Young Lilian's Guide to Learning How to Fight
From The Discworld MUD Wiki
It can be confusing to decide what skills you should advance. If you decide that you want to learn how to fight better, and you have no idea what you are doing, this guide will help you.
There are many skills that affect combat ability. The most important skills are attack skills, and defence skills. The first thing you should do is to choose one attack skill and one defence skill to concentrate on. To do this, first look at the primaries your guild offers. If for example you are a ninja, your [primaries are dodging and sword. Therefore, it will be cheapest for you to choose sword as your attack skill, and dodging as your defence skill.
On the other hand, if you're a witch, you don't have any fighting primaries, so you can choose whatever you want for attacking. You might choose polearm, because you'll probably be carrying a broom anyway. You might choose dagger, because they are fast and light. You might choose misc because you're a weirdo. A witch or a wizard should choose to use a floater to start off with for defense, because that will be the cheapest way to get a decent defense. So they should raise ma.sp.defensive, and whatever else is needed to make the floater work. A priest should chose a totem or minor shield for defense. Totem is a short-lived total defense (based on fa.ri.mi.ta) and minor shield is a long-lived defense that absorbs a proportion of the damage (based on fa.ri.de.se).
Once you've chosen a fighting defense, you should set your 'options combat tactics response' to match. If you choose dodge, you'd put 'options combat tactics response = dodge', and if you choose parry you'd put 'options combat tactics response = parry'. If you decide to choose block, that's very odd because nobody chooses block. But of course you can if you want to. If you choose block you'll need a shield, and then you can't use two weapons (unless you have three arms or something).
Now assuming that you've chosen your attack and your defense, you should pump lots of experience points (xp) into both of these. You can see how you're going by using the command 'skills fighting'. For each skill, the first number is your level, and the second number is your bonus. Some targets for you to aim for are a 100 bonus (average skill); 200 bonus (good skill); and 300 bonus (excellent skill). With a 100 defense bonus, expect to get hit a lot. With a 100 attack bonus, you won't hit much. So get higher bonuses than that!
Once you've got 300 bonuses in your chosen attack and defense, you're all set, right? Wrong. Now you need to raise what is probably the most important skill of all, fighting.special.tactics. If you have a high tactics bonus, you can fight multiple enemies at the same time and beat them. With a low bonus, you won't even get a hit in. Therefore, you'll want to learn a lot of tactics. If it's not a primary skill for your guild, it will be really expensive. If you lower your intelligence and wisdom, it will be really really expensive. But you still need a lot of tactics. So don't complain, go and learn it.
Other skills you'll need to raise are other.health so you can have more hitpoints, and other.perception so that all those thieves in Ankh-Morpork don't steal all your stuff. Also you'll need to consider which skills are affected by which stats when you choose your attack and defense. If for example, you rearrange your stats by lowering your con and str and raising dex, choosing polearm as your weapon would be a bad idea, because the polearm skill depends on con and str. You should probably choose dagger or sword instead.
Therefore, in summary, choose an attack and a defense. Get good at that attack and defense, and use them all the time by wielding appropriate weapons, setting your combat tactics options, and using floaters if available. Once you get reasonably good at your attack and defense, make sure you learn a lot of fighting.special.tactics. This is a pretty simple plan, and it will work if you stick to it. Good luck! And happy Discing.
