Player's Guide

You may know about how each class uses one primary attribute m they do in attacks (if not, see Building Your Pirate, below):

• Buccaneer: Strength
• Musketeer: Agility
• Privateer: Will
• Swashbuckler: Agility
• Witchdoctor: Will

You can boost other attributes, and should!

Agility, Strength and Will all provide a host of benefits, not the least of which may be increasing the chance of Epic talents happening. Also, during combat the value of your attributes are often compared to the enemy’s and some things only happen based on whose attribute is higher.

For example, if your target is a Buccaneer, you will be more effective with your attack if your strength is higher than the target’s, so that you’re basically overpowering them.

Here’s another example:

Whether or not someone can dodge an attack depends on both the attacker’s Accuracy and the target’s Dodge values. The higher the attacker’s Accuracy, the higher the chance that the attack will actually hit the target. But if the target has a high Dodge, they can lower the attacker’s chance of hitting them, so that the attacker might miss the target.

It works something like this:

          Odds Bonnie Anne will hit her target = 75% + her Accuracy – target’s Dodge It’s not quite that simple, but this gives the basic idea. Each attack starts with a base of 75%. A higher Accuracy means better odds that the attack will connect. But the higher the target’s Dodge, the lower the odds.

Example: Bonnie Anne has 10(%) Accuracy and she’s attacking someone with 0(%) Dodge.

          Therefore, she has 75 + 10 – 0 = 85% chance of hitting her target (no guarantee she’ll hit, but a good chance)

Example: She has 5% Accuracy and is attacking someone with 20% Dodge

          She'll therefore have 75 + 5 – 20 = 60% chance of hitting her target (because they can dodge pretty well!)

Example: Someone with 5% accuracy is attacking Bonnie Anne and she has 5% Dodge

          The attacker has 75 + 5 – 5 = 75% chance of hitting her (hmm, I should put more points into her Dodge!)

Remember that how much damage boosting you have doesn’t really matter if you can’t actually hit the enemy. Having a higher Accuracy is critical to consistently hitting the enemy, and having a high Dodge value means they’ll miss you more often.

And if they do get hit, having a high Armor reduces the damage from physical attacks, just as Resist reduces damage from magical attacks.

Let’s take a look at the various character attributes that all combatants have, and what they mean.

Character Attributes

Rough - – boosts physical and magical weapon attack damage.

Spooky - boosts Powers effects, including healing, poisoning and trap damage. It won’t affect powers like Backstab that still uses a weapon for the actual attack. It will not boost staff damage or gun damage.

Armor - won’t reduce the odds of getting attacked, but will reduce the amount of physical (i.e. non-magical) damage received. So this attribute is good against Melee and Crossbow attacks.

Resist - won’t reduce the odds of getting attacked, but will reduce the amount of magical damage received. So this attribute is good against elemental gunfire and pure magical attacks (like the Witchdoctor staff).

Accuracy - boosts your chance that non-Power attacks actually hit, and for ranged Powers may actually boost the damage.

Dodge - helps you avoid getting hit (won’t help with AoE attacks – those that hit multiple combat tiles at the same time)

Weapons

While you can’t swap out your companions’ weapons whenever you want, you can change your own weapon. Weapons all get bonus damage from one of the three primary attributes (Agility, Strength and Will). Which attribute is used depends on the type of weapon it is:

• A Shooty weapon uses Agility for the bonus
• A Slashy weapon uses Strength for the bonus
• A Smashy weapon uses Strength for the bonus
• A Stabby weapon uses Agility for the bonus
• A Staffy weapon uses Will for the bonus

For every 5 points you have of the attribute that the weapon uses, you get +1 extra damage added to the weapon’s damage range. The weapon doesn’t care about the other two primary attributes.

Notice I didn’t say anything about what Class the pirate is? Any class pirate can wield any weapon and it’s the weapon that boosts off the attribute. But classes that have a higher value for that primary attribute will do more damage with that weapon.

