Occultist Combat

Caoimhaen

So I'm new to this whole occultist thing and was wondering anyone could give me some pointers as far as combat, as I am practically clueless. Some help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Dunn

Occie house, Primanus clan. We teach ya gud.

Basic Occultist 1v1: Stack affs into Cadmus (3 affs), stack mentals into Hecate (5 affs), Madness, Enlighten, Unravel.

How you get to these various points, or even skip some outright, can vary a lot.

Mishgul

Rub death seven times, wait an irl month, (store card in stockroom) then dustbomb/fling death on unsuspecting opponent

Caoimhaen

Not joining the occie house! Dude! I'm asking ooc.:P. Besides I already shrugged them off. So...yeah. they hate me.

Dunn

Told you the basic strat. Start off with attend/leech to get ahead of herbqueue since a lot of people will redeaf/blind before curing leech. Use instill/bloodleech to stack to Cadmus then swap to mental stack to get Hecate since most people shut down focusing with Cadmus active so all of the pressure on their curing falls on herbqueue. That's the standard. Once you get that, there's a -ton- of other ways to get there.

Caoimhaen

@dunn thanks a ton. At least now I have a starting point. The rest is probably trial and error. Just a completely different approach to combat since I was a blademaster forever.

Mannimar

I'll work with Occie combat with you @Caoimhaen. I've been meaning to sit down and see how well my theories work, but I've been lazy in getting my tracking adjusted. I'll work on it this weekend, and I'll try and slaughter you.

A Question for @Dunn have you found kelp stacking viable with the changes? It just appears with the way the afflictions work that kelp stack into aeon may be extremely effective...

Makarios

An intended aim of the changes was to make aeon less of a go to (and hence less viable) in one v one, to try to avoid the class becoming outdated with progressive curing improvements. That was actually the primary reason you can't combo aeon with entities: if you want to strip speed the intention was you'd lose a lot of your progress (I.E. your kelp stack) to do so. Whether that's actually succeeded remains to be seen.

Tesha

Web/hangedman stacking with lethal ink(possibly aldar too) into trample/cadmus is something Jhui used against me, pretty strong. You might not need the aldar. Try that.

Torc is also really strong for Occultist, but as with any class, the main thing is practice. You won't be able to do what Jhui does the instant you get these things. Work at it and build up, use web/hangedman stack to get cadmus and prevent them from attacking effectively while you are at it.

Moon/hecate is a good followup, and soon you can enlighten.

Santar

Occultists seem to have a tad too much momentum offense right now.

So do Priests.

For the former, I'd suggest simply making it a little bit harder for them to get past shield. If you're in the room with an Occultist, they're constantly going to be stacking afflicts on you, and they already have mechanisms that disallow you from running, and they're hard to hinder as well. Shielding barely slows their momentum, to the point where I'd almost say that if you shield, it -favours- the Occultist because they can continue to stack more afflictions in the time you're off EQ.  Make shielding a little bit more effective against Occultists and it'd be balanced.

For Priests, the disrupt skill is just poorly designed. Making those spirit elements basically "must cure" afflictions and then requiring you to focus to cure them for 250 mana a pop was a huge buff and a little over the top. To fix this problem I would let them also be cured with a herb eat, which is only a slight nerf considering the defensive problems that still creates with constant chastening + spirit wrack coming out to destroy your herb balance.

Caoimhaen

@tesha if I could only find aldar.haha! That would be great.

@mannimar you won't have to try very hard. I'm pretty easy to slaughter.:P If you managed to slaughter a buncha mhaldorians by yourself. You can take someone like me.ha.

Need to figure out a decent system for aliases and key bindings. Really unsure how to set stuff up. Since I'm not positive as to what my plan of action is in combat.

@santar hrm. Interesting. Good things to know I suppose. I always hated fighting occultists as a blademaster. I usually was no match. Makes more sense now

Santar

Well, Blademaster is a class that actually has amazing defensive opportunities against Occultists. BM can hinder Occultist well with stuff like voidfist/para if necessary, use alleviate, or evade off.

Some classes get majorly screwed by Occie though.

Tesha

Give it a try. You might not need the aldar, just lethal ink. If you can stick web/hangedman long enough to get balance/equib back before they finish writhing, trample will hit. The margin does not matter.

Caoimhaen

@tesha I will see what I can do. Thanks!

@santar indeed. Its true. Blademaster are very good with classes that cause many afflictions. Something I always liked. But typically, for me it was the damage I struggled with as well as the strategy of being mounted, having shield up, parrying, and having rebounding up. It really messed with me. Granted I did learn to sort of get around it. But it still slows a blademaster down when he constantly has to knock the person from his mount, and bring down the person's shields, and bring down parry

Santar

Web/attack with diadem works about 50/50 time with no EQ trait. 

Jhui has quick-witted most likely.

Mizik

Santar said:

Occultists seem to have a tad too much momentum offense right now.

So do Priests.

For the former, I'd suggest simply making it a little bit harder for them to get past shield. If you're in the room with an Occultist, they're constantly going to be stacking afflicts on you, and they already have mechanisms that disallow you from running, and they're hard to hinder as well. Shielding barely slows their momentum, to the point where I'd almost say that if you shield, it -favours- the Occultist because they can continue to stack more afflictions in the time you're off EQ.  Make shielding a little bit more effective against Occultists and it'd be balanced.

For Priests, the disrupt skill is just poorly designed. Making those spirit elements basically "must cure" afflictions and then requiring you to focus to cure them for 250 mana a pop was a huge buff and a little over the top. To fix this problem I would let them also be cured with a herb eat, which is only a slight nerf considering the defensive problems that still creates with constant chastening + spirit wrack coming out to destroy your herb balance.

