Hello,
I'm Maligned and I've decided to write this guide in order to aid the newer players in getting a grasp of all the basic concepts in the game as well as helping the intermediate players learn a few more advanced tips and tricks to both melee combat and archery.

A little about the author:
As of the time of writing, I have 480+ hours logged into this game and I'm one of the better duelists in NA as well as being a very good longshot crossbowman. I've made a few video guides on youtube, as well as being active on the paradox forums. Feel free to message me on Steam with any questions or suggestions.

The Controls in War of the Roses are similar to most FPS.
WSAD controls movement and your mouse controls your aim.
The left mouse button is used for attacking and the right mouse button is used for blocking, parrying, or aiming your bow/crossbow depending on the situation.

When it comes to swinging your weapon or parrying your opponents weapon there is a small difference.
Fist you hold the button down, the you move it either left, right, up, or down. This will change which direction you swing or attempt to block. When you pick your direction to swing your attack, you will begin to charge an attack. A Pie shaped indicator will appear on the screen and it will start to shrink. The smaller the pie, the more powerful your charged attack will be.

Note: Encumbrance will slow your movement speed, your acceleration, it will also slow your swing speed, and increase the recovery time for missing hits and being parried. You can mitigate this with perks, but keep this in mind when designing your kits.

The Core concepts in WotR are the things that veteran players will talk about but there aren't many explanations for what these are but I'll break them down here with a brief overview before going a bit more in depth with them later on.

• Footwork - This refers to your positioning and where you move when fighting an opponent in melee combat
  
• Parrying - Blocking using the 4 directional block, as opposed to using a shield
  
• Hitbox - The actual area of the weapon that needs to connect in order to do damage. An example of this is the head of an ax which needs to connect to your opponent, hits with the wooden shaft will do no damage
  
• Riposte - The counter-attack you launch after landing a parry on your opponent
  
• Feinting - Cancelling your attack in order to disrupt your opponent's parry timing or to draw them into attacking.

Armor seems easy enough when you think about it, but often when new players hop into the game they are confused by the way damage is represented and if they hit a certain type of armor or even if they did any damage at all. So I'll give you a quick table here to explain what types of armor do what and how the armor absoption system works, It's actually quite simple.

In order to calculate how much damage you did, if any at all, the game uses a simple algorithm to test it. The formula is:
Your Damage * Armor Absorption = Damage done
If damage done is not greater than or equal to 15, no damage is done and the blow reflects off of the armor. When no damage is dealt by a blow, the game will show you a shield icon in the color of the armor you struck. So you can simply put some numbers into this to see how it works. Let's say my ax does 50 damage to your plate armor before absorption happens. So we simply plug those variables in:
50 * 60% = 30
30 > 15
30 damage is done, which shows up as the number 30 in the blue plate color.

Unfortunately because of recent changes to armor absorption values I no longer have the exact numbers for absorption protection.

Also, They changed penetration slightly for a few weapons (such as swords) in a way that makes me feel that the formula above may be off as well.

I will do my best to try to get more information on this so i can provide it to you.

First I'll start off with the basic melee concepts. These are the things you'll need to start working on at the beginning of your career as a glorious knight if you don't want to be put on the ground repeatedly and without so much as a wimper.

The basics of defense consists of two key elements: Footwork, and parrying/blocking.


Parrying
Parrying, as I stated in the previous section, is the act of blocking along the 4 directions without using a shield. This is essential in preventing damage without using a shield allowing you to use 2 handed weapons while still being able to defend yourself. After you have parried your opponent there is a small window in which your opponent cannot attack you. He is able to parry your counter-attack, which shall be reffered to as a riposte from now on, and launch his own riposte afterwards. This sets up melee combat between two better players as a series of parries and ripostes going out at rather high speed, if you can't keep up you'll go down in a pile of metal and tears. Work on this early and often to have a solid defense to go with your attack.

Protip: Players in public TDM, CQ, or Assault servers rarely parry. They mostly just swing and rely on their timing and footwork to land blows and survive. Throw out a quick parry and riposte and many will be unable to deal with it. Just be careful not to get too defensive or else you'll be overrun.

Note Your weapons have health like you do, and parrying your opponent reduces the health of your weapons until eventually they break. Learn when to parry and when to avoid the attack.

