Fighting (Player Guides)

Combat is one of the basic activities on The Two Towers, as it is the only means to advance your character. This guide contains some basic information on how to easily dispatch NPCs.

Becoming a better fighter

First and foremost, the more skilled you are, the better you fight. When you first start here, your skills and stats are at their lowest and you will find that you may only take on the easiest of enemies. However, as the time progresses you will grow more powerful and will fight much better.

What factors in combat is your stats and your skills. The former may only be increased by profession trainers (and their increase is required for levelling up: see 'help levelling'), while the latter will also increase on their own while you use them (read: fight). In fact, at low skill levels, the increase of combat skills is fast enough that you should not worry about training them at trainers for a while.

The second thing that affects your combat performance is the weapon and armour you use. Without a weapon wielded, you will be using your bare fists, which is not very effective. Without armour, you will take a lot more damage, which will require you to spend a lot of gold and time on healing.

There are many ways to obtain fighting equipment. For new players, every home town has a 'helper' NPC that can provide them with starting equipment. While not very good, it should suffice for the starter fights. Later on, equipment can be obtained either from killed NPCs, quests or shops. As the NPCs that you can kill will probably carry weak weapons at first, the two latter ways are preferable: there are quite a few quests in the newbie areas that yield decent weapons, and shops are usually full of mid-grade weapons that are just too weak for high level players, but perfect for low levels. However, when you decide to buy a weapon at a shop, be aware that what you buy may be damaged; it is a good idea to "handle" and "condition" the weapon before buying.

After you reach 1d of character age, or advance up to level 3, you will be able to use the auction system. This is by far the best way to get the best equipment in game for the lowest price; high level players often have it in abundance, and auction the equipment to gain extra gold. Auction prices are almost always much lower than shop prices for the equipment, so you should take advantage of this system as soon as you can.

Combat

Fighting on The Two Towers is fairly simple; the combat is for most part automated, with the option of using various professional abilities and specific items. There are some basic combat-related commands that you should be aware of:

• consider - before you attack something, "consider" it to see if you have fair chances of winning. Even if an NPC attacks you on its own, you should consider them while fighting to see if you shouldn't run away!
• align - If you wish to roleplay as a strictly good or a strictly evil character, it is good to know if the NPC you are going to kill is good or evil, and therefore is it "moral" for you to kill it.
• wear, wield - Commands that let you equip your armour and weapons. Do not forget to wield your weapon before combat!
• wimpy - If you want a safe exit from combat, you may enable the wimpy mode. With it turned on, you will automatically flee when your HP fall low.
• kill - Your basic combat starting command. Note that you can also initiate combat by using professional abilities. Typing just 'kill' when your opponent is bleeding to death will finish them off, ending the combat quicker.
• headbutt, feint, kickback, multinock, trample, cast - ... and many others, the professional abilities let you utilize your profession's unique talents. Similarly as with regular combat, you will start by being very weak at using these, however with time your skills will improve. Unlike combat skills, they will not increase by use too fast (and each attempt costs a sizeable amount of endurance points too), so you will have to start training professional skills at trainers eventually.
• shape - A very useful command that will tell you how badly wounded your opponent is and thus how you are faring in your fight.
• hpq - Display your current hitpoints. This command is only somewhat useful, as your HP and EP are displayed in your prompt by default. Note, however, that prompt only refreshes after you type a command, so it might be "outdated" if you just let the combat run; it is wise to press ENTER every few combat rounds to see how many HP you really have.
• focus - A helpful command that lets you switch your combat tactics slightly, focusing on any of the four basic combat skills.

Here is a short example of a battle with an orc as your opponent:

     Orc scratches you.
     You hit Orc.
     Orc hits you hard.
     You inflict massive damage to Orc.
     Orc misses you.
     You massacre Orc with incredible force!
     Orc falls to the ground.
     Orc is bleeding to death and needs to be bandaged!
     You killed Orc.
     Orc has died.

After the battle has ended, examine the corpse immediately; you may find the corpse contains items and gold you want to take with you.