Stoneshard: Right on Target for Maces Guide

Hello everyone, in this guide I’ll try to explain my thoughts regarding Right on Target Maces and show how to play it.

For those that want a quick look at what skills are pretty much mandatory you can refer to the images below.

You might have some questions regarding this build so I’ll try to answer some of those here:

Why Right on Target with Maces?

Because it’s fun to have to work around not having a shield to cover your defenses and the Finish Off skill is hella powerful. Also, you get to use 1h Flails and those are pretty powerful. Finally, stagger debuff is also incredibly strong.

What the strenghts and weaknesses of this build?

As your strengths, you get to take advantage of the powerful stats given by Right on Target
(RoT for short) and you get to use the powerful mace abilities, Armor Break and Finish Off.

As for clear disadvantages, the Mace skill tree doesn’t offer any inherent defense mechanisms aside from applying stagger or chaining dazes for a stun, so you have to complement your defense with other skill trees, you also don’t have any mobility skills or AoE skills.

What’s the general playstyle of this build?

Because you won’t have a lot of defenses early on and you won’t have any AoE Skills, you’re pretty much locked into having 1 v 1 fights. You’ll be focusing on maintaining that one enemy staggered for as long as possible. But, once you’ve unlocked some of the defensive skills in other trees, you’ll have more leeway to fight 2 v 1 or 3 v 1.

What character should I play as?

Any will do, although picking one with Mace and Combat Mastery(CM) skill trees unlocked is preferred.

Which stats should I focus on?

As a rule of thumb, you’ll focus on stats that unlock your skills. Because we want to pick RoT, we’ll almost always start with Agility (Agi) and put a point into Perception (Per) at lvl 6. After that you’ll have to put points into Strength (Str) to unlock your mace’s skills.

The distribution can change, depending on if you get a early CM II book or a Mace II or III book.
In those cases you might not need to invest into Agi or Str early, leaving you free to put points into Per or Vitality (Vit).

After you’ve unlocked all your core skills, you can focus on Str or Per, depending if you want raw damage or more critical chance.

In this section I’ll guide you through your skill choice as you level up.

Up to level 5 you’ll most likely put your stat points into Agi, as to unlock RoT at level 6.
Depending if you can get a CM II book early, you can then put your stat points into Str, so that you can unlock the Mace skills earlier.

Level 1

You’ll get Armor Break and Seize the Initiative (StI).

Armor Break

This will be your main skill until you get Finish Off. This skill does everything, has a chance to apply Stagger, breaks armor, reduces the cooldown of your Mace skills, applies a damage taken and control resistance debuff on the enemy. It’s offense, defense and utility in a single skill.

Seize the Initiative

StI is a pre-requisite for RoT and also a pretty good early game skill. Not only does it increases your stats, but also debuffs the enemy for the same stats. So it makes you more effective while making the enemy more ineffective.

Level 2 to 4

In this level range you have some choices, those being Dazing Strikes, Disengage, Mighty Kick, Onslaught or Opportune Moment.
The only mandatory skill in this level range would be Moment of Weakness, because we want to get Hammer and Anvil at level 5.

Dazing Strikes

This passive skill provides some cool debuffs every time you attack an enemy that’s dazed or staggered. This early in the game though, you’re mostly getting one stack from staggering with Armor Break. The passive daze chance is nice, but not really that noticeable this early in the game.

Disengage

This passive skill provides dodge chance and a Accuracy (Acc) and Fumble debuff for each enemy adjacent to you. Early in the game this is pretty good because enemies already have bad Acc and Fumble chance, so you making it even worse helps you survive. This is also a pre-requisite for Dash and Elusiveness, both skills that are good in this build. You’ll need Athletics unlocked to get this though.

Mighty Kick

This skill is pretty useful early game because you can kick enemies into walls, dazing them. It can be paired with Dazing Strikes, so you can get some extra stacks of the debuff on the enemy. It also is a pre-requisite for Push the Falling and No Time to Linger and those are quite synergistic with Mace skills. You’ll also need Athletics unlocked for this skill.

Onslaught

Onslaught is a weird skill, the first attack burns energy and tries to knockback, if you succeed the knockback, you get a second attack with a little bit less dmg and a chance to daze.

This early into the game this skill is pretty good, you can use it after StI and Armor Break to get both a stack of Sti and possibly two hits with the 10% extra damage from Armor Break. If you also have Moment of Weakness and have staggered the enemy with Armor Break, you get possibly two hits with increased damage and critical hit.

