Learning to fight again

Serin

Haven't had a chance to set things up yet, work and college are killing me right now.  I am fine with doing a manual setup but wanted to see if some of the best fighters in Achaea could chime in a give a brief description of how you fight.  (Not asking for any of your secrets just which style you use and how you deal with the spam of fighting both singular and in a group)

Also newb question, if I wanted to create a alias for truestare at a target, is there a builtin &tar feature or do I have to try and find the target alias for svof and base it off that?

Thanks for the help guys!

Exelethril

As a heads up, you're not likely going to get anywhere significant without a good time investment in setting up your offense and learning the ropes.

I'd suggest learning about combat mechanics (bleed+focus dmg on mana/apostate locking in your case), how svof works, how to gag and highlight initially. Then create simple dstare para/asthma etc aliases once you've grasped the reason why you're doing these things.

Antonius

@Serin There's in-game targetting. Use SETTARGET <target> to set your target (ST <target> for short), then you can use &tar in commands. A lot of attacks, and other abilities, will also work without specifying a target in the command itself if you've set one using SETTARGET.

In terms of keeping track of things for my offense, here's a brief example of what I'm seeing when I fight: https://ada-young.appspot.com/pastebin/H-Eg1GUb Basically, there's a lot of colour.

Target herb/mineral eats have the background of the line coloured corresponding to what herb/mineral it actually was; bloodroot is red, kelp is green, etc. I can tell what they're eating just from the coloured lines (I don't have anything else that uses background colours).

Delayed or passive effects that give afflictions (e.g. dragoncurse in that log, Bard songs and songbird procs, Depthswalker passives) have their foreground colour set to the colour corresponding to the cure of the affliction (e.g. asthma is kelp, so it's green text). That helps me keep track of when things are actually landing, since it's not when I regain balance like it would be for other two aff classes (Knights, Serpent, Apostate, etc.).

Active cures are a darkish blue foreground, as well as bold and italic. Passive cures are a light blue foreground, bold and italics.

Tree is green (and italics, though doesn't seem to show up on the pastebin). Focus is gold and italics.

Ankhareoutef

I was once told, "Combat is 10% knowing how to kill people, 20% knowing how to survive, and 70% highlights."

By 'highlights' he means echos as well.

I have echoes for everythingggggg. My attacks are color coded. Enemy aff curing is color coded (kelp: green, goldenseal: yellow, bloodroot: red, ginseng: orange, focus: yellow background, tree: green box echo, etc.) I used a lot of deletelinefullorwhatever to gag the actual output so I can put two lines of BLOODROOT || BLOODROOT in red. I have box echoes of various shapes, sizes, and colors that are warnings for important combat milestones (like being inquisitioned, Cadmus, or the big lightning strike from sylvans).

I have the barebones map geyser box thing (the one on the mudlet wiki) in the upper right corner. I have a chat box that I made from information also on the mudlet wiki that captures communication. Channels are all different colors (especially partytells). Tells and party invites have a sound effect in case I'm chatting in between things (though if you do this, use ndb to limit it so like only allies trigger it). It also helps especially when I'm hunting. My eyes are pretty bad so without the sound I miss it.

Anything I can track (burn levels, freeze levels, enemy mana %, enemy heath %, milestone affs [inquisition, manaleech, etc], estimated numbers of mental affs, limb damage, and enemy bleeding), I track on my prompt. Obviously if I'm shaman, I don't need limb damage or freeze levels. All of my tracking I learned to do myself by a combination of the mudlet wiki, reading IRE forums, and asking questions when I was stuck (especially don't afraid to do that!). Don't just read our forums. Read the other games', too!

If you want to use an aff tracker, I encourage it! On two conditions. One, that you can ALSO completely manual an offense using just your echoes. This is verrrry important. Aff trackers and limb counters will get you far, but there will be situations where you need to improvise on them. You can't do that if all you've done is programmed an offense and not learned how to actually do it. And two, you learn to code it yourself. Or at least you learn how to make improvements on something publically available (not that they're bad, it's just that they weren't written with you in mind. They were written for the author. It's super awesome to have great coders will to share their work, though. It makes it so much easier to learn when there are practical examples!).

Other than that, I started by learning in sequences (which I now know is referred to as charting). Memorize the sequence of a lock (have someone help you and inevitably die when you get it a little too right too quickly (cough you know who you are cough). Get it under your fingers. Things go wrong and sometimes you'll know something the tracker doesn't.

tldr: I use lots of echoes and numerical trackers on my prompt for various combat milestones. I also have big ass ugly echoes for important defensive milestones. Aff trackers help but not if you don't learn how they work.

Torinn

Definitely echos and highlights 100% 

Serin

Great advice guys I really appreciate it.  Started working on it last night, got a good deadeyes alias set up but now I m making alias's for specific combos.  Got inducted into a clan that is helping a lot too!  Soon to set up Party targeting and gagging.  As well as alias's for other skills I haven't made.

The more I look at lua the easier it is to understand.  I can do a bit of python programming and shell scripting but the wildcards in lua were very confusing to begin with.  Now that I understand them better I feel more comfortable about setting up a system.  

I have to say creating an automated fighting setup would be very interesting to do I am going to go for mostly manual to begin with and work on an automated script once I understand my attacks and affs better.

Nehmrah

I get my ass handed to me all the time, but I make sure I learn something from it.