Monthly Archives: October 2012

Shatter Shot for the Week

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Like I always do when I have a few topics in mind I want to cover and the choice is one longer topic changing post or a few super short posts I do the former.

Cannith Elemental Weapons:
I left off yesterday talking about looking at the Cannith challenge weapons for my dps guy while leveling. And I have to say I am super impressed with some of the challenge weapons for say an alt that has very little in the way of gear. The really cool thing about them is at their final tear the Heroic level weapons are craft able up to +3. Meaning if your willing to raise the level some you can make a great multi-tasker or if you want to you could lower the min level with a Masterful Craftmanship shard and no other enchantments.

Just a few standout 1-2 potential prefix shards: keen, Ghost Touch, Holy, Elemental Burst…
A few standout 1-2 potential suffix shards: Righteousness, Maiming, 10% Melee Alacrity

Lets look at some examples at level 12 t3:
Elemental Greataxe of Fire
+4, Flaming Burst, Brilliance, Metalline, Cold Resistance, Craftable (+3)
Elemental Khopesh of Water
+4, Icy Burst, Paralyzing, Crushing Wave, Fire Resistance, Craftable (+3)

Add Keen and Maiming…or holy and maiming or Ghost touch and Righteousness

You can get a fairly cool weapon with a little work. I mean add Righteousness Elemental Greataxe of Fire and you have a heroic version of the Epic Antique Greataxe. Dual weald Keen, Maiming, Icy Burst, Paralyzing, Crushing Wave Khopeshs are fairly good too. Or how about holy, maiming, Icy Burst, Paralyzing, Crushing Wave Khopeshs?

Seems good…

My new personal biggest hit:

I was in a pug (I know right?) getting the last 30k xp needed to cap out (so I was still level 18) on my currently wf barb first life guy doing the IQ boat quest. I used my shard of summon beholders once and a while and got one. While fending off one of the waves of attackers my beholder dominated a trash mob, I was mostly raged up ran out of pots a few nights back but I don’t want them taking up backpack space for my TR, cleave or great cleaved with my Maiming cleaver against a human and boon 550 points on the first number. There was a trail of other numbers, but that is my biggest first number yet. I hope to beat it yet this weekend before TRing now that I have the capstone and whatnot for more power!!!!

Well I went longer then I thought I would on those two topics and now that I have dealt with a work fire I forgotten the other topics I wanted to cover…

<3s?

Project Dps, p3

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So I don’t have a full build laid out yet. And odds are I wont. I play kind loose and fast with my builds but I am really warming to that 18/1/1 fighter/barb/arty. As for leveling order it would be arty, barb, and finishing out fighter. Seems simple enough.

But the question becomes what weapon? I mean if your Kensei you have to pick one, right?

Well sort of…. You have to pick a type of weapon. And all the best 2 handers for max dps are slashing weapons so that is easy. But remember you can reset enchantments every 3 days so switching from say a falchion while leveling to a great axe because you have an epic one at 20 and then back to falchion after pulling a Breach, The Dividing Blade works.

So my current plan is big two handers with the plan to at least tear two my green steel falchion blank as holy/good burst giving me a res clickly if needed. Meaning I need to run the shroud some…. Well once and get passed power shards. Have to see about getting some guildies together or hitting up some of my Sarlona buds…

Basic leveling gear should be fairly simple, I might take the time to casual run Threnal chain for a cloak and maybe a few look for the blood rage but other then that I think most of my misc gear should work to power him up.

Although with Mabar is right around the corner an a few epic cloaks of night might need to be farmed up. As well as some leveling robes of night, think they have the night shield clicklys…

Well assuming I don’t decide at the last sec to go dual wielding heavy picks and cashing in some tome pages for Deathnips….

Also I am looking a little at the elemental weapons via the Cannith challenge system and some of them look fairly solid at T2 and T3…..

<3s

Project Big Hits, p2

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So we know fighter will be the main class in my Darth Samius build. So to me the next big call is race and splash levels….

To me race and splash levels are very close things. You wouldn’t want to splash sorc on a Horc melee build would you? Not unless your trying to be very funny…. And frankly you not that funny, so stop trying.

So options:

Horc, the clear winner in 2 handed dps, when that is heavy action boosted focused.
Helf, the clear winner with the most options…. And the strongest race right now.
Human, a very solid choice not as strong as Horc but I would say in the top 3 races in the game right now.
Dwarf, Very solid if you plan to use axes and combat skills. You could do worse also cool beards…. ☺
Halfling, who doesn’t love them? And with fighter as the base finding some feats for the healing marks might be a fair way to go. But they are not the strongest melee race…
Are there other races?
Elfs would be good if you want to use race weapons they get a falcon line, very nice but down con…. ;’-(
Drow, nope.
Oh WF…. They went from a powerhouse race to meh in one update. Sorry your heals suck, you lost your immunities, armor is shitty and more. There is just no reason to play WF unless you’re an arty right now.

So in my mind it is between Horc, Helf and dwarf with Elf maybe poking its head into the race as I am leaning at using a falcon over the greataxe. But really it comes down to who can heal the easiest and that at least for now is the Helf via the dilettante feats.

