Noob occultist?

Drot

What are some things someone should know before starting an occultist? 

Bashing efficiency?
Key skills that make it unique, and sample comba strategies?
Best artefacts to get?
Useful common skills such as weaponry and riding?
Pure damage potential? 
Con or int more important? Horkval armour better?

Thanks!

I could make the switch but wouldnt have much of anything left so want to be well informed. Thematically I think it is an incredibly cool class and Babel is pretty sweet. My favorite god now that pandemonium is dead. rip

Aylek

Drot said:

What are some things someone should know before starting an occultist? 

Bashing efficiency?
Key skills that make it unique, and sample comba strategies?
Best artefacts to get?
Useful common skills such as weaponry and riding?
Pure damage potential? 
Con or int more important? Horkval armour better?

Thanks!

I could make the switch but wouldnt have much of anything left so want to be well informed. Thematically I think it is an incredibly cool class and Babel is pretty sweet. My favorite god now that pandemonium is dead. rip

Definitely not the most experienced Occultist here, but having a load of fun with it.

Occultist PvP attack speed from instill (selectable affliction from a limited pool), and domination (ordering select entities to attack at certain speeds) scales with intelligence up to a maximum of 17 int, anything after that and you're just boosting your damage potential (which can be pretty nuts).

Only arties I would suggest is either + 1 int to reach the 17 int cap (500cr), an SoA (800cr), sip ring (500cr), and an aldar diadem (1200cr) to really get stuck in, though I would imagine its perfectly viable without any of these. As an aside from this, you can pretty much get any artie you want (collars for % damage increase, boomerang to grab people, chitin greaves for leap, ring of flying, bracers of frost to freeze the ground etc) so loads of potential there.

For combat you'd definitely want to go Int spec, as the bread and butter for an occultist is the Enlighten stack, you essentially overwhelm them with afflictions to reach certain numbers to use different abilities (3 affs for cadmus, 5 for crone, then select affs for whisperingmadness and eventually enlighten), this allows you to kill your target with a pretty cool ability.

Useful skills? Not too sure - probably mountjump in riding so you can use your Chimera from domination to jump over walls if you need, tumble in survival to get out of nasty limb break setups, and parry in weaponry.

Bashing seems a bit slow, though I've not done too much of it. Again, I believe the bashing attack scales with int for damage (as well as artefact collars).

Occultist has some really unique and interesting skills - transmogrify - a "free" death, which leaves you mutated granting some potential positives or negatives to your character (+1/2/3 -1/2/3 int, +1/2/3 con - 1/2/3 con etc) which makes it pretty funny.

Controllable doppleganger to move around the realm for you, you can channel certain skills and abilities through. Tentacles that stop your enemies leaving the room, travel to the chaos planes and strike up pacts with chaos lords, or turn your very being into energy (?) with astralform and infiltrate enemy cities.

On top of that you have really fun abilities like encipher, where you can code messages to other occultists in letters and such, lots of RP potential with their abilities, and they only share one skillset (with jesters) in the form of Tarot.

They definitely have a lot of potential, though it can also be a bit frustrating at first to set everything up from a combat perspective.

Once done correctly (see @seragorn @jinsun @archaon @otheroccultist), you are definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Others will definitely give you a better picture, but right now, loving it.

Omor

Adding onto Ayleks list of people to page..
@Hirst @Arcani @Nylian

Drot

Just realized I forgot to say thanks @Aylek! That was very helpful