The problem is that, because you need to knockback to get the second hit with the chance to daze, once enemies start getting some amount of Move resistance, you’ll fail the knockback check more and more often, not getting the true full potential of the skill.

Opportune Moment

This passive skill provides some fumble chance reduction and a 10% chance to get 5% of your total mana back and to reduce the active cooldown of your skills by 1, and on a critical hit, this effect is guaranteed. This early into the game this skill only provides a little bit of fumble reduction and the occasional 5 energy regen, but once you start getting consistent critical hits, this skill provides a lot of value.

Moment of Weakness

This passive skill provides some stagger chance and a buff for your attacks when you attack a Staggered or Stunned enemy. The stagger chance it provides helps you with staggering enemies with Armor Break. Overall, it’s a pretty good passive. It’s also required because of Hammer and Anvil.

Level 5

Assuming you spent your stat points correctly and unlocked Moment of Weakness, you’ll be able to unlock Hammer and Anvil at this level.

Hammer and Anvil

This is the Mace stance, it provides some nifty buffs for using mace skills, most notably Fumble reduction and Stagger chance. The fumble reduction allows you to skip Agi from now on, even when using Flails. The stagger chance pretty much guarantees that your Armor Break will stagger, and later on, when you can get it to 4 stacks, maybe even your basic attacks will stagger.

The other buffs are nice to have, but are less impactful. Daze chance is nice, but the amount you get is half of the amount of stagger chance, it only directly benefits the second hit of your Onslaught, and that needs to first pass a knockback check. Although if you do daze someone, you’re more likely to daze them again, because of the inherent control resistance debuff of the daze effect.
The armor damage is also good, as it allows you to more quickly deplete the enemy’s armor.

In this level range you should be using your stats points to further unlock your mace skills.
Assuming you picked Arna as your starting character and that you didn’t drop any useful skill book, your stat line should be, at level 5:

Str 11 | Agi 15 | Per 10 | Vit 11 | Wis 10

You should then, put a point into Per at level 6 to unlock RoT and then focus on getting Str to 15 at level 10, finally you’ll put a point into Per at level 11 to unlock the Tier 3 skills.
With the Arna stats above, at level 11 your stats should look like:

Str 15 | Agi 15 | Per 12 | Vit 11 | Wis 10

In reality, depending on your luck with skill books, that 12 in your stats could float between Str, Agi or Per.

Level 6

At this level you should be able to get RoT.

Right on Target

This is the main point of the build. This skill provides a ton of useful stats as long as you’re not using anything on your Off-hand. The amount of fumble reduction and Acc you get from this skill will greatly off-set the penalties of Flails and together with Hammer and Anvil, it will make their usage possible.
At this point you can grab a Militia Flail or War Flail and go smack some thugs.

Level 7 to 9

In this level range you’ll have some other choices of skills to get, although you’ll be required to get Dazing Strikes and Onslaught as to unlock Respite at level 10.

You can get some of the skills mentioned on levels 2 to 4 in case you didn’t get them.

Some other options are, Dash, Offensive Tactic and Push the Falling.

Dash

Pretty intuitive, it helps you escape from dire situations. If by this point you’ve unlocked it, via book or maybe by stats, and you already got Disengage you can get it. This is also a pre-requisite for Elusiveness

Offensive Tactic

This skill provides a lot of useful offensive stats, raw weapon damage, counter chance, skill cost reduction, accuracy and crit efficiency. It lasts a long time. No reason not to get it at some point.

Push the Falling

This provides some crit chance and some energy regen when you kill a bleeding/dazed/stunned/staggered enemy. This, Opportune Moment and Respite will pretty much guarantee that you’re always at full energy. This is also a pre-requisite for No Time to Linger

Level 10

At this point, I hope you have unlocked Respite because this is the skill you’ll be getting at this level.

Respite

This is your energy management skill, it gives you energy for every time you daze/stun/stagger an enemy and can trigger multiple times in the same attack, in case you cause 2 or more effects at the same time. The passive energy restoration is the cherry on top.

Level 11

And finally, the end game, assuming everything went right you should’ve unlocked Finish Off and you should use your skill point to get it now.

Finish Off

This skill is insane. It has a damage multiplier and can stagger, it hits the head with so much force that it’s almost certain to cause a minor injury depending on the enemy and your gear, and last but not least, it puts all enemy’s skills on cooldown. This pretty much guarantees that you cannot lose on a 1 v 1 ever, as long as you aren’t naked and drunk I guess.
After you get this skill, you’ll only have trouble when dealing with multiple enemies, as for now, this skill has a pretty long cooldown.

