(WIP) Guide to Combat events of the Realm (Last updated Spring '21)

Every time the pumpkin king, barbarians, or the rat king threatens the realm I always see the same questions being asked about combat events. Here I'll compile a guide to combat events and try to keep it updated as changes are introduced.

Why participate in combat events?

While most non-combat events of the realm reward just stamina investment or participation, combat events reward those in addition to accomplishment. As the rewards from combat events tend to be rare opportunities to gather gear, each combat event can help you perform better in the next.

Participation Rewards

Every 10 stamina invested in defense of the realm offers money and combat experience. Especially for newer seekers, this combat experience can be much more significant than struggling against low-level monsters, so can be a great way to train your combat prowess without risking defeat outside of town. Each attack also offers a 20% chance of finding rewards, including tokens, items, popularity, resources, prize points, and even equipment. This is similar to the structure of non-combat events like the autumn feast and offers pretty significant rewards, especially when added to guaranteed money and combat experience from any attack. These participation rewards are given regardless of how much damage is dealt, every time 10 stamina is used to attack.

Equipment

The equipment rewarded from prize points are the hex hunter set, town militia set, and the carnifex set. The armor from these pieces has many advantages over fur and leather gear in protection and bonuses, and also all offer boosts to specific skills. While there's nothing legendary among these, they're solid pieces of equipment that are very obtainable and you'll be hard-pressed to find a grail veteran who doesn't have at least one piece incorporated into their set of gear they've worked on for years.

The weapons offered in the town militia set and carnifex set are among the best weapons you can acquire without a significant struggle and will serve well to put points on the board in the combat events and protect you from monsters on the road. Lower quality versions of these weapons offer the same damage as the high-quality versions, so they are a great budget option.

Upgrading quality or creating equipment of different quality has different costs in prize points. The cost to upgrade equipment is the difference between the cost of its current quality level and the cost of the quality level you want. The quality will often determine the level of the skill boosts on the equipment.

• Cheap: 10 prize points
  
• Normal: 20 prize points
  
• Expert: 40 prize points
  
• Master: 80 prize points
  
• Grand Master: 160 prize points
  
• Grail: 320 prize points
  

The Tombola

The Tombola is a drawing within each town at the end of the event to determine who receives the special prize, usually a new piece of equipment. 1 ticket for the drawing is rewarded per 10 stamina attack, regardless of the damage dealt. This levels the playing field and ensures that seekers that deal less damage still have a chance to win.

Dealing Damage

Damage in events can be complicated, but setting yourself up to do the most damage you can per stamina is where strategy can benefit you. Your damage will mostly be determined by 5 factors; your weapon, your combat skills, your personal skills, the grail blessing, and your followers.

Weapon Damage

This is often the most confusing for people. The best weapons for regular combat outside of town are not always the best for combat during events, as mechanics like initiative, to-hit, dual wielding, and two-handed fighting play a much different role in events than in the normal, turn-based flow of combat.

Your weapon is based on several calculations.

• A random damage value between your minimum and maximum weapon damage +
  
• A random number within the range of 0 and your "to-hit" value on your weapon +
  
• A random number within the range of 0 and your "initiative" value on your weapon
  

This will represent your base weapon damage. It's important to note that "to-hit" and "initiative" calculations cannot go below zero, so you will be punished much less for having a large, slow weapon. You will also, however, be rewarded more than in typical combat for having a quick, accurate weapon.

Below are some weapons I've pulled from the hands of the top of the leaderboard and I've broken down the total weapon damage average for each. Notice that while some weapons perform as you'd typically suppose, many perform much differently than they do in normal combat.

• Cute Teddy Bear: 19
  
• Berthulda's Great axe: 13
  
• assassin's dagger: 7.5
  
• Carnifex Crescent: 7.5
  
• Dreadful Smasher: 9.5
  
• Cutlass: 6
  
• Nuldrim's Runesword: 10.5
  

This randomized weapon damage will increase with .1 from each point of the melee skill, and your primary and secondary combat skills. The arms master skill increases your chance to deal maximum damage on the randomized portion of your weapon damage. This chance starts at 5% and increases with .2% per point of arms master.
Your weapon damage adds to your damage from other sources, but some combat skills apply only to your weapon damage.