Footwork
Footwork is all about being in the right place to land your attack then moving into a place where your opponents attack is unable to land. The correct place to be depends on what weapons you and your opponents are using. Knowing the length and where the hitbox is on the two weapons means all the difference in each step you take. If your weapon is much shorter than your opponent you want to hug them so you can land your hits while being too close for them to strike, obviously in the opposite situation you want to keep your opponents at bay.
There are a few tricks to footwork which will allow you to dictate the pace and positioning of the fight

• Make them miss - Stepping out of the range or stepping to the side of the weapon and making them miss completely will cause them to be reduced to base walking speed as well as unable to attack and defend for a short time. If they miss you have a free shot at landing an attack or you'll have the speed advantage to change the positioning to where you want giving you the advantage for future attacks
  
• Step into the swing - Shafter weapons, such as the pollaxe, have a large wooden shaft connecting the head to the grip. The shaft does no damage and does not interrupt you if it hits you. If your opponent is swinging one of these weapons at you, step towards him and into his swing in order to make sure that only the shaft connects with you. This is an easy way to avoid the damage.
  
• Use the charge - When you have the Man-At-Arms perk, the perk all melee classes have, you have a charge ability bound to the F key. With this skill you charge forewards rapidly and if you connect with your opponent you'll stun him for a short time as well as push him back as well. If you hit him in the back he'll be knocked on the ground and stunned for an even longer time. Obviously this skill is good for closing the gap on your opponent but it can also be used to gain some distance on your opponent. If your weapon is longer and you need some space on your opponent charge into him and start backing up. The stun as well as the pushback will often gain you enough space to get them out of your face. Also, be sure to launch an attack right after your stun lands. Unless they have good reflexes you can usually land a free attack here as well which will reduce your opponents attack to base speed even if they parry it, allowing you to gain even more space.

Using Shafted Weapons
Shafted weapons are the weapons with a wooden shaft connecting the head, which does damage, to the grip, where you hold the weapon. Because only the head of the weapons do damage landing the attack can be a bit tricky, especially with the longer shafted weapons such as the Gallowglass Long Ax or the Knights Hospitallier Halberd. Learning the range of your weapon and having good footwork are the essentials for being successful with these weapons, but there are a few tricks.

• Turn into the swing - When you swing to the sides you'll have the largest deadzone, or area where you'll be unable to damage your opponent, as opposed to stabs. If you turn into your sideswings you'll actually shorten the deadzone. The weapon starts closer to your body than when it's at the height of its swing in front of you. Turning also increases the momentum of your swing and increases the damage.
  
• Change your Attack Angle - With ultra-long weapons like the KH Halberd and the Swiss Halberd, landing its on opponents at point blank range is near-impossible without changing the angle from which you attack. What I mean by this is simply aim low, for the legs or feet. This uses biomechanics similar to real life, at shoulder level your arm extension is the furthest away from your body it can be but once you start to lower your arm away from shoulder level, It gets closer and closer to your body. So use this to your advantage, Turn into your swings and aim for the kneecaps. These longer weapons also have a higher swing arc to begin with, so you're more likely to hit their chest or shoulders than you are their legs.
  
• Use the stab - When your opponent is too close for your sideswings use the thrust attack, the downwards charge. This weapon has a deadzone much closer to you than your sideswings and is quite often a damaging and fast attack. You can also aim up towards your opponents face to increase the damage done.
  
• Get behind them - Try to appraoch your opponent from behind so you have more control on the spacing for the first few seconds of the fight. This also allows you to land an easy attack ot maybe even two before they can react and turn to face you. If your opponent is hugging you with a shorter weapon such as the War hammer or executioners axe the best way to get them off of you is to get behind them. If they use an overhead or underhand swing you can simply step to the side and make them miss which as i said before will slow them down and give you the speed advantage. If they use a side swing, put your parry up to that side, step into the swing, and keep going until you're behind them or they manage to turn and face you again.

Once you're proficient at the basics its time to start working on more advanced techniques to elecate you to a higher skill bracket. These are often a bit trickier to pull off and require a more intimate knowledge of them game to know when to use them and on who.

Feinting
This, again as i stated earlier, is the act of canceling your attacks. You do this to draw your opponent into attacking or to make him think the attack is coming from one direction or another. You feint by pressing the block button when you have your weapon charged or even shortly after the attack is released. Feinting is how you get past good defensive players who rely on ripostes to do their damage. There are a few ways you want to do this in order to be the most effective.

• Delay your swing - Defensive players, myself included, tend to rely on timing from parries to launch our ripostes. If you ready a swing start the swing and then cancel it, You'll often cause the defensive player to think that the parry will land so they start their riposte. You can then start the same swing and release it and it will land faster than your opponent can ready their weapon. This works because your opponent has to move his weapon into the swing position before he can even launch his attack, while yours is still in the same position from the attack you just canceled.
  
