Fighters

Class hall dir: 2n, w

Learning Curve	Low
Damage Dealing	A
Damage Absorption	E
Soloing Ability	D
Bashing Ability	A
Tanking Prowess	D

Famous fighters: Calvin

Class Abilities - General

Fighters don’t get many unique abilities, but they sure are powerful. These are berserk, fury, disarm, outflank, will, sharpen and evaluate.

You get them all at level 1.

Sharpen is a neat ability that allows you to make edged and pointed weapons marginally better, sometimes turning an ‘average damage’ weapon into a ‘greater than average’. You’ll need a whetstone (get a ranger to forage one up for you, polished whetstones are the best). Before sharpening should "wet" your stone, preferably with oil, or from going into some water. There is some lamp oil from Fredd's that is cheap and has multiple uses.

Sharpened weapons can then be honed using a strop (again, ranger-made). The sharpening will wear off over time, but re-honing renews the sharpening. Sometimes, the sharpening backfires and you’re left with a useless weapon. Also, a weapon can only be re-sharpened 3 times before it’s ‘too thin to sharpen’.

Evaluate is a useful tool used to determine how well suited various weapons are for you and others. It also gives information about the quality of armour. Use it to determine the sort of weapons that are good for you. However, be aware that it isn’t always spot-on, some weapons that get a bad rating are still pretty good, and.

Another thing to note about evaluate is that not every character will have the same eval for every weapon or armour. Skill plays a big role, as well as strength, dexterity and even possibly intelligence.

Offensive Abilities

Berserk is an ability you’ll be fully aware of already. It’s what sets fighters apart from others, and is what gives fighters the A+ in damage output. It is also very good for your skilling speed, as you hit so much more and harder. It’s already been explained enough in the ‘defences’ section.

Fury is the newest addition to fighters. You must have Defence: None on to utilise it. It drains 2 spell points per round, and gives you an occasional extra hit (about twice every three rounds) and also randomly does a special hit, which does upwards of 150 damage (as shown so far anyway). There hasn’t really been enough playing around with this yet to form a definite opinion on it, but it would appear berserk is overall more convenient and damaging at this stage for the average fighter.

Defensive Abilities

Fighters don’t have any particularly powerful defensive abilities, however they’re better than nothing.

Disarm is the most useful one. It does what it says, costing only 10 spell points for an attempt. Success rate depends on your weapon (rapiers and other bladed weapons are generally the best disarming weapons, blunts and axes poor), your dexterity (big difference between dwarves and elves), the opponent’s dexterity (boomerangs and barbed darts can make all the difference) and the opponent’s weapon (eg, Venletta is harder to disarm when she has Mace of Darkness than her normal mace). Carry around a boomerang all the time and maximise the use of this very good ability.

Outflank is most useful when soloing. It is an ability that can only be used when fighting multiple opponents – you can ‘outflank’ one of the opponents you’re not attacking and they’ll stop hitting you for a few rounds. Success depends on your dexterity, and the opponent’s dexterity and intelligence. It’s of limited use for tanking fighters since those monsters will just proceed to hit your bashers instead after a while. When bashing, 2 places of note for outflank are Delair and Orc mountain. A fighter who enters combat quickly against the lieutenant will often get hit by the captain – an outflank allows the tank to only have to tank one monster at a time. A fighter can also begin combat on the orc mountain guards, outflank one, and have the tank rescue him/her, and once again the tank will only have to take one guard at a time. It’s fairly useful for a solo fighter, however, as quite a few areas have multiple opponents in the same room.

Will is an inherently risky ability. You convert all of your spell points into temporary hit points. Once your will power runs out, you return to 1 hit point, unless you didn’t lose many of your temporary hit points. You now get tell-tale warning messages before your willpower runs out too. For most players, this is a panic button – when bashing, you should go into will mode before doing something drastic like quitting out. For fighters without much to lose with a stable connection and a good knowledge of where the safest areas are, it’s a pretty useful ability to help when soloing. Just be aware that even in the safest seeming areas, a loose feral wolf could still wander in and finish you off. Also, never will when you’re poisoned.

Skills

A fighter is good in all skills, and generally raises every skill faster than any other class. The exceptions would be marksmanship (rangers and maybe freedom fighters are faster), and maybe unarmed (shapeshifters). A levelling fighter should choose 2 or 3 skills to raise, as it gives them more flexibility when playing, and also it’s a lot easier to get 3 skills to 70 than 1 to 100, and there isn’t a huge difference between having 100 or 70 skill in something.

