Combat Module B: Defenses, race stats, and weapon selection.

[theobserver]

Alongside the necessary changes to defenses to accomodate combat styles, we've also made many other changes to defense that may not be immediately obvious. As you know, parry used to be based on strength, dodge on dex, and shield block on neither. This was what Stryth told me and what was in the helps. Well, it turns out that wasn't what the code thinks: dex in fact used to be showing up in defenses all over the place in all sorts of undocumented ways, even in parry and shield block. As a result, we've corrected defenses now to accurate reflect the theory put forth by the helps. This means that high-dex races will likely notice a decrease in their defensive effectiveness compared to high-str races, just like how high-str races noticed that high-dex races gained much more hit/dam when we had updated the hit/dam stat bonuses a while back. Karma is a double edged sword.

The strength factors in parry and dual parry, as well as the dex factors in dodge, have also been doubled in magnitude. This means that it has now become very important to properly counter high-str parry with weapon type advantages, and high-dex dodge with combat style superiority.

Dual parry weapons deserve a special mention. They're now more effective at enhancing the dual parry abilities of someone who already has proficiency in the skill, rather than as a means of providing dual parry to someone who does not normally have the skill. If you were a non-dual parrying class (for example, berserker, paladin, thief, etc) relying on a dual parry weapon, in most cases you're better off switching to either a shield or a higher-average offhand weapon instead.

Shield block is now based on wis and con. This sounds surprising, until I add that wis has already joined luck anyway as one of the side factors that affect all the defenses. An intuitive way to visualize the numbers is to think of high wis races as being inherently "luckier" when it comes to combat, and low wis races as being inherently "unluckier" in combat. Neither luck nor wis affects combat anywhere as much as str and dex do, of course, but they just might make or break a close fight, though they aren't really heavy enough of factors to really swing a battle.

Speaking of wis, you'll probably notice that wis is the stat that changed the most during the stat changes across the various races. This "luck during combat" factor is one reason, with others being disclosed as they become noticed or are made relevant by future changes. Someone already posted a thread elsewhere about the wis decrease of drows adversely affecting drow shamans, for example. Remember, ALL stats are supposed to be important. The notion of "leveling stat" is going to become less and less accurate as the changes pile up, so it is to your advantage to keep all your stats maxed whenever possible.

One of the most interesting changes is the shuffling of weapon proficiencies across classes. All mages retain dagger as their main weapon, and illusionists also retain staff and whip as their other weapons. Necros now have polearm and flail instead of sword and whip, however. Before you complain, read the helpfiles for HELP POLEARM and HELP SWORD and you'll discover that polearms actually parry better than swords, so this winds up helping necros defensively. As for invokers, they gain sword instead of whip so that they have a selection of the most commonly used weapons at their disposal (sword, mace, dagger), as befitting the class's combat-oriented RP.

Since invokers also gain shield block, I should revisit shield block again to discuss defenses and spellcasters. The difference between one full defense and two full defenses is huge: ask any berserker who can no longer use shield block while raged. In fact, defenses have diminishing returns, where the difference between zero and one defense is night and day, whereas the difference between two and three is much more modest. Because of the diminishing returns, shamans with their two defenses were actually closer to a fighter class's three defenses than a mage class's one defense in how well they tank (i.e. shamans tanked as well as thieves did, which was MUCH better than mages). Now, shamans have a shield block penalty to bring them to exactly halfway between a thief and a mage in tanking effectiveness. This applies to healers, and will apply to druids as well.

But invoker shield block: the penalty on it is so severe, it's actually markedly worse than an illusionist's blur (and MUCH worse than a psi's displacement, which used to be the uber defense as far as mages went). So before you get any crazy notions of invokers tanking like clerics used to, remember that their shield block is worse than blur AND invokers can't stack it with an uber parrying staff like illusionists can. So despite their well-balanced weapon selection and their shield block, for the time being invokers are still quite underpowered from a tanking perspective (especially considering they're the only mage class without charmies). That will change once we get around to making some invoker changes, of course.

Lastly is the interesting case of ninjas. I've already gotten prays from people complaining that the dual parry weapon makes female ninjas much too "unbalanced" compared to male ninjas. First of all, as I mentioned above, dual parry weapons no longer work so well on classes without dual parry (such as ninjas), and in fact from a purely defensive perspective, counterbalance works better than dual parry weapons for a ninja. But more importantly, the nunchaku vs fan thing is just the very tip of the iceberg for ninjas -- did you catch all that Murama Kuei and Lau Kuan stuff in the helps as a teaser for the setup to come? That will have to do for now, since the weapon changes will be as far as we will be covering the ninja divide in Combat Module B.

Speaking of which, we're still not through with Combat Module B yet -- there's lots more to come. Oh yes. Are you dizzy yet?