Combat Questions

[artic]

Another good thing got mentioned here: 'Twin Weapons'. As assumed it makes the off-hand better- hit more or harder doesnt really matter. But, what if im a dark elf and have the 'Ambient dextirity' racial bonus. Does it render 'twin weapons' useless as both my arms are already good?

[asventral]

I think you should more think about 'twin weapons' like a combat style ... where you use your offhand weapon as much as your primary one.

Btw, that's just what i'm feeling

[galiere]

A few words on twin weapons, rural combat and animal lore etc.

Twin weapons and ambidexterity work side by side. If one fails, the other has a chance to kick in. They will not make your hands (claws, tentacles...) equally fast, but rather double the speed of the weapon in the off-hand (a separate check for each non-primary weapon) for the current "round" of combat. This may (or may not) be enough to give you another attack, should you have enough combat points for it.

Rural combat and animal lore are not normal attacks, you have a chance to perform both once in a given unit of time. The chance is greater the more combat points you have in offence.

Whirling blades and many (most?) other maneuvers as well go off faster with higher offensive combat points assignments. How much faster? You have to figure it out yourselves.

Keep in mind you may not be able to tell the difference between low and high defensive combat point assignments against foes who attack slowly, because your defensive pool(s) will have enough time to refill themselves between the attacks even with a low defensive setting.

[creln]

Well galiere summed it up pretty nicely.
You are also getting into too much detail. I'm not going to list every pool. Combat code is changing and I don't know current status and even if I knew, it could be changed anytime. I'm just laying out the general working of combat.

I'm not saying descibing each offensive/defensive skill would be too much info to you, It's just that I don't know current workings of them and I don't want to spead misinformation. I'm also not so sure that would be beneficial. So lets focus on the big picture.

And protection from armour is not affected by your combat settings.

And mizzts tests were right but atleast first conclusion wrong.
1. Because chance to successfully dodge/parry etc depends very much on your combat style. Having tons of points in defensive pool does no good if you don't ever succeed in the check.
2. This is partially right conclusion but I would say it has more to do with right gear and skills. It is right in a sense that it's harder to avoid hits from bigger monster but big hpmax and good protection makes biggest difference. Some defensive skills work nicely with offensive combat style like avoid hits and dodge but parry is the skill to use against big monsters and it doesn't start working well unless you have defensive style.

And yoz was right that the skills are checked in sequence. If one fails, you still have chance with other. And generally you only lose points from pool if you got some message from the skill. Also rest of yoz:s stuff is pretty much right.

[solar]

Minmaxer alert!:

I've just been pondering this ambidexterity thing and how it stacks or overlaps, so I have a question, or a actually a few questions:

From what I've been able to find out, there are several sources of 'ambidexterity' sort of bonus stuff:

Dark elf racial major ambidexterity
PDF blessing of minor ambidexterity
Hive mutation (nimble limbs, was it) ambidexterity
Telekinetic celerity ambidexterity (it did give one, right?) effect
Twin weapons's offhand speed effect

How much of those stack and how many of them just grant the same generic overlapping <ambidextrous=yes> - flag to the character?

Like, is there any use whatsoever in taking pdf ambidexterity to dark elves/mutated hive vermin?

Galiere did share his inside knowledge on how some of it works, which was nice. But for some odd reason, the more we know, the more questions we have. :)

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And the other question I have is about dualwielding normal, toolless, weapons: Umm, do they actually deal a reasonable amount of extra damage more accurately through parries, or are they reasonably faster as opposed to being wielded in one hand?

I'm not sure about the logic of damage message scaling and I don't really have any triggers to count how many hits (rends and tears, the rumour has it) I might score out of all my attacks, but from my own point of view the bonus to damage seems marginal at best.

Recently some kind wiz went through the combat code and made some stats have a greater impact on damage, but might there be a similar "feature that needs fixing" in dualwield code as well, like a comma error? :)

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This brings us to the third hypothetical question: Does ambidexterity/twin weapons make dualwielded weapons also sometimes faster (ie, doubling the speed of the weapon the code finds wielded in their left hand, despite it also being wielded in right hand?

That's all for now, enjoy, bash, counter-whine, help icesus is icesus, whatever :)

[yoz]

Blaablaablablablaa

A no, you will never rock!

[belannaer]

Ambidexterity is not just a On/Off switch. It's a number that affects more the bigger it is, although it suffers pretty steep drop in effectiness after having more than the said have/don't have step. Basically Dark elf and hive ones are better than the blessing and others but as said they do stack (added to each other). So certainly there is some use of taking the blessing for even those who already have some form of ambidexterity but it might not be that useful, especially if you have high twin weapons, but everything helps naturally.

And like Galiere said twin weapons itself affects the totally same thing as ambidexterity but on separate occasion so like he said if one fails, the other one might save you. Ambidexterity and twin weapons only affect weapons after your first weapon, they don't have any effect on the first weapon.

[solar]

Thank you Bel for clarifying this for us.