Quick Combat Questions

Mizik

Gonna take Warlocks to civil war for Runewarden.

.....

Actually, that is a fantastic idea.

Stay tuned. Also, thanks Isis.

Sylvance

Q: How do you deal with Occie ents inside the Arena? Kill zem? Ignore zem?

Eld

Heartstop

Mizik

When I'm a quick, high damage bashing class I just smash them out.

Like before takedowns, gremlin, orb, soulmaster usually have to go.

Madrax

What's the best stance when hunting? I'm up to thyr in twoarts and I was just wondering which is the best to go hunting. Which race is good for a great Blademaster? I'm a raja now but im thinking of going human because of the high crit chance and the sip.

Eld

Madrax said:

What's the best stance when hunting? I'm up to thyr in twoarts and I was just wondering which is the best to go hunting. Which race is good for a great Blademaster? I'm a raja now but im thinking of going human because of the high crit chance and the sip.

Eld said:

Zael said:

Sena said:

Zael said:

What does more damage Bm blade (without a band) or Sentinel's Jaguar maul?

With reflexes, maul beats unbanded drawslash in Thyr/Mir/Doya, but drawslash is better than maul in Sanya/Arash/unstanced. Without reflexes, drawslash beats maul in any stance.

Edit: That's if you're asking about damage per second. If you just mean the damage of the attack, ignoring speed, then maul is 500 damage while drawslash in Arash (the strongest stance) is 496.

Arash huh? I thought it was Thyr but anyway thanks you and I have no reflexes sooo I guess I need to make some.

Arash does the most damage (and damage per second, since it's also quite fast), but you take significantly more damage in it, so it's rarely used while hunting. Up until a couple months ago, when drawslash damage on denizens was unaffected by stance, Thyr was the best damage per second (about the same as Arash). Since that bugfix, Arash is the highest (but dangerous for hunting), followed by Sanya.

Any race works.

Mizik

The correct answer is Sanya.

Sylvance

Sure I'm being dumb here - how is Sanya better than Thyr?

Sena

Sylvance said:

Sure I'm being dumb here - how is Sanya better than Thyr?

Sanya does significantly higher damage than Thyr, more than enough to make up for the speed difference.

Sylvance

Sena said:

Sylvance said:

Sure I'm being dumb here - how is Sanya better than Thyr?

Sanya does significantly higher damage than Thyr, more than enough to make up for the speed difference.

I thought the only difference was that Sanya bypassed armour; I also thought that denizens didn't mechanically have armour.

Someone help me out here, because it seems I need a complete overhaul of my understanding of BM stances :S

Eld

Sylvance said:

Sena said:

Sylvance said:

Sure I'm being dumb here - how is Sanya better than Thyr?

Sanya does significantly higher damage than Thyr, more than enough to make up for the speed difference.

I thought the only difference was that Sanya bypassed armour; I also thought that denizens didn't mechanically have armour.

Someone help me out here, because it seems I need a complete overhaul of my understanding of BM stances :S

Stances don't change the effect of armour. Infusions do, because they change the damage type of the slash. Stances do affect the damage of a slash, with some increasing it over unstanced slashes (Sanya, Doya, Arash, in that order) and some decreasing it (Mir, Thyr). It used to be that that damage difference was only for adventurers, and drawslash would do the same damage to denizens regardless of stance; hence, Thyr was the best stance for bashing because it was the fastest (tied with Arash) without the reduced defense of Arash. This was a longstanding bug that was fixed relatively recently. Since that bug fix, the same damage modifications apply, and Sanya is enough stronger than Thyr to come out ahead in damage per second.

For straight DPS, Arash>Sanya>Thyr=Doya>Mir.

Edit: I should maybe note that when I was starting out, I was told that void infusion bypassed armour, which is true, but no more so than for any of the other infusions. I don't know if you're mixing that up with stances, or if you were taught that it was the stance that mattered rather than the infusion. Misinformation abounds, as always.

