Your First Battle
Now that you've done all of that, you're ready to enter battle. Start by selecting an appropriate enemy, far enough away from the guards so that they don't "save" you.

Look for a leet or something similar, at level 1 all the mobs will be yellow, so don't worry when you can't find a green or gray con mob to try. Find a target, the Leets or Birds of Paradise are the best bet for a successful first fight.

Target your chosen mob and hit the 'Q' button. You are now in combat, which you can see by the little red flashing target symbol to the left of the compass at the bottom of your screen.

You will fight with your weapon until you or the enemy are dead. Use any special attacks that you put on your hotbar earlier. You will notice that there is a bar going up and down in the top left of your screen. This is your weapon speed.

As you attack it goes up, this is the weapon speed in your weapon description, then it goes back down before it can attack again, this is your reload time.

Aggression / Defensive slider
This is a feature of AO that allows you to define your combat style. It effects the speed at which the attack bar mentioned above rises. The downside is that it modifies your defensive rating as well, the faster your attacks, the more damage you are likely to take as well.

In your stats menu you find the slider, despite the fact it looks and acts as a slider there are actually only three settings that are effected. Full defensive (i.e. all the way to the left), Full Aggressive (All the way to the right) and anywhere in between which balances the two

Movement in Combat
Moving faster than your opponent can be a very important part of a combat. Whether it is to flee combat or approach so quickly that your opponent can't react before you're on them, this is very useful. Everyone has access to some basic run speed enhancing nanos (Swiftness, Adrenaline Pump, and Quickness, in order of bonus).

The two professions that are much better at this are Fixers and Adventurers. Adventurers have some basic speed enhancements, including one for their team. Fixers are vastly superior in this regard, though, as their lowest level speed enhancing nano (Limited Grid Jump) adds significantly to run speed and also to evasion, at the cost of reducing damage output. You could run into battle and cancel the nano before engaging combat if this were a problem, however.

Moving faster is as important as getting your opponent to move slower. There are only a few Professions that have the ability to make their opponents move more slowly, Agents, Bureaucrats, Fixers, Traders, and Nano-technicians. Traders and Nano-technicians only have root nanos, Bureaucrats have both root and slow nanos, and Agents and Fixers have slow nanos. Note that many of the slow nanos actually function as roots in many cases, since their effect is to drop your run speed by a considerable amount. If your run speed is dropped below 0, you can still move, although at basically a crawl speed.

Why is this useful? The two most obvious reasons are to escape combat, or to remove someone from engaging in combat. If you snare or root someone, you can obviously get away much more easily, obviously. An example of the second use is to snare/root a melee-oriented character if you have a ranged weapon, so you can hold them out of range of melee attacks but within range of your ranged weapon, and slowly tear them apart. The opposite also works, melee-oriented characters can root someone there so they can't run away, and you can pound them to a pulp.

It is possibly to time your movement during the actual battle to take advantage of certain conditions. The most common one is reloading. When you're reloading, you can do it whether or not you are standing still, so if you have to move, doing so when you're reloading doesn't incur a penalty on how quickly you attack. Also, if you pay attention to the attack bar in the upper left corner, this moves from left to right and back again (at speeds dictated by the Attack and Recharge speed of your weapon). A shot or attack is only made at the right end of the bar. Moving at that time will delay your attack, but movement at any other time will not affect your attack, as long as you stop moving before it gets to the right side.

Evades and Armour Class (AC)

What does it mean?
AC stands for armour class - the higher this stat is, the more protection you have against that type of attack. a good majority of the attacks in Rubi-Ka come in three main categories - most armour types provide the most defense against these types:

Melee/Ma AC - This protects against close combat and martial art damage
Imp/Proj AC - Protects against Impact and projectile damage from most standard issue bullets
Energy AC - Protects against energy damage from laser weapons

There are also a series of less common damage types. These are not always protected by a given armour type. Therefore check your stats carefully - you may be opening yourself up to a certain type of attack. Whilst this isn't too much of an issue against NPC Mobs, in PvP a canny opponent will soon figure out where your weakness lies.

