Curse

Sir Santiago · Aug 12, 2005, 12:19 PM // 12:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yukito Kunisaki

edit*
speaking of teamwork, Weaken Armor allows my fellow rangers and warriors extra damage on my victim. Plague Touch ensures that my monk won't care or need to care if I have a condition. From what I've both read and experienced, Plague Touch will never lower your dps in the slightest. If anything, it keeps it high by removing weakness and blind from yourself AND moving poison and bleeding and disease to a shmuck. Our definition of helping teammates must be very different...

Do you know how much damage Weaken Armor actually adds with each of your attacks? I don't see how -20 armor can add considerable damage, but if it can, please enlighten me. The casting time for Weaken Armor really turns me off.

EDIT: Is it more efficient to have a necromancer primary as support casting Weaken Armor & such, while the warrior/necromancer casts faster spells??

Yukito Kunisaki · Aug 12, 2005, 05:19 PM // 17:19

Good call Nightwish. By going too focused, you are doing the one thing the enemy wants, opening up your weaknesses. Thankfully, most classes outside warrior have SOMETHING to deal with pesky hexes/conditions. If you lessen your weaknesses as much as possible, you maintain dps instead of losing it. Every build I consider tries to have as few weaknesses as possible. A warrior swinging a weapon is already a pain in the arse to stand next to. [a non enchanted hammer user for instance, OWUCH...] Now if he can't get either hexed, conditioned, or both, then his enemies got problems...

As for you Santiago, I've been given that argument about Weaken Armor before. "It's better on a caster" he said. This warrior tells me this while using self-mending...

Some inexperienced people would say REND is better on a caster!!! [yeah ok, how can you tell your teammates outside teamspeak/vent that your target has shield of judgement? asap?] Rend is DA BOMB on necro warriors. It's been said by some, denied by more, and I'm not one to follow the majority most of the time. Weaken Armor on a caster? That'd ONLY be feasible if his teammates had warriors who were aware of this, and even then at times, the caster should go after one target while the warrior shuts out another...

What is wrong with a warrior having skills to make his damage higher? 3s. cast time? I thought everyone knew that warriors were 'ignored' in combat? [lol, yeah, like that's really true] Weaken Armor is a surprise assault skill that adds a VERY considerable amount of damage to your target. -20 armor on a Warrior reduces his armor to about 75-80. May not be much and it's almost as if you're doing elemental damage to him. However, on a 60-70 armor caster, turning his armor to 40-50 means you're doing a LOT MORE damage on him/her than you normally would be doing. What's worse, this extra damage is experienced by ALL your physical damage teammates...

Weaken Armor, with just an extra warrior or ranger backing you up is PAIN...

edit*

Weaken Armor has a 30s. duration and recycle time. A caster who should be spamming the crap out of his skills shouldn't rely on a skill that turns his skillbar into 7 skills for 30s. [that means he's fighting at less than full potential, except in some instances with enchantments] A warrior however, with his low energy pool/regen, combined with the fact that he doesn't need to spam as many skills, Weaken Armor seems perfect for him. Along with Rend. Why do you think Conjure Ele is soo good on warriors? 60s. duration?!! Of course!! ^_^ If you're going to have HARD striking skills on your skill bar as a warrior with a secondary, make sure that it's effect is monstrous and its recycle time long enough to get all that energy back to use it again.

Jake · Aug 12, 2005, 09:23 PM // 21:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yukito Kunisaki

Hex Breaker vs. Plague Touch. I know both skills well. What I don't get is how you intend to use it with frenzy in there. Cancel them out? (that's kind of a counter measure to yourself there because having 2 stances in your skillbar means you're only using half of them half the time...) If the enemy multi-spams you during frenzy [hey, it happens], the dmg is probably worse. Also, how does hex breaker add to your dps? I can imagine it stopping things like Faintheartedness, but outside of stopping it, how does it 'harm' your enemies? The damage it does is laughable at best. At least Plague can dump 10pips of degen onto someone very quickly. Not something to be ignored, gotta do mass condition removal there. Hex Breaker only stops one, when 4 more get dumped on you, only one of those 4 will be stopped.

