Best Class for me

Worves

Hello everyone,

With the recent retirement feature, I've found myself wanting to make a new character to take advantage of my pool of credits. I currently have around 4.5k to spend on developing a new main. The thing I'm unsure about is the class. I've been browsing the forums and reading other threads, and I have a general idea of what I want, but I'd like input on which actually fits my needs.

I'm looking for something that will ultimately be able to hold its own in high-end pvp, but that doesn't require a monstrous amount of coding like Occultist. I would prefer it to have somewhat decent bashing, but that isn't a heavy requirement since I can offset it a bit with arties. I also tend to prefer more physical classes as opposed to magic, so I would eliminate things like Shaman, Occultist, and Magi.

In particular, I've been looking at serpent, the knight classes, and bard. I really like the versatility the knight classes offer, but my main question is how do they stack up with pvp? Do they scale well with arties? Is there one knight class in particular that's better than the others? I'm somewhat familiar with Runewarden, but how viable are the different specializations as Infernal and Paladin?

For serpent, I've heard that it's very viable at the upper end, but is there a huge coding requirement like the old serpent classes used to have?  Would I need to spec con at first to be able to hunt properly? I think I read somewhere that a Thoth's Fang and 15 dex maxes out the dstab speed, correct? Would you recommend going for a class that let's me max con and then buy a Thoth's fang and +dex boots? Or should I go with some artie distribution to make my experience better?

Bard is the one that I'm the most unsure about. I've heard that it's extremely good at killing people in a timely manner. I've also heard that the artied bashing is godly. However, does this one require a lot of coding? From what I understand, there's 3-4 things you need to be actively tracking during combat, and I think that might honestly be more than my combat abilities can handle. If that's not the case, what kind of arties could I be looking to go with here?

Are there any classes that I could look at that would fit my needs? I know that Sylvan is very popular right now, but I'm sure it's going to get nerfed in the future given the complaints about damage. I'm also not -that- interested in playing for Eleusis at the moment, since I came from something similar in other games. I'm not overly interested in Blademaster either, as the bashing is extremely awful. The limited functionality in group combat is also a bummer.

Kiet

Serpent and bard require either a lot of coding knowledge or a lot of affliction knowledge. Both are completely manualable, but so is occultist, technically, so if you don't want to manual occultist you probably don't want to manual serp/bard. Not sure what you mean by 'old serpent classes', since serpent is essentially the same class it's been for 10+ rl years, just with more tools in its arsenal lately.  Serpent is always going to be squishy because you're running at -3 con compared to a con spec, at the very least.

Knights are good and easy at pvp and will do well at any spectrum of arties, really. Paladin is probably the best knight in pvp right now, and the most flexible. Knights do need to be able to do damage, though, so if you're like a 10 str knight don't expect to do that well unless you're a paladin that has perfected the aff route. Infernal can vivi, technically, too.

Worves

I suppose by old serpent I was referring more to having to know how to sneak stuff around anti-illusion. I never really was quite good at that, although I understand that has been changed now?

As for the others, I'm not really averse to a steep learning curve, but I would prefer something that I could work with a more limited coding base. I'm not saying that I'll be completely manual, but my coding ability is sketchy at best. Would you recommend I stay away from Bard/Serp given that?

Kiet

Barring system-breaking illusions, the idea of serpent (to beat herb balance to stack afflictions that let you achieve a purpose), has remained the same. Affliction illusions aren't the centrepiece of serpent combat now, but serpent is still about tracking afflictions whether in your head or on your screen and planning around that.

Any class's offence can be manualled (with simple aliases and such of course), it just depends on how much effort you're willing to put in. If you think occultist can't be manualled, you might (but might not!) find serpent and bard to be in the same boat, since they also need to keep track of rapid affliction delivery. Occultist doesn't really require monstrous amount of coding, so we might just be defining monstrous differently.

That said, it is probably easier to manual serpent/bard than occultist simply because their afflictions are more predictable. But manualling knight is the easiest of them all, is all I'm saying.

Worves

The affliction tracking isn't something that I'm really that worried about, as I feel like I can manage that with enough practice. I've never really had any experience with occultist combat though, so I can't testify to it. The thing that I'm worried about is adding multiple balances that I need to track on top of it, such as entity for Occultist and the multiple ones for Bard.

Kiet

Multiple balances is not difficult now that you have class queue as an option. Of all the difficulties of Occultist that is not one of them. It's more of an issue for bard, who sometimes wants to change up t he timing of singing/jabbing, but that won't really come up for a while as you learn to fight.

Sena

Worves said:

For serpent, I've heard that it's very viable at the upper end, but is there a huge coding requirement like the old serpent classes used to have?  Would I need to spec con at first to be able to hunt properly? I think I read somewhere that a Thoth's Fang and 15 dex maxes out the dstab speed, correct? Would you recommend going for a class that let's me max con and then buy a Thoth's fang and +dex boots? Or should I go with some artie distribution to make my experience better?

Yes, dstab with a Thoth's Fang will max out at 15 dex, and for PvP, enough dex to max dstab speed is all that's really important. Con artefacts are cheaper than other stat artefacts, so getting the necessary dex with your spec/traits and then buying a con belt would be better than speccing con and buying dex boots.