For example, the Witchdoctor

• starts with a Staffy weapon ( Staffy bonuses come from Will), which has a basic 8 to 14 points of damage.
• starts with 20 Will, so 20 / 5 = 4 bonus damage added to the staff’s base damage.
• thus, the witchdoctor will do 8+4 to 14+4 = 12 to 18 points of damage with this weapon.

You can see this same information by going to My Character and putting your cursor over the Weapon section, which shows how much damage the currently-equipped weapon will do. The pop-up window will show how that damage range is calculated:

This shows the equipped Feathered Staff will do from 8 to 14 points of base damage. As a staff, it uses the Will of the character holding the weapon to boost the weapon’s damage. The Witchdoctor starts with 20 points of Will, so 20/5 = another 4 points of damage added to the base range, making the staff do 12 to 18 points of damage.

This same bonus value applies to any Will-based weapon that the witchdoctor equips.

On the other hand, if the witchdoctor equipped a Strength-based weapon, the bonus wouldn’t be as good:

• equipped a Smashy weapon – which uses Strength - that does from 8 to 14 damage
• Witchdoctors start with 15 Strength, so 15 / 5 = 3 bonus damage added to the staff’s base damage
• Therefore, the witchdoctor will do 8+3 to 14+3 = 11 to 17 points of damage with this Smashy weapon.

Not quite as good, but not terrible either. Bear in mind, though, that a lot of the skills that any class learns – and the weapons they get from quests – are focused on their class weapon type, the type they come with when they start.

You can see the Type of a weapon by putting your cursor over it, in the My Backpack inventory or in a store.

Here we see the Feathered Staff again. Underneath it, we’re reminded that it is a Staffy weapon. Under that, it says that the damage bonus comes from the Will attribute. Then it shows the damage type (Magical) and the staff’s base damage (8 to 14) and – in the case of staffs that hit more than one tile – it also shows the pattern of the combat tiles that an attack will cover (in red). Finally, the dotted arced line shows that this is a ranged weapon and you can click on targets standing up to 3 tiles away.

Note that both Crossbows and Guns are ranged weapons using Agility as their bonus attribute, but the damage they each do is different. Crossbows deal Physical damage (even if firing Fire arrows). Guns deal elemental – which is Magical – damage (although guns do not benefit from the Spooky attribute).

That means that damage received from a Crossbow can be reduced with a high Armor value, while Gun damage can be reduced with a high Resist value.

Building Your Pirate

When first creating your pirate, there are several things that you can do to tailor your pirate if you want.

First, note that each class is weaker in one of the three primary attributes (Agility, Strength and Will)

	Strength	Agility	Will
Buccaneers	20	20	15
Musketeers	15	20	20
Privateers	20	15	20
Swashbuckler	20	20	15
Witchdoctor	15	20	20

As mentioned up above in Weapons, these primary attributes will affect the damage bonus you can receive with different types of weapon. But, you can also compensate for the damage from a weaker damage bonus by adding Rough to your talents when you level up.

Second, you change a secondary attribute when you decide where the player was raised:

When you pick a birth location, your pirate gets a talent based on how they were raised (the talent is shown in parenthesis when you put your cursor over each option). The possible talents are:

• Born Sneak adds +5 to Dodge attribute
• Born Warrior adds +5 to your weapon damage range
• Keen Eyes adds +5 to Accuracy attribute
• Naturally Spooky adds an additional 5% to Spooky damage
• Naturally Tough adds an additional 5% to your max health (even after you level up)

For example, in the picture above you can see that selecting Skull Island will give you the Born Sneak talent.

In addition, Privateers and Musketeers start the game with 1 Resist, while Witchdoctors start with 2 Resist, due to their professions’ experience of magic.

The Privateer’s starter weapon also includes a shield. Shields add an Armor bonus as long as that weapon is equipped. Other weapons, clothing and other equippables can also grant attribute bonuses.

Next Up: Companions

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