sneak the impaleslash into a different impale. Whatever, the basic strategy is to somehow get that sequence of moves on somebody without them running away.

    edit: caveats: I am nub, new BM also. Multi slash can't be followed by a strike. Pommel strike can.
  • edited January 2015
    The three main strategies, in broad strokes, are to try to kill with brokenstar, to use pommel and voidfist to try to lock someone so they have a combination of afflictions that mutually prevent curing one another, or to just do enough damage to kill the person (which is more doable in a lot of cases than you would think).

    In all cases you use hamstring to keep someone from running away once you start trying to actually secure the kill. You also use airfist to avoid having to deal with people parrying your attacks on their limbs.

    You kill with brokenstar by causing so much bleeding that they don't have the mana to clot it anymore and you can reach the requirements for brokenstar. You do that using bladetwist, which requires the target to be impaled, which requires the target to be prone. If you just use the strike that prones them, they'll get back up before you get balance back for the impale, so you need to break their legs first (or, ideally, at the same time). If you can, you probably want to break something else first so they apply restoration, then break both their legs at the same time while they're still waiting to be allowed to apply restoration again. In order to do that, you need to figure out how many hits you need to get on each limb such that it's only one attack away from breaking, so you can break the one then immediately break both legs at the same time with legslash - this is not trivial since legslash does a different amount of damage to each leg when you do it.

    Impaleslash increase the mana cost of clotting. Not necessarily essential, but realistically important against a lot of people to make brokenstar viable. Usually you try to find a way to get an impaleslash in without doing your whole two-legs-and-another-limb setup. I'm not actually sure what the current method most people use for getting a pre-impaleslash in is though.

    You lock people by using voidfist and repeatedly hitting with pommel while striking to cause afflictions. This gets pretty technical and you probably want to find someone good at it to explain it or read some logs. I can't remember if Lusternia really has "locks" in quite the same way Achaea does - if it does, you know how fiddly this can be, if it doesn't...it's really fiddly. You really have to sit down and work through how it all works in close detail.

    The third way you kill people is through straight damage, often by repeatedly mangling the person's legs faster than they can cure them. Against people with a lot of health and strong health recovery, this won't work, but it will still work against a lot of people who need to be able to run away periodically to survive your damage. Obviously it matters how much damage you can do here too.

    Like Ernam said, you probably want tri-trans (plus a fair bit of survival) and level 80 to really get into fighting - without that you're going to have very, very exploitable deficits, like when an opponent realizes you don't have focus in survival for instance. You can definitely do some fighting before then though, especially with people in a similar situation, and figuring out how to prep limbs and how locks work is likely to be a long process worth starting now.
  • All of the above is good advice.

    I would say focus on one particular aspect at a time with spars and such, make aliases and such as yo uneed them. For instance want to get impale/bladetwist down, practice just that, then when you can impale/bladetwist off a leg break, try with two legs, then move on to getting enough bladetwists for a brokenstar and slowly move up from each section till you have it all working.

    Learn to judge when limbs will break (experience or with a limb counter) and then practice putting your plan into one fluid motion, so you don't have to wait between your last hit and figuring what to do next, you just get natural at that first tactic. Once you've done this, move onto another tactic and practice that till you get it perfect (they may not work on everyone but the idea is to get it to be a natural progression) then when you can go through two or three different methods seperately, start trying to find similar things in their prep that can lead you to having them as two options.

    Just my two cents, how I approach classes - obsess over one tactic, when that works, move onto the next then try and pair them together so you have a switch option without having to change too much.
  • I'd argue you don't really need to transcend all of your skills to be an effective blademaster. Shindo is pretty much just utility beyond Shin Trance, and aids your defence. However, as long as you aren't fighting people who are more than 400% your might with thousands of credits in artefacts, you'll do fine without the majority of Shindo. By fine, I mean you're one of the best classes to fight as with two trans skills (you don't need to transcend Striking either). 

    I would suggest you get full Twoarts, then get to Shin Trance, then work on transcending Striking, and then Shindo. Survival you need up to tumble, everything else is supplementary but generally unnecessary. 

    A "minimum" ability guide I'd give you: Brokenstar in Twoarts, Feet in Striking, Shin Trance in Shindo (optional but advised: Tumble in Survival). 

    I don't have time to advise strategies right now, but a lot of that has already been covered and can be achieved with the above abilities.
  • Doh! I learned a bunch of Shindo since it looked useful with lots of utilities. But thanks for the lesson blueprint; I'll make these my goals now!

