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Blademasters

As a Blademaster, your main goal is to kill through stacking bleeding which allows you to BrokenStar your enemy. To BrokenStar, your enemy has to have a minimum of 600 bleeding. There are several ways to do this, and also some techniques that do not require any bleeding prep at all. Below will be a synopsis of these strategies.

-------------------------------------------------------Stances------------------------------------------------------

We have several stances at our disposal. We have Doya, Thyr, Mir, Arash, Sanya (in order you get them in TwoArts). Doya is a slow stance that does increased limb damage, better accuracy for a speed reduction. Thyr is the fastest stance, with reduced limb damage. Mir is the slowest stance, with greatly increased defense but with the limb damage of Unstanced. Arash is slower than Thyr but faster than Sanya, but does tremendous damage. Unfortunately, your damage taken also increases tremendously and this stance should be used only when you are sure you are capable of surviving shortly after. Arash gives the highest limb damage per hit. Sanya has increased Shin generation, increased offense and unchanged defense.

Primarily in 1v1 or group situations, you will want to use Thyr/Sanya/Mir/Arash/Doya in terms of importance. Obviously this will change depending on the situation you find yourself in.

-----------------------------------------------------Kill Methods-------------------------------------------------

Firstly, you have to be able to stick Impaleslash on your opponent in order to get any of the bleeding levels you want. Impaleslash makes clotting use more mana thereby making it less effective overall.

The next few strategies will be with pre-impaleslash. To do this, you have a few options: You can pommelstrike/strike knees on your opponent using a long balance. You can use paralysis stacking (pommelstrike/strike neck 3 times with lvl3 band, 4 times with lvl0 band unhindered) which allows you to beat herb balance. If they are paralysed you can impale. When you impale, you are guaranteed a balance of action before they writhe (IE Impaleslash, bladetwist). You can also do this with voidfist and pommelstrike/strike neck. When your opponent shields, you can raze/strike knees and you will get balance before they do thereby allowing you to impale as well. Figure out some other methods on your own, there are lots of options!

-----------------------------------------Pre Impaleslash – Two legs broken------------------------------------

First, you have to prep both of the legs by legslashing on alternate sides. Left/Right into a “prep” which allows you to slash on either side and break both legs. You will need to practice this more than anything else, as breaking limbs simultaneously is absolutely required on anyone who knows how to fight a Blademaster. To bypass parry you can use the paralysis stacking as detailed before, or you can use your Striking ability Airfist. Airfist gives about a 50% chance of bypassing parry, but 100% against Monk guarding.

When you legslash/strike knees to break both legs. You will impale, and you will get the time to bladetwist 4 times (assuming you don't make any mistakes). This usually equates to ~700-800 bleeding depending on your opponent. They will writhe, and you will get balance to BrokenStar immediately before they stand. This is the easiest kill method, but also the one that works less and less as you get into more advanced fights.

-----------------------------------------------Two Legs, Torso-----------------------------------------------------

As before, you'll prep both legs for the break. Also, in this method you will be prepping their torso. You can do this by centreslash, or by compassslash. You will want to slash to break torso, then slash to break legs/prone immediately after. With a broken Torso, each bladetwist does an increased amount of bleeding. You'll want to impale and on balance Impaleslash. You will have time/balance to bladetwist twice more after this. They will writhe off, and you can then re-impale or Brokenstar depending on their bleeding. I usually recommend impaling once more and twisting, just to try to make sure. When they writhe they will stand and can then leave the room, so choose carefully. This method is a bleeding burst that usually outstrips your enemies attempt to clot.

-----------------------------------------------Head, Torso, Two Legs------------------------------------------

This is a slight variation of the above. In this scenario you also prep their head and torso to break in one slash. Most enemies will apply to their head when you break torso/head. You can then break legs/prone and impale right as they apply to their leg. In this method you have the same options as above. Impale/Impaleslash/Bladetwistx2/(Impale or BrokenStar). What this does is ensures that they do not have the salve balance to heal their torso before you can break their legs.

------------------------------------------------------6 limb--------------------------------------------------------

This scenario is the hardest to execute correctly, as your enemies will have many options and times to get away from you. Here we will prep both legs, head/torso, and both arms. You will want to break Head/Torso then Arms, then Legs. Depending on your speed (band), you can force them to apply to arms before you break legs, which gives you time for an extra bladetwist after your impale – or you can break legs immediately after arms, whereby they do not apply to arms but immediately to legs after their head. This sequence gives you the option of locking, or brokenstar due to the broken arms. Most enemies will not stand around long enough to allow this, but you can use some breaks as decoys (break arms randomly, let them leave and come back to break head/torso>leg/leg, etc).

------------------------------------------------------Damage---------------------------------------------------------

In this scenario we will be using more Fists, and switching stances. You will want to prep both legs for break, in whatever stance you are comfortable with. At this point, you will want to run away and switch your stance to Arash. We run away for two reasons: Give the impression that you were worried, and they do not know you switched stance. When you go back, you will want to Flamefist your enemy. Flamefist negates rebounding, and makes it so that you can string attacks without worrying about hitting it for a time. Here we will break legs.

