You can't use parry as a defense while holding a bow/crossbow/sling. Make sure you don't have your defense set to parry if you're going to use aimed weapons.

to expand even more, assuming evasion is your highest skill among shield, parry, and evasion:

(1) When you're about to get out your bow/crossbow, first type "stance set 100 0 80"

This will put 100 of your defense points into evasion, 0 into parry, and 80 in to shield. You may see a message about having a couple of extra points. You start with 180, but gain one for every several ranks in Defending you have (cf: https://elanthipedia.play.net/Defending_skill).

So, if you actually have 183 points to spread around, you'd type "stance set 100 0 83".

(2) If you want to use evasion and parry as your primary defenses, you'd instead type "stance set 100 80 0". In each case you'd have 100 points in evasion, then 80 in the other defense.

Of course, other distributions are possible (60 60 60 for relatively even training of all three defenses, for example). And certain defense types are better against certain types of attacks.

As a survival prime, I usually keep 100 points in evasion and then split the other two equally between shield and parry unless I'm using a ranged weapon, but playing around with a variety of stances is definitely something you'll want to do.

Thank you for the information everyone.
I typically have gone with the 60/60/60 split.

Setting my parry to 0 while using ammo weapons has helped tremendously.

I think the key point is that the game really plays like your defense skills are summed. Lets say I have 100 ranks of shield, parry and evasion. 100% evasion + 80% parry ends up being 180 effective defense points, so someone going 60/60/60 still ends up with the same effective net defense points. Now there's more going on, like I assume behind the scenes each defense is multiplied by it's stance % and then by special factors that influence that defense's effectiveness against a given attack. So parry might be multiplied by zero if it's a ranged attack, or your shield gets multiplied by 90-100% depending on it's size and if the attack is melee or ranged, or evasion might get multiplied by a percent depending on if the enemy is in front, flanking, or behind you. This is the step that would also factor in stat scaling to defenses, your reflexes, discipline, agility, and other stats that influence specific defenses will further influence that defense pools ranks before they are summed.

>I stance my primary defense about 15% higher (i.e. parry as a Barbarian, evasion as a Thief, etc) since the primary pool takes longer to fill, but otherwise keep them split equally.

Not contesting what you say or how you hunt. Just food for thought.

Per Kodius...
>Evasion: Takes overall hindrance (armor + shield) and this value penalizes the stat bonus to evasion skill by a large amount, and evasion skill by a smaller amount.
>Parry: Overall hindrance penalizes skill bonus from weapon balance and stats, shield hindrance penalizes parry ranks.
>Shield: Shield hindrance penalizes stat bonus to skill.

Evasion went from being King to being the Court Jester. For now, Shield is King. When you split 60/60/60, at level, you are increasing your penalty to DF across all three defenses as opposed to two at 100/80+. Now, many people put 1 in there so it's 100/80+/1 but this is just for a trickle of learning and doesn't really affect DF much I'd assume. Still the even split across all three is more risky for those of us who push the hunting envelope and are risk averse.

Rhadyn da Dwarb - Blood for fire!

Barbarian Guild Suggestions
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4L5hAxR1-VLDegDNZBIhGdo5bMgnCtm84Icm2E0utU/edit#gid=0

> Still the even split across all three is more risky for those of us who push the hunting envelope and are risk averse.

Evidence?

>Evasion went from being King to being the Court Jester. For now, Shield is King

I don't think this is an accurate assessment.

All my defenses are within ~5 ranks of each other and I have no encumbrance and light armor hindrance. I find the defenses to be roughly analogous, unless I am holding a high-balance weapon with weapon ranks equal to my defenses, then parry seems noticeably better than the other two.

We have to remember we know the penalty situation you listed but not much else. For example, Ssra said that parry is the defense least penalized by a multi opponent situation (which is almost a given when hunting).

I split between three defenses regularly, then evasion/shield for bow use, then parry/evasion for small edged and offhand. I don't notice much difference, I even tried shield/parry once out of curiosity and the result seemed the same.

Mileage will of course vary by skillset/encumbrance/armor burden/stats but assuming all things equal they seem pretty similar performance-wise. Please note the "FOR PLAYER VERSUS ENVIRONMENT NOT FOR PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER" in bold letters surrounding that generalization.

Just to put my input in here, I find that you should always have a primary, secondary and tert defense. This meaning that I usually stance highest in evasion which I keep at 100 at all times, then split the two others in usually a 3/4 to 1/4 conversion. I just basically tweak shield and parry to where it shows i'm shield blocking most of the time, but get the occasional parry in there. My stances usually are 100 evasion 60 or so shield and 15-20 parry, give or take some according to points available.