Eh.. you use hex breaker to start, go after your target, get him snared, turn frenzy on, whenver you notice you're being targetted, cancel out of frenzy back to hex breaker to get rid of the double damage bonus penalty of course. You aren't gonna be running around with frenzy up 24/7... Hex breaker adds to your dps using YOUR reasoning. Your plague touch warrior gets hit by hexes and not even a monk can really save you now because he's "busy" and it's SO DIFFICULT to get rid of hexes unless it's 1 at a time. If you got faintheartedness/empathy/clumsiness/ineptitude/soothing images, etc blah blah your dps plummets obviously. Hex breaker will stop that with ease, the only way you can get through hex breaker really is have 2 people chain hex you because you will already have hex breaker ready immediately after the first time it's gone, after a second hex now you have to wait for 5 seconds but the damage has already been done basically. If you get condition spammed uh oh! one person with martyr, draw conditions, restore conditions, etc THERE'S TOO MANY MASS CONDITION REMOVAL SKILLS. It's too easy to get rid of conditions. Who gives a crap about dumping conditions on someone when it's so easily taken care of? Conditions help you win wars of attrition, and plague touch will be nice when there's masses of people already dead but that's about it. Disease is the only major condition that seems to be effective at the early stages of the battle due to it's spreading nature, plague touching a poison and a bleed to 1 person is laughable damage. Also with disease running so rampant lately, it's hurting plague touch users. If you have multiple conditions on you with disease on top you have to plague touch the disease on someone who either a) already has it or b) has tainted flesh, nice energy drain there, then after you spam plague touch you get disease right back anyways, oh damn!

It's funny you should mention energy problems in a warrior build that only has tiger's fury, FGJ (hello 45 second recast time) and sprint(only used under certain circumstances) as giving energy problems when your build has - swift chop (I surely hope you aren't spamming this, it's more drain on your energy than tiger's fury alone, well if you aren't there goes much of your damage), Weaken Armor, Rend Enchantments, and Plague touch. First of all, anytime you switch targets you have to recast your hex(es) or your damage is gonna suck ass which is a huge problem for curses on a warrior, if you get condition spammed plague touch already drains all your energy, how do you EVER not run into energy problems with this build wtf? Also there's that little problem once again that you never seem to answer, anytime you want to rend, weaken, plague touch, bye bye battle rage, enjoy the grace period of 5-10 seconds getting it back up.

Please don't tell me that build will outdamage anything I've got, I've used the build and it's damage output even with weaken armor is laughable whilst giving you battle rage restrictions, sorry it's just not good. If you want to use a decent non-weapon elite, use warrior's endurance instead.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yukito Kunisaki

If you ONLY want pure damage output, I think the true damage ceiling would lie in the hands of the W/E. Let's face it, who the hell can compete with the melee character combining with the most damaging character in the game? Aside from Primary Eles of course.

You'd think so but it's not that simple. There's this stupid ass delay you gotta wait for after casting pbaoe's (not real sure about direct nukes) before you can start attacking again which hurts dps pretty bad. You can't move at all so there's no funny move to cancel the delay then start attacking again tricks I believe. Eles are the king of AoEs though of course and warriors are best at close quarters, pbaoes can give them nice damage output in like.. an altar map. But as for direct damage I believe other subprofessions can easily compete, gonna be hard for someone to find that apex of damage output.

Sir Santiago · Aug 13, 2005, 12:59 AM // 00:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yukito Kunisaki

Good call Nightwish. By going too focused, you are doing the one thing the enemy wants, opening up your weaknesses. Thankfully, most classes outside warrior have SOMETHING to deal with pesky hexes/conditions. If you lessen your weaknesses as much as possible, you maintain dps instead of losing it. Every build I consider tries to have as few weaknesses as possible. A warrior swinging a weapon is already a pain in the arse to stand next to. [a non enchanted hammer user for instance, OWUCH...] Now if he can't get either hexed, conditioned, or both, then his enemies got problems...

