melee combat

[rawr548]

me and a buddy were wondering
What is advantageous about using a shield and full melee combat rather than focusing on unarmed combat, if anything?

[dagrimreefah]

Nice double post .

Advantage to melee is that you need less melee to get on an equal footing (defensively) with higher stat characters. I.E. if you have 100 melee and someone with 125 unarmed punches you at full attack, it will take 50% defense away while you have the shield maneuver on and have a shield equipped. The same if you have 400 melee and someone with 500 unarmed punches you. In short, your defense bar is harder to deplete with a shield and shield maneuver activated than someone with the same amount of unarmed and the dodge maneuver activated.

Also with valorous strike, you are hitting at 175% of your melee. That is a lot! You can really fuck people up with this. Example: when you use valorous strike at say, 100 melee, it is like punching through someone's defense bar with 233 unarmed. You can catch people off guard with that advantage.


The disadvantage though, is if you get caught in standing combat (standing still fighting each other face to face) or in small, cramped areas where you are forced to stand-off, you're fucked =p

[jordancoles]

Basically, shield stance is a way for you to transfer your MC's offensive power into a form of defense. It effectively turns your melee skill into a UA defense by multiplying your MC by 1.25.
If you have 100 mc and are in shield stance it's the same as if you're being hit with 125 ua.

Another reason why MC is used is because of the offensive weights of the moves. Punch is .75 weight, sting is 1.00, and val strike is 1.75 iirc. This means that MC moves will lower your opponents defense bar better than a punch which is the preferred attack for UA users. The up side to MC fighters is that it is much quicker to become competitive in pvp because of how much rings and armor help to increase the stat. On top of this your skill is multiplied by 1.25. The downside to being an MC character is that people who are full UA (the majority of players) will have the advantage of being able to use maneuvers against you, and they will most likely be able to get full benefit from those maneuvers. Since most MC users have low UA and high MC, it means that someone with 2-3 times more UA them are able to get the most out of their maneuvers when using them against the MC character. An example being that Death Or Glory will give them more IP every time you use a move on them and etc. It's not exactly straight fact but maneuver delta depends on your UA vs the opponent's UA. I would say that in order to get full delta on someone you'd need to be about 3x's their UA. As a general rule for an MC character you'll want to have at least 300 UA because otherwise everyone will be able to rape you with their maneuvers, DoG, Bloodlust, Oak stance, all giving full potential to your opponent while you're stuck in shield stance. The reason why I say 300 ua is because 3x's that is 900 which isn't common unless they're in a larger faction. Another reason why it's good to have some UA is that if you're hit outside of shield stance, you'll be hit based on how much UA you have an not based on how much MC defense you have.

Lastly, you will need high strength, a high quality sword, and you will need to be full martial in order to do anything as an MC character. Typical armor class these days is around 1400-1600 so you will need to be able to sting for higher than that in order to do damage to your opponent. Without being full martial you can almost forget about it.

[Ninijutsu]

With diminishing returns, 900 is only around twice as much as 300 actually. 300% better than 100, 50% better than 400.

Coles summed it up nicely though.

[Avenheru]

It's not exactly straight fact but maneuver delta depends on your UA vs the opponent's UA.

your ua / enemy ua = a number, multiplied by the stance attributes (DoG as an example +1 IP) while the max is 2 times the attribute (only tested with an alt so might be wrong)
and when your opponent has more ua than you, you get nearly nothing
so if you have 300 ua and the other guy 600 he still gets 2 ip

[DDDsDD999]

I usually just use it for zerg alts. A couple characters with 200 MC and some decent thanes can take down any titan pretty easily with team-speak and some practice. If you don't have any combat experienced friends you can probablly run 2 with some practice, maybe 3 if your target is in an enclosed space.