Now that you have unlocked Finish Off, the only thing you might want now is to reinforce your defenses. For that you might want to work on getting Elusiveness from Athletics or Stone Armor from Geomancy.
For your stats, you can go whatever you like, Str for more damage, Per for more crits and better Acc or Vit for health and energy. I particularly like to get to Vit 15, because I value the extra life and the extra energy allows me to use Medium Armor.

Because the content we have at the moment is rated for a maximum lvl of 15, you’ll get like 4 extra skills before you start overleveling the content, you can continue playing after of course, but at that point you’ll probably be crushing anything anyway.

I’ll give some extra skills suggestion that I think are important to consider in this level range.

Athletics

As mentioned before, you can go down the Disengage skill branch to get to Elusiveness and from the Mighty Kick skill branch to get to No Time to Linger, all of these skills provide loads of benefits to your character.

Elusiveness

Provides you with 5 stacks of elusiveness, each stack gives you 20% dodge chance and -5% damage taken. Each missed or fumble attack reduce the number of stacks by 1 but walking around increases it by 1.

This skill provides a lot of resilience to your character, you can eat dangerous skills like Onrush, Heroic Charge, Hooking Chop, among others, without fear of getting hurt.

At five stacks it’s pretty much guaranteed that the enemy will at least fumble the attack, meaning that the damage is halved and it can’t apply status effects, like Stagger in the case of Heroic Charge.

Only some tier 4 enemies have accuracy above 100%, which means that sometimes the attack will still go through, but in those cases Elusiveness -25% damage taken will make the attack sting way less. In those cases, you also won’t lose a stack so the next attack will still grant you the maximum protection.

No Time to Linger

Gives attacks against Bleeding/Dazed/Staggered/Stunned enemies 10% Acc and 10% Critical Chance and also gives a passive 5% counter chance. This skill plus Moment of Weakness means that attacks against staggered enemies have +20% damage, +10% Acc and +20% crit chance, that’s a lot of stats.

You’ll be criting enemies every other attack, aplying dazes, staggers and stuns way more often, getting value out of Opportune Moment, Respite and other skills.

Adrenaline Rush

If you get both of the skills above and have the tier 4 Athletics skills unlocked, this a neat skill to have.

You pop this skill in the middle of 5 enemies and you let them pray to the Host. Your skills won’t cost any energy, you’ll be restoring energy like a madman, you’ll be criting like crazy and attacks won’t hurt. It’s insanity.

The only downsides are that it does have a really long cooldown, but we can fix that, and it takes 7 skill points to unlock, so you’ll be getting it way past the level 15, so you won’t really be able to see the real power of this skill.

Peak Performance

Because of the combination of Opportune Moment, Push the Falling and Respite, you’ll almost never dip below 50% energy, unless you get hit by 2 Onslaughts at the same time, I guess. So this skill is pretty much free stats. The problem is the same as Adrenaline Rush, it comes too late in the game to make any difference, at least for now.

Combat Mastery

We already grab some skills from this tree but I’d like to suggest some other skills that are worth considering.

Small mentions to War Cry and Setup.

War Cry gives Battle Rage buff to yourself and Weakness Debuff to the enemy in a large radius, the problem is that shouting attracts enemies and you don’t want to be overwhelmed by 5 enemies, so getting this early on might be counter productive and getting this late might be overkill.

Setup is nice to have when you get netted and you need to wait to clear the debuff, but the effect lingers for too little. It’s good to have when you need to reapply Hammer and Anvil or Offensive Tactic, but it’s hardly mandatory

Finisher

This is my main suggestion in this skill tree, this skill resets all active cooldowns, all. That means, Adrenaline Rush, Dash, Elusiveness, Finish Off, Stone Armor and everything else. With +25% accuracy and +25% Critical Chance if you use this at the right time, you’ll get the effect.

Armor Crusher

You might ask, why would you need more armor damage on maces? My answer would be, maybe you don’t, but I like to think I do. For now I think this skill is unlocked too late into the game to have a noticeable effect in your gameplay.

What mostly picked my interest is the fact that the second effect, the one that trigger when reaching 0% armor, seems to trigger even on enemies with no armor, so against beasts like gulons you get the +25% damage right away and that’s cool.

