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Shaman KILL Strategies?
Been sparring and testing a lot lately, I am really looking for the real way a Shaman is fighting. I am sure I am getting it all wrong.
Okay...I am so confused I am not sure what I am trying to ask...is there any plans to start?
What I have done:
I must be missing some important concepts about Shaman and doing random things altogether! Appreciate all advises!
Okay...I am so confused I am not sure what I am trying to ask...is there any plans to start?
What I have done:
- Using Charts to time the curses, but curses alone can't do much for me...I am like keep looping the same curses over and over until I die to limb breaks...
- Trying to setup Tzantza...doesn't really work without a lock.
- Trying to lock with curses...whoa I need more luck!
- Combined the use of Vodun and Curses, now this is more reliable, but it requires me to fashion so much it's insane to still be living, unless I move about a lot at the right times, which just straight up annoy the opponent.
I must be missing some important concepts about Shaman and doing random things altogether! Appreciate all advises!
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Comments
Get past this, and you will lover longer.
Life > opponent life
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
The basic thing for locking is seeing what their priorities are. The first one you care about is whether they prioritise curing asthma or paralysis.
If they prioritise curing paralysis, you're going to go in cursing paralysis. Your curses come out at .99s and herb balance is 1.5s, so you can curse faster than they eat. Keep cursing paralysis and after the third curse, they won't be able to eat the cure before you get balance back. That's when you slip in asthma or impatience. Then you just go back to paralysis until you can slip in the next one. You repeat this process until you have a lock. When people talk about an affliction being "stuck", they're talking bout slipping it in like that.
If they prioritise asthma over paralysis, things get a little more complicated, but most classes become pretty nonthreatening to you - you curse asthma like you did paralysis above, and the first affliction you slip in is paralysis and, since they keep curing the asthma instead of the paralysis, they're stuck being paralysed as long as you keep cursing (there are a few classes that don't care as much about being paralysed).
There are a few wrinkles.
First, you don't have enough swiftcurses to fully lock someone, so you'll need to reswiftcurse, which means you'll either need to swiftcurse when you would normally slip in a locking affliction, then go back to paralysis until the next opportunity, or they'll cure one of the afflictions you gave them. Make absolutely certain that you use a swiftcurse charge to swiftcurse - swiftcurse applies to itself.
Tree and active curing will be a problem. You can either just accept that they'll try to tree out of your first lock attempt and quickly set about repeating the whole strategy before their tree balance comes back or you can try to puzzle out which affliction they cured and slip it back in.
The biggest problem is that curses doesn't have the slickness affliction in it. You need to find some other way to afflict it. The simplest is vodun imbibe, but you can get fancier. The first level of fanciness is soulscourge from the Marak binding - use that to imbibe and you can deliver the final locking affliction and the slickness (via imbibe) at the same time instead of waiting for another few curses to give you an opportunity to slip in the imbibe as above.
That means you'll need a doll. You can just fashion it up the good old-fashioned way (and, if they don't know how to hold you down/you're good at it, running away while fashioning is a tried-and-true method, even if it is annoying), or you can try to use Maligus's bind ability soulrend to get fashions while cursing (for instance becase you want to be cursing to hinder their offense). Soulrend only works when their mana is low, so you need to do something to get their mana lower - the Maligus attune will help (especially since it does mana and health damage and most people will prioritise sipping health) and, since most people will spend the mana to clot it away, the Teraile attune can help a lot too. Usually, if you're trying to do a Maligus-based strategy, those are the attunements you'll use. If you can stick manaleech, that can help with Maligus too.
Your other option is to use Aspar's binding, coagulate, to deliver the slickness. Coagulate requires that your opponent is bleeding. Rather than with Maligus, where you need them to clot away the bleeding, here you need them not to clot it, so you can use it to coagulate. That means you need to stick haemophilia as your first affliction, so they can't clot.
In all of the above cases, you can speed up the process somewhat by using Syvis's relapse to stick the first affliction (particularly helpful for haemophilia because you want it applied to as many curses as possible before you try to coagulate). So in the above example, you can curse haemophilia and relapse haemophilia, then start cursing paralysis or asthma - the haemophilia will get stuck without having to wait for a few curses. Think of Syvis as giving you a one-affliction head-start to building your lock.
