Combat Advice?

[Archipenos]

Been in and out since w6. For all that time I've never once truly understood combat, but there was a time when spamming punch at ua15ish could take a fox or an ant. What is the current equivalent of that? I'm not too interested in handfighting a boar, but a fox? yes, please. Basically, is there an idiot's guide to low-level PVE content? Bats and foxes essentially. Especially bats.

[Bruthol]

Easy bat trick is to kite them to cave entrance, you go out, reduce openings, go back in to punch, rince and repeat.

As for fox or badger, get a dugout, and use hurricane client, there is an option to auto de-aggro fight, and a key to auto engage anything nearby.
Play with both to get your kill.

[Reiber]

first of all. cheese is king. even if you are able to fight something, your armour holds longer, and your wounds list is shorter if you abuse every opportunity given to you,

so use a boat, or abuse cliffs and caves, also allows you to test your capabilitys without risking too much.

the usual progression is , to , just as you said, get 20-25 ua, and punch bats,ants, foxes and badgers, from boats,
the boat here only gives you a savepoint to reduce openings etc.

once you have gotten quick barrage, you use that instead of punch, and use a knive /your axe etc. you should level melee combat to 40 ish.

if you get your hand on a sword, or spear, even better, you have slightly more range than the animal now if you are using mc moves. this allows you to kill anything up to bears without ever getting touched.

you most likely would use a set made up of quickbarrage, and full circle at that point.

also, quick tipp. armour is amazing, and the new woodland armour, is inexpensive, def helps from getting too much knicks becoming worse wounds.

if you are dead set on being unarmed, you just use "knock its teeth out" instead of quickbarrage, still want to full circle probbably to use the increased damage your knive/axe does in comparison to pure punching.

[Wingedjustice]

This is still pretty relevant for the basics: viewtopic.php?f=42&t=72160

Aside from that, the post above explains it pretty well. If you don't have Quick Barrage, Sideswipe isn't bad for a starter either, little slower, no IP gain, but still effective if you have a decent flint knife. I found it more effective than punch still. Only got 10 UA before I switched to melee.

You can also use cave entrances for foxes/badgers too.

[XBBW]

I find cheesing boring, face the fucker and get them wounds.

[Grog]

I find cheesing boring, face the fucker and get them wounds.

Are you doing this with snakes, too?

[Tubby_Squirrel]

Its a color matching game. Think of it as you have 4 shields, and your opponent has 4 shields. Green, Yellow, Blue and red.

The goal is to reduce any *one* of thoes shields low enough to damage it until its dead.

[Sephiron]

This is my most basic suggest 'no thinking' guide to starting combat, in my experience it's the best way to start fighting
Your most important stats are STR and AGI. You should be working your STR up to mine either way, so focus a lot of effort into getting your AGI stat up.
At least try to get 30 AGI, 30 unarmed combat, 30 STR before fighting anything.

Although armor is important I really don't suggest leather armor(except boots) because of the agi debuff (Armor that debuffs will be important eventually, but not when your stats are so low) Instead, Before you fight anything run around and collect as much yarrow as you can. This will be vital for preventing wound stacking, which is really how you end up getting the wounds that kill you. Knicks+knacks/scrapes+bumps should be healed with yarrow whenever you get the chance to outside of combat, or they'll evolve into much more dangerous and harder to heal wounds.

Your first fights should be bats and foxes, they offer a lot of your most basic attacks, won't kill you if you fall down, and bats will give you hide/wings for very good early game armored cape 'batwing'.