As a fighter, you can raise all the tough skills relatively fast, so your best policy is to go for those. Pick at first club, two handed axe/sword or longsword. When you’re higher level with time on your hands, branch out to two weapon, exotic and all the other smaller skills that you’ll require to raise two weapon.

Races

As a consequence of the fighter’s exclusive dependence on physical damage, and disarm’s high dependence on dexterity, dexterity and strength are easily the most important stats for a fighter. Taking humans as the standard, orcs get the same strength, 1 more dex and 1 more constitution, while dwarves get 1 more strength, 1 less dex and 2 more constitution. Though perhaps once upon a time dwarf would have been the best for raw damage, with the advent of the two weapon skill, in my opinion the orc is now the undisputed fighter when it comes to dishing out damage. To boot, it also comes with high dexterity to disarm better. Dwarves are still perfectly viable, however.

On the other end of the spectrum is the half-elf. If your goal was to get as many skills as quickly as possible, this would be the race for you. Half elves at 16 strength can wield (almost) all the top end weapons, and have the highest int + wis combination of all the races, thereby letting them wield whatever they like, and skill insanely fast. However they obviously will do less damage than dwarves, humans and orcs.

Elvish fighters are often argued as the best fighters, due to 2 factors: their highest dexterity, and the Elvenheart unique. I think this is garbage – though an elvish fighter with Elvenheart gets 19 strength and 17 dex (1 more strength and 1 more dex than an orcish fighter), therefore probably dealing the most damage of any fighter, that all rides on having Elvenheart. Having the viability of your entire character ride on one unique is pretty pathetic. Without it, an elf has 3 less strength than an orc for 1 more dex – which means a huge list of good weapons are unavailable to you – Shadow sword, one handed outstanding sword, crystal blade, awesome scythe, etc etc. As such, elves are good for trying out Elvenheart, and that’s about it.

Once again, humans are the happy medium – they do average damage, skill fairly fast, can wield almost everything, don’t get auto-attacked due to their race in any area, etc.

Levelling Your First Fighter

Fighters are easy to get off the ground, but much harder for newer players to go all the way to level 19 with, when soloing, due to their fragility at the high levels.

Level 1-5: pick a easy to hit with, useful later weapon – rapier, club, polearm or axe, get the easiest one, Zhou it up to 15 using berserk, and Zhou it from 15 again – you should get about 20-25 at the end of this session.

Also a good idea is to get a catty from the blacksmith, to get marksmanship to this sort of level before you reach level 5 and can no longer get the catty any more.

Level 5-10: Once you get dexterity up to 6 or 7, you can start working one of the skills that are harder to hit with – two handed axe, two handed sword or longsword. Do the same routine as before. Also, start watching out for boomerangs and kill sanal for it when you run into him – this will slowly raise your marksmanship skill and also get some thrown weapon ability for you, not to mention the immensely useful dexterity penalty to the opponent.

Don’t neglect your intelligence or wisdom – having them too low reduces your skilling rate significantly – it’s a lot better to be at level 10 with a dozen more skills than with maximum strength/constitution/dexterity.

By level 10, you should have 1 or 2 primary skills (eg club or two handed axe) in the 30s or 40s, with 1 or 2 backup skills (eg longsword, rapier or marksmanship) in the 20s or 30s.

Level 10-15: it is through these levels that your primary skill turns into a monster damage dealer. If you plan on partying your way to level 19, then feel free to raise the big weapons like two handed sword, two handed axe, etc from here – then simply join a party of the right level and get your experience.

If you’re going to be doing it solo, you have to be much more versatile. If you haven’t received any financial assistance to this point, then you’re going to have to be careful about not taking too much damage with berserk, and use all your abilities to full effect.