Now, after we break legs, we want to immediately begin balanceslash/strike sternum. This is the highest damage attack that Blademaster has in a PK setting. While your enemy is prone, Arash cannot miss. With a double leg break you will either get 4(lvl 0 band) or 5(lvl 3 band) hits will prone. With that you can do balance/sternum 3x, and Multislash as your finisher. Now, you have two options to increase your chances of landing this kill – your infuses.

Infusing ice will hit the enemy with shivering>frozen>disrupt. Using this in conjunction with your leg break, you can throw off salve timing by them applying caloric. Also, using Ice infuses turns your damage into Ice, which there are few ways to mitigate.

Infusing fire will set the enemy ablaze. Everytime your fire infuse hits after they are emblazed, you get a small damage hit from burning them.

Usually, the Ice setup works a bit better than the Fire setup, as there are more resistances to Fire damage than Ice damage.

You can also engage after your multislash, so that if they do survive and stand up and try to run, they will also get hit by engage.

---------------------------------------------------Locking------------------------------------------------------------

You have a few options for Locking. Primarily you can prep both legs, prep both arms, break legs, break arms so that they will cure both legs and stand before even applying to arms. This is 9s-10s of time that you can stack afflictions. Pommelstrike/strike is your fastest way of afflicting. Hypochondria is currently the only way that a Blademaster can give Impatience to seal a lock, therefore you need to afflict that first and ensure that you stick it. Impatience, Weariness, Anorexia, Slickness, Asthma (paralysis/prone) are the afflictions that you need to be sticking.

Another method is stacking using pommelstrikes. This is more difficult as most classes can hinder you enough. However if you unhindered enough ever 4th pommelstrike (lvl0 band) or every 3rd (lvl3 band) affliction beats herb balance. Meaning you can do neck, neck, neck, asthma – and your asthma affliction immediately follows a paralysis cure. Meaning you can then hit paralysis again and now you have “stuck” asthma.

Another option is through Voidfist. Voidfist has a chance of making an eaten herb have no effect. Through this you can stack quickly because they are unable to cure anything. Given enough afflictions and time, you can lock them.

Blademaster has a lot of options and avenues to setup kill strategies. Work on your own methods and see what you can come up with!

Ernam said:

Despite some claims that it wasn't possible, and with the help of a lonnnng list of people, the blademaster (and several other) limb damage equations have been solved.

In conjunction with this, I noticed something: There were currently no high-quality (publicly available) limb counters available, particularly for Blademaster.

Thanks to a brief stint of "free time" lately, I decided to spend some time building a limb damage tracking system.

The design goals of the system were... not exactly modest:

• Only use the game's actual limb damage equations (no guestimates, no magic numbers, no thumbrules)
• Support all classes, all stances, all artefacts, all weapon types, skill levels, etc.
  
• Tracks multiple targets at a time, and also tracks limb damage reset time of each of their limbs.
• To the most accurate extent possible, track limb damage from third parties and rebounding.
• Customizable display and GUI options (auto-hiding of GUI, SVO prompt tags, prep warnings, etc)
• Fully functional API and boolean "prepped" functions.
• Include parry tracking and parry strategy detection
  
• Full in-Mudlet help / config interface (example)
• Work seamlessly with Godzilla (for those using it)
• A host of other stuff
  

As of yet all design goals have been met, with one exception.  As of now, the system is fully functional with most classes that use limb damage - however - I have not been able to completely test it with a few major classes.  I am releasing the project to Blademasters first, which has been thoroughly tested by multiple people, and has been proven accurate to a single hitpoint, from 500-~11,000hp, with all bands, stances, and so on.

One other thing I'm proud to present is a very useful real-time "prep path" algorithm for Blademasters (screenshot), which outputs the most efficient route to putting limb pairs into double break range (yes, respecting main and off-slash damage, specifically).  The path is updated every single time your target receives limb damage, or whenever you change stance, change target, etc.  The algorithm also (optionally) respects your target's parry strategy, and will find a route with their strategy taken into account.

For the full list of features (there are quite a few more) as well as some combat log demos (coming very soon), please see the Manda website.

I'll follow up with a few combat logs to demonstrate the system in action.  I also expect the Knight release (all three) to be released in the next several days, followed closely by all other classes within the next several weeks.  Staggering the releases will help me contend with minor bug fixes quickly, as they present themselves, and will give me enough time to help people get the system set up and incorporated into their own combat styles and/or systems.

I'd also like to make a big thank you to a long list of people who helped with the limb damage testing, as well as coding, of the project.  Big shout-outs to @Seragorn, @Isaiah, and @Vadimuses for either direct or indirect help, as well as to the two-three dozen individuals who let me hit them for hours to develop and test the various equations (@Aelios, @Linus, @Qara, @Iskla, @Reonna, @Goggo being some of the big ones!).  Also props to @Dorn whom I've never actually met, but whose GUI was used as a starting point for Manda's.


To those already using the system, thanks for your support and participation, and have fun!