Matt Firor, from the Camelot Herald, talks about how combat style damages are assessed. Read on... Version 1.38 introduced a major revamp of how combat style damages are assessed. This is a short article to fully describe what the changes are, why they were made, and the effect they will have on your character. We made two major changes to the system. They are: 1) All your styles do more damage the more you train in the style's specialization. 2) Harder to use styles (i.e. ones that require openings) now do extra bonus damage. This change means that the more you train in a weapon specialization, the more damage styles you get from that specialization will do. The only exception to this is the first style in each weapon specialization, which never grows in power. What this does for your character is that now you have many more styles available to you that in the previous version were "too weak" to use. You probably want to go back through all your older low-level styles (except the first one in each spec) and check it out again. Also, we've added even more damage to certain styles - ones that are more difficult to perform. Previously, performing hard-to-do styles didn't do enough bonus damage to justify their use - these are styles that require openings (such as parry, block, evade) and styles that are "chained" off other styles. Now, performing these will do a lot more damage than they did before. An example of this is an Albion character who specializes in 1 handed slash. His first style (at 2 trains) is Ruby Slash. This is the first style in the 1H slash spec, and as such never gets better. This is a style that is quickly outgrown. The second style in the 1H slash spec is Cross Slash, which requires you to be to one side of your opponent. This style has an opening requirement, which means that it will now do more damage than it did before. The third style in 1H slash is Uppercut, which has no opening requirement - you can use it any time. Uppercut doesn't do any more damage than it did before, but now it will do more damage the more you specialize in 1H Slash - it will potentially never be "outgrown". Because of these changes, we saw that the Hibernian Piercing style Sidewinder required an opening style (Black Widow), which had no opening style. This means that under the new system, Sidewinder is much too powerful (because of its additional bonus damage) to be able to be used with no real opening - i.e. since Black Widow can be done any time, you can always easily chain into Sidewinder. So, we changed Sidewinder to require Tarantula, which in turn requires you to block. Now, to chain into Sidewinder, you must first block, then do Tarantula (extra bonus damage), and then Sidewinder (extra bonus damage). Please note that Assassin characters (Shadowblade, Nightshade, Infiltrator) will not notice any changes to their Critical Strike series of styles in version 1.38. This is because CS styles already were using this same bonus (they were the first class to receive these bonuses). Please keep in mind that because the base damage for Critical Strike styles is significantly higher than base damages of other class's styles, Assassin characters still do more bonus damage than any other class. The important thing to realize here is that you will be doing more damage with this new style change, since you are being rewarded for performing hard-to-do styles. We apologize for not documenting the Sidewinder change - that one slipped through the cracks.