Heyas, folks!

Back in the days of purely being a player of an Empath, I looked at my TDP's and skills and compare them constantly against the players I played with regularly. As I'm sure a number of you have thought time and time again to yourselves...man oh man, I'm missing out on all those weapon TDP's...I'm getting further and further behind statwise, etc.

So back in February, I went out and attempted to verify this doing a statistical analysis seeing whether or not there was any validity to this theory...that Empaths are at a TDP disadvantage compared to magic and non-magic guilds from the ready lack of melee and ranged-weapon TDP's. Because of this, Empaths should be able to learn weapons experience from parrying with a particular weapon, I asserted to Maelona. Maelona then charged me with the task of going out to prove it.

I sampled about 80 players between the circles of 26th and 30th circle gathered over two days at various times. After wringing Excel's scrawny neck so that it would calculate overall accumulated TDP's in an acceptable manner without me having to handcrank each person's via calculator, I discovered that with 95% confidence (translation for you non-math people - there's a 5% chance that the data is flat out lying to me)...that level for level, there are no differences in TDPs accumulated. This does not account for the confounds such as time ingame versus circles gained.

However, this story has a happy ending. Various combat changes (hee, there's an understatement!) have come out in the meantime, and the fact still remained that skill with a weapon does impact skill with parrying with the weapon. On Tuesday, Damissak will be rolling out a change to the parry skill that will allow everyone (but this in particular benefits Empaths) to gain some weapons experience from parrying. It doesn't come close to the experience you get for actually hacking and slashing critters, but it is a nice healthy chunk.

You may now start cheering. :) The first person who asks for shock-free exp for slashing stuff shall be thwapped with a wet noodle repeatedly.

On a different note...

For the next two weeks, due to some real life issues beyond my control (college examinations, moving away for the summer, etc.), I won't be in the game. I'll hopefully be back May 7th, though I plan on peeking on the boards in the meantime.

Fear when I return. More changes cometh. ;)

Nionon