Part 127: Warrior Skills

Warrior Skills

Special Skill - Warrior : Spin Attack
- The Warrior's special move is a swirling attack which hits every enemy at close range. It's very effective, although it drains your stamina when you use it, which means that if you need to run, you may not be able to. Warriors do the most damage done per point in strength, so this is a very handy attack. It is unfortunately pretty much the ONLY variation of attack for a melee warrior.



Special Move: Swirl Attack



Path of the Specialist (red)

There are 8 Mastery Skills: Sword, Axe, Mace, Hammer, Spear, Bow, Crossbow, and Shield. All except Shield can be obtained at Level 1. In version 1.40 and beyond, all the masteries give a percentage-based bonus. In previous versions, only Sword Mastery gets the percentage bonus, the rest have fixed bonuses.


Sword Expertise (Passive) - _{Initial skill for Male Warrior}
- To no one's surprise, due to designer bias, swords are once again the best weapon class in the game. Sword Expertise gives you a bonus 5% extra chance to hit an enemy per skill level, it decreases your recuperation by a two points each level, and best of all, it adds 10% extra damage per level. Swords tend to have both strength and agility requirements, though. Male Warriors start with +1 Sword Expertise, which has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging Male Warriors to only use swords, because otherwise they would be wasting one of their free skill points.


Mace Expertise (Passive)
- A 2% bonus chance to hit an enemy per level, Recuperation time decreased by 3 with the first point, and an additional 1 per point. Mace Damage is increased by 50% with the first point, and 10% per additional point. It also adds 1-4 damage with the first point, and the maximum value increases by 8 points per point to a maximum of 1-32 points of extra damage. This is an OK skill, but sword bias means there are more and better swords.


Axe Expertise (Passive)
- Recuperation time is decreased by 3 with the first point, and an additional 1 per point, and it adds 3-10 damage with the first point, and an additional 2 + 10 damage per point to a maximum of 11 + 50. There are some decent unique axes near the start and the end of the game, but not so much in the middle, and the base damage of pretty much all axes is 50-100. VERSION 1.40 CHANGES - All Weapon Masteries now give their damage increase in a percentage instead of a fixed number.


Hammer Expertise (Passive)
- This adds extra damage, decreases Recuperation time, and gives up to a 5% chance of doing a Deathblow (instant kill). There aren't really any good hammers. This skill doesn't do anything worthwhile. VERSION 1.40 CHANGES - All Weapon Masteries now give their damage increase in a percentage instead of a fixed number.


Spear Expertise (Passive)
- Increases damage and lowers recuperation time. There aren't many good spears or staves. This lets you throw spears, but why would you want to? Thrown spears even do reduced damage until Rank 5. VERSION 1.40 CHANGES - All Weapon Masteries now give their damage increase in a percentage instead of a fixed number.


Bow Expertise (Passive)
- All this does is decreases the recuperation time of bows by 3 points a level, down to 15. Since bows have a base recuperation of 15, this means you'll be firing incredibly fast. Worth getting if archery is your thing. VERSION 1.40 CHANGES - All Weapon Masteries now give their damage increase in a percentage instead of a fixed number.


Crossbow Expertise (Passive)
- This decreases Recuperation time and allegedly increases damage, but the skill is broken, it doesn't add the extra damage it should. That makes it worthless. VERSION 1.40 CHANGES - This skill has been fixed in 1.40. And again, all 1.40 Weapon Masteries now give their damage increase in a percentage instead of a fixed number.


Shield Expertise(Passive)
- It adds a 5% chance per level of a shield bash, which does 6-10 damage at Rank 1 up to 36-66 damage at Rank 5. It might be useful, but probably not so much.


Path of the Ranger (green)

These skills are for intended mostly for those who use bows/crossbows as their primary weapon. Survivors often use this path more than Warriors. NOTE: Any of the bow skills which say that they do damage - that does NOT stack with the normal damage you do with the bow, it REPLACES it, so even if you have the best bow in the game, it may as well be a short bow from Aleroth if you're using damage-dealing bow skills. However, that's probably alright, as the bow skills already do substantial damage, and if the weapons damage WAS added in, they would be more overpowered than magic skills. As it is now, it's a lot of damage at a far cheaper mana cost than magic spells.


Elven Sight (Passive) - _{Initial skill for Female Warrior}
- Each point increases your sight by two units. Your default sight range is very small, so two or three points into this is pretty much mandatory for rangers and mages, but if you get +Sight suffixes on items you may not need much. A total of +7 sight should be sufficient. Female Warriors get a free point. You can scroll the screen to see farther in one direction, which is where having a high sight comes in handy.


Evade Arrows (Passive)
- This is a passive defence skill. It doesn't help you dodge at all, but it does reduce damage. At Rank 1, each missile which hits you only does 90% of its damage. At Rank 5, you only suffer 50% damage when hit by a missile. This is probably not all that useful.


