Strategy Advice (How should I join them?) (in General)

Okay, Brock is hitting a really painful glass ceiling. There are no longer enough total messes of strategies to prey on to advance.

I think I'm ready to give up on UC. Brock with a total of 1.5m experience or so in ST and UC does less damage per hit than the "aholefromthenorth" in butters' butters char. I wanted to salvage it by ditching AMF, VA, and most of my dex, and instead going for huge UC, a Gi, a MgS, and DB's. I can't really afford that, but I can save towards it. I'd have a much lower PR, but that's not enough to balance out the losing-every-battle issue.

A large single archer might be fun. ToA + Archery + all the money I can blow on my bow. I'd also be willing to hire additional minions if someone has any cool plans.

Or I can just join them. Ditch every physical stat, get a level 190,000-ish fireball, and win on the basis of my ToE. Ideas?

might as well have a decent backup melee weapon (katana) not pumped up a whole lot, but just enough to do some damage in melee. that is if you go archer.

Pardon, 2m experience in ST/UC, and wearing Helm's gauntlets. And yeah, I'd certainly go for a backup weapon -- or I could always just go bloodlust, but I didn't think I could afford the equ for that.

make a SM with the ToE for a while and save up for equipment...

I still think you need WAY more HP and you'd do fine.

" I still think you need WAY more HP and you'd do fine. "

Dig the number rounds my battles last and the number of battles I have that end in stalemate. More HP won't do much. :D

Still, stick with it. Perhaps DBs would help, I don't know. I still think you should stick with single UC minion. You've made it this far and proved the nay-sayers wrong so far. Even though I beat you every time I cycle through my list, I look up to you. =)

Well -- it is fun to be novel, but I might just go into full-time forging at this point to make money to buy some displacement boots. I'd rather use up the rest of my new user bonus someplace else or actually help my clan, but heck, unarmed combat is Brock. I'll try unlearning most of my dex and AMF first and redistribute those points to see if it changes anything, but if not...

Thanks for the advice guys.

I'd suggest waiting until May and see the changes, if DD gets nerfed you'll be wishing you hadn't have changed and if NW is ruined you'll be wishing you had a UC minion :)

Yeah Myth, that's great advice. I'll just forge until then. The redistribution made me way worse, so maybe if I can afford decent base items at least it'll help. :)

y don't u get a tatoo? so that u can last longer..or will the combat gi be more useful?^_^

I have a large ToE I just took off. The ToE is much better than the Gi, but I was trying to find a way to make the Gi work by capitalizing on the evasion and UC bonuses all with a lower PR. It really, really, really doesn't work. Owch.

Why not train a second Enchanter Minion that casts AMF and VA and put say a TOJ on it, that way you can get the bonuses to UC from the Combat Gi and Helms Gauntlets and still have a tattoo.

"Why not train a second Enchanter Minion that casts AMF and VA and put say a TOJ on it, that way you can get the bonuses to UC from the Combat Gi and Helms Gauntlets and still have a tattoo."

That's a great idea, but I tried doing precisely that with magic damage tattoos and they got slaughtered far too quickly to be of any real use. So, I started training ablative shield, and it was just bad news all around. Couldn't beat anyone; tattoo didn't live long enough, didn't do enough damage, and my XP was greatly watered down.

Maybe that'd be different with a ToJ? Or is there a way to make this go well with an offensive magic tattoo?

Thanks for the input. :)

Well TOJ's have slightly more HP and they do train endurance which means it could take more punishment and survive into Melee. It also wouldn't be susceptible to opponents with large AMF's trained. Basically it would mean Brock would take half damage from Magic - as opposed to quarter damage if you used a TOE , however your UC minion would be able to deal more damage than as a solo minion with a TOE, and the TOJ would be able to deal some damage itself.

And if I went with a Gi, I could also wear a MgS for some limited penalty to UC but additional protection against magic. Brilliant. I like the way you think except when you're farming me -- and speaking of farming me, you'd be the one to ask.

Do you distinctly prefer AMF over EC or DM here? DM in particular might be valuable but it's hard for me to say for sure. I'd also put protection on Brock to take advantage of that.