• Change of direction - You can also use the feinting mechanic to quickly change the direction of your swing. This will trick a lot of the newer players who wont be able to change the direction of their parry in time. The down side of this technique is because you have to stop your swing and then move the weapon into whatever position for the new swing, it is a little slow to pull off. Veteran players are often not phased by this and will block your new swing or will just get a quick stab in before you can even launch your new attack. Use this sparingly and with great discretion. If you have the option, the first technique is almost always going to be more effective.
  
• Make them think there is an opening - Feinting can be used defensively as well. If your opponent is using the delay move or is charging an attack but is hesitating to release it, put your parry up to the wrong side. This will make him think there is an opening and he'll throw his attack at you. This allows you to put your parry back up in the right place and get a riposte off on your opponent who is expecting a clean hit.

Quick Riposte
The quick riposte is a timing technique that involves dropping your parry a bit early in order to release your riposte sooner. There is a small window that you can let go of a parry and start your attack while still parrying their attack. This gives you a few frames advantage on your riposte and with faster weapons that can mean the difference between landing an attack and being parried yourself. It's a tricky thing to do and requires a lot of practice. It also varies based on ping because the window for you to parry in changed with higher pings, either from you or your opponent.

WARNING Because is a technique heavily based on timing, you'll be very susceptible to feints especially the delay technique. Use it intelligently.

Facing Multiple Opponents
When you find yourself in a 1v2 or more situation there are some tips to help you win the matchup. In order to use these tips you have to be able to think on the fly and you're required to have some working knowledge of the game in addition to very good footwork.

• Know if FF is on for your server - When facing multiple opponents making them hit each other is a key part of the strategy to win. If FF is turned on then obviously you want to make them hit each other more often than you normally would, in essence let them do the work for you.
  
• Keep only one person in range of you - When you're taking on more than one person you want to take them down one at a time. To do this you use good footwork and keep one person in front of you and keep the rest of your opponents behind them.
  
• Start with the guy with the longest range and the lightest armor - This is the guy who's going to move the fastest towards you which will put some distance between him and his friends. If you let the guy with heavy armor and a war hammer, for example, get in front what will happen is when you move near his range then not only will he be able to hit you but the opponent behind him with the light armor and long range weapon will be able to hit you as well, wither through his friend or around him.
  
• Frustrate the aggressive players - These are the guys with headsmans axes, war hammers, scottish swords and the like. They generally don't parry or have good footwork but instead try to keep you in their range and spam attacks. If you keep these guys behind their allies and move in and out of their range they will try to hit you and wind up hitting their friends instead and will get frustrated fairly quickly. If you frustrate them enough they'll either move on to someone else or do something rather stupid like charge ahead of their friends and try to take you down on their own. Since they don't know how to parry, keep an eye on these guys and when they get into your range and away from their friends they're rather easy to drop.
  
• Don't get surrounded - This should be pretty self explanitory but can be hard to pull off. You generally want to have one guy in front of his friends and the rest behind him in a large cluster. This means that the guy out fron will be the most dangerous to you and all the guys in a cluster behind him are more dangerous to their friends than they are to you.
  
• Keep the melee players between you and the archers - Archers are a big danger to you when you're facing multiple melee at once because not only do they do damage to you but they slow you down and interrupt your attacks and parries. The key to dealing with multiple melee and ranged is keeping the ranged behind the melee and making them shoot through their melee allies. If they hit them they'll inflict all of the negatives on one of the melee you have to deal with and make them drop behind the pack. Whenever it's your first safe opportunity you should redirect the pack of melee guys to follow you to an area where the archer cannot see.

Here are a few drills to work on independant areas of your game. They are quite simple and just involve isolating the area you need to improve on.
Footwork
To work on your footwork simply have a duel or just get in a 1v1 fight with someone. During this duel, don't block or parry. Concentrate on making their attacks miss or do no damage, while being able to follow up. You'll probably lose, but if you just keep focusing on your positioning eventually it will become organic to you to the point where you don't have to think about where to move, you just move into the right place.

Parrying
For a good parrying drill, you'll need a friend. Grab a nice long shafted weapon and stand face to face with your opponent. Get as close as you can and start throwing out attacks and ripostes as quick as you're comfortable with. Becuase you're only hitting with the shaft, it won't do any damage to your friend or his weapon. Keep increasing the speed of the parries and ripostes and learn the sounds that weapons make on different hits at the same time.

