Not true. that would only occur is vs every mob I was a few % points
behind. Odds are if I was even 80% as effective as them I would win out by
random chance vs some mobs when I did well and they did not and I would get
the mob attention. This never happened.

All combat messages were on and they way outdamaged me, not even close.
Ranger has double attack in addition to dual wield and the sk was just scary
with double attack and his 2-hddr.

Its the typical problem many game systems have. Being focused is all that
really counts. Being versatile just means you stink at everything. Neither
the ranger nor the sk worried about putting points anywhere but strength and
agility and stamina because it just didn't matter. Where I have higher
stats overall, particularly in Charisma, they have much higher combo of
strength and stamina than me. Agility is about the same all around. the sk
can hit twice in a round for 40+ points each hit (Dark Reaver), the ranger
has the same combo I do, PGT and Dirk, plus he has double attack so can hit
twice as well. Their focus on melee stats (extra hp's and more melee
skills) makes them far more effective than me.

Consider. All melee classes get 6 or 7 melee skills except bards. we get
two, dodge (which everyone gets) and dual wield. That's not even close to
50%.

Kit

-----Original Message-----
From: kim@... [mailto:kim@...]
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 12:25 PM
To: 'eqbards@onelist.com'
Subject: RE: [eqbards] Bards abilities redefined was: Attack speedups

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Kimes, Dean W. wrote:
>
> Our melee is really too weak currently to qualify as a secondary. I back
> this opinion up by this experience. I was grouped at one point with a
> ranger and a shadowknight. We agreed to test out our melee skills,
letting
> the monsters be the judges. None of us cat any spells or used any
abilities
> except the ranger to snare mobs that had ceased to offer their opinion as
> judges. The result? I did not take more than a single attack the entire
> night in any fight. In 4 hours of play I took maybe 150 points of damage.
> The shadowknight won the contest but only barely. He was attacked 54% of
> the time, the ranger 46%. The number of attacks on me was below 1%.

This is a bit misleading. Your melee could be 95% that of the
ranger (and the SK's 101%) and you could get the same results.

You'd be better off turning on all attack messages, then
parsing the file afterwards to figure out damage/sec and
damage_taken/sec figures.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...

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