>>Yes and no. There are still a lot of people who believe the best way to train is through feint spam

The boost to damage dealt via the OF contest has been reduced from the old pre-3.x metrics. It is much easier to effectively 'cap' the OF contest now via buffs (accuracy wise, read earlier in this thread.), which reduces the return on training agility versus strength, since it both boosts OF and increases damage output. That being said, having taken a barb to 150, I am an advocate for keeping ALL stats even (yes, charisma too. As an active PvPer, roars are important, and some of the fun ones still rely on charisma.). I am merely speaking on the late game return on strength versus agility, as one's usefulness will hit an effective 'cap', while the other won't.

>>I think balance is severly over rated.

Also, this. Noticed very much the same, even with thrown weapons, with a horrible balanced ~120 stone greatsword versus a nicely balanced spear. Rate of contact did not vary much, if at all. These are all things that have been brought up in the combat forums over the years, and we are derailing. Back to how barbs suck.

How do you run out of stam as a barb? that's crazy? I'm around circle 40 swinging a 113 stone weapon for hours and stamina is the last thing on my mind. You use avalanche?

Ah, maybe that. I'm definetly not swinging the 6 second chop min RT for greatswords or dire maces etc. But then again, he should have double the stamina or more then me.

I dunno, I find I learn roughly 4 to 5 mind states per critter with melee, and if I kill faster I learn faster. Jabbing repetitively makes the time to kill slower, and I don't find I end up looking quicker. As such, I try snd buff damage output and defensives to allow me to stay in combat longer, even though my defenses also outpaced my weapons a while ago.

>Mind-lock, intrigued, pondering, as long as you're not learning or below, who cares?

That's a simplistic view to say the least. Mind state is not what determines your learning rate. Your pool and drain sizes (Int, Wis, Disc) do.

>The faster you kill a critter the faster your overall plat income is

Well, if someone is playing a barb to be a plat farmer then they are a fool. There. I said it.

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>>Well, if someone is playing a barb to be a plat farmer then they are a fool. There. I said it.

Now the thread has finally come full circle. Yes, Barbarian damage output compares to no other guild but Traders, and not even to them, for long. A half skilled empath can put out MUCH more damage than a barbarian, per second, utilizing GS, targeted TM, and weapons (if they choose). That in itself speaks volumes.

> The thing people are missing is none of that really matters. Mind-lock, intrigued, pondering, as long as you're not learning or below, who cares? We're getting the same rate of learning as the next guy. Even the pace with which you lock your weapons is meaningless, as long as you're not going so slow that you'll end up completely draining the previous 4 or 5 weapons you locked up.

If you are training every weapon skill (15 of them including offhand and not masteries/expertise/parry, 14 if not), and doing it in weapon cycles (locking one and moving to the next), the speed at which you progress through the weapons is highly important.

Yes, pool size is int and drain rate is wis. But you want to maximize those two regardless, as things like expertise, defenses, supernatural, etc will be impacted by wis drain rate even if it doesn't boost individual weapon learning rates. It takes about 90 minutes for my pool to fully drain. So for me, cycling through my weapons faster is highly important -- it's the only lever I can move for how much I gain in each weapon per day. Plat income is less of a concern -- I'm not anywhere near plat farmer levels, but I still net about 200-300 plat/day and have every weapon I need.

I've tested with heavier weapons and it doesn't improve training speed for me. How rapidly do you lock your weapons?

>>How do you carry 15 weapons at the same time?

Use weapons that cover multiple skills. My new little barb (circle 9) is carrying a small handled riste (2hb/sb/se), bastard sword (2he/le) and light spear (pole/ht/offhand) in addition to single weapons (flail, nightstick, sling, xbow, bow) to cover the rest and not having any burden issues.

>>Use weapons that cover multiple skills.

Not even entirely necessary. I have a circle 16 cleric that I play currently with all 4 armors on, and one weapon for every type (no duplicates), and I am not burdened at all until the bundle is ~1/2 full. And that is with all stats within 3-5 points of each other.


