SMT strategy musings.. (in General)

I've been pondering the AMF vs dispel magic question for a bit. More so about how it applies to a single minion tank.

I think Jon's done a good job of making CB2 a rock-paper-scissors game now -- each strategy choice you make will allow you to beat certian others, while making you vulnerable to a different set. The "right" idea is to set your strategy up to beat not the most other strategies, but beat the most popular strategies. The most popular does not mean the optimal.

I'm not sure if the jury is still out or not on which strategy(ies) have an advantage (however so slight) over others. In CB1, there way the standard FBM and it's variants. I'm not sure that's so good now, though many folks still follow it.

It would seem tattoos and dispel magic have added some twists.

I'm curious to know where the break point is for tattoos. At what point does a ToJ start to hinder a tank -- when the meat shield effect is not as efficient as a big piece of armour. I figure that one can graph the basics (tattoo level/HP versus damage prevented due to AC, and see how close they are, where they cross etc) but that doesn't address other enchantmets such as GA or AMF (since a tattoo will help AMF backfire). I saw one person claim "it's been said if you rely on a tattoo, your strategy is not good." I disagree untill more info like my above question can be explored more. (Now those that rent $1mill tats generally have a poor strat, but the fast XP from beating much higher PR chars may make up for that)

Anyway, onto other thoughts. Think about single minion tanks. The tradeoff between AMF or DM specifically, and the distribution of current strategies. I'm considering retraining to DM simply because of the number of AS/AS+GA/AMF+DD/DD teams in/around my PR. A decent DM will mean 2 minions should go down the ranged round, hopefully the tat sucks up enough DD damage so that the remaining mages are torn apart during the melee rounds.

DM will diminish any GA, AS, protection against EEMM teams, but does the reduced GA damage, and quicker "start hitting the mages" make up for the increased damage one will take from the DD mages ? Good question. It would also help against any EEEM/EEMM teams that toss in haste to aid their tattoo, but I'm discounting haste, GS and VA in this.

For a SMT with AMF, they'll need to dump a lot more cash into weapons to beat through the shields to get to the mages. Where as using DM means higher $ spent on armour +'s to live long enough to vanquish the mages.

Anyway, enough rambling, but I do invite other's thoughts on this matter, corrections or just chime in on what not.

Paper, Scissors, rock? That's one idea although I think only kept in play (at least in my opinion) by Jon's nerfs. Make your's need $0 to work, but give yourself options to improve your char through NW and you'll do well ;)

Relying on tats means you have a bad strat? Well, no, but it shows that you aren't winning through your strat. Needing a tat to win is a diferent story though, they're very much a part of strategy and aside from the people using ones far too big for their PR, they can be used well even if they don't fight your battles for you and it can only be a good thing to use a powerful option such as a tattoo.

AC/Tat? I can't say for sure how that will turn out but a point I'd like to make is that AC is basically extra HP, for a tank, getting a ToA gives more ST/DX which means you can put more EXP into HP, possibly that's more cost effective, I mean, AC is only giving "EXP" for your HP anyway.
Same with ToE, increases your HP a lot, my own char with 0 AC but a ToE I'd guess that I have around 180k "HP" (unless the opponent has decay or AMF which pay no attention to Endurance/AC), that may well be more cost effective.

FBM variant, I'd also like to point out that in Myth's first post (or one of his first) he gave a CB2 version of that, it's still a great strat, just people need to alter it to work in CB2.

DM is brilliant against AS. Much better than AMF against the AS/AS+GA/AMF+DD/DD teams. - Can say from experiance, when I first switched to AMF from DM these guys were suddenly owning my char.

SMT? What's that?

single minion tank

Well after a day of testing, a 5-8k score loss and whatever PR I lost in the re-training, I must say.. AMF still holds its own over DM for a SMT.

Now, at higher PR levels, when one has a much higher NW, that may no longer be the case. And for other strategies, that may not be the case. But for a SMT, even with a ToJ, it is better to have AMF than DM. Yes, I was able to add maybe 8 teams I couldn't beat before to my regular list, but a number of lower PR mage teams simply demolished me. Even an AMF of 0.25 against single mages does a great job of reducing the damage one takes.

Yes, I cut down the enchanters in the ranged round (and it was nice to see all the fizzles), but I still took DD damage. Perhaps an archer SMT would do better with DM -- 3 attacks in ranged should/could possibly mean 3 down before melee. Though the same caveats below may apply (AC, HP, endurance)

So, if a SMT wants DM, it will need a large + AC, maybe a tattoo to reduce damage, and huge HP. Otherwise, it makes more sense to keep the AMF. Realize that most EEMM/EETM teams at/around your PR may still be able to beat you through AS is an acceptable tradeoff, I suppose.

I probably should have looked at my fight results a bit closer, but I don't recall noticing that DM had a noticeable effect on GA -- should it have ? (Again, could very well have just been oversight on my part, and I was fizzling or diminishing a lot of GA, but for some teams I lost to, where one of the E's was a GA/AS minion, the AS would fizzle, but the GA still cast, or so it seemed... fuzzy head)

I have to wonder: how much DM did you have trained? At 10k, with an 8K effectiveness, it worked pretty well on my SFBM. Alhtough i just switched over to AMF, as i was meaning to do for some time, DM seemed to have some very nice effects.
1) Reduces that Nasty AS spell. At max effectiveness on a 5 minion team, i.e, your seeing AS casting at like 1-100... that's ~ 40k with the 10k DM i had. 40k health is nothing to sneeze at.
2) Reduces GA. not sure how well it works against GA, rather hard to tell exactly how reduced that Angel gets. However, seeing as most people with 4 minion teams only have 1 GA, on either a AS/GA or (FB/MM)/GA minon, that means that they prolly have 1/8th or less of their exp into it. it's quite easy to get 1/5 - 1/4 of it into yours.

for those math challanged people who didn't know how i got 1/8th :
4 minions mean you get 1/4 of the exp on each minon. a slight Exp bonus for having 4, but it's not big enought to make a difference for this purpose.
1/2 of the exp trained equally into either AS or DD spell and GA
= 1/8 of the exp you get goes into GA.
note that people training 1/2 into GA, and 1/2 into their DD spell, or AS, might not be high. more like 1/3 GA, 2/3 other.
(SMM - Single Minion Mage)
HP, FB, DM. mostly like not evenly split. more likely to be 2/5th HP, 2/5th FB, 1/5 DM.
(SMT -Single Minon Tank)
HP, STR, Dex, DM, BL, VA.
1/3 into either (Str/Dex), 1/6 into Hp and (Str/Dex). 1/6 or less into rest. Either Str or Dex is 1/3 depending on what you want: Heavy Tank or Light. (this is roughly what my single tank on CB1 is like, just replace Dm with AMF :P )

AMF Advantages.
1) Damage to DD users, unaffected by Armor.
2) Reduces Decay, only thing that can. (This point is enough for me to keep it, even if only for that.)
3) Reduces damage taken. I thought about this on CB1. If i get 100k damage from AMF, that's 100k HP i didn't loose, and 100k Damage (that's not reduced by thier armor) i didn't have to deal. dropping all that EXP (200k AMF) into HP would only give my ~ 150k HP. If i hit a Decay, it would take my 200k Hp to 100k, or with that exp into HP, my 350k HP to 175k. I'd rather have AMF.

nice contributions

Note that people have adapted their strats to counter the popularity of DM. Except for GA, I don't see a lot of reliance on enchanters for AS, Prot, and so on. When I took a 4 minion team from DM to AMF, it helped recover a dip in my score.