Thanks, as always, to everyone for your questions! You can submit any questions relating to current development plans, to request clarification on basic game mechanic questions, or questions on community issues through the Grab Bag Submission form. For any other feedback or suggestions please use our feedback form.

Read on for the questions! 

Overall there is no hard-set rule for ability type overrides, though it is true that we do tend to reward most realm abilities over other ability types. In these two cases however we think it is more balanced for it to work the way that it currently does.

Bolt miss-rates are calculated more similarly to other standard spell resist rates than they are melee swings.

One major difference is that bolts cannot be resisted like other spells can, they can only miss or be blocked.

The block rate of bolts is determined similarly to block-rates of archery shots where the block-rate of the target will determine how often a bolt is blocked, so long as the target is facing the bolting caster.

For misses, there are two distinct types of misses. The first type of miss is a standard miss where the bolt caster will receive the “You missed!” messaging in their combat log. The second type of miss is a hard-coded miss to prevent multiple simultaneous melee attacks or bolts from hitting the target at once. The chance for the second type of miss is 100% but only occurs when other bolts or melee attacks against the target land simultaneously.

For the first type of miss (a standard miss) the level of the bolt spell being cast and the level of the target are the two factors that determine its miss-rate, similar to how resist rates work for normal spells. This works out to a base miss rate of 10% for bolts that can be further reduced or increased based on the difference in bolt spell level and the target’s level. Players can further lower their base resist rates in RvR by using the Resist Pierce item bonus. For bolts, each bolt spell already has an inherent +20% chance to hit that applies after the initial miss rate from spell and target levels is determined.

After all of the calculations, against a level 50 target, a level 8 bolt spell will have 17-19% standard miss rate while a level 38 bolt will miss around 6-8% of the time and a level 46 bolt will miss at a 2-4% rate.

Double, Triple, and Quad hits for Savage’s Hand to Hand are only affected by the Savage’s Hand to Hand’s specialization level (including any amounts over 50 specialization). Rates for each will increase slightly as specialization increases. No other stats or bonuses will affect these rates.

For an idea on these rates from a previous Grab Bag:
The rates at 50+16 H2H specialization are as follows:
Triple: 16%
Quad: 5.75%

The rates at 44+16 H2H specialization are as follows:
Triple: 14%
Quad: 4.75%

For the +Parry and +Evade bonuses from Hand to Hand styles, these do not give the player a buff icon but are instead ‘hidden’ bonuses that are only valid for the next combat round of whoever is attacking the Savage at the time. These style bonuses do stack with all other Parry/Evade buffs but do not exceed the Parry/Evade caps.

The item bonus requirement “vs Humanoid” only refers to monsters of the Humanoid type. The requirement listed would need to be blank, say “vs All”, or specifically say “vs Players” in the delve for it to work against players.

There are several TOA-era item bonuses that are limited to only work versus specific monster types by default unless otherwise specified: Spell/Archery/Melee/Style Damage, Spell/Archery range, and Spell Resist Piercing. All other TOA-based item bonuses work on and versus players by default.

The order of resolution in combat is Evade, Parry, Block, Guard, Miss, and Bladeturn.

To be clear, the chance to hit only refers to a character’s chance not to miss a melee attack. Evade, Parry, and Block/Guard calculations are entirely separate from the following answer and those mechanics have been outlined in several previous Grab Bag responses.

Weaponskill (or any character stat) has no bearing on the chance to hit or be missed.

The first determining factor of hit-rate (or miss-rate) is the ‘enchantment bonus’ value of the weapon(s) being used and that of the armor being hit. Dropped weapons and armor all have standard enchantment bonuses set but crafted weapons and armors must be enchanted by your friendly Alchemist or Enchantment NPC to receive these bonuses. This also means that a lower level weapon (with a lower maximum enchantment bonus) targeting higher level armor will miss more.

Assuming that both the weapon(s) and armor are properly enchanted, the base to-hit rate is 87% (or 13% miss rate). What can affect this further is a given style’s +to hit bonus/penalty as well as any +accuracy buff/debuff on the character. It can be quite common to have a 100% hit-rate when using +to-hit styles and accuracy buffs.

The number of attackers does affect to-hit rates against monsters (including pets) but not against enemy players. The number of attackers only really enters into block calculations for enemy player targets.

Positional attacks with or without melee styles do not inherently increase to-hit chance, though many positional styles do have +to-hit bonuses and those obviously would. And while separate from to-hit or miss rates, positional attacks are of course greatly affected by Evade, Parry, and Block chances since non-Advanced Evade, Parry and Guard all rely on attackers being in the frontal arc of the defending character.

Lots to digest there! :)

Thanks everyone, and enjoy the weekend!