I got curious and decided to see if i could calculate the maximum amount of hits a character with 8 character points at creation with help from rituals, magic items and potions could get. I’m not counting the ability to heal, so unstoppable and Elixir Vitae don’t count, just raw global hits, assume cost is not an issue. A character with no skills or armour has 2 global hits
Armour- Heavy (also make sure it’s physically heavy for dreadnought) this gives 4 more hits, this brings the total to 6 hits
Build- 5 character points to max out on endurance (which is actually only 2 ranks) and pick up dreadnought for 1 character point and that extra hit, surprisingly you can only spend 6/8 points, this is because the cost of endurance increases after each buy. 2 hits from endurance and 1 from dreadnought brings this up to 9 hits.
Potion- You can gain 3 ranks of endurance from the Ironblood Tonic, this can also be achieved by being and orc with either potion from the Double-sided Blade tonics, this is cheaper but you also get weakness or venom and you have to be an orc to get 3 ranks, humans only get 2. You can not be under the effect of 2 tonics at once. The 3 ranks of endurance from the potions brings the total global hits up to 12
Ritual- Unbreakable Behemoth Strength gives 5 ranks of endurance at the cost of a powerful role-playing effect. This is an enchantment and you can’t be under the effect of more than one enchantment. These 5 ranks raises the total to 17 hits.
Magic Items- I could not find any magic weapons or group magic items that increase hits, however the heavy armour Winterborn Warmail gives 3 ranks of endurance, this is the highest i could find for armour. For talisman, the magic standard Titans Battlemark give 5 ranks of endurance. So the magic items increase the total by 8 hits to 25 global hits.
In the magic game there’s a rule that you can never have more than triple your base rank: I’m honestly surprised there’s no similar rule for hits. I had a look in the wiki, but I can’t find one, so it looks like you might be right!
If you are able to source some heavy metal armour phys-reps, an expensive tonic, an expensive ritual, a really pricey set of armour AND an expensive banner…
It’s an interesting speculation, but you chances of getting your hands on all of those at character creation is about nill.
Min-maxing furiously on one axis will also narrow what fun you get out of the game in a similar fashion.
Nicely done as an exercise, I advise against trying for this in game.
There is no maximum threshold on hits. One big reason for this is that unlike lore, having more hits doesn’t really achieve much for you in lots of situations: someone with 25 hits goes down and dies just like anyone else if their squad is surrounded and cut down…
oh yeah i would never try this myself, just not worth the effort. Just got curious. Also the reason i put them at character creation is because if they had infinite character points they could have infinite endurance so i needed an arbitrary number that somewhat made sense. But yeah totally agree, super min maxing should be left in the theoretical, not the practical. thanks for the feedback
To be fair, while i don’t think this would be the best idea, i could see a rich group dedicating 14 thrones to something like this, like in the challenge of the iron duke.
But it would take 16 ranks of fortitude in order to regenerate health in theory, and when i shot an email to PD, they said that if someone did manage to get to that, that they wouldnt regain hits after 2 hours on the floor, as it isnt a safe enviroment to heal in. The exact timing was around 128 Minutes, and the email responder said that if they managed to get back through the gate, they would die from multiple trumatic wounds immediately upon return
Full leather is medium, at max, so 5 hits in total.
What heroic abilities are you looking at?
(This is being asked as someone who knows a number of folks who went Hero Points just for “Stay With Me” which is a nifty little way of keeping people up in a line if you’ve not got a dedicated frontline physick)
For contrast the unstoppable build gets a lot more hits:
Hero points,
Unstoppable,
Extra hero point,
Dreadnought,
Shield use
So without items or enchantment you have 7 hits in full metal armour base with an additional 9 (+3 per unstoppable) hits from healing yourself (total 16).
Then you get:
Weapon:Triumphant blade,(+1 hero point)
Shield: champion’s bastion (regain 1 hit on hero point spend)
Armour: golden fire scale (unstoppable heals 5 hp)
Skip the potion because you missed out an item
Enchantment: going full bar though you could have Still waters running deep (+3 hero points).
This effectively means your 7 hit points base and all your hero points (7 hero points). Each unstoppable heals 6.
So that means you’ve got 49 effective hits, assuming you take a 5s breather (including on the floor).
thanks for the feedback