RE: Occies v shield

Gremlin not using ent balance makes shielding a waste of time, since they can just gremlin/aff, while your own offense is halted.

RE: Priest Disrupt

My concern is REQUIRING Trans Survival before even considering fighting a class.

Also, disagree with creation of Lash. And Inquisition Absolve req drop.

Antonius

I couldn't imagine fighting an Occultist outside of the arena without a permanent tree tattoo (or being a serpent), to be honest. Too high a chance of it fading midfight otherwise and then you're in serious trouble.

Dunn

I had the idea of kelp stack into aeon initially, but it's just not worth the effort and RNG that goes into it. Too high of a chance to fail and SVO cures aeon too well for it to be considered more viable than other strategies.

@Mannimar

Also, I never thought of focus being the ONLY cure for earth/air/fire/water disrupt being a bad thing (trans survival since 08)... well shit. Da fek @Makarios? All well, that's what public classleads will be for.

Antonius

@Dunn: You can cure disrupts with tree tattoo as well, but not fast enough to keep up; there's also the disrupt (fire, I think) that deals mana damage when you touch any tattoo to punish you even more for it. Serpent's probably the only class that could consider not using focus, due to evade and shrugging.

Santar

They tacked on a mana cost to shrugging that makes it not worth using vs. priests. costs the same mana as focus.

I really think shrugging should be a no mana/wp skill since it never was before.

Tesha

Priest is not as ridiculous as you guys are making it out to be, trust me. There are very few Priest fighters and changes like these take time to adapt to. I have mixed feelings about requiring focus - any damage class requires the opponent to have a substantial pool of health. You get locked by serpents quick if they realize you do not use focus. Same with apostate. These types of requirements are everywhere.

Santar

but you can still cure anything a serpent or apostate does with normal curatives.

I made this same argument when Priests were released - That anyone without focus simply had no way to cure these afflictions other than by every 15 seconds with a tree.

Make a herb cure them and all will be fine.

Jovolo

I think tree got sped up to 10 seconds with recovery, but your point still stands. As far as I know, one of them is cured by lobelia but the rest only by focus. I don't know why that was decided or why the inconsistency with it was considered to be a good idea. If they're all cured by herbs though, the speed of the abilities is what? Enough to keep up and overwhelm the single herb balance it'd take to cure? I don't think so.

I'll preemptively apologise for any ignorant comments, I'm only just coming back to it and new Priest is pretty foreign.

Dunn

It's hard to tack on another method of curing disrupt because then you could just focus/use other cure/tree for shits and giggles and that wouldn't be balanced either. Would have to move it off focus curable entirely, but then that removes the mana penalty that drives a lot of the offense imo.

Defensively, priests need some work, but this is an Occultist thread so let's stop talking about priests.

Jovolo

If tree and shrugging take care of it, passive and active curing such as angel care, syphon, fool, alleviate, bloodboil etcetera also all cure it? If that's the case which I think it is and also should be, then keeping it as a focus cure doesn't seem ALL that horrific. There are a lot of classes that are difficult to fight without Focus. Remember the days of fighting an Apostate with a nightmare and permanent stupidity. Or the joy that is a Bard's voicecraft and passive mentals. 

Except, you aren't -quite- as punished for it while fighting a Priest, considering the active and passive ways to cure it, including a tree tattoo every 10 seconds. Will certainly test it out over the coming weeks having just gone Priest (shh! I'm really feeling it this time. Good vibes).

The last I'll say about it for now... this isn't exactly the correct medium for it.

Santar

Ok then, re:occultists, make it impossible to use entities while off balance from hammering or using the shieldbreak ent.

Dunn

Then we'd have to make the same impossible for Alchemists with their abilities. And remove rsl.

PS this isn't the ACC thread for Occies. Was an Occie 1v1 how to question thread.

Santar

I'm not gonna lie. I only read like the last 7 posts.

Makarios

The focus only status of the four disrupts was mostly because at the time it was pretty unclear whether it'd be practically viable to stick disrupts given the fairly limited aff control priests have if it was an herb cure. I can sympathise with the comments that you require focus to be reallistically capable of fighting one at mid/high tier, but the same can be said for several classes in that regard. That's definitely something which can be tweaked in the upcoming classleads though, both occultist and priest mechanics in particular should be pretty open to adjusting as necessary now that they've been out there for a bit.

Trample/Cadmus won't work (and if it does, that's a bug). Cadmus (unlike hecate) requires very specific affs to be stuck.

The shrugging cost was just left as what it was to put up the defence. Best file a report on that and someone will take a look.

Santar

Well, to me it doesn't seem like the point of disrupt is to "stick" them. The point is that they have to focus no matter what, so that's an extra 250 mana you drain per round.

Re: Shrugging, so you're saying it's not intended to have a mana cost, then?  I was pretty disappointed when I saw the heavy mana cost since ya know, prior to this, shrugging just worked at no cost, so the mana cost seemed like a pretty over the top nerf 

Also, I've honestly not used shrugging much, but I was just playing around with it and noticed that we can't even use it while off balance/eq? What's up with that? I didn't even realize that was a limitation before. That's pretty terrible for us. Mana cost + not being able to use it off bal/eq are some pretty serious limitations.

Didn't realize it was quite this massive of a nerf. Probably needs to be buffed a little.

Is it intended that being off balance/eq stops shrugging @Makarios?

Makarios

The mana cost likely shouldn't be there, no.

The balance/eq requirement was intended. That'll be something to do in classleads if it needs changing, but I'll fix up the mana requirement now.