Shattered Kingdoms

So I am going to ask a really noob question, Aim? How does it work?

I am just going to write how I think that it works.

Aim - Upper - Highest chance for damage, but the trade off is that you have a lower percentage of change to hit.
Aim - Mid - Highest chance of likehood to hit, but medium damage. Also has a chance to cut off arms which would result in no xp gained after both arms are cut off?
Aim lower - The only think that I know about this is you can cut off legs which helps preventing from fleeing.

It's important to note that in SK, unlike many tabletop RPGs such as D&D, your character's "hitpoints" are not in fact one pool. The percentage in the prompt is an approximation that can and does mislead you if you interpret it incorrectly.

Looking at an injured NPC will reveal information about the status of various limbs. Head is scratch, chest is bleeding heavily, and so on. Each of these "body parts" has its own HP pool and consequences if that pool should fall too low. Each has different qualities, too.

For example, the hands and feet and other such extremities are not critical. You can lose them and stay alive. On the other hand, one's chest and head are important body parts. You do not want them mangled nor severed.

When you aim upper, you try to direct damage towards the head. This means that your damage can more quickly slay an opponent, but does not necessarily mean you are dealing "more" damage.

This is one of the paradoxes of levelling. You are rewarded for dealing damage, so consider whether or not you want to kill a NPC with minimal damage dealt? In situations where you can kill things very quickly, perhaps it does not matter, but the idea is good practice for thinking about PVP.

The hitpoint percentage in the prompt reveals the percentage level of the most-injured body part. This is why it can sometimes seem to take forever to drop someone, because you are in fact dropping them from 21% left arm 100% right foot to 21% left arm 20% right foot, for example. You'd only see a change of 1%, but more went on than that. This is also, in my opinion, one of the reasons why spell damage has such a hard time competing with highly accurate melee spam.

Many people don't seem to get this concept. Gilgon's Algon Guide, for example, glosses over accuracy as a mechanic and talks about damage in terms of "dps." It isn't a good idea to assume that SK works like whatever RPG or MMO you've seen before, because chances are there are features at play you may not even directly be aware of when it comes to SK mechanics.

you askin for PvE or PvP

in PvE by the time we lop off monsters' arms they about dead anyway, the arms cut off yield no experience was probably put in to fix an exploit where NPC could be healed but was not dealing damage

in PvE, if fighting NPCs front row, it is sometimes helpful to aim lower to mangle/severe the leg so it can't dirt kick, if dirt kicked we cannot go fight the next NPC, but there is washer for that now

in both PvP and PvE i have found though it takes significant damage to mangle/severe a body part, and in both scenarios it is usually better to be behind something to bypass all the undesirables - this is why most people advocate second row aim upper

Grep is giving mostly good information here. It's good to see it recognized that SK has some unusual and/or unique mechanics and is not just a clone of D&D, WoW or [fill in the blank].

The only thing I'll add is that in addition to HP pools for each body part, there is an overall HP pool as well. The overall pool is not "targetable" by aim -- you always take damage to BOTH overall and whichever body part was struck. Taking any one of these pools (the head, torso, waist, overall) to zero HP is a recipe for death.

So even if you never once get hit in the head, torso or waist, you can still theoretically die "from blood loss" due to damage suffered only to those "expendable" arms and legs.

Actually, just going off of my own observational experience, there are two factors in play: First, you have your overall HP pool, and you also have your HP pool for individual body parts (head, chest, waist, 2 arms 2 legs) which is substantially smaller than your overall HP pool.

When you take physical damage to any body part, your overall HP pool decreases, as does the HP pool of the body part that was hit. If a body part goes to zero, it's severed. If your overall HP pool goes to zero, you die. If a vital body part (head, chest, waist) goes to zero, you also die. On mode stun, you don't sever limbs, and you don't knock someone out until they hit 0% on their overall HP pool. When you take spell damage, it is only directed to your overall HP pool, not to a specific body part.

The % HP bar that you see on your prompt and that you get when you glance at people is either A) the overall HP pool, or B) the lowest vital body part, depending on whatever's lowest.


However, what grep says about damage is correct. In SK, you gain experience not by how many NPCs you kill, but by dealing damage. Also as you mentioned, cutting off both of someone's arms means that they no longer grant xp. The pros and cons look more like this.

Aim upper: You kill more NPCs and gain more gold, but at the cost of potentially running out of NPCs before they respawn in some training areas. Aim upper is also slightly less accurate than aim mid/lower I believe.
Aim mid: You can mangle/sever arms, meaning that you'll take less damage from melee NPCs, but at the risk of potentially severing both arms and ending up not getting as much xp as possible. That's unlikely though.
Aim lower: You get the most possible xp per NPC, decent accuracy, plus the added benefit of mangling a leg early in a fight means that dirt kick is less common.

Personally, I always aim lower when training. However, if you're training with a partner, it's best to put the training buddy that deals the most damage on aim lower, and the one which deals the least damage on aim upper. That way you still get the most xp out of every NPC.

tl;dr
aim lower maximizes xp per NPC
aim mid makes you take the least damage while training
aim upper makes more gp5 while training.


Update: Well Bah Dulrik interrupted me.

That's okay, Edoras. I give your reply two thumbs up. I especially like the tactical summary.

lulz

Is there also a percentage to hit?

Harder to hit the head vs mid or low?

I'm fairly certain you get a shot to hit every available body part, so the aim that provides the most targets will generate more hits, they'll just be spread out over more parts. Aim upper only targets head and chest, so you only have two targets to check against whereas aim mid gives you four targets to check against (chest, left arm, right arm, waist.)

Brings up a question I've had but never really realized it. Does the head part have sub-parts? I've noticed that hitting NPCs with a giant merc using a greatsword directly on the head is generally a one-shot kill, but if I hit the mouth, jaw, or throat, it isn't.