True Shot (Passive)
- This skill only works in the 1.40 GoG version. It does NOTHING in previous versions. However, assuming that you DO have the GoG version, at Rank 1, hits add 4-10 damage. At Rank 5, hits add 20-50 damage. Rank 5 can be attained by level 22, so for GoG users, this is probably worth it if you like shooting from afar.


Splitting Arrows
- This sends out 5 or 6 arrows at a time (each skill level). However, I think that it replaces the damage of the bow and only uses the damage of the arrows. If you have a good chance to hit, this could be useful for crowd control. At Rank 1, each arrow does 8-48 damage for 1 magic per shot, at Rank 5 each arrow does 36-156 damage for 5 magic per shot.


Poisoned Arrows
- Don't bother with this skill. Use Poison Weapon instead, it works on bows, and that should let you combine poison with an additional special attack. It does 20-60 poison damage (over time) at Rank 1, and 60-180 (over time) at Rank 5, but even on poison-weak enemies, it seems to suck. The cost is 1 magic per shot at Rank 1, 5 magic per shot at Rank 5.


Spiritual Arrows
- These arrows are quite powerful, and devastating on spiritual-weak enemies. Unfortunately, resistances get higher towards the end of the game. At Rank 1 it does 30-80 spiritual damage, at Rank 5 that's up to 70-200. Undead enemies are usually immune to spiritual damage, as are many others in the late game, so the utility is limited. The cost is 1 magic per shot at Rank 1, 5 magic per shot at Rank 5.


Explosive Arrows
- This does flat damage, but enemies with fire resistance will likely take little damage. At Rank 1, it does 80 damage, at Rank 5, 240 damage. The cost is 1 magic per shot at Rank 1, 5 magic per shot at Rank 5.


Elemental Arrows
- Despite the snowflake symbol, it does no cold damage. It randomly inflicts spiritual, lightning or fire damage, the unpredictability makes it less useful. It does 40-90 damage at Rank 1, and 80-210 damage at Rank 5. The cost is 1 magic per shot at Rank 1, 5 magic per shot at Rank 5.


Path of Warrior's Lore (blue)

This group of skills is mostly passive. There are three elemental skills identical in their damage, so they have been grouped together.

Lightning Damage / Fire Damage / Poison Damage (Passive)
- Rank 1, each melee attack has a 10% chance of inflicting 4-10 Lightning/Fire/Poison damage. At Rank 5, there's a 30% chance of inflicting 20-42 Lightning/Fire/Poison damage. If you get all of them and max them all, all these passive bonuses can add a substantial amount of damage. A "pure" Warrior doesn't have a lot of skills worth taking. I think this only works for melee, but I can check.


Stun (Passive)
- At Rank 1, there's a 5% chance that enemy attack recovery is penalized by 10, if the spiritual resistance is under 10. For each rank , the chance goes up by 5%, the attack recovery penalty goes up by 10, and the spiritual resistance requirement goes up by 10, so at Rank 5 there's a 25% chance that an attack will penalize enemies attack recovery by 50, if their spiritual resistance is under 50.


Repair - _{Initial skill for Female Warrior}
- Rank 1 Repairs 60% of the maximum durability, all the way up to 100% at Rank 5. There's no penalty for fighting with a weapon at only 60% durability, so just 1 point and you'll never have to worry when your weapons break. Keep any items with +1 Repair. Female Warriors start with +1 Repair.


Augment Defence (Passive)
- increases the protection of your armor by 10/20/30/40/50%. This is probably useful, but I'm not sure as it's unclear how the game uses armor values to determine damage reduction.


Augment Damage (Passive) - _{Initial skill for the Male Warrior}
- Each consecutive hit gains a 1-3 / 2-6 / 4-10 / 8-16 / 10-20 bonus amount of damage. It's hard to say how helpful this will be, even maxed out it's a pretty small amount. But then again, health doesn't scale up a lot in this game, so it's not as bad as it seems.


Repel Damage (Passive)
- For each rank there's an additional 5% * Rank chance to reflect melee damage, and attackers suffer a 5% * Rank percent of the damage they inflict. So maxed out, there's a 25% chance this will kick in when you get hit in melee, and when that happens the attacker will take 25% of the damage they inflict.

The problem is that not a lot of attackers do enough damage normally to be intimidating to YOU, so having their already weak attack cut to 25% isn't going to hurt them too much. It might work better on bosses, but Bosses have a huge health pool. Let's say that an enemy can do 52-100 damage (only a boss or miniboss can do that much). With this skill maxed out, you can reflect 13-25 damage. But a boss/miniboss can have anywhere from 1000-4000 HP. Do you really want to spend 5 precious skill points on that?



