#260 Levelling physical combat skills should provide some kind of benefit to WC.
Crossfire's combat originally was inspired by Gauntlet, a fairly fast paced top-down action game where accuracy on attacks wasn't a factor. You couldn't quite run through crowds as quickly as you could in some of the older versions of Crossfire, but you still had an effective melee and ranged option in addition to more limited magic for crowd control.
Current versions of Crossfire have tried to tone down melee/physical combat's importance, but to the point where physical combat is essentially slow as molasses compared to spellcasting. It's not necessarily difficult; you can still get AC to the point where you take negligible hits from enemies, but it takes a long time to actually kill individual monsters in combat. It's not even due to the relative speed drop from older versions of Crossfire, which is a reasonable change where before you could move at lightning fast speeds. The main problem with the current version of Crossfire is it's almost impossible to gain enough WC and therefore accuracy to hit anything reliably which makes otherwise easy enemies (where you probably have more than enough AC to take their hits) take far too long to kill. Weapons with + modifiers on them do not appear to buff WC anymore (see: the guaranteed weapons that drop in the first two Scorn nobility quests, + weapons from shops, artifacts). Weapons only improve WC if they specifically have it in their stats now, which makes WC from amulets and rings far more valuable. More significantly, your physical combat skills (punching, clawing, karate, one-handed weapons, two-handed weapons, throwing, missile weapons) do not appear to raise WC when levelling them, at least not by anything more than a negligible amount.
Magic on the other hand is more or less unchanged, aside from a significantly improved starting pool of Mana. Add to that how many spells completely ignore AC, and magic becomes not just a fantastic part of your kit, but a sheer essential part of it to kill anything in a timely fashion. A level 12+ humanoid Barbarian still struggles to get enough WC to kill goblins and ogres in a timely fashion, whereas a mage half that level can easily blast through crowds by then while having access to other utility spells to boot. It means that starting out, the classes that don't start with spells are far, far more ineffective compared to spellcasting classes. And, because levelling has a negligible impact on your physical combat, it's a far better use of your time to improve spellcasting, which raises your overall pool of magic as you level thus directly improving how much damage you can pump out.
In older versions, one level in a physical combat skill = 1 WC point. So 10 levels meant you had 10 better WC. This is very significant, but it meant that levelling physical combat had a direct improvement on your abilities, even if it was just accuracy and your damage was still largely tied to items. If in the current version of Crossfire this is too much WC, perhaps adjust it to 2 levels in a skill = 1 WC point or even 3 levels = 1 WC (I wouldn't lower it more than this, though). This should improve base accuracy enough that melee feels reasonable to use in conjunction with spells rather than one being far beyong the other in usefulness. I'm OK with the relatively slower combat speeds overall, it's just that the vastly lower and harder to raise physical combat accuracy makes physical combat very slow and dull. It doesn't feel at all like Gauntlet, and you run into significant problems when you encounter enemies that regenerate at high speeds but you simply don't have the WC to hit them reliably.
Note that in the classic versions of Crossfire, enemies were still perfectly capable of being difficult even if you could reliably hit them. You still needed enough AC and Armor not to take too much damage in crowds, you had to watch for spellcasters, etc. In updated versions of Crossfire with the melee rebalancing, I'm not sure what impact levelling melee skills has on direct combat, but it feels like it has almost no benefit whatsoever and by the time your WC gets reasonably high enough to hit reliably magic is far and away the most useful tool in your arsenal to the point where there's no real reason to invest time or effort in melee combat or bow and arrow combat.
What I'd like to see is the current speed rebalancing kept, but with adjustments to WC made (2 levels in a physical combat skill = 1 WC point for instance) so that levelling up your physical skills had a noticeable improvement as you progressed, so that gaining levels in your physical skills allowed you to hit stuff more reliably, keeping it somewhat useful and competitive with spells.
Seconded, I've tried playing a dragon monk, and ended up with most of my levels from pyromancy because dragon breath worked so much faster than clawing or karate even with fairly low int and high strength. Melee needs some sort of buff.