Notice how Aspar and Maligus are at odds though. You can't really exploit soulrend and coagulate at the same time - if you want to use soulrend, you need them to be burning mana clotting, and if you want to use coagulate, you need to give them haemophilia so they can't clot (and won't be burning mana).
The final wrinkle is that most people aren't going to stand still long enough for you to do all of this. Marak and Syvis and will help you speed up the process, but even then it's comparatively slow. You'll need some way to hold people down or give you an opening - vodun mangle can be useful or concussion+aeon. There are a lot of ways to use vodun to make the above easier to pull off.
Those are the basics, without really getting into strategies involving vodun.
Use of soulrend is already limited by not being able to be swiftcursed, so the conflict of soulrend over coagulate never really comes up. You need to dedicate your actions to draining mana on top of the bleeding from Teraile to use it properly anyway.
Vodun is stupidly powerful, and can easily help you get the lock even below 30 fashions depending on what you do.
Some fun strategies to try:
Relapse asthma slowlock: Pretty simple, there's a 5 second window between stripping speed and speed coming back up, which gives you time to curse twice before the second slow. So: vodun slow, swiftcurse asthma invoke relapse asthma, swiftcurse something random here, generally this will be cured before slow and is just helpful to get timing of slow down for relapse, finally vodun slow again. Once you get balance back if they haven't cured slow, curse them into a lock making sure to curse asthma everytime they cure it.
Salvelock: This one is fun, and I'll leave the theorycrafting to you. The general idea however is to stick impatience and anorexia when they're off salve balance from applying restoration to fix a mangle. My current strategy involves the use of soulscourge, although with good timing it isn't necessary even against fitness users. Because mangle is two applies of restoration and 2 second balance, you have 2-3 curses prior to their second apply to stick impatience prior to sticking anorexia. The rest should be simply to figure out.
You can also blight a lock affliction in order to speed up the process of locking someone if they don't diagnose in time.
I also don't think I ever realised that Maligus didn't allow for swiftcursing. I'm not really sure why you'd ever use it if you'd be cursing so slowly and you'd need to be cursing to reduce mana. Why would you ever do that over just fashioning normally?
Also soulrend is still situationally useful, especially if vodun status is up so you can see when a good time to use it is.
It looks to me that Shaman's kill almost always start with a lock. While I think the same, I guess there could be other ways of working to a win.
4.7 T: send smoke
5.7 swiftcurse anorexia (or soulscourge here if enough fashions)
6.7 T: eat kelp failed, send focus/epidermal
7.7 ...continue to a lock?
Is my chart right? I am not entirely sure how the curing of most systems work while in aeon...I hope this theoretically work. It will take 21 fashions to start, or 22 to command touch tree first.
So far I am taking that Shamans need to seal a lock to win reliably.
Also, even to the degree that you do need a lock, it's not like shaman is particularly unidimensional with all the different ways you have of achieving one.
But since I am mostly sparring in arena, we almost always arrived prepared and reliability is a demand, but of course I don't think any class have a "Surefire" reliable way of pulling of a win which is not defendable, I think there are parts where I can do better and make myself more reliable.
I just tested the slow setup, this is how it happened:
2.7 T: ate kelp
3.7 T: focused
5.5 r asthma hits
Hmm...I must be missing something here!
3.7 swiftcurse stupid
Why use stupid? It gets cured instantly and doesn't accomplish anything.
You might want to do the strategy in blackout to lower reaction times on curing and speed strip as they'd need to check defences and diagnose before curing. Blackout also hides the initial Aeon affliction message.
So force tree (vodun command touch tree) - blackout, slow, curse asthma/relapse asthma (kelp eat) - curse para - curse clumsy/asthma relapses - slow.
If you find they run when you do this, which they will if they're any good, mangle a leg beforehand.
See if you have more success with that.
I didn't look at new Shaman when it came out so I'm not sure Spiritlore does exactly, but you can chain together anorexia/slickness, right? That means you just need to stick asthma and impatience to lock them which should be pretty easy. Command touch tree-para-para-impatience-para-asthma-gecko/slike-para. If they can fitness? para-para-impatience-para-asthma-para-weariness-gecko/slike-para.
