Fighting

Version 0.12: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

Fighting is a generic combat skill that provides small bonuses to your accuracy and damage with melee attacks (but not spells or ranged attacks), as well as extra hit points.

Combat Benefits

Every melee attack you make gains the following bonuses from your Fighting skill:

Accuracy: Adds 1dFighting
Base Damage: Multiplied by 1 + 1d(Fighting/30)

This is a smaller bonus than you get from training your weapon skill, especially when weapon delay reduction is taken into account. However, the benefits from the two skills stack, making it worthwhile to train both if you intend to fight in melee often.

HP Gain

The extra durability provided by this skill, although small initially, is significant by the end game, and any character can benefit from training it. The base extra HP provided by Fighting is equal to:

(XP level × Fighting) / 8

or 0.125 HP per experience level. This base HP bonus is then modified by your species modifier; the Robust, Frail, and Rugged Brown Scales mutations; and certain transformations. It is then rounded down to the nearest whole number, but the calculation does take into account partial Fighting skill level. In the end, the final adjustment amounts to a gain of about 2.2% more HP per level of Fighting.

Characters with good species modifiers (such as ogres and trolls) will see the most dramatic gains from training Fighting. While low HP species such as felids and spriggans will see more modest returns from training the skill, they also have a greater need for more HP.

Examples

• A level 5 human with a Fighting skill of 5.0 receives a bonus of (5 × 5) / 8 = 3 HP.
• A level 15 human with a Fighting skill of 12.5 receives a bonus of (15 × 12.5) / 8 = 23 HP.
• A level 27 human with a Fighting skill of 27.0 receives a bonus of (27 × 27) / 8 = 91 HP.
• A level 27 felid with a Fighting skill of 27.0 receives a bonus of ((27 × 27) / 8) × 0.6 = 54 HP.
• A level 27 ogre with Robust 3, Rugged Brown Scales 3, and a Fighting skill of 27.0 receives a bonus of ((27 × 27) / 8) × 1.67 = 152 HP.

Fighting Aptitudes

From Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.12 in-game documentation:

At	Ba	Co	DE	Dg	Ds	Dj	Dr	Fe	Fo	Gr	Gh	Gn	Hu	Ko	Mf	Mi	MD	Mu	Na	Op	On	Sp	Te	Tr	Vp	VS
-1	2	0	-2	-1	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	8	0	1	1	2	1	0	0	0	3	-2	0	-2	-1	-1

The average fighting aptitude of all species, excluding coloured draconian, is +0.077.