Defenses? Broken?

[b00mslang]

As I have said so many times, training is for losers.

[theobserver]

This obsession with training is dangerous. As an Immortal there is nothing more frustrating than having a new player ask where he can find training equipment. He can barely find his guild from the south square; he has no idea how to re-equip himself; no idea how to fight, how to run, how to explore and already he wants to train. Why? Because he was grouped with people who insisted on leaving at level 14 to master those defenses and attacks. Because he asked players to group who told him no thanks, they had to train. Even without asking the implication is there that training is necessary. If he does ask, he gets told ' skills work so much better when mastered'.

Because of this, a culture and an obsession with training has developed. Guys who have been here for a while spend hours trying to get a few extra % in their dirt kicking, get frustrated/bored when their 'perfect' character dies and deletes. Their character skills may improve but their playing skills remain stagnant. They lose a fight and blame their lack of training. How many of those training dirt kick so frantically realized that it has a greater chance of failing indoor than outdoor? Very few I wager because they were all too busy slack jawed in the hobgoblin mines. I have even heard people discuss training time as one of the criteria when choosing a race / class combination.

The skill/spell system was designed to improve over use and through time. It was designed so skills/spells would have a risk of failure. I have no sympathy for people who train because they do it to themselves.

[Vertas]

[Simpleton]

[Avendin]

The most time I have EVER spent training a character in the traditional sense of the word is 40 hours. That was with my first serious (laugh all you want) character Kadric, an elf warrior Knight, when I still subscribed to the notion that you need to train. I've since escaped this foolishness and now I spend as much time as possible actually having fun.

[Denyx]

How about a pwipe with the new training rules? That'd make things interesting.

[Avendin]

No, that would just kill the already small playerbase.

This is NOT that radical a change. Even the complete revamp of warrior-class combat doesn't seem that radical to me.

[theobserver]

[Louis]

training defenses may be nice but it definitely isn't necessary. i say if you are dead set on training a defense, at least train the one that is most applicable to you by theory. in my opinion, a stone warrior for example should train parry whereas a halfling thief should train dodge. i don't think its that important for the stone to master dodge and the thief to master parry. think about it.

[LABruinCub]

Yes, stop training, have more fun, learn more about the realms. If you noticed, very rarely does a battle come out evenly. Usually, one person is winning by a lot. Often times that person who is winning by a lot isn't more trained than you, instead he skillfully took all advantages against you, i.e. vulns, dirting, purples, area of combat, initiation, weapon knowledge, flight, protection, plan of attack, and the list goes on and on. So yeah, there's way more to pking than mastering everything and hoping that extra attack you parried will save your measly 10 hp left. Instead, what will happen is:

Someone's flaming bite MANGLES you!
Someone's flaming bite MANGLES you!
Someone's flaming bite MANGLES you!
Someone's flaming bite MANGLES you!
You parry someone's attack. <~ That's what your 100+ hours of training earned you.
Flee
You flee from combat!
Someone walks in.
You yell "Help me, I suck at fighting! And I'm blinded, unsanc'd, did not initiate, did not choose to fight on an area I know intimately, forgot about weapon vulns..."
Someone's advantage's kicks your ass.
You have been killed!
Rinse and repeat... until you actually learn the rest of the AR combat system.