As an aside, on the weapon/defense gap: You really need to get a little more efficient with the weapon training, stop allowing them to go clear as you cycle, and that gap will start to slowly close. Will make QoL much better all the way around, that gap is pretty major.

it's a training efficiency thing though, he's right. Letting other skills clear because you're training individual skills to lock is inefficient and will result in fewer ranks/unit of time overall.

>it's a training efficiency thing though, he's right. Letting other skills clear because you're training individual skills to lock is inefficient and will result in fewer ranks/unit of time overall.

Show your math? Assuming you drain 1 mindstate per 3 minutes, and can generate 4 mindstates per minute (i.e. all weapons train at that consistent rate, or your own set of assumptions).
Over an infinite amount of time, going to 34 then 34 then 34 then 34 nets the same amount learned as going to 1 1 1 1 then 2 2 2 2. It's less efficient over short time, and if you have to restart your script you'll wind up with imbalanced skills unless it rotates training order based on ranks. But over the long term? It's not less efficient (given imbalances fixed), because if one skill would fall off via locking then moving to the next, you either need won't make it to the last skill on your list, or they'll fall off anyway with the other methodology -- depending on exactly how your script is setup.

>Skills pulse at the same rate regardless of mindstate. All weapons pulsing 100% of the time is going to net you more gains across the board than each weapon pulsing only 80-85% of the time, or any less than 100%, period. Beyond ~350 ranks in weapons, 100% uptime is attainable.

Yes, all weapons pulsing all the time would net you more than pulsing less than 100%.

But training to lock vs not training to lock does not create that distinction, and is actually equal even though you have a longer period of downtime at the front because you get the full drain when you log out. Over long periods of time, swinging a weapon a few times, swapping to another, etc -- is no more efficient than locking a weapon and moving to the next.

I will point out that I have actual experience with this.

My Bard trains all weapons and uses the get everything moving first method. My Warrior Mage, on the other hand, uses elemental weapons exclusively except for skills where one doesn't exist and because of elemental charge resource issues cannot change weapons very often, so he simply mindlocks each skill in turn.

The Bard has a clear advantage in gaining weapon skills overall than the Warrior Mage.

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>>Over long periods of time, swinging a weapon a few times, swapping to another, etc -- is no more efficient than locking a weapon and moving to the next.

This statement, and where you said 'given an infinite amount of time' or something similar earlier, is where you are wrong. Say you hunt for 10 hours. In the approach you take, I believe you claimed 4-5 weapons stop moving, so roughly 1/4-1/3 are not moving at any given point. Being generous, that equals ~75% uptime. So in a 10 hour stretch, you are draining any given weapon for 7.5 hours, or 450 minutes. You used the example of a mindstate every 3 minutes, so we will run with that. In those 450 minutes you pulse the equivalent of 150 mindstates (worth of bits), wasting 50 mindstates (worth of bits) worth of potential drain time.

Those 50 minstates worth of downtime is far in excess of the capability of offline drain, even if ALL the weapons were locked at logoff (which given your representation, only 75% of them will even be moving, most of which nowhere near locked).

Now you might say: "But if I only hunt for 5 hours, that's only 25 Mindstates worth of downtime on each, and at least a COUPLE weapons will drain more than that while logged off." Again, this is under the assumption that the end goal isn't to lock all weapons with the alternate method, which is in fact possible.

My only point was that there are better ways to do things. That if you're beyond 350 weapon ranks, keeping all weapons moving at once is absolutely possible, and increases overall rank and tdp gain, which is never really a bad thing.

>Heh, one thing I find kinda funny is how half the game or maybe more is really just about writing scripts and "gaming the game" Is this good? is this what the game designers intended? who knows?

This is a product of all games, not DR. All games, I mean that, ALL GAMES, can be min-maxed, and indeed, that's fun for some people too.

>all I'll say is changing the method from swapping weapons pre-lock to at lock won't change downtime, downtime is caused by an inefficiency elsewhere (and I pointed out a few of those that I'm too lazy to fix), and there is no evidence -- in your reply or elsewhere -- that there is any inefficiency caused by locking weapons one after another.