Path of the Warrior Gods (yellow)

Spiritual Damage (Passive)
- This is like Lightning/Fire/Poison damage, except that it always activates, there isn't a percentage chance of it activating. Rank 1 inflicts 4-10 damage, Rank 5 inflicts 20-50 damage. It requires a slightly higher character level to put points into as well.


Feign Death
- It makes enemies think you died, and they go back to their idle wandering. Whoopie. At Rank 1 it costs 6 magic to cast, and drains 80% of your current total magic. Each rank the drain goes down by 20%, and the magic cost rises by 3 until at Rank 5 it costs 18 mana, but no longer drains any magic. You should never have a need to use this skill.


Enchant Weapon (Passive)
- This skill lets you apply 1 to 5 charms (also known as Ylin stones) to an item which has a Charm Quality. You can only apply as many charms as you have ranks in Enchant Weapon. Items have a charm quality from 0 to 5, the number of charms they can hold (0 obviously holds no charms). The size of the item does not matter, so you can put 5 charms onto a ring.

Charms are closest in nature to gems from Diablo 2. They're coloured spheres with runes on them which can give you huge bonuses, especially with late-game charms.

Charm slots are only found on magic items, including the most powerful items in the game. Unique items almost always spawn with a Charm quality of at least 1. There are 11 equipment slots, counting the shield. Each piece of equipment can have up to 5 charms, so you can theoretically have 55 charms on ALREADY incredibly powerful magical equipment.

The best quality (golden)attribute Charms give you +40 to X resistance, +10 to attribute X, or +100 straight to Health or Magic. Considering that each piece of your end-game gear will have multiple slots, you can give yourself insane boosts in pretty much every area.

Charms all have unique two-part names, but thoughtfully, you don't have to memorize them, the description of the charm gives you the effect and approximate strength of the enchantment.


Boomerang
- Any weapon you throw is automatically returned to your hand after it hits a target. Does not work on bows, crossbows or two-handed weapons. Boomerang does 20/40/60/80/100 percent of the weapon damage.

This skill is just as useless as you think it is. You have to spend five points to get the same damage as you would get if you just ran up and smacked the thing normally? No thanks. Maybe, maybe, it would help if used on enemies who were too dangerous to fight in melee, but those enemies try and close to you on their own anyway. Maybe this is for spear users?


Death Strike (Passive)
- This skill theoretically has the ability to insta-kill an enemy. It's pretty worthless in practice, though. There's a 1% chance per Rank for this skill to kick in, so maxed there's a 5% or 1 in 20 chance for one of your attacks to set this off. Now, IF that 1 in 20 chance actually triggers, you need to get past the enemy's Spiritual Resistance. The enemy needs 10/20/30/40/50 Spiritual Resistance to survive. Spiritual Resistance is really common, even early on, and even more so later. And since you can't even START putting points in until level 24...


Flash Attack
- Teleport the warrior to the target. And oh yeah, it drains 100/80/60/40/20 percent of your stamina. It might only be useful if there's a crowd between you and your target. But even if there's a crowd in the way, why not just run around them? And if there is a crowd, A Warrior will want that stamina for his/her swirl attack. Avoid this skill.


Reflect Missiles (Passive)
- This is the same as Repel damage, except for ranged attackers, except that there's a 100% chance to reflect instead of 5% * Rank. Attackers suffer a 5% * Rank percent of the damage they inflict. So maxed out, attacker will take 25% of the damage they inflict. See my rant at the end of Repel Damage for why this is worthless.


Shadow Warrior
- It creates a warrior of shadow to attack your enemy that does 16/22/28/34/40 percent of your damage. But since you need to right-click on an enemy to use this, it's of dubious value since it requires you to stop attacking at 100% of your own damage to hit something else for 40%. Yaayyyy.



Class-based Combat Strategies




Warriors are excellent at dealing damage and hitting things, but they have a penalty to defence. They're very loud, so they'll attract enemies from farther away. Their best survival tactic is to kill enemies in as few hits as possible. Attracting a lot of enemies to melee range works really well with their Special Move, which hits all nearby enemies at once, and can be spammed as long as you have enough Stamina - which Warriors should have if they've been putting points into Constitution.

Warriors, interestingly enough, don't have a lot of skills which are basically just flashy variations of "Hit this thing with your melee weapon." No less than 7 skills are going to be pretty useless to the player, and it could be as high as 15, because 8 entire skills are devoted to Bow skills, and 8 skills are different weapon masteries, and it's best to only take one of those.

If a Warrior wants to spend a lot of skill points on his side of the skill tree, he'll probably end up focusing on the passive skills - the 3 elemental passives, Spiritual damage, and stun.

The choice of your warrior's gender is especially tricky for a Warrior. The male Warrior forces you into Swords, which are plentiful, but clichéd, and he has the not-that-great Augment Damage skill. The Female Warrior has the very useful Repair, and the pretty-useful Elven Sight, so your warrior's gender should be based on whether or not you want to use swords. If yes, male, if no, female.