    And thanks again to everyone else for the replies so far!!
    I have 150 Lusternian credits that I'll trade over for Achaean ones. Let me know if you're interested!
  • Blademaster combat simple: Take metal stick. Sharpen one side. Leave about a foot with no edge. Hole on blunt end with no edge. Hit opponent with sharpened side. Evade out. Repeat.

    Evading optional.

  • Will give opinion when I get home.




    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • Blademaster combat is farrrrr from "simple", just once someone gets a handle on it, it looks super easy. There are many intricacies and tiny details you have to grasp if you want to kill anyone that is any good.
  • Even hitting and evading and running around all day isn't quite so simple anymore, since the 3min limb reset
  • Do you need a limbcounter to succeed in BM combat?  Is there anyone who could help me get INTO combat?
  • Crono said:
    Do you need a limbcounter to succeed in BM combat?  Is there anyone who could help me get INTO combat?


    You don't -have- to get a limbcounter, but you'll have to put in a ton of time learning the breakpoints for people alone. Accounting for the stance changes alone is a pretty difficult thing to do. There are also limb points sometimes where you can't prep them in 1 stance, so you need to know what each stance can do.

    Dorn has a limbcounter somewhere here on the forums, and it is the one that I personally use. There is also Manda, which @Ernam sells if you want to contact him.

    Can message me IG if you need anything else indepth!





    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • edited May 2015
    Atalkez said:
    There are also limb points sometimes where you can't prep them in 1 stance, so you need to know what each stance can do.
    I've seen people say this frequently, and I used to think it was true, but I'm actually pretty sure that it isn't. Thanks to the relative damage of the main hit of armslash, the off-hit of armslash, and compass, there shouldn't be any health values where you have to change stance to doublebreak with a single armslash (and obviously the same applies to centreslash and legslash). I'm pretty sure it was deliberately designed to make that the case, given how it works out.

    A while back, I spent some time testing this with a friend after he figured it out (we tried a few people and used health arties to get more data points) and he seemed to be correct.
  • I've had it happen plenty of times. Prepping with alternating slashes until you can slash from either side, sometimes only breaks on your main-slash, leaving your second leg "prepped" - Compassslash damage is too much to prep the leg without breaking it, unless you switch stance prior to your breaking legslash.





    Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
  • edited May 2015
    Atalkez said:

    I've had it happen plenty of times. Prepping with alternating slashes until you can slash from either side, sometimes only breaks on your main-slash, leaving your second leg "prepped" - Compassslash damage is too much to prep the leg without breaking it, unless you switch stance prior to your breaking legslash.

    It's slightly unintuitive - he (Maktube) had to explain it to me a few times before I got it. You don't just use a single compassslash to the unprepped limb to make the doublebreak prep work.

    Any time you're alternating slashes and you get a single break, it must be on an odd-numbered slash - it isn't possible to single-break on an even-numbered slash (this should be pretty intuitive).

    So imagine you do left-right-left and it breaks only the left. That means their limb health is between and 1+2x (their right limb, which didn't break) and 2+x (their left limb, which broke), where x is the off-slash damage. So if you do compass left, compass right, then slash left, their left limb will (assuming compass slash is the same as a primary slash for the sake of simplicity) be at 2, and their right limb will be at 1+x. Then you do a right slash, which puts both limbs at 2+x, and we know their limbs break at 2+x or less.

    I assumed that compass was the same as a primary slash there to make the math easier, but that doesn't have to be the case. That's all inescapably true so long as compass is at least as damaging as the primary hit of arm/leg/centreslash and less damaging than the primary plus the difference between the primary hit and the off-slash (1 <= compass < 2-x), which definitely seems to be the case. So long as that's the case, it is always possible to doublebreak someone without changing stances. The math is a pretty unintuitive and it feels like it shouldn't work, but it's definitely correct if you go and work it out.
  • HeroseHerose Nova Scotia, Canada
    If you set limb damage equal to max health then compass slash limb damage equal to:

    ( 530 + 10% of max health ) x ( 1 + band mod + stance mod)

    band mod = 5/10/15% based on level 1/2/3

    stance mod:  mir = -10%, thyr = -20%, arash = +10%, doya = +5%, sanya = 0%, unstanced = -5%
  • Anyone have a link or something to Dorn's limbcounter?




  • Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
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