It is broken for combat. In past a thief had 2 main weapons in combat:
defense and
sneak. Defense was nerfed long time ago by Frór (even superb defense means nothing vs parry split) and sneak was nerfed recently with nosneak feature (truth is sneak was kinda overpowered as it was). I vote for reinstating working defense, so thieves could yet again work as decent buffers as in mume 5. Today's combat system orientation on parry-split (read overkill) is not good imho. Parry-split should still give some advantage, but as it is now, the bonuses from parry split are simply stupidly high.
- IMHO, Ideally the domination triangle graf should be balanced like this:
- Offensive hitter-types dominate Casters
- Casters dominate Defensive hitter-types
- Defensive hitter-type dominate Offensive hitter-types
ad 1: Offensive warriors simply have the ob required to hit the casters with high success ratio, which prevents casters to cast, thus putting them in huge disadvantage.
ad 2: Defensive warriors and thieves lack the ob required to hit the casters with high enough success ratio and usually also have less hps than offensive warriors, they also tend to have lower willpower so it takes less spells to kill defensive warrior and is easier to apply special magic features on him than for offensive warrior and the chance to land the spell is higher.
ad 3: Offensive warriors generally inflict less damage to defensive hitter-types than they receive from them (especially if defensive hitter-types fight in wimpy mood).
I remind I am still talking about ideal state as I see it. In fact now it is like this:
Offensive warriors dominate everyone that is not sanced. (including other offensive warriors who are in smaller group)
Focus-staffed casters dominate bashed targets and slow targets. (mostly they just amplify the power of offensive warriors)
Non-focus staffed casters dominate bashed targets and superslow targets. (mostly they just amplify the power of offensive warriors)
Thieves are dominated by everyone. (if we don't count backstab)
When I spoke about casters, I used term "mostly", as luckily there are still few more tactical possibilities for casters, like quakes, quick blinds or use of charmies.
To sum it up, I think Frór did big mistake when he nerfed defence which seemed to some players (mostly to overkill warrior groups) too powerful. Instead he should have strengthened the casters somehow. (And since the best defence can be reached by whities with +10 db sapphire ring, it was the darkie casters who needed the boost in first place. Instead orc shamans and bns were left weak and offensive warrior types were made superpowerful.)