Sena

Compared to unstanced, Thyr has increased speed, but reduced damage (the lowest damage of any stance). Sanya has normal speed, and higher damage than unstanced.

Edit: Eld beat me to it.

Sylvance

Thanks to both, that clears it up really nicely. 

Seems I got infusions and stances confuzzled.  My strategy has always been to Arash anything I could kill in a few hits/things that don't team, and Mir the high-damage or lolganking denizens.  Did not realise that Sanya did more damage, period, so that's really great to know. I may even reach dragon at some point.

Naisar

And doya is turrible.

Adet

Daeir said:

Naisar said:

And doya is turrible.

Everybody knows Earth is the weakest element.

I mean, come on.

Really?

Eld

For abilities that give random mental afflictions, like Moon tarot and (I think) Contradanse, is there a common list of affs that they all use, or a separate list for each?

Iocun

All separate.

Contredanse, for instance, gives stupidity, confusion, recklessness, masochism, dizziness.

Moon gives stupidity, confusion, epilepsy, hypersomnia, anorexia.

Shirszae

So, just to get this solved definitely, does aiming affects sniping accuracy or only shooting?

Iocun

Only reason not to aim would be to conserve endurance. You get away without aiming with snipe+wind+marksman, but yeah, generally you should do it.

Mishgul

I have heard that aim does not affect snipe. Does anyone have any numbers?

Dunn

Moon also has a high (higher than the rest of the affs) chance to give amnesia. @Iocun

Sanna

Dunn said:

Moon also has a high (higher than the rest of the affs) chance to give amnesia. @Iocun

This is why I wish we had a fully fleshed out wiki.

Iocun

Dunn said:

Moon also has a high (higher than the rest of the affs) chance to give amnesia. @Iocun

Ah, good to know!

Sanna said:

Dunn said:

Moon also has a high (higher than the rest of the affs) chance to give amnesia. @Iocun

This is why I wish we had a fully fleshed out wiki.

Is something like this that important to know for the average combatant though? And if it was so important, would it be so hard to discover it by yourself?

I never knew it until now, and I don't think it has ever actually impeded me. But if I somehow had died in some fight due to not knowing this, I'd have gone back, saw that I had been missing something, looked into it, and found out. Either way, no big deal at all.

I'm really not opposed to basic knowledge about combat mechanics being publicised, but there's no need for all details like this to be covered, or people will eventually spend more game reading the wiki than playing the game. One does not need to know how everything works in order to enjoy Achaea!

It is possible to get by with rather limited amounts of detailed knowledge and still be "successful", simply by roughly and empirically learning the things you truly need to know and developing a kind of "intuition" through that.

I don't need to know exactly how long a knight will be off balance from doubleslashing me with soulpiercers. I just need to fight knights with soulpiercers a couple of times to get a general feeling of how fast they are and learn what consequences this has for me, offensively and defensively.

I might need the precise times if I discussed changes to it in the ACC or made a classlead proposal, but those are specialised situations.

Sanna

Sanna said:

Dunn said:

Moon also has a high (higher than the rest of the affs) chance to give amnesia. @Iocun

This is why I wish we had a fully fleshed out wiki.

Is something like this that important to know for the average combatant though? And if it was so important, would it be so hard to discover it by yourself?

I never knew it until now, and I don't think it has ever actually impeded me. But if I somehow had died in some fight due to not knowing this, I'd have gone back, saw that I had been missing something, looked into it, and found out. Either way, no big deal at all.

I'm really not opposed to basic knowledge about combat mechanics being publicised, but there's no need for all details like this to be covered, or people will eventually spend more game reading the wiki than playing the game. One does not need to know how everything works in order to enjoy Achaea!

It is possible to get by with rather limited amounts of detailed knowledge and still be "successful", simply by roughly and empirically learning the things you truly need to know and developing a kind of "intuition" through that.

I don't need to know exactly how long a knight will be off balance from doubleslashing me with soulpiercers. I just need to fight knights with soulpiercers a couple of times to get a general feeling of how fast they are and learn what consequences this has for me, offensively and defensively.

