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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.
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!
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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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
And thanks again to everyone else for the replies so far!!
Evading optional.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Okay so lets start off with a few key things:
Stances - You have Doya, Thyr, Mir, Arash, Sanya. Doya will be your beginning stance for low-level hunting. Outside of very few niche enemy health situations, it is practically worthless in PvP settings. Thyr will be your most used stance for PvP, as it is the fastest and most accurate, at a cost of damage. Mir is your major defense booster, good for tankier opponents and hunting, at a cost of damage. Arash is your if-I-don't-kill-you-before-you-kill-me stance. You're absolutely fucked if you are not 100% sure you are going to kill with it, 9/10 times. Sanya is your best stance for pure shin generation, and causes some Fists to last longer (before last round of Classleads. This may have changed).
Abilities - You only really -have- to have the following abilities to succeed: BrokenStar, Knee, Neck, Hamstring and Feet strikes. Alleviate in Shindo. Now, getting kills with this skill setup won't be easy (nor should it be) - but you have the tools to do it. This will mainly work for BrokenStar Kills, or Manglelocks. Any kind of Venomlock won't work without several more Striking abilities.
Tactics - There are several options for a Blademaster. The easiest and he most widely-recognized is a simple pre-impaleslash (through beating herb balance with paralysis, proning off of a long EQ of your enemy, etc) two-leg restoration break (requiring an application of restoration to cure, per leg). This will allow you to impale, and bladetwist 4 times before they writhe off of the blade. Most targets will die at this point to BrokenStar. Sometimes, you may have to re-impale and get another twist, which gives your enemy plenty of time to turn and run before you get balance back. This can be the hardest setup to pull off as you get further into advanced tiers of combat, as it simply isn't enough to kill some people/classes.
Another option as mentioned above, is locking. With the recent changes to Hypochondria we can now give the only affliction blademasters failed to have for a venomlock which is impatience (and disrupt, but that's neither here nor there). Through a variety of measures can you secure this lock: You can use your speed to beat herb balance, legbreak with an armbreak for no outrifting of herbs into affliction stacking, you can try to use Voidfist (though with the changes recently to it, it is much harder to use effectively for locking purposes).
For targets that are under a certain health threshold, you can also Manglelock if you do enough damage and are fast enough. This is best done in Arash (it's a rush, let me tell you). Once you prep both legs to break, you can Flamefist to drop rebounding and Legslash to the right side repeatedly. This will eventually Mangle (2 restoration applications) the right leg, leading to them being prone for a much longer time and you hitting them with reasonable damage throughout.
Limbs - Limbcounting is probably the number one hurdle to overcome as a Blademaster. All of the stances do different levels of limb damage, and your off-slash does less limbdamage than your main-slash. It can be difficult, but if you mess around with it enough you can learn it. There is a free limbcounter here on the forums somewhere, and another that costs 100c. Both work rather well, though I personally use the free one. I've heard very good things about the other one as well.
This is by no means -everything- a BM can do. It's simply a few tactics to help you get started. If you need any help or have any questions you can always message me IG.
Good luck!
tl;dr BM is the shit
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
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.
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.
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.
( 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%
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.