"If our people are to fight their way out of bondage
we must arm them with the sword and the shield
and the buckler of pride."
- Mary McLeod Bethune
Parrying allows you to protect yourself from melee type attacks using a shield or a weapon. It is a very usefull skill for both mages and warriors, whether you PvM or especially PvP. At GM level, when successfull, parry will allow you to completely block all melee and range damage against you, including those that would have been inflicted through special attacks. In order to benefit from the skill, you will need to wield either a shield (for higher success rate) or a weapon. So even if you use 2-handed weapons, your parrying abilities will not be lost, but your success rate will be divided by 2. Using defense increase jewels/weapons, could greatly compensate for that 2-handed weapon penalty (up to 15% increase per item). Note that shields can also benefit from defense increase bonuses. A mage with wrestling will benefit from the extra wrestling bonus (as long as he doesn't wield a weapon), even if he wields a shield.
The table below displays your rate of success based on skill level:
| Skill |
% Success Using a Shield |
% Success Using a Weapon |
| 5 |
1.5% |
0.75% |
| 25 |
7.5% |
3.75% |
| 50 |
15% |
7.5% |
| 75 |
22.5% |
11.25% |
| 100 |
30% |
15% |
| 120 |
36% |
18% |
The type of shield used does not affect your chances of success, but simply the durability, strength required and resistance bonus you will benefit from. The table below outlines the durability, strength requirement and resistance bonus of the various available type of shields.
| Shield |
Resistance (+1%) |
Required Strength |
Durability |
| Buckler |
Poison |
20 |
40-50 |
| Wooden |
Energy |
20 |
20-25 |
| Bronze |
Cold |
35 |
25-30 |
| Metal |
Fire |
45 |
50-65 |
| Tear Kite |
Energy |
20 |
50-65 |
| Metal Kite |
Energy |
45 |
45-60 |
| Heater |
Fire |
90 |
50-65 |
| Chaos |
Physical |
95 |
100-125 |
| Order |
Physical |
95 |
100-125 |
The more you block the more damaged your shield will become. Having some GM repair deeds handy could spare you quite a bit of grief, especially if you have a uber shield and a macer is having fun bashing on it.
Skill Training
You stand a chance to gain parry everytime you engage in melee combat while holding a shield or a weapon (though once you reach 60, you get better gains when holding a shield). So basically, you could just fight your way through GM, never really focusing on Parry, yet still gaining.
However, as parry is a very useful combat skill, you may want to GM it as quickly as possible to increase your chances when facing more powerful creatures. You will also get better gains when training parry if your other damage evasion skills are low (such as tactics, eval int, anatomy, wrestling and all other melee skills). You will want to fight multiple creatures at once to increase your gains. On average 8-10 creatures should do the trick. This means, have a healer handy or you will be biting the dust more times than you care to. Cross-healing with another person also training Parry is a good way to raise multiple skills. You should both have high dexterity to increase your healing speed and high healing to increase the amount of HP restored. Don't forget that you will be fighting so your fingers will slip a lot.
The table below indicates what to train on according to level. Remember to have about 9 of those creatures attacking you at once:
| Skill |
What to Fight |
Where to Fight |
| 0 |
Buy Skill from NPC |
Smith, Armourer, Noble, Fighter |
| 30 |
Small animals (sheeps, cats, rabbits) |
Yew Sheep Pen, Jhelom / Delucia Farm |
| 40 |
Chickens, goats, pigs, sheeps |
Jhelom /Delucia Farm |
| 65 |
Unarmed Female NPC Fighters |
Jhelom Pit |
The NPC females will take you all the way to legendary. As your skills increase you will need to also increase the number of those females you fight. Unarmed, those NPCs will not damage you at all so don't wear any armor: you would wear it out for nothing. Attack them to make them attack you then tab out so you do not damage them. Have A LOT of spare shields in your backpack because you will go through them like candy. Ideally, you should ride a beetle with bags of 20 shields so each time you run out, you can just grap another bag without having to leave. If all the female fighters have weapons, just hire one of them, bring them to the pit (ie outside guardzone) use a disarm attack to get rid of their weapon, then release them.