Radiation AC - Protects against weapons or attacks that do radiation damage. After level 50 some Mobs do use radiation attacks.
Chemical AC - Protects against chemical attacks - most common against Fixer's using their chemically modified Maussers
Disease AC - Protects against disease (poison) damage
Fire AC - Protects against fire damage
Cold AC - Protects against cold damage

Be aware that some professions (martial artists especially) have the ability to change their damage type through the use of NF's - they might switch mid fight from doing melee damage to suddenly doing Fire or chemical damage!

When you start you don't have any armour, it's not an issue for the first few levels, but after that you'll want to start looking for some as soon as possible. We'll talk about how to find equipment and armour in a bit.

Bring up your 'WEAR' menu and check the armour tab, this will show you what slots can be equipped with armour

Evades
Whether or not to raise your evade skills are one of the most frequently asked questions of new players to AO (and some veterans as well!). This guide will explain in as much as it can (as the exact calculations are not known to anyone other then the programmers!) what they can do to help you on your travels.

What are evades?
Evades are a set of skills found in your 'SPEED' tab on your skill selection. There are three evade skills that can be raised. We will deal with the specifics of each in a little bit. These skills effect the chances of a mob hitting you, and the chance of that mob doing a critical hit. Whether they actually effect how much damage a hit does is open to debate. Your AC's effect the amount of damage much more then your evades.

Best advice is always to keep your AC's as high as you can in the first place! A good rough guide is that for normal hunting of mobs your armour ratings should be at least your current level x 20.

If your AC's are at or around the level mentioned above you will notice that mobs seem to do either their minimum damage (which will vary from mob to mob) or a critical hit. For example at level 100 a mob will probably do around 100 pts damage as it's minimum. A mobs critical hit can vary depending on the type of damage it is doing and the weapon type it's using. This is where the types of evades come into play:

If you look at the description for any weapon you will see which of the evades it uses to calculate hits. Mobs hits are calculated in exactly the same way.

• Dodge Ranged
  This is the evade that is used when the attacker is using most types of ranged attack. This is the most common type of attack you will be faced with. If you feel you only have the IP to raise one evade, raise this one.
• Evade Close Combat
  This is the evade used to calculate melee hits and martial arts attacks.
• Duck Explosion
  This is used very little in player v mob combat, but can be useful in PvP as it is used for several of the lines of shotguns in AO. Mobs will very rarely use this type of attack against you.

What is know is that hits are calculated as a check against the attack rating of the attacker and the defense rating of the target. Whilst you can see your attack rating on your hud you cannot see your defense rating. It's a hidden statistic.

Evades are based 50% on Agility, 20% on Intelligence and 30% on Sense. That means you will roughly get 1 pt in evades for every 8 spent in agility, every 16 in Intelligence and every 14 in Sense (those are rough calculations and will vary based on your breed / profession)

So what do they do really?
Well, given the confusion with AC's as mentioned above, players have long debated the worth of evades and what I am explaining here is purely from my own observations in game, and those of other gamers / feedback on boards.

Under level 50 the effect of evades is negligible, so this is something that you don't really need to worry about until you've played the game for a bit. Once over that level though you can notice a marked difference. If a player fights a mob and hasn't raised their evades damage will go something like this:

Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob hits for it's minimum damage

Now if you have raised your evades, it's more like this.

Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob score a critical hit
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage

Remember that AC is important, if a mob is doing variable damage against you, its more then likely you need to work on raising your Armour Class as well as your evades. Once you see one of the above patterns developing, then you're probably on target and will start to see the real benefit of raiding your evades.

If you are still skeptical try raising one of the two main evades and then notice the difference in the damage type you raised.

