| Stats Affected: | Description: This is your ability to perceive and defend against attacks from opponents. By increasing this skill, you will block and evade more attacks when using a sword. You will also take less damage, and will be less likely to stumble when hit by a weaker attack. A balanced swordsman would keep this skill similar to his Melee Attack level. |
| -Chance of blocking incoming attacks | |
| Ways to Train: | |
| -Getting hurt, getting beaten up, losing battles
-Blocking incoming attacks | |
| -Combat- | |
Melee Defense is used in armed combat. Equipping a weapon will cause characters to block incoming hits. If no weapon is equipped, the character will instead dodge using the Dodge skill. Both are not possible - an armed character will always block (except if attacked while stumbling).
The chance of blocking is calculated similarly to the chance of dodging. It has a maximum 95% chance when your melee defense level is at least 21 levels higher than your opponent's attack level. Having additional levels does not provide any additional benefits, but it may be useful against more skilled opponents.
Training[]
Due to this skill being affected by Stronger Opponent Logic, an effective yet high risk method of raising melee attack and defense quickly is by lowering your combat skills. This happens when you equip a backpack, various helms or some armours such as the Holy Chest Plate. In combat, when your stats show a negative in brackets (e.g -10 from a traders large backpack) this is the base used to calculate your experience gain. Meaning, if you have 20 defence normally and find it is leveling slowly, if you equip a traders large backpack it will be counted as 10. You will then gain the amount of exp that someone with 10 melee defence would. This is also true of Melee Attack. Please note that this will not reduce the amount of experience needed to level.
Pieces of equipment that lower your combat abilities are cumulative, for example a large traders backpack in addition to chainmail, the holy chest plate and a tin can helmet would lower your skills by (-18).