Personal Skills

Agility, Endurance, Intelligence, Luck, Speed, and Strength all increase your base damage by .1 per point of skill. It's important to frame this against weapon damage for relative effect. If you have 100 on all 6 relevant personal skills, that would equate to 60 base damage. Each of these has a stat potion associated with it. Having those potions active (+20 points) would give +2 base damage per potion, for +12 base damage through the event if all are active. Other factors like bonuses on equipment and pigs in the ranch can also boost your skills, increasing your damage further.

Combat Skills

We've already discussed how your primary and secondary weapon skills and the melee skill will increase weapon damage, and a few other combat skills. Keep in mind this includes skills like cleaving that aren't active in normal combat. If you are carrying an axe, cleaving will increase your event weapon damage, even if the combat screen says the skill is not yet implemented. For the most part, the other combat skills do what you'd expect in different amounts. Aro has a great look under the hood already in the event help file, but here we'll discuss why some are better than others.

Plan on resetting combat skills before an event if able to try out a new style that's more advantageous to event mechanics.

• Critical strike vs arms master
  

Both arms master and critical strike give +.2% chance of activating their bonus. Arms master gives maximum weapon damage, whereas critical strike is double damage. As critical strike doubles base damage as well, unless you are a very young seeker and have no relevant personal skills, critical strike is always better. Even the most inconsistent range of damage weapons benefit from double damage but don't always get the full benefit out of max damage, and your other sources of damage are unaffected.

• First strike and charging
  

First strike and charging both offer a .1% chance to get an extra attack for any attack you perform. While the chance to hit twice and collect rewards twice sounds great, you'll also take damage twice. Each point is giving you a 1/1000 chance of performing a second attack too, which means there are way better uses for your points. The critical strike skill doubles damage dealt without doubling damage taken, and its twice as effective as these skills. Save yourself some effort, and respec these skills before an event.

• Slashing/crushing/piercing weakness
  

These skills offer a 1/3 chance of adding .5 damage to hits with the relevant weapon type. I keep seeing people not add points to this, I think because it's deceivingly more complicated than other stats. If we break it down, this means on average each point gives you .16 extra damage, which is 60% better than your primary and secondary skills or the melee skill.

Grail Blessing

The grail blessing is increased by town citizens contributing grail tokens to increase it. It will increase the damage of everybody in town by its current value as a %. During the event, particularly in the first few days, the grail blessing will randomly increase from attacks within the town. This means the first few days, you will do significantly more damage waiting as long as possible til reset to spend you stamina attacking, as the multiplier will be significantly higher from others' attacks.

Followers

The following followers can assist you in combat and will be more likely to assist you based on your popularity. Your warhorse has a 1% chance of dealing damage per point of riding skill.

• Brute Mercenary
  
• Warhorse
  
• Free Company Soldier
  

Preparing and surviving

While anybody can spend stamina and get great rewards, people who are looking to perform strongly for their town in combat events often spend months preparing. Pralines, grail stamina potions, health potions, stat potions, presents, and gear can be gathered and labored on in preparation for the event. Many people will reset their combat skills to a more advantageous set up before the event and trade potions and pool resources with small groups within town.

Maintaining life

Though many have the tendency to pile up stamina potions endlessly in preparation for a combat event, you can't forget that all the stamina in the world doesn't help when you're out of life. Typically, the stamina penalties for >50 life are not disabled during combat events, so running out of life can have dire consequences on your performance and be tough to climb out of.

As many seekers lean on health potions to keep them healthy during combat, constitution can get very important in events. Potions heal a % of max life, and constitution grants extra max life. If your constitution score is 1 (101 life), then a master health potion will give you 67 life. If your constitution is 100 (250 life), then a master health potion will give you 166 life. This 100 life difference is huge. You can raise your constitution with egg soups, or items like bandalf's staff or constitution potions. Equipping a bandalf staff before drinking that master healing potion would've given the seeker with 1 constitution another 7 life.

reserved for changelog

Arms Master Bonus is not the same as Critical Strike:

Arms Master: Each point on the skill increases the chance to do the maximum damage of the weapon by 0.25%

The Critical Strike Skill increases the chance of inflicting double damage with 0.2% and works for all Weapons classes