Shattered Kingdoms

Have you experienced a lower success rate than disarm than I have? I've witnessed characters from all sorts of different races, classes and builds with all kinds of different weapons being able to disarm very successfully. The only reason I could ever justify disarm not being the first skill you use in melee before everything but quaff heal is if you were fighting against someone who literally couldn't be disarmed by using hand weapons or a cursed weapon, or maybe if you knew that your target had zero reflex and you should be able to bash/trip them reliably. It's barely over half a round combat lag, quicker than bash, dirt kick, trip or taunt, and it has a high success rate and sets the damage of your target to zero, either until they re-arm or potentially for the entire rest of the fight.

What skills even come close to competing with that?

Please post the classes and which subtypes were being used in your witnessed accounts as well as buffs.

I've already given them for the two specific instances of Garnon vs Berr and Rall vs Khalim, although Khalim's subtypes were khopesh and straight dagger.

For the other examples, it was khopesh human merc versus elf kama khopesh swash. The human had bless, not sure about the elf.

Bash, heckle, dirt kick, disarm, and trip jump to mind as very high priority skills which I'd situationally use in different orders.

Swashbucklers have significantly different priorities than they used to due to the addition of new skills, especially when fighting trippable opponents wielding parryable weapons.

And reflex isn't so good as to make bash a #2 priority unless your opponent's agreed to use the stance you want and not flee.

A swashbuckler should never lead in with trip now unless they know for certain that they severely outmatch their opponent, at which point taunt + disarm is a better option anyway. Prioritizing trip over taunt/heckle/disarm as a swashbuckler provides the possibility, however small, for your opponent to have the chance to quaff heals or disarm while you're caught in skill lag from a failed trip or in lag from knocking yourself prone due to trip. If you're worried about losing the fight in taunt lag, you can lead in with heckle before turning on the disarm/quaff heal train, causing them to have to flee out and lose their weapons or die. If you're confident in being able to take two rounds of damage without dying, you can lead in with taunt, then heckle, then start the disarm/quaff heal progression until they run out of weapons, in which case you will always win unless your enemy disarms you first.

In melee combat, dirt kick is terrible compared to disarm if your opponent can possibly be disarmed.

Dirt kick takes around 1.25 combat rounds of lag, has a decent failure rate, and if successful, lowers your target's damage by a slight amount.
Disarm takes half that time, succeeds with alarming success, and if successful reduces your target's damage to zero for the rest of the fight.

For a merc, barb or swashbuckler, Here are the possible outcomes if you use bash/trip.
A) You might get lucky and bash or trip them, knocking them prone. You can now perform approximately one meaningful combat action before they get up from being prone, at which point you'll have to get lucky again to keep them prone.
B) You might fail to knock them prone, giving your opponent a free combat action. This option is extremely likely if the opponent has a moderate amount of reflex.
C) You might critically fail and knock yourself prone, at which point your opponent will have time to perform somewhere around 4+ meaningful combat actions before you get up, including quaffing heals, disarming, taunting, whatever. If you critically fail a bash or trip, you are virtually guaranteed to lose the fight.

Now here are the possible outcomes if you use disarm instead.
A) You might disarm your opponent and send their weapon flying, reducing their damage to zero or near zero until they pull out another weapon.
B) You might disarm your opponent and let them secure it, reducing their damage to zero until they re-wield their weapon.
C) You might not disarm your opponent.

If you bash/trip first and you don't succeed, your opponent can disarm you and you lose the fight.
If you disarm first and bash/trip after, then you will win the fight even if you get bashed after disarming, because your opponent won't do any damage without a weapon.

You really think that it's a better idea to bash/trip before disarming unless you're already winning the fight by a huge margin? Right now between melee classes, the primary determining factor in who wins a fight is based on who gets to disarm the other person and send their weapons to the ground faster, especially when swashbucklers are involved on either side.

That said, it seems like we're just arguing in circles, and in-game I've witnessed way too many successful disarms from PCs and NPCs alike over a long period of time. It's a bad mechanic.

So rall had gs haste and bless while using a spec vs an unbuffed khalim.

Help disarm.

That's not the only example of the fundamentally high success rate of disarm. My khopesh spec'ed merc gets consistently disarmed by level 30 NPCs, because reasons. Every duel I'd had with another PC has resulted in extremely high disarm rates on both sides of the battle simultaneously, all the way back to my first character which was an elven rogue. In more recent history, Garnon and Berr both disarmed each other within 1-2 combat rounds of starting to disarm.

To compare disarm's success rate to that of trip, for example, over 433 trip attempts my human merc with max STR and DEX failed to trip an elf (with max or near-max DEX/STR) with no innate reflex that was wearing heavy armor 123 times, with 22 of those being critical failures. That's a 25% failure rate on a PC with no innate reflex on his gear. Factor in some reflex and you're looking more at a 70-80% failure rate easily.

But not disarm, feel free to spam that, because it's going to work, pretty reliably on the very first try too, and unlike trip, once you disarm someone and send their weapon flying, that weapon's gone for the rest of the fight. If you have experienced otherwise, please feel free to let me know. However, as it stands right now, the winner of a PvP match between melee combatants is the one who disarms all of the other's weapons to the ground first.