Feinting

For feinting, there's really no drill you can run except to start to slowly work it into your repitoire as you play. When you start with it just throw a feint in every now and again in order to catch your opponent off guard. As you become a bit faster and more fluid with it, You'll be able to use it as a defensive and offensive technique. You want your parrying and footwork to be completely natural to you so that you can focus on when and how you'll feint your opponent in order to land your blow.

Archery in this game is much simpler than the melee side but it's still more challenging than shooting in any other games you've played involving guns. The reason is that your arrows/bolts have a significant projectile drop, speed, as well as being able or unable to penetrate different types of armor based on the tip you use. Aiming your bow or crossbow requires holding down the RMB to aim and then pressing LMB to release your shot. This is the same as many other games and shouldn't come as a shock to many.

Reloading a Crossbow
Reloading a bow is easy, the game does it automatically for you, when you reload a crossbow you have to hold down the RMB and you'll see two sets of moving red shapes. The outer ring and an inner latch. There is also a ring around these two that will begin to fill as your weapon is reloaded. You can passively reload it by waiting for this ring to fill. But there is also a minigame here that will allow you to reload your crossbow much faster. If you press LMB when the two red shapes overlap, you'll see the inner one pull the outer one at a faster pace which will make the ring fill faster. Once you get the hang of this you won't use the passive reload. It's quite easy and only takes a few moments to get the hang of.

Projectile Drop
The arrows and bolts you fire will start to drop as they travel longer distances, this is called projectile drop. This varies depending on your bow or crossbow, the tip you use, and the angle of your shot. In general crossbows have a more gradual drop to them while bows have a more severe drop at longer distances. If you're planning on shooting anyone from even medium range, you need to learn your weapon and be able to quickly judge the drop on the shot.

Projectile Speed
Arrows and bolts in this game actually have to travel in this game. They aren't instantaneous like bullets are in other games. What this means for you is that you have to think ahead of what your opponent will be doing and where he will be by the time your arrow reaches him before you even fire that shot. Once you get to distances over ~75 yards or so, hitting moving targets becomes a bit tricky. In addition, crossbow bolts travel faster than arrows fired from bows.

Armor Penetration
When you creat a ranged class you'll be able to choose the tip type for your weapon. Different tips do differing amounts of damage to your opponent and are able to pierce different types of armor. Also, certain tips also add a bleeding or flaming famage over time, DOT, effect to your target. Here's a quick table of the different tips available and what they can pierce and if they have a DOT effect as well. This isn't ALL the info on these tips and i highly recommend you experimenting to see which ones you find effective with your playstyle.

Note: Recent changes have made it necessary to charge you bow somewhat to achieve penetration against mail and especially plate. I have not personally tested this yet to provide feedback, but keep it in mind if your shots are bouncing off of plate

Ranged combat in WotR is pretty easy at close distances but once you start moving to longer ranges the projectile drop and speed makes things quite a bit trickier. There are some other factors involved as well that effect your shots and if they land or not. I'll break this down, as well as tell you the three most effective and most often used classes currently and how to use these effectively.

Elevation Matters
The arc of your shot is parabolic and where your aiming is a line tangent to the beginning of that parabola, meaning that if you looked at your shot from the side the path it would travel would be a parabola and the line from where you're aiming would only touch the ar of the shot once which is the point where you fired it. Understanding that isn't really important to the gameplay, but it does effect how your shots will behave from different elevations. If your opponent is standing roughly level with you: your shot will travel upwards, reach its peak, and then begin to descend towards its target. This is rather simple and it's easy to learn about how far above his head to aim so your shot will connect. If your opponent is standing substantially lower than you: the shot only travels downwards. If your opponent is substantially higher than you: the shot will travel upwards and depending on the distance and where you aim it may or may not peak and come back down before hitting him. To give an example of how this effects you lets say your target is ~80 yards away from you. If he were level you may only have to aim a few degrees above his head in order to connect, If you are above him your aim might be a degree above his head, and if he is above you then you might have to aim several degrees above his head. To boil this down simply, the higher your relative elevation the less you have to account for projectile drop.