The Helf has a lot of other things going for it atm, human amp and human versatility are huge, throw in human adaptability and you have the best of the human options.

As for the splash…

To me there are 4 main options.

2 rog, skills (mainly umd) which will let us lesser at 20 to adjust the stats and let umd take over for healing freeing up the dilettante feat for something else and evasion.

2 arty, same skills as above but gives most of the key xbox feats so giving a ranged option with little work. We loose evasion however. But we can go xbow and shield when needed or rune arm for a little more ranged dps.

2 monk, we decide not to worry about umd and will stay clr dilly wise but gives fists for some fights, as well as evasion. But mainly 2 more feats to play with.

Or the one I am leaning towards atm, 1 barb 1 arty. You loose rune arm use from the 2 arty splash but gain fast movement and another rage (assuming I take the past life barb feat {I totally will}) and +1 more to power attack I will be losing do to my race and main class picks.

As always let me know what you think via the comments.

❤

Project Big Hits, p1

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So after much thought I am leaning towards fighter base at least 12 most likely 18 levels for Darth Samius. I think most of you know I like options and what melee class has more options open to it then fighter? There is an argument that could be made for monk, but lets sit them aside for now.

Fighter over barb:

Not rage dependent. – Rage is the bread and butter of the barb class. Pure number breakdowns are putting fighters about 10-16 points behind barbs per swing assuming everything is equal. But I have been reading lots of people pointing out that the math guys are forgetting the openings on the fighter feats allowing for (g) weapon specialization feat line, and Kensei pluses and room for the other great combat feats. So the numbers might be smaller. Where barbs pull back out a head is that Frenzy/Great Frenzy combo for another fireball (6d6) on top of the few point lead that fighters pushed to catch up on….

Flexible – As I kind of said above all the extra bonus feats allow me to pick and choose more combat feats to add to my arsenal. I could for example go slashing weapons and make use of both the two weapons and two handed fighting styles. Or trick out with other combat feats like Imp Sunder and Stunning blow all awhile-keeping toughness feat as well as others. 10 bonus feats are nothing to laugh at.

Easier to selfheal. – This is a huge part of why I am leaning this way and goes along with reason one; Not being raged based means that if I need to use a scroll or wand mid combat I don’t have to worry about unraging to do so.

Easy Fighter Haste boost – I know I could grind a million twist points and twist in a haste boost or I could just be the class that gets them and not have to worry about that. I am not sure I could work in the full line for 10 Ap but I might find away. You never know.

If I lived in a world where I could trust someone else to heal me 100% I think I would go 18/2 barb/fighter but as is the 18/2 fighter/x just seems a better fit.

❤

IP, The Big Hits Project

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This weekend I really worked on leveling up Darth Samius. I went from 13 to 18 and I learned a lot of things.

1, WF suck right now. Like a lot. Immunities are a joke as “magical” stuff still gets you, so um everything. Healing is a joke as they changed the WF friend line to make the later part of the line work better but makes you spend 3or4 points to get to the same pre change 1 point effectiveness. Meaning that the main healing my WF had (a lesser vamp sword from attack on stormreach) heals for 0 per hit….. I went ahead and made a vamp only greataxe and it only heals in small bursts for 1-2 even though it shows 1-3 on every hit.

2, I really dislike relying on others for HP care, even hirelings. See the last half of the above paragraph. Trying to be at least ½ under my own healing I downed more then 200 repair pots in the first 5 quests on Friday. Then I said F it and started to use a few pocket hires. Even so I still drank another 200+ pots over the weekend, very pricy….

3, Maiming is not as bad on a high crit range weapon as one might think. I happened to have a Maiming Clever sitting in my backpack. I remember buying it off the AH thinking it was a clean Bloody Cleaver for next to nothing. Then once I saw it in the mail I realized that it wasn’t want I thought it was so it sat taking up space. Then I started working the IQ last night I remembered the human bane part of the cleaver and thought why not try it??? By far the best numbers of the weekend where happening.

I have broken 400 before but that is around my best personal best. I mostly build for high normal numbers and consistently. Java for example does between 88 and 92 points every hit, but only crits for 150 or so. This barb so far is all over the map, hitting from anywhere between 30-100 on normal swings. Lots of that is how raged up I am and what weapon I am using. Remembering to down a rage pot every 90 secs can be a challenge. And using the right weapon for the mob is key. I saw a lot of 430+ crits vs mobs with some kind of DR making my numbers yellow; who knows if I would have hit harder earlier if I had the right DR breaker in my hand at the time….

4, Might need to find a few mad greataxes and I need to look in to heavy picks (if I want to dual weld.. @Tobril keeps telling me that THF is the best for big numbers right now when working in EDs. But as I plan to TR into something else once I hit 20 and fight my way back up before getting into EDs on this guy for sure. I wonder if I would be better for heroic levels to dual weld and then do some switching around for EDs when I get there……

And there are always khopeshs and axes… Need to do more DPS reading to find the right weapon type for me.

Anyway <3s