The problem with this skill is that right now it’s easier to kill the enemy before breaking its armor, unless you’re using something like a hammer, so you don’t get a lot of value on some enemies.

Survival

This Skill Tree offers a lot of utility and the majority of skills here are worth considering.

Adaptability

Adaptability provides tons of useful stats, skill cost reduction, healing efficiency and fatigue resistance are all nice to have. The health restoration bonus you get with Vigor together with the healing efficiency make it so you recover from fights way faster, meaning you waste less time sitting around accumulating hunger and thirst.

The effect on your max health threshold makes it so that you can keep in fighting shape for longer, just take care to not break a limb because you got overconfident.

Finally, reducing the duration of Bad Trips, Drunkenness and Aftermaths is awesome for those that use Drugs and Alcohol.

Ever Vigilant

This skill at first glance can be quite unassuming, but getting +5% Dodge, giving every attack of your enemies -5% Acc and halving the chance of a critical hit is quite powerful.

This plus Disengage makes it so attacks of enemies adjacent to you receive -10% Acc and +5% Fumble chance, it might not sound like much, but in the long run it increases your survival chance.

The rest is just small conveniences that are nice to have, but aren’t the main focus of this skill.

Make a Halt

This skill is a convenience skill, you’ll get this when you’re exploring the map and don’t want to dedicate half of your inventory space for Elven Mud.

Being able to craft bedrolls is nice, but you probably won’t use this part of the skill very much. The important bit, is that camp beds and bedrolls can now restore morale and sanity, alongside being able to grant Vigor, at a rate of 120 turns per hour of sleep, compared to 150 per hour on a normal bed. This makes raiding distant dungeons way easier, as you can always find a campsite near the vicinity of the dungeon, guaranteeing that you’ll be able to approach the dungeon with full Vigor.

Being able to gain Vigor by resting at a campfire is also cool, because the fireplace in kitchens inside bandit forts, count as a campfire, so you can restore Vigor while resting inside the dungeon.

Skinning

Now, crushing damage of maces doesn’t hurt pelts, so you can get a lot of money using this skill. This can jumpstart your game really easily.

I particularly think it is not needed, because you can get all the necessary money to get your gear with contracts and the loot from dungeons, but maybe when new stuff is added to the game and we get more stuff to spend money on, this skill might become more of a staple in the build.

Magic Mastery

There’s only one ability that is worth considering in this ability tree for this build, although I think that this ability is worth considering for every build in the game.

Dissipation

This gives you 1 energy and 1.5% Magic and Nature resistance per 1 point of Magic or Nature damage you take.

This skill is bonkers for costing just 1 point imo, right now we have the majority of Undead and Crimson Covenant enemies doing some amount of Magic and Nature damage, so you always get value there, against human targets we have only the Rogue Pyro mages, but as more enemies are introduced, more enemies that deal magic or nature damage will appear, making this skill more and more desireable to have.

Geomancy

One point wonders are my jam and the spell bellow sure is one of those.

Stone Armor

This is something that just recently I tried out, Stone Armor is pretty cool, the duration is short and the cooldown is long, but if you combine this with Finisher, you have an effective defensive skill that can substitute Elusiveness to some degree.

The magic and nature resistances also makes this effective against mages, undead and crimson covenant enemies, unlike Elusiveness that has limited effectiveness with some of those enemies.

So, about equipment.

I particuraly like medium armor in this build, it provides enough protection without compromising too much in the energy department, and the dodge penalties are just enough to keep you above negative dodge.

A full armor set by lvl 15 should be something along the lines of a Sallet, a Light / Elven Brigandine, Sergeant Gloves and Sergeant Greaves.

Then we get a Jibean Cape, if you like cloaks or a backpack if you’re one of those weirdos.

The belt can be the Fancy Belt or the Knightly Girdle

For jewelry, silver aquamarine/topaz rings for Crit Chance and Acc. The silver emerald ring can be a nice tech option for the new boss fight.

The amulet is whatever you like best. I like the hand amulet.

As for weapons, you’ll start using normal maces until you get Hammer and Anvil and RoT, after that you can comfortably start using flails.

Flails are the best weapons to RoT with in my opinion. High Base damage, the accuracy and fumble penalties are easily compensated by RoT and H&A and they give +stagger chance, the best stat for maces.

You can easily finish the current content with just a Heavy Flail, but if you want to style on the enemies you can get a Footman Flail or an Elven Flail.