Fight Skill 101

A simple introduction to early Fight Skill.

Introduction

As we have quite a few new or fairly inexperienced players I thought it might be worth putting together a fighting “primer” to cover the basics. Please understand that the following is obviously only MY preferred approach, and like most things there are always different styles, and methods, so I am not for a minute suggesting that what I will lay out is the ONLY way to do it. If you want a rule of thumb you can go with:”if it works it’s fine”.

Before I get into specifics a few general observations.

There is one crucial parameter in fighting that you absolutely cannot afford to ignore – your stamina. If you run out of stamina on foot in the middle of a fight you are almost certainly dead. For this reason one of the most important “preps” you should do is learn to ride a horse – i.e. 21 Body Control. A cart works as well in a pinch, but I would highly recommend that before you do anything else you learn to ride – I’ll cover a way to do that when I get to details. The reason this is important is because of stamina. If you are on a horse or a cart it doesn’t matter if your personal stamina is gone, you can simply ride away out of danger, and come back or not, when you have recovered. This means for instance that you can start a fight with a spider, take a few wounds yourself while also wounding the spider, ride out of range and heal yourself, and come back for another crack. The first Champion lava spider I ever soloed was on Serenity, Epic in WO. I did that 21 times over about an hour with 18FS and a LOT of cotton! Eventually I won :)

Another point about being on a horse or a cart is also another general one. In a fight you ALWAYS want to get above your antagonist. Height matters, and gives an advantage. Being on a horse already gives some height advantage, but being aware of the terrain you are on and circling to get to the high ground should become second nature. They don’t call it “high ground” for nothing.

Early Training

As I said, riding a horse is a no brainer so how do you skill that the fastest? Again others might have their methods but I always use Archery. You can skill archery on a target up to 40 Archery skill, and 30 skill in any individual bow. I usually start with a Longbow and skill that to 30, then switch to a Shortbow and skill it as high as possible before my main Archery skill hits 40. You simply make a bunch of arrow shafts and pace off optimal distances from the target, 20 for Longbow, 10 for bow, 5 for Shortbow. Arrow shafts are easy to make and don’t worry about the quality of them….they will break and you might need to make more but just start with 100 and see how you go. Fire them all at the target, then pick up what didn’t break and do it again. REPAIR the target each time you pick up your shafts or you will destroy it. Depending whether you use sleep bonus or not you should be done in 2 or 3 hours. By the time you get to 40 Archery you might already have 21 Body Control, or you will be very close. If you need a bit more make some more shafts, or even a quiver full of war arrows, and improve them. Fletching also gives good Body Control skill. At the end of this you will be able to ride a horse, therefore be relatively safe hunting, and you will also have a decent Archery skill. Believe me…it’s really fun to take out a troll from a distance away with archery – they are dumb as bricks and long range fighting like that gives the same FS as killing it in melee.

First Fight Skill

Use a practice dummy. You can skill to 20FS on a dummy with no more risk than that you forget to repair it and you break it. Get yourself a low QL shaft and equip it as a weapon. The lower the QL the less it will damage the dummy so the longer you can fight between repairs. Again – if you want you can use sleep bonus to speed things up. This is the only time sleep bonus affects FS…..on a dummy up until 20FS.
So now can can ride a horse, have decent Archery, and enough FS to take out anything up to a spider usually. This will also depend on your gear of course so the next section will deal with that.

Gear considerations.

Choice of weapon is VERY personal. To be honest most things will work if you practice them and gain the requisite skill. On PvP servers the considerations are different so people usually need shields and a weapon. On PvE servers you don’t necessarily need a shield. You can pick a two handed weapon and rely on doing massive damage to get fights over with quickly. I personally use a 2 handed Huge Axe because the amount of damage a single hit inflicts is massive. One point though is your fight mode. It’s possible to fight in Aggressive, Normal, or Defensive. If you have no shield you only need Aggressive because you have nothing to block with anyway, and you will still parry with your weapon. If on the other hand you have picked a shield/weapon combo then most people will sit in Normal for the majority of the time. Remember though, you need skill on everything you use, so if you just have a two-hander you only need skill in that, while say you have a shield and sword, you need to skill both of them (plus shield bash). You can get weapon skill in some weapons such as swords and axes by cutting down trees with them.
There are also a number of weapons enchants that are very useful. It is very nice to have a reasonable Life Transfer cast on your weapon if at all possible. :)
And now armor. Basically armor is about quality and weight. Against MOBS studded leather above 50QL works…but 60QL works better….and 70QL better again! :) It’s a good choice as it isn’t too heavy, especially while you still have low Body Strength. As soon as you can though Steel (or moon metal) Plate is the way to go. Plate is heavy though – you won’t move so fast on foot wearing it. It does give good protection though. Standard PvP armor is 70QL Plate. For PvE though 50 already works pretty well.
Chain is OK, but I would always try for a slightly higher QL Studded Leather over Chain – again, personal preference. There are a few Armor Calculators around if you look for them on the Wiki which tells you the equivalents between a QL of one type vs another.

So let's go hunting.

If you have followed through on everything until now hopefully you have some gear, some skill, and a horse. Grab yourself a LOT of cotton, and maybe some Farmer’s salve. Until you feel confident you can look after yourself I would advise getting at least one companion to hunt with. This can mitigate nasty surprises, and two is always better than one if you find you have bitten off more than you can chew. Try to solo your kills though to get all the skill from it. If two of you fight the same MOB then the person with the highest FS will get the majority of the FS gain. Just take it in turns. If possible voice comms are very useful when hunting, and fighting. On PvP servers they are an absolute requirement usually. Even on PvE servers though, in areas with high density MOBS it’s easy to become so busy staying alive it’s hard to type as well. Just remember... you do NOT have to make a kill in one go. If you get 50% damage from wounds back away..that's why you have the horse right?....heal yourself with that cotton you brought.....and head back in. Watch out that the MOB doesn't go for your mount (they do sometimes), keep your sound on and if you hear your horse scream, ride away fast. Especially spiders will try to kill your horse to get you on foot...and then remember the stamina thing? They can be sneaky.....

One safety tip: if you aren't close to your deed drop a tent to give you somewhere to respawn if it all goes pear shaped. That will at least help you recover your gear for future adventures!

OK – I think I’m done for now. This is not supposed to be definitive…it’s just a guide to hopefully help get people started. Fighting can be a lot of fun. Ask questions, talk about it, keep learning……it’s all about experience and I learn something new most times I go out.

Think of it as a road…and this the first step!

Good Luck!

[El Burrito]

Good guide, all good tips

[redfive]

wd good tips

[Frondale]

A very good guide. Thank you

[Mardoin69]

Superb info. Thx!

[Sanginius]

Thanks for the guide, having just got the game i was looking for some of the info you have here, in this instrance specifically the archery target ranges, but i read the full guide through and it was all interesting.

[󠀡󠀡󠀡󠀡󠀡󠀡󠀡󠀡Atlas]

well done Heb :D

[DrUltraLux]

A great guide for beginners. Thank you very much for putting this up. :)