Shattered Kingdoms

Originally when I read that Kick was now supposed to do PE damage, I was impressed. I mean, that would almost be enough reason to actually train/use the skill. Except I was leveling a character for a bit and I was getting kicked by NPCs and realized that I was losing more PE from just getting third attack to proc than from getting kicked. It literally does less than 1% PE damage. That's really, really terrible. This should probably be adjusted up by a lot.

Move damage is still damage and is effected by the melee skills you have trained and gear worn. Nobody has spent time optimizing NPCs for the kick changes. Since when have NPCs ever been the barometer for the maximum potential of an ability?

Well, since you asked.

Infinite throwing daggers:


Innate sanctuary:


Innate max (more max than players can have) dexterity and, potentially, other stats, last time I tested.

Plus NPCs getting haste/gs without fatigue on wear-off.


Just to name a few.

Grep, stop trolling me by being purposefully obtuse. The actual abilities of everything you mention is no stronger for NPCs than PCs. Thrown daggers do the same damage, max stats are exactly the same for race. Number of daggers and spell duration are code optimizations so that the game doesn't lag like a dog, but its nothing that a PC can't do as well or better.

I'm not intending to troll. I'll drop the obtuseness; I was trying not to put on airs that I knew exactly what was going on.

I was under the impression that some NPCs came out with 30 dexterity. If I'm wrong, I'm happy.

Can you confirm that a NPC will suffer fatigue once a haste/gs wears off? That's the only thing that's left unmentioned in your reply.

Have now seen a log of a PC using kick against another PC. Still think the PE damage caused is way too low to even be worth considering.

What exactly were you expecting?

What was the race/class of the opponent? What skills did they have trained? Were they wearing foot weapons appropriate to that best skill known? At max strength? Buffed for damage capability?

In addition, what was your level and had you trained move?

There's quite a range of capability available between the worst kick and the best kick depending on the above and other factors. Send me a PM with those details and a log if available, and I'll see if it makes sense to increase it.

It wasn't used against me. I just read a PK log of it being used by one PC against another. The PC using it didn't seem to be buffed, and it was a Swash using it against a Barb. I'm not sure about the foot weapons being used. I'd presume not. It still resulted in less than 1% PE damage.

I get that there's a lot of prep that can go into buffing the damage, but I just am not really sure that THAT much difference can be made.

As to what I was expecting, I was expecting the kind of PE loss that would make the skill a serious consideration vs something like taunt or bash or trip. From the results I'm seeing in its use, kick is still an extremely poor decision on the part of the one using it. I mean, maybe with a build/prep style completely dedicated to using kick in PvP it might be that, but you would have to completely ignore the much more easily exploited powerhouses of bash/trip to build and prep for that and that just doesn't make any kind of sense.

I definitely wasn't expecting kick to be competitive with bash in PvP. Considering that bash is the gold standard, buffing kick enough to compete with it would be pretty tough and probably end up being quite unfair. Besides, the only class to get both of those is mercenary (barbarians don't get kick, swashbucklers don't get bash).

As an aside, I probably ought to swap the level learned of kick and bash on merc, since bash is definitely the better of the two.

Trip and taunt are better comparisons. I still think you'd always taunt first, but taunt has diminishing returns, so kick becomes a natural follow up once you land the taunt. Trip is harder to justify not using continuously, but maybe you would consider alternating them.

In PvE, I am expecting that kick would beat out all of the above almost 100% of the time. Yes, I think it's okay if some skills are more for PvE than PvP. Still, I am open to raising the PE damage based on feedback. As it is, the PE damage is way higher than the HP damage, but most people's PE pools are naturally much larger than their HP pool even before training.

I don't have evidence to add, just adding a vote for raising the PE damage more. Take the average PC PE pool and make it do 3-5% of that, and you've got a skill that's still inferior to bash/trip/taunt in PVP but at least worth considering if you can fit it in between trips.