Would help if you posted logs of you trying things out
Oh, also. Rift-lock is and has always been hilariousy overpowered as a Shaman provided you can get the fashions. All you need to do is keep them still (leg mangle) and then mangle arms, stick addiction while you curse:
para(eat)-addiction-para(eat=out of bloodroot=paralysis stuck)-asthma-asthma(asthma stuck)-impatience-impatience(impatience stuck)-weariness(weariness stuck)-imbibe slickness-locked with (two mangled arms, asthma, slickness, impatience, weariness and no outrifted kelp or bloodroot).
This becomes harder if your opponent takes precautions and has minerals and herbs outrifted, prioritises addiction etc, but it's an inevitable situation because you can mangle arms as much as you have fashions at only 6 fashions per 8 seconds of no outrifting.
*Fades back into obscurity*
Even if you swiftcurse something with an herb cure instead of stupid, they're going to eat at ~4.2, get herb balance back at ~5.7, eat the cure at ~6.7, smoke at ~7.7, and you still won't have balance back until 8.4s. Even if you account for latency or the .2s delay of serverside, you're probably not going to gain the .7s you'd need to be able to curse asthma again before they cure aeon. And that's all assuming that they aren't smart enough to start curing before they get balance back, accounting for the aeon delay.
Tested few combinations, the one with blackout is stickier and has better success rates, but anyone with SVO can walk out easily, even without using serverside. WunderSys seems to have some issues with blackout + concussion though, heh heh, still easy enough to notice and manual it.
Now I have some vodun combos to pull, while not too reliable, I am starting to get good results.
Next up I am trying to work on hindering while fashioning up, and to invoke soulrend which at this point looks entirely alien to me. People almost always have full mana, bleeding and clotting do not make mana low, sticking haemophilia for a bit and then releasing it does make them low for a really quick while, but the work isn't worth the time...yet. Sneaking in vodun reckless out of the room seems to work, bleed a few and soulrend do work, but only if they are not careful.
So...still a lot of work to do! Also wish to hear about hindering while progressing as a Shaman.
I too would be interested if anyone has some insight there.
It's sort of frustrating when people ask a question and then post "I figured it out!" without posting the solution they found.
Once they are low on mana, a few soulrends can really quickly prep the doll to 30-40 fashions. I will usually keep soulrending as long as I get 3 fashions in, otherwise I switch back to the bleed/stupid/sleep loop. I also found out blighting stupidity or reckless with soulrend works pretty well in keeping the mana down for few consecutive soulrends.
That too, provided if I wasn't too hindered, as they can sip mana back up if I was hindered...
I am still working on this, now people just hinder me like mad...I could not do this as effectively now. You have any tips?
@Tael if they don't clot and I fail soulrend which I know shouldn't be failing, I will do an inflame.
Some of the stuffs I find:
- bleed curse: causes ~40-60 bleeds, requiring ~110m to clot. Teraile gives 20 bleed, requiring another 40m to clot. Maligus drains 100m. Total mana drain: ~250m
- stupidity curse: Focus uses 250m, Teraile gives 20 bleed, using 40m to clot, Maligus drains 100m. Total mana drain: ~ 390m.
- other herb curses: Teraile 20 bleed, 40m to clot, and Maligus drains 100m. Total drain: 140m only.
Alternating between bleed and stupidity is the quickest and hinders a bit too. The only caveat is if they are eating goldenseal instead of using focus, then, switch to straight bleed, or do 2 stupidity curses twice works too.
I may be wrong with the numbers. Accordingly INT/Collar/Sash does not increase bleed amount on people and does not improve mana drain from Maligus. So there is no artefact that is capable of making the drain more effective.
Teraile + bleed curse is 110 bleeding, I believe teraile itself is around 50-55. Not exactly sure on that particular number.
Maligus is 70 health, 70 mana flat I believe, though this may have changed since my testing.
Clotting is a 3:1 cost, 3 mana for every 1 bleed (each clot is 60 mana to clot 20 bleeding) except for knights, who get cheaper bleeding if they remember to use it. (This makes bleed + teraile + maligus 400 mana damage each time, whereas forcing focus is 470-480)
It also makes bleed + maligus + teraile straight up better in most cases to vodun bleed, with the only other strategy worth trying bloodlet still being significantly weaker, although it is still useful in that it is not quite as obvious.
And yeah, everything is more or less flat, so no arties to help out, which is extremely annoying and something I've tried to get changed.
Also, blight manaleech and healthleech.