Look where your target is going
When you're shooting at a moving target from a long range you'll have to lead them quite substantially. If you only think of your opponent as moving in an open field with nothing around him, you'll miss a lot of shots. Take a quick second to try to figure out where he is heading before you start to lead your target and account for the drop. He might be heading to fight one of your allies, moving to grab an execute, or running for cover to bandage himself. Knowing where he's going matters because once you know that you'll know where he'll be when your shot connects. For instance if your opponent was running to the right and you simply lead him you very well might miss that shot. The reason is that he stops earlier than you though to revive his teammate. If you took a moment to view your surroundings you could have waited until he stopped to revive his teammate and had a much easier shot.

Be Patient and Opportunistic
In my last example patience was the difference between missing the target and hitting it. If you're patient and wait until you find a vulnerable opponent you'll be much more effective and accurate with your long-range shots. There are quite a few situations in which your opponent will remain fairly still while waiting for an animation to finish, giving you an easy shot.
These are:

• When he's bandaging himself or a teammate
  
• When he's reviving a teammate
  
• When he's executing one of your teammates
  
• When he's reloading a crossbow

On the battlefield you will see many people doing these things quite often, learn the animations as well as when and where to shoot and you'll have a much easier time taking advantage of helpless foes.

Protip: There's a small gap between the base of the helmet and the top of the chest covering where you can put an arrow for a critical hit faceshot. This is most easily achived when someone has their back to you and is bandaging, reviving, or executing. You'll see a small bit of flesh if they don't have a coif. Being slightly elevated helps as well.

Example Ranged Classes
Here's 2 ranged classes that are highly effective and are the most often used by veteran players:
Machinegun Bowman

• Weapon: Self Elm Bow - Barbed Arrows - Double quiver
  
• Main Perks: Slight of Hand - Longbowman
  
• Aim for: Anything

This class is all about getting your arrows out fast and loose. Don't spend too much time lining up your shots and don't wait for your bow to be fully charged. This setup can usually down your opponent in 2-3 arrows which come out in very rapid succession. This is a close-range setup, you need to be fairly close so you don't have to account for the drop and speed of the shot.


Headhunting Crossbow

• Weapon: Steel Spanned Crossbow - Push lever - Swallowtail
  
• Main Perks: Eagle Eye - Marksman
  
• Aim for: The Head

This is a more advanced class as it requires you to aim for the head of your opponent. The tradeoff is that if you do, you get an instant kill on them (unless they have a plate helmet). If you miss and hit the chest it will still do a decent amount of damage and as far as crossbows go this one is fairly quick to load. You'll want to stand at medium range with this weapon simply because of the reload time where you'll be unable to move. Also, this class best makes use of the Protip above. If you can land that shot between the helmet and body armor, it will be an instant kill.

With these 2 classes and with any kind of ranged class, Light armor is recommended. Your encumberance effects the speed at which you travel, swing your weapon, recover from missed swings and being parried, and to some extent your passive reload time with bows and crossbows (Meaning the time it takes to put another arrow/bolt in the quiver.) Medium armor also works well. Specifically: the brigandine (Which some mistake for light armor at a glance) and the almain cuirass.

If you're a master by now or still a beginner, Here's some tricks to help you:

• Duel servers - These are special TDM servers that are privately owned and are usually moderated by admins. This is a great place to work on your skills and there are often veteran players willing to teach you and answer your questions. There are special rules in these servers.
  • 1v1 Combat only, unless agreed to by your opponent
    
  • No randomly attacking players. This applies to melee, ranged, and calvalry.
    
  • You must ask for and your opponent must accept a duel request. This is done simply by raising an upwards parry, you can also bow while doing this by looking downwards with your parry still raised
    
  • No horses in the center of the field. The square fenced off area is for melee duelists only. There is a special jousting area along side of the field for horses.
    
  • Pay attention to the chat. Duel server often have other rules that are specific to that sever, such as no executing. If someone tell you you're breaking the rules in chat, please respond and apologize in the chat. Try not to break server rules, there are often admins in these server who will ban you from that server.
• Bring friends - This game is a lot of fun in general, but when you get some friends together and play with them it gets addicting fast. Having someone to watch your back or help you take an objective is much more preferable to being frustrated that your team didn't read your mind and do it.
  
• Use the Forums - Here[forum.paradoxplaza.com] is the Paradox WotR forum. This is the one most of the veterans use and is a good place to ask questions or to report any bugs you encounter. You can post in the main thread by just making an account but to post in the subforums you need to register your CD key with the forum.

Thank you everyone for reading through this insane wall of text.
Feel free to post a comment here with your comments, suggestions, and critique.
Also, feel free to leave me a post on my youtube page, the Paradox forums, or to add me to your steam friends list.

I sincerely hoped this helped,
Maligned