Bear in mind that these are only really visible against high green / yellow mobs. If you try to always do orange / red mobs you probably get high end damage all the time anyway. Likewise if you constantly team, the mobs drop so quickly that your evades are much harder to judge. To get a true picture try a solo mission at 50%-75%, you will truly see that they do make a difference when you can see the damage clearly as you can in that situation.

My personal advice would be to raise these skills, especially if you solo a lot.

Evades and PvP
If you plan on actively participating in PvP, or want to, you will need to max these three skills whenever possible. No question, no debate, raise them! Players you will fight are more powerful then the mobs and adopt tactics that are designed to exploit weaknesses in players skills. Many PvP'ers use shotguns so the Duck Explosions skill becomes vital. Due to scopes and nanos players also crit much more regularly then mobs so be warned!

Conclusion on evades
As I said earlier, I or no-one else outside Funcom can prove this one way or other, all I can do is say that as a player of AO since launch I believe that they are very helpful to a successful character, and vital in PvP

Special Attacks
All of the special attacks have a factor that determines the speed at which they refresh. They also have a greater chance of doing critical damage. The time factor can be described as follows: a person using a weapon with Burst on it, for example, multiplies the time factor for Burst with the attack speed of the weapon, resulting in a period of time that it takes for your Burst ability to refresh after making that attack. Since Burst's time factor is 60, a weapon with a attack of 2.50 sec, will result in a 150 second (2.5 minute) recharge on Burst.

Icons for your special attacks can be found in your actions menu, these can be dragged and dropped onto the hotbar

Crowd Control
Crowd Control is a term that came from Everquest, and it is used to refer to times where a group is attacked by more enemies than they know what to do with, and you need to either "remove" them from the battle for a period of time, or look for the nearest escape route for yourself.

The most common way to do this is to "mesmerize" or "mez" your opponent. This has the effect of basically making them stand there for a period of time, effectively stunned, while you deal with the rest of the enemies and can move on to that one. In AO, there are three professions that can mez the enemy, Bureaucrats, Nano-technicians, and Traders. Bureaucrats are the best at it, receiving their first mez spell early on (before level 10) and having the longer lasting ones. Traders don't receive their first one till around 20th level, and nano-technicians only receive one, and have it much later on.

These spells last for a certain amount of time (25 seconds for the lowest level Bureaucrat one), and during that time, the creature will stand there doing nothing. Attacking the creature during that time will break the effect.

Reloading
Reloading is a minor issue in combat. Obviously only weapons with ammo need to be reloaded. Melee types can skip this section.

In many cases, reload times are not too important and they are merely a nuisance. There are times where they become important, and anyone who has played an Agent knows what I'm talking about. Many rifles have very small magazines (5 or 6 bullets) and have long recharge times, and can't be dual wielded, so you wind up with large amounts of time standing there, in combat, reloading your gun.

The way around this is simple. Guns can be reloaded manually. Pick up the ammo from your inventory and right-click on your gun in your Weapons tab. This will reload your gun. As an Agent, I could usually kill the enemy with a full clip without having to reload, so this was a way to come into battle fully-loaded and ready to fight.

Healing
You will be able to heal yourself between fights using the treatment kit all new players are provided with (sit down by pressing the X key and right click the treatment kit, or if you have placed it on the hotbar you can just hit the relevant key). Heal yourself during fights by using the provided First Aid kits (target yourself by pressing F1 and right click the first aid kit)

The starter kits only provide a little healing and nano boost, before long you will want to buy heal stims and kits. Stims can be used during combat, while treatment kits have to be used when not fighting. Let's not worry about that just yet, you can get by with the starter kit until you have the hang of it.

Treatment kits are used to quickly replenish health between fights. In order to use a treatment kit on yourself you must:

• Be sitting
• Not be in a fight
• Have yourself targeted
• Have the requisite skill in Treatment

When using on another person the target must be seated, you do not have to be. Nano rechargers can be seen as a treatment kit for your nano energy. In addition to treatment skill they require a certain skill in Time and Space. The treatment lab new players start with also restores nano points.