Shattered Kingdoms

Why are skills like dodge, parry, enhanced parry, and all weapon skills/self defense, brawling, wild fighting excluded from the ability to learn from your mistakes while using them?

I find it rather difficult to master some of these skills and it leaves little incentive for someone to try and master a skill that is outside of their usual repertoire of weapons, because it is just mind numbingly boring to pound 30,000 NPCs just to get a single improvement at say, flail, or mace. Of course at the same time you could have already mastered a weapon that you specialized in, say khopesh under swords, and you use that a lot, so naturally you get a lot of improvements in sword.

It turns into a monolithic task to master other weapons, which limits the classes like barbarian who get bonuses from every single melee weapon in the game, though it is only practical to master 1 or 2.

Speaking on the subject of parry, enhanced parry and riposte, with my last swashbuckler I mastered all of these before even training dodge, just to gain an advantage in only using parries to deflect blows. Even without training dodge it is very difficult to master these skills, because you simply can't learn from your mistakes. With dodge, it becomes nearly impossible to get improves in those skills, especially riposte since a weapon that is parryable needs to be wielded for you to even have that skill fire off. Parry is the main line of defense for the swashbuckler class, and it is incidentally the most difficult skill for them to improve in.

There's other skills like endurance and fast healing meditation/trance that are also excluded from improvements by learning from your mistakes, but I'm really more interested in weapon skills because tactics are limited by the fact that they are incredibly difficult to increase in skill level.

It's no fun to grind endlessly on NPCs. That's about the least fun thing to do in the game. And yet, that's exactly what one needs to do just to increase their skill in weapons, and it is a shame when you have a huge list of weapon classes, that in the end just serve to be a daunting task instead of a true addition to tactics in the game.

I think becuase most skills attempt to do it automaticcly and if we got improves for failed attempts all the skills would be mastered really fast with little to no effort...

I think this is something of a balancing factor for races like Deep elf and elf. With their higher Int but lower physical stats they can "quickly" master skills giving them an edge to bring them back to a similar level.

Riposte has been made slightly easier to master recently with the new NPC wield weapon code. Just give any humanoid NPC a weapon of suitable size and they will wield it.

That is not true, if the game thinks their fists are better they will remove the weapon, which happens with a lot of NPCs that I've seen.

You actually don't make any sense either.

Fight weaker NPCs on mod stun. Give them a dagger works with all the NPCs I have tried. Still takes for ever but they miss often enough due to low level + wielding a weapon = riposte training.

My point of a balancing factor is a weak one but it is still there. The races with a higher max int are physically weaker. How ever their increase speed to train skills makes them sightly more viable choice for the player who doesnt want to waste hundreds of hours training a skill (they might only waste a hundred rather than hundreds).

How ever I would also point out these speeds of skill training carry over from when you would spend these hundreds of hours grinding for XP as well. I would like to see their chance of improve increased but I have seen how massive a change making them check on failure is. Having being a member of a cabal when a similar skill to the ones mentioned was changed as suggested. It went from one improve a if I was lucky every hour of NPC fight spamming to V good to Mastered in a few hours after the change. I know it even better because my skills where reset more than once with that char due to a few different reasons. Double the current rate would be a significant change with out taking the idea of someone training to be better completely out of the game. There still should be some reward for a bit of dedication to your skills same as there is for dedication to enchanting. Also We do not want to make skill training too quick because it will encourage people to move quicker from one char to the next.

In short I agree something should be done but what you are asking for is far to much remember there are lots of little factors in the game that are not often explored but are still there.

This is the one reason I don't play SKs.

Yeah, I haven't been playing for quite some time now either. The last changes (½-1 year) forces you to spend waaaaay to much time on grinding NPCs...

So you agree that it still would take you a long time to master a skill like riposte by giving NPCs daggers. The swordsman can't even bother to see where he's making his mistakes.



What? You're saying wasting at least 100 hours training weapon skills? Who wants to waste 100 hours grinding on NPCs for random improvements in their weapon skills? This is exactly what compounds the issue. A player is most likely just going to pick 1 or 2 weapon classes out of all of them, probably sword and spear to bother mastering, because there just isn't enough incentive to work with the others. You have to waste time grinding on NPCs instead of being able to improve through usage.



A player that wants to level isn't going to pick up a weapon that they have less ability in because they'll do less damage, and hit less frequently, thereby making them level more slowly. If you're leveling in a group that's pretty much just giving the xps to other members because you're probably not doing as much damage as them. There's really no incentive to try and master another weapon class while leveling when it slows down your xp gain rate.

The rest of your arguments are just absurd. It's more difficult for races with lower int? We're not talking races here, we're talking classes. You completely miss the mark. Even more so because the races with lower int are going to master weapon classes slower than races with high int. This isn't even a viable discussion when there are spells like giant strength and haste that exist.

They're still not going to bother with other weapon types though because the incentive on trying to master them to use them out in PK or elsewhere just isn't there.

While this hurts the barbarian and mercenary classes the hardest because of their huge list of weapon classes, it also hurts other classes to a lesser extent, such as paladin, hellion and scout.



How is it far too much? The ambiguity and mystery in your statement lead me to believe that you didn't even put much time into thinking that through.

This is a game, it should be fun, and we shouldn't have to surrender to mind-numbingly boring things like grinding on NPCs for improvements in weapon classes and other skills when we could be doing other things like roleplaying and obliterating our enemies.

I agree with Cyra on a lot of this.


I think he's making a lot of really solid points, especially about picking weapons to master. This kind of forced grinding discourages experimentation and encourages more cookie-cutter use of weapons, fighting styles, etc..

I play a human rogue, mentor 1 level. I've only about 232 hours in my character or so, but still some of my skills aren't yet maxed and my intelligence is at Brilliant +.

Dodge, Parry, even circle stab and hamstring have suddenly seemed to drop in their advancements. Hamstring especially considering i can only get 2 uses per NPC generally. (As if it hits it auto mangles, and 2 mangled legs and you can no longer use it.) Pick lock, even sneak and hide are a pain. I can understand some grinding, don't get me wrong, but when you can literally spend 6+ hours a day JUST training stats, it gets a bit boring. Especially on the skills where you don't fight.

My deep elf hellion however, before I deleted, had all of his spells at superb and same intelligence and he levelled far faster than my rogue, despite the same charisma level. I for one agree that some skills should be easier to raise, others should not.

SK Has gotten boring due to all of the grinding. I may end up taking a break myself to try other things at this rate.

-Kin