Firstly you need a versatile weapon to be your primary weapon – it needs to be one handed so you can use a shield, or alternatively parries well, disarms well and does respectable damage. This means longsword, club, polearm, curved blade or rapier. Since fighters have high strength, wear a lot of armour (but leave enough space for loot and heals). If your primary weapon isn’t much good at disarming, grab something that disarms well and keep it in your inventory (rapiers and the carved whittling knife). Then have an alias system like:

• 8 = unwield primary weapon
• 9 = wield disarming weapon
• 10 =disarm
• 11 =unwield disarming weapon
• 12 =wield primary weapon

Set your defence to block or parry, and kill things that you can disarm – your typical NPC guard in Zhammar, Andeli, Drakhyra, Balan, Dalair etc are all very good for this. Carry around a boomerang and maybe even barbed darts to make them easier to disarm. If you end up with 2 things attacking you, be sure to outflank one of them. As long as you keep the enemy from damaging you too much, your skills will keep flying up. Some kills are quite the kittens when disarmed, so feel free to turn back into berserk mode once you liberate them of their weapon. Also some kills do the majority of their damage through magical means instead of physical – such as the orcish sorceror in Dalair, and the witch in the newbie manor – it’s best to berserk these ones.

Using will is a risky business, and best done only in areas you’re very comfortable in. You should first get a feel of how long it lasts, and then before you use it, you should have a safe room nearby in mind. Once these conditions are fulfilled, it’s a very good way of getting a few more rounds out of combat before you have to run away. Also, since the temporary hit points won’t be lasting long anyway, it’s probably a good idea to turn on berserk while you’re using will too. Also, don’t use will while poisoned.

Needless to say, it’s a good idea to have an alias for defend berserk, and another alias for defend block or parry.

By the end of level 15, you should have one skill in the 60s or 70s, and one or two more not too far behind.

Level 15+: if you’re going to party your way to level 19, then just keep going.

If you’re going to keep soloing, a fighter could kill very quickly, or quite slowly, depending on how much money you’re willing to spend, and whether you’re using your ace skill, or just working another one.

If conserving money, keep on doing the same sort of thing as just before, only killing harder guards, while mixing in the occasional easy kill like wyvern or fairy ring.

The expensive way to play is just grabbing the biggest damaging weapon you can find, loading up on heals, using berserk, and picking monsters with not a lot of hit points to kill quickly (evil cleric, old sage, lich of merrick, riognach, wigwog) etc, and just burning through heals and kills very quickly. This will net you a lot of experience quickly, but obviously will cost a lot, and you’ll need a cleric on hand to purge your building tolerance to all the potions you’ll be chugging.

A fighter will inevitably hit level 19 as long as they don’t take too many risks and use will at bad times.

Playing a Fighter

The sad truth is that the most efficient way to play a fighter is in a party. Though potentially you can get more experience soloing, having a tank is a lot cheaper, safer, easier and most of the time, faster. This makes the fighter the ideal class for someone learning how to party. Incidentally, although fighters are one of the best bashing classes, they also do not have to do much while bashing compared to other classes while bashing (mages, rangers). This means the learning basher has a lot of time to concentrate on the basics of bashing (attacking quickly, learning the areas, grabbing the loot quickly, etc), while the learning tank has a lot of time to observe what the tank is doing, why they’re doing it, where they’re going and the other important things. Bashing is easy to get started on – get a good weapon, 2 containers (ideally you can wear both), a few cigars to smoke when you get hurt, a set of medicinals if your tank wants you to be the medic, and just follow the tank around, attacking what he does, and grabbing the loot when the monster dies.

When working a low or mediocre skill, do what I describe you do at levels 10-15 above.

However every so often a fighter should go on a blitz. If you get your hands on some high quality unique armour – ichor, star armour, armour of gaius, dragonplate, and a big weapon like Crescent or Krakadoom, it’s time to let hell loose. With that sort of protection and firepower, you’ll still be hurting, but the NPCs will be hurting worse. Carry plenty of food, drinks and potions with you – but if there’s a safe room close and a safe route to it, then don’t be afraid to use will when the NPC is near dead. Once the NPC dies, take time to let will wear off, heal up again, and release the fury on the next kill. Don’t rush too much when you’re low on potions – a fighter who is extremely stuffed and drunk and therefore can’t heal himself is fairly pathetic. You should be able to take out a 6k or 9k every 3-5 minutes – do that and you’ll be pulling in somewhere between 100k and 250k experience in an hour.

Tanking fighters are rare. They usually need the very best equipment and bashers to do well, and if you’re good enough to tank successfully as a fighter, then you don’t need my guiding words for it.

Is a Fighter for you?

Fighter is a fairly plain class, and therefore excellent for learning the basics of the game with. For those who like accumulating skills, this is definitely the class to be. A lot of people also find bashing very enjoyable, and coupled with the goal of getting every skill to 100, the game has seen many of its best players also spend a lot of time on the fighter class.

Credit

Drafted from Rhynsts newbie guide, with minor alterations.