Sure it's not necessary to know, but if I'm interested in a class, I wish I could see what their abilities did. Especially as a novice, not being able to tell what I'm being killed by gets annoying. Especially since you can't formulate strategies without knowing basic information on classes(like balance time on a ability). For example I was in a rampage, and Jhui managed to kill me only using telepathy. I'd like to figure out how he did it, but besides bothering him for every detail on all of his abilities I have no way to do so.

Iocun

Maybe he won't mind you bothering him that much? Or if he does, maybe others won't? Many combatants actually quite enjoy discussing such things, even if it's still on a "newbie level".

In the end, you really don't need to know all the details behind every telepathy ability to understand how he did it. You will need to know the essentials behind afflicting/curing, you may need to know the basic effects of the abilities he used on you, but you don't really need to know their exact equilibrium times, how much mana or willpower they cost, etc. Yes, there may then still be grey areas that you don't completely understand yet, but that's not so important: you want to learn something from every single fight, not everything.

There are very few people who will be totally unwilling to answer a few questions if you ask them politely after a fight. They may not be able/willing to answer everything, but probably enough to make you progress.

Being given the exact balance times of every single ability on Achaea wouldn't be helpful to me anyways, since there's no way I would remember them all. I would only remember a very few that are actually important for me to know - and those few won't be such a huge trouble to find out in-game.

Sanna

@Daeir and @Iocun The problem is asking and reviewing logs is great to an extent. But if I want to learn about other classes, I'd prefer not to just pester people non stop. I ask specific question, but when I want to learn generally what skills do, especially in classes I'm not affiliated with, it's hard to figure out. For example in telepathy you just told me what mind batter does however looking at the logs, I would have a hard time figuring out what skill did, and even what questions to ask. Let's look at the help file for telepathy for an example. These are four skills that are at the top end of the skill set:

Scythe              Scythe through the bond between a subject and a spirit.

Batter              Devastate your opponent's mind with an overwhelming attack.(*)

Radiance            Destroy your subject with a single blast of mental energy.

Mindprints          Take a mindprint of your subject.

Can I figure out what any of these things do? I have one option. Ask people, who may be busy, ignore my questions, or there may just be no one to ask. I like to be able to figure things out, without having to rely on other people to tell me what skills are good or bad. And from the information I have, I cannot tell that. Sure I've learned a lot of little details from reading the last 40 pages of the combat logs thread. But I still wouldn't be able to look at a class and figure out a new strategy, because that hinges on details that aren't available. There is so much to take in, and I can't just ask everyone everything all the time. I mean I don't even know what works well in my skill sets, because I can't do research on my own. The only reason I know how long blackout lasts is because I asked my mentor to try it out on me. Same with the damage on throttle, how much damage sensitivity increases things by, etc. If I want to try something new and use say vodun puncture, I don't know what it does, I can't find it in logs, my only chance of figuring it our is hoping one of the few shamans are on, and sometimes even they don't know.

//End Rant 

Shirszae

Mishgul said:

I have heard that aim does not affect snipe. Does anyone have any numbers?

Probably a question to ask @Sena

Achilles

Iocun said:

Only reason not to aim would be to conserve endurance. You get away without aiming with snipe+wind+marksman, but yeah, generally you should do it.

This isn't accurate.  There's a .2s delay from aiming to where you acquire your target in which you have to pause (cant smoke rebounding/hold breath).  So effectively you are shooting (depending on your bow) about 5-8% slower.  I would say don't use aiming unless there is a wall, maybe shooting a monk/bm (projectiles).

Simoln

Er, does Aiming have an effect on Projectiles? Thought Aiming affected hit/miss whereas Projectiles was caught/not caught, two different chances.

Achilles

Simoln said:

Er, does Aiming have an effect on Projectiles? Thought Aiming affected hit/miss whereas Projectiles was caught/not caught, two different chances.

I only did limited testing (10 arrows) but with aiming I hit more often than without.  Could be a fluke.