Recently, I've found that a good way to beef up your character's effective power is to farm weapon skill back in UT3. As long as you haven't been too deep into the Gloomy Cave, greater and giant carniverous plants are worth 10 points a blow, and the kiwis they drop can keep you fed as long as you need.
Anyway, the other day I had a character wielding Mjolak who spend a hella long time killing plants. I decided I'd get my skill with Mjolak up to 20 before leaving. So, I get it to 19, then keep going for a while...
My skill jumped from 19 to 64!
Pleasantly surprised, I went through the gloomy cave, butchering things at my leisure, (Includeding Ur-Khan) until I got savaged by Sherry. Oh well.
Several characters later, I once again delved into UT3 to farm skill, this tme with 2 mithril longswords. I found that since longswords are much better for blocking than Halberds, (or maybe it was just because I had 2 of them) I could stand next to Genetrix and hold down the wait button until she and 7 greater/giant carniverous plants were constanting biting at me, while I deflected most of their attacks. This time, I wanted my skill with longswords at 20 as well, to see if it would make a similar jump.
Sure enough, it went from 19 to 65. That's a 325% battle bonus!
But here's the kicker - I don't know if it was because it was day 6, or because of my crazy skillz, but the monsters got
nasty. For example, a wolf got up next to me and bit me in the chest, breaking my +7 mithral plate mail and doing about 50 damage. A greater carniverous plant attacked me, and I partially blocked with both weapons, which ended up breaking my +8 mithral longsword.
I ended up dying to Elpuri after I got polymorphed into a young carniverous mutant bunny. Must've been a wand of polymorph on the ground nearby that I didn't see.
Anyway.
Has anyone else tried training their weapon skill this much? Results? I'd like to know if I'm really on to something here.