I mean, you're wrong about this, but if you insist on doing it your way, and it's working well enough for you, by all means, continue doing this. There is absolutely inefficiency in locking skills sequentially.

>Still seems like a lot of things in limbo (path bonuses, some incomplete masteries, damage generation) for 3.5 years after the release of 3.0.

FWIW, there have been a fair amount of tweaks over the last 3.5 years, some of them pretty substantial. I say just to make sure you don't have a completely bleak outlook on things - Kodius has definitely made adjustments.

>I mean, you're wrong about this, but if you insist on doing it your way, and it's working well enough for you, by all means, continue doing this. There is absolutely inefficiency in locking skills sequentially.
>You're standing behind the argument "No, it is this (unconfirmed) thing I am too lazy to fix therefor cannot prove, your experience in successfully keeping them all moving means nothing." You're very right, this conversation is leading nowhere, I just wanted to make sure people didn't take what was being read as bad advice.

You two are welcome to post evidence about this. Until then, I think we can agree that's unproven. I've run models before and not seen any difference. Assuming you gain mindstates at a constant rate, you hit a maximum number of mindstates given drain rate regardless of methodology, and wind up with the same total number of mindstates drained for every skill. All it does is a better job of preventing weapon rank gaps if you would otherwise always train weapons in the same order.

It's very basic math. Assuming you gain mindstates at a constant rate, which is pretty fair based on my experience. If the rate of drain is greater than the mindstates gained per time period, then you can't keep all the skills moving, and if you it is less, then you can. The method of training (lock vs smaller mindstates) influences neither the rate of drain nor the rate at which you gain mindstates. For example, if you assume you drain 1 mindstate in each moving skill per pulse, then the question is whether you can gain 15 mindstates (or more) per pulse or not, as you have 15 weapon skills to learn.

If you can only match it, you would keep all skills constantly at 1->0 (or 34->0 cyclicly). If you can beat it, then you would slowly gain mindstates such that you wind up with all weapons at 34/34, given infinite time. If you can't beat it, then you would wind up with downtime on skills.

None of this has ANYTHING to do with whether you swap weapons every 1, 2, 7, 15, or 34 mindstates. There is no mathematical or logical basis for assuming a difference between the two methodologies. At the end of the day, those two numbers are all that matter -- mindstates gained over time vs mindstates drained over time. If you gain 4 mindstates/minute and lose 1 mindstate/skill/3minutes, you cap out at 12 simultaneous skills, or 80% uptime -- the same as as I have.

>Back on topic of barbarian damage production suffering, Kodius has even agreed in the past, I read somewhere, when he was talking about some new abilities he was trying to release. Kodius around to actually chime in on any of this? Still seems like a lot of things in limbo (path bonuses, some incomplete masteries, damage generation) for 3.5 years after the release of 3.0.
There are definitely a lot of things that were 'going to happen' that have not. Kodius got drafted to do all the lore releases which has meant he hasn't had time to dedicate to class dev.

The rate of bits in != to the rate of bits out, and as more skills are moving this is a cascading effect. There is absolutely a sweet spot for cycling through the skills without letting them fall off. Given the alternative things my combat script does (appraise, pick pet boxes, cycle buffs, hunt, a few other things) the sweet spot was +22 mindstates per cycle, initially, but it is variable. With a little optimization, and some ramp up time to start building mindstates, my script does not allow a single weapon to stop learning, and will eventually maintain all above 30/34. This was not possible with taking a weapon to mindlock, as even if you locked the first weapon, the time invested on each was too high to keep the first from falling off before the cycle completed.

This is based on, in total, months of testing, balancing and optimizing. I know of at least 4-5 others that have posted on these forums with similar results, as well as others I have talked with privately. There is no reason to beat this dead horse. Maybe try and make those adjustments you were too lazy to overcome, get that hurdle out of the way, and try and accomplish what you are simply contradicting due to lack of effort.

Please try to stay on topic (Barbarian damage output) instead of going off on tangents about the most effective weapon training regimens.

Thanks,
Adilea

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