Tattoo of Ice (in General)

I bought a (Lesser) Tattoo of Ice and now I'm regretting it. The dang thing has no hitpoints and does not attack until the melee phase. It seldom survives to get off a single shot. I'm having trouble selling it even though I got it upt to level 3500. The only strategy I can think of that would work with it is to get Ablative Shield way up but 75% of the foes I face have Dispel Magic way up there.

Is there a general agreement that this Tattoo is the weakest one?

Are there any plans to beef it up a bit?

Actually, the CoC seems to be little used by anyone out there. Is that a weak spell in general?


anyone else think that COC attacks should be moved up into the ranged section like MM and/or Fireball or increased in damage by an order of magnitude?

CoC.

The red-headed step child of the Direct Damage spells...

;)

"Head, pants, now!"

Your strat is all over the place... no wonder it's not working for you.

Drop a few of the enchantments, beef up the AS, and pray. You could always try fighting against teams that don't use DM, too.

And, yes, I'm not happy with CoC's limitations, but it's certainly not useless.

As fights get longer CoC becomes more useful than fireball. Add in the fact that fb does damage to its team and the cobf damage reduction and I think COC will be very effective in the long run.

I'm a very new player. My strat is:

1) Put the fireballer up front so he dies off in the ranged round and doesn't kill everyone else off. Even with a 6000 fireball, it seems his damage is generally brushed off.

2) Put a damage resister in second place with dex, evasion, and anti-magic. He still gets slaughtered though, usually by magic missiles at such high levels they brush past the AMS. He's not very effective.

3) Put the damage dealer in 3rd place To deal out damage when melee comes to play. He does OK.

4) Put the MMer in 4th place. He really has a high EC spell and would love to get a ToJ which would benefit from it, but they are to dang expensive and all I could afford is a LToI. I'm working on it. Saving the bucks and trying to sell my LToI.


I try to use only spells not affected by DM. I had a decent Ablative shield but it kept getting dispelled by the hoards out there with high DMs. So I swapped it out then decided I had to have it if the ToI was to get a single shot in. So bought it up again. What a waste of points!

I had decay but it never fired until the battle was almost over doing pathetic damage.

I had guardian angels but switched that before I found out how to use fireball properly. I kept getting my fireballer torched by my own AMS. Now I know that is a good thing - Fireballers should die before melee or they torch your team. Wish I would have kept those points there.

I had dispel magic but half the time there was nothing to dispel and I hate using skills that don't get used.

I have a few points (about level 1000) in haste, giant strength, and ablative shield in case the opponent does not have DM. I don't plan on increasing them any.

I have to admit I am struggling for a working strategy. Any suggestions?


Still, your criticism of my play style, though probably apt, does not answer my criticism of CoC and the ToI.

Jon's point is:
Don't say a wrench is worthless just because your trying to use it as a raft.

> Jon's point is:
> Don't say a wrench is worthless just because
> your trying to use it as a raft.

I'd love to buy a raft but they cost too much. So I'll just swim along with the dang wrench until I can sell it to some sucker.

That still does not answer the criticism. Would you buy a ToI over a ToS, and if so under what conditions. I suppose you could MAKE a ToI work, but it really does not fit into too many strategies that I can see that a ToS would not fit better. And from the stats out there not many others like it either.

But from the responses you are all posting, you are happy with the CoC and ToI as it is. My question is then, do you actually use them?

Focus on 1 or 2 minions at first. If they do work, then start to think about hiring another minion. 4 minions, with lots of enchantments and stats only means your team will lack focus.

Someone did an analysis of CoC vs FB in CB1 and if Jon hasn't changed the numbers they should hold up the same. The numbers indicated that if your average fight lasted longer then 10 rounds CoC was more effective. If I were to hazard a guess I would guess 90% of fights end in 7 rounds or less and 99% end in 10 rounds or less. As you can guess CoC isn't a popular spell.

It is hard to directly compare Magic Missile and CoC though because they target different number of minions.

I could be convinced that a Tattoo of Ice was an awl and a tattoo of steel is a hammer and a tattoo of fire is a wrench :)

Myonax, if the CB1 stats for FB and CoC hold true ("Fireball does precisely 11% less damage than CoC, and after doing some math, you can see that its beneficial to use CoC only if your fight lasts longer than 11 rounds. If it lasts less than that, you would've been better off using fb."), both got an equal damage increase in CB2 (20%, if I remember correctly).

But.

CoC lost it's first attack. The only thing to balance this it that FB does damage to team members and is reduced by a cloak.

I'm not sure how much damage overall CoC has lost (I don't know the damage penalty it had - if any - for it's ranged attack), but I'd bet it was more than 11%.

So FB does more damage than CoC, earlier.

If you kill your opponent in ranged combat, then FB s melee splash damage does factor as a draw back.

Why ever use CoC... Maybe with a Melee/Decay based strat... Damage is king in CB1 & 2. And ranged damage rules over melee.

Poor cousin indeed...

> Focus on 1 or 2 minions at first. If they do work,
> then start to think about hiring another minion. 4 minions,
> with lots of enchantments and stats only means your
> team will lack focus.
>
> --bartjan, 5:26 PM EST

Thank you for that advice. I found out too late that most experienced players suggest sticking with one minion until you reach 100K. But what do I do now that I already have 4? Retire 2 and keep going with the 2 best? What happens to my current ranking? Is that even possible?

You can start over with another character (*NOT* another account; another character ON your existing account).

Many have done exactly this. Your first (few!) characters are often throwaway anyway after you learn the ins and outs of the game.

Okay, you've got 3 minions, each is trying to be a tank. None of them IS a tank. They all cast Haste or GS or AS, but none of them do it WELL, because they all have at least 1 other way to devide the xp. So basically, you've got 3 sucky tanks where you could have had 1 good tank training a normal happy nice tank. So, now that that's out of the way, copy my char, Undertow. That is all.

here is one idea for 4 minions + Ice

1 AS
1 AMF or DM (or GA if you're willing to suck a bit harder vs large DM)
1 tank (with DB, eventually)
1 CoC + Ice

the idea is to keep the minion and his familiar who are both casting CoC alive long enough.

cb always punished sloppy strategies; with DM it is punished even more now. Concentrate your xp where it can be useful.