As for you Santiago, I've been given that argument about Weaken Armor before. "It's better on a caster" he said. This warrior tells me this while using self-mending...

Some inexperienced people would say REND is better on a caster!!! [yeah ok, how can you tell your teammates outside teamspeak/vent that your target has shield of judgement? asap?] Rend is DA BOMB on necro warriors. It's been said by some, denied by more, and I'm not one to follow the majority most of the time. Weaken Armor on a caster? That'd ONLY be feasible if his teammates had warriors who were aware of this, and even then at times, the caster should go after one target while the warrior shuts out another...

What is wrong with a warrior having skills to make his damage higher? 3s. cast time? I thought everyone knew that warriors were 'ignored' in combat? [lol, yeah, like that's really true] Weaken Armor is a surprise assault skill that adds a VERY considerable amount of damage to your target. -20 armor on a Warrior reduces his armor to about 75-80. May not be much and it's almost as if you're doing elemental damage to him. However, on a 60-70 armor caster, turning his armor to 40-50 means you're doing a LOT MORE damage on him/her than you normally would be doing. What's worse, this extra damage is experienced by ALL your physical damage teammates...

Weaken Armor, with just an extra warrior or ranger backing you up is PAIN...

edit*

Weaken Armor has a 30s. duration and recycle time. A caster who should be spamming the crap out of his skills shouldn't rely on a skill that turns his skillbar into 7 skills for 30s. [that means he's fighting at less than full potential, except in some instances with enchantments] A warrior however, with his low energy pool/regen, combined with the fact that he doesn't need to spam as many skills, Weaken Armor seems perfect for him. Along with Rend. Why do you think Conjure Ele is soo good on warriors? 60s. duration?!! Of course!! ^_^ If you're going to have HARD striking skills on your skill bar as a warrior with a secondary, make sure that it's effect is monstrous and its recycle time long enough to get all that energy back to use it again.

Well, if your physical damage teammates knew enough to attack the target with weaken armor, wouldn't the same teammates know enough to attack that target if the caster cast it instead? I don't see the difference. If the warrior calls the target, and everyone is going to attack it anyways, and the caster calls the weaken armor onto the target, there is no change as to what's going on. I guess I'm confused by what you're saying.

I guess I'll have to take another try at Weaken Armor. I was turned off from it initially by the cast time. I suppose you are right in that if many characters are attacking that one "Armor Weakened", the difference would be noticeable in damage.

Yukito Kunisaki · Aug 14, 2005, 04:49 AM // 04:49

Damn, looking back, I realized I made a slight mistake, and for that I'm sorry. I didn't make this thread so people can say, "This W/X is better than W/N." I honestly don't care at all about that. This isn't a debate on what secondary a warrior can bring. They all have strengths, they all can be countered, so there REALLY is no point saying this build is better than that one...

As for Weaken Armor. The reason it shouldn't be on a caster is that Caster's need to bring better spells. Wth does that mean? Spells that actually HURT the enemy. A warrior doesn't need spells or skill spam at points to deal his damage and since Weaken Armor has that long ass delay, a caster with 7 skills for 30s. [unless he uses an elite like Oath Shot] isn't that dangerous.

It's the fact that Weaken Armor has a reasonable energy cost and duration that coincides well with what a warrior does that makes it unsuitable for a caster. Give me a caster with anti-spell skills like Shame/Guilt/Diversion or Shadow of Fear/Enfeebling Blood vs. one with Weaken Armor. It makes it harder to coordinate to a degree as well if your caster HAS to bring this skill. Bring all the skills to put you at your best. Don't ask someone else to help you become your best. That someone else helps you kill somebody or stay alive, using their own means. If it's a smite monk with warrior buffs, hey, that's another story, but there's always the exception.

stefan16 · Oct 01, 2005, 12:18 AM // 00:18

What about weaken armor AND Barbs? also curses and adds DPS for phys attacks

made that up time ago