For hunting, there's no limit to how much dex will help, and it actually has increasing returns so the more dex you have, the more you'll benefit from any further increase. Because of that, for bashing it would probably be best to get as much dex as possible (19 is the most you can get with race+trait+arties), which combined with a level 3 lash will give you close to the highest DPS in the game, but you'll then want good defensive artefacts to offset your squishiness (because of the lost con from dex spec).

Aegoth

Eh. Speccing dex and buying con is cheaper, yea... but speccing con to buy boots -and- con arties makes you way tankier in the long run without sacrificing any speed

Kiet

You can just respec by the time you have you have con and dex arties maxed out though.

Xinna

I'd say bard. Very high skill cap and can go damage or locks.

I never coded old serpent (can't even think of a top serp who did pre-new things) so not sure where you got that there's a coding requirement.

Exelethril

I think SnB infernal would be really interesting/strong - can vivi/truelock/dsb, kinda tempted to try it on an alt. If you don't like chasing, bard is a bit annoying against prep classes that run every 2-3 jabs(forces you into doing things like sticking impatience/claustrophobia indoors or outpacing their prep outdoors)

Dochitha

High end PvP, can be manualled, cheap in artefacts, con spec, you are definitely asking for alchemist. 

Worves

Following up on this thread, I decided that I would like to go for a Troll Runewarden. I simply don't want to have the factional investment required of the other classes, and the rp idea of being able to empower my weapons and armour appeals to me.

So far, I've chosen to be a Troll Mercenary and I've taken the str trait to bring me up to 17 strength with Jera. My main question now is which artefacts should I be looking to buy? Here's how I am breaking down my current credit situation:

Lvl 80 = 205 credits (with History Quest) + 170 starter lessons + 245 level lessons = 1475 lessons
Lesson Packages = 2000 lessons

I want to trans my 3 class skills, survival, avoidance, weaponry, and riding. So 7 x 1736 = 12152 - 3475 = 8677
That will mean I need to spend 1447 credits on transing those skills.

That leaves me with about 3050 to spend on arties. I'd like to set aside 1600 for weapons, as I haven't really decided which spec I will choose. That'll let me get a lvl 3 bastard sword, lvl 2 scimitars, or a lvl 2 longsword and SoA after I play around with them a bit. So I'll have about 1400 credits left to spend on other things. Does anyone have suggestions? Collar of Lupus shouldn't be in the calculations, as I'm going to try and get one of the recent crated mounts that come pre-collared. (Apologies for all the math. I like thinking things through logically, so I was using this as a bit of a sounding board for myself.)

Peregrino

I heard somewhere that scimitars of the falcon min/max dps/speed for a dual wield knight.

Sword and board knights appear to switch their shields around, so you can't just use SoA for all of your attacks, which was a downside for me because I don't want to stop wielding my artifact shield.

Bastard sword seems to be cheapest but it's actually 2h weapons, not 2h sword, some of them seem to swap to warhammer.

Kiet

Technically all the classes you were looking at were unaligned, but it's good you settled on something!

You don't actually want a SoA if you wanna pvp as snb, I'm pretty sure, since it's slower than a buckler.

Dairon

That leaves me with about 3050 to spend on arties. I'd like to set aside 1600 for weapons, as I haven't really decided which spec I will choose. That'll let me get a lvl 3 bastard sword, lvl 2 scimitars, or a lvl 2 longsword and SoA after I play around with them a bit. So I'll have about 1400 credits left to spend on other things. Does anyone have suggestions? Collar of Lupus shouldn't be in the calculations, as I'm going to try and get one of the recent crated mounts that come pre-collared. (Apologies for all the math. I like thinking things through logically, so I was using this as a bit of a sounding board for myself.)


Nooo quote box. 

I would suggest getting the no brainer credit package. Also factor in the lesson bonus from converting your first 1000 (?) unbound credits to bound when calculating how many credits you'll have left over for other artefacts. 

I'd suggest a pendant (crit), wings, and a few health related arties if you are going full strength

Worves

Dairon said:

That leaves me with about 3050 to spend on arties. I'd like to set aside 1600 for weapons, as I haven't really decided which spec I will choose. That'll let me get a lvl 3 bastard sword, lvl 2 scimitars, or a lvl 2 longsword and SoA after I play around with them a bit. So I'll have about 1400 credits left to spend on other things. Does anyone have suggestions? Collar of Lupus shouldn't be in the calculations, as I'm going to try and get one of the recent crated mounts that come pre-collared. (Apologies for all the math. I like thinking things through logically, so I was using this as a bit of a sounding board for myself.)


Nooo quote box. 

I would suggest getting the no brainer credit package. Also factor in the lesson bonus from converting your first 1000 (?) unbound credits to bound when calculating how many credits you'll have left over for other artefacts. 

I'd suggest a pendant (crit), wings, and a few health related arties if you are going full strength

I already did put the lesson packages into my calculations. The retirement credits are bound as well. I've have no interest in a crit pendant, as I don't really plan on hunting a ton. Maybe I'll get to dragon one day, but I'm not going to be absolutely trying to beat the record. I'll just take it nice and easy as I go.