I recommend checking cave entrances and fighting whatever bats are close to the entrance, and just punching the shit out of them. Do not worry about using anything other than punch (not even left hook because there is no synergy between L.hook and punch) If your openings get too high (the colors at the top center, left side are yours) the enemy will deal too much damage. You can use maneuvers to lower them, but go outside first- You can lower openings a little bit while the bat is still targeted to you for a short while. Once the bat de-aggroes you, heal your wounds with yarrow and go back inside. Punch it until it dies, rinse and repeat, and you'll probably get new moves from that. Punches, sidesteps, very important at first. Rinse and repeat until you get as many punches quick dodges Left hooks and sidesteps as you can (make sure to add them to your deck)

Take the bat hide and wings, and make batwings. Make as many of these as soon as possible, and gild them with relevant gilds. I recommend at least spun gluethreads(bone glue, fine plant fibre) that give an AGI buff. Any leather armor, like boots, that does not debuff your agi is good as well and can be gilded with more gluethreads is worth it. But you can get more creative with this, experiment a little, but whatever you do NEVER put CON gildings on any of your equipment that can break, and none of your equipment at all if you're concerned with griefers/PVP players running into you. There's nothing stopping that equipment from breaking/getting unequipped and ensuring your death

Make sure to raise your AGI/STR/unarmed while doing this, until you can kill bats easily without exploiting the cave entrance trick. From there, you should be able to mostly take on foxes out in the open as well- Go around and punch foxes. But make sure this time, you use maneuvers to lower your openings. Quick dodge to cover green openings, Sidestep to cover blue openings. Foxes shouldn't give you any other color openings, but it helps to add jump (yellow) to your deck just in case
Keep going until you can kill foxes with punches easily, replace armor pieces as needed, and if your AGI is high enough to where the debuff from leather armor doesn't affect your performance that much, you can start wearing the rest of your leather armor at this point.

It will be short lived however the minute you can kill badgers- When it comes to badgers it's a little harder to say exactly how strong you should be. I think at this point you should have at least 60 STR/60 AGI/50 UA, and a decent unarmed deck set up. You want to kill as many badgers as possible, because their hide can be turned into another really good early game armored shirt 'badger vests'. These offer good damage soak with no debuff and unlike leather armor can be gilded- I'd equip one into each shirt slot with more gildings. You should also start taming around this point. Mouflon are great for taming because they're arguably the easiest to tame with UA and full armor, give both milk for cheese production (good stats) and wool for Vapntreiyu (Really great early game armored overcoat, It's the best shit ever)

I'd say, once you're comfortable killing badgers with UA or even before, and you actually have Bronze available, you should consider starting to move over to Melee combat. Use your bronze to make the best 'Boar spear' you possibly can, and dump at least 20 points into melee combat. You might have a few melee moves by now also, since you get the best easiest 'no brainer' melee combat moves from foxes and badgers: Quick barrage and full circle. Using these 2 moves, with sufficient points in MC and STR/AGI, you will be able to delete just about everything, clear dungeons, etc. with no sweat. You can kite boar on horseback with boar spear without exploiting (boar are slow), if you're fast enough you can kill roe deer, wolverines, badgers easily, cave rats etc etc.

I recommend using 'Oak stance' instead of 'Chin up' or 'to arms' whenever possible, because 1) You should have very high unarmed combat skill by this point, and it uses that, 2)once quick barrage has enough points it's so fast the damage decrease from oak stance is negligible, and 3) it passively lowers your highest openings every turn, meaning you don't always have to waste turns dodging to lower openings.
Try to stay away from combat meditation- The use case is VERY niche, oak stance beats combat meditation 90% of the time

So in my opinion, the ultimate 'brain dead' tactic with melee combat is
>spam quick barrage until the enemies openings are at least 50 each (should take a few seconds)
>Throw in a few full circles, they synergize with the openings created by quick barrage to deal more damage, but it's much slower than QB
>You'll notice a lot of IP is being generated (IP is used for special moves), eventually play around with 'finishers' that use IP- I personally like 'Go for the jugular' or 'Takedown', they synergize with openings created by full circle and quick barrage

obviously this will not work in PVP, but if you keep this meta up and slowly improve it over time you'll most definitely have a good understanding of how combat works
I also know there are plenty of ways to do this much better- I'm no professional but this works great for me. I personally enjoy the combat system a lot, and although more efficient I just don't find cheesing any fun