Combat rating

Introduction

Combat rating is the system in wurm, which decides how often you miss and get missed in combat. It is a numerical value calculated from a variety of factors. A higher combat rating makes you hit your opponent more, while making your opponent hit you less.

The system

When two players do battle, combat rating is used to decide how large a percentage chance each player has to miss their opponent. A miss is an attack that does not do any damage at all, essentially a "wasted" attack.

In order to determine how large a chance each player has, a formula is used:

Hit chance 1 = combat rating 1 divided by combat rating 1 + 2 multiplied by 100.

As an example, we have two fighters fighting each other. Fighter 1 has a combat rating of 15, while Fighter 2 has a combat rating of 25.

Therefore, the hit chance of fighter 1 is: 15 / (15 + 25) * 100 = 37,5%

The hit chance of fighter 2 is: 25 / (25 + 15) * 100 = 62,5%

What's special to note is, that the two hit chances will always add up to 100%. That means that not only does a high combat rating make you hit more, i.e. do more damage, it also provides a form of defence!

Acquiring combat rating

Every player in wurm and every creature has assigned a specific combat rating at all times. However, it is a large bundle of variables, not only determined by your skill and equipment, but also by your location and your kingdom population.

Confirmed variables to effect your combat rating:

Fighting skill. One of the basic ways of acquiring a high combat rating is, of course, to get a high fighting skill. Your fighting skill gives different combat rating depending on whether you are fighting an NPC creature, or you're fighting in PvP combat. When fighting versus other players in PvP, every 5 levels of fighting skill yields 1 extra combat rating. When fighting in PvE versus monsters and guards, every 10 levels of fighting skill yield 1 combat rating.

Kingdom bonus. A wild-only feature, there are two steps to this kingdom bonus. If your kingdom has less than 20% of the server online, you receive and extra 1 combat rating. If your kingdom constitutes less than 10% of the server population, you gain another point of combat rating, yielding a total of 2 extra.

Suspected variables to effect your combat rating:

• Weapon quality
• Armour quality
• Flanking
• Footing
• Height advantage
• High-faith bonuses from Magranon and Libila
• Combat bonuses from being near an altar of your deity
• Ruler bonus
• Appointed assassin, executioner or avenger bonus

Other notes

While it might seem like an obvious idea to add combat style (defensive, normal, aggressive) to the list of contributing factors in combat rating, it is not certain it does. Due to the double-working nature of combat rating, getting more will not only make you hit more, but also get hit less. So saying that aggressive fighters should get a higher combat rating than defensive fighters is false, since the added combat rating would also cause them to get missed more.

It is also important to note that due to the different combat ratings given out by fighting skill in PvP and PvE, fighting skill is less important in PvE than it is in PvP. That is, it is more important to have good weapons when fighting animals than it is to have high fighting skill, when compared to PvP.