Personally I think EC is a useless Enchantment unless your going to put a VERY large portion of your exp into it. From my experiences with EC, even if your EC's big enough to cut your opponents strength in half, you will only see about a 20% reduction in overall damage. As far as using EC to build up a DEX advantage, you would be better off training DEX or putting more X's into your Axbow.
Whether you go DM or AMF is up to you, personally I would go with AMF with so many mages around.
Also what effect does your UC currently give without the Combat Gi and HG bonus? I

40/150,752 with nothing, 60/391,221 with Gi + Helm's. That's worth a Lot of XP.

Interesting - just two final points.

1) Are you sure you want to lower your dex? It would be a shame to waste all that Evasion - with a big pair of DB's and a significant dex advantage you'd almost be invincible against other Tanks.

2) Perhaps you should stop raising your UC for now? It's going to take another 100k of UC to raise your UC effect by just 10 - thats only about a 25% increase in damage.

Anyways I have no experience at all using a UC based team so feel free to ignore my suggestions :)

Yeah, I think UC is done for now. The dex idea was given to me by someone else; if I could specialize in to-hit by using very high UC (which confers an inherent evasion, and probably has a very high to-hit relative to other weapons, who knows) + Gi (more evasion) + DB (super evasion) I could potentially ignore dex for the most part, just keeping enough to get triples on mages. Seemed good at the time, but I think it's one of them thar NW-dependent strategies.

I won't be able to catch the dex of a ToA tank or most any other tank because I have to spend so much XP just for my weapon, especially if I want to have a second minion/ToJ.

Whadya think?

Fair enough, but you will have still have problems hitting other tanks with low dex, even with +60 to hit that is only .6 hits per round against tanks (you probably wouldn't get any hits from your low dex). If you unlearn VA, AMF and maybe half your Strength on your tank and put it all into Dex you would probably have over 100k Dex which would mean:

a) Probably one hit per round from Dex alone against most other Tanks around your PR (probably about 1.6 hits once you take the pth from UC into account.

b) Other tanks around your PR would get probably less than one hit a round from dex (as opposed to almost 2 if you had low dex) and since your evasion would be high they would get no extra hits from pth.

c) Halving your Strength would not reduce your damage by all that much and the extra hits each round would probably mean more overall damage (although perhaps slightly less against mages since most have no dex)

Why aren't you considering ToA + UC? Wouldn't that be a better way of running UC, letting it handle all your future st/dx needs and then pumping all into hp/uc? Especially now it's got the built-in evasion. I would agree with Myth on this one, wait and see what May has in store before you make any hasty decisions on changes. NW based pr is pretty likely, as you know, and I'll be very surprised if the ToE doesn't get a change of some kind too.

Just a thought....

I've tried using a ToA with UC and it wasn't as good as a ToE. GA, CoBF's, and magic damage were all much too difficult to deal with. Also, I was thinking waay down the road; I don't know whether a ToA would be "worth" as much XP as the +10 UC from a Gi, and even if it were, would this make up for the PR hit? I don't know... good observations regarding the stats + evasion though. I'd love to hear any other ideas you or anyone else has. :)

I don't know what to suggest; that moment when your strat seems to slow down is a downer for sure. One word of advice though - the mage shield is no real substitute for AMF - it works well enough but you need to put a lot of money into it - mine's a +23 and it's only about as good as the 35k AMF on my mage team. That's still pretty useful but if you're needing your money elsewhere a bit rough on the bank account! =)

A couple of observations.

I can't hit ToA tanks most of the time. My pth is too small when compared to thier DBs + 10 from the ToA and my dex isn't large enough to insure a dex based hit every round.

If the pth of UC isn't reduced by evasion, then dropping dex could be a way to go. But if it is, DB + ToA will lower your pth drastically.

With a Gi and no ToE, CBF will be your bane. Some of the larger CBF s are too damaging for my 100K ToE to deal with.

But I feel that if not nerfed, ToE s and (hopefully) CBF s will be modified in the next change month, so it might be best to wait till then...

Not to be a snot, but consider buying a decent melee weapon and dump the UC. The experience saved on UC would allow a decent Str and Dex (with Dex higher than strength, naturally). You already have a decent ranged weapon, too.

Given your current setup (Axbow), archery seems a painful waste, especially since many four minion mage teams go with ToF/TJK, allowing you to only kill 3/5 minions in ranged (and usually not the damage-dealing minions).

A melee weapon would (1) allow you to pump your fighting stats higher (2) Require less untraining than magic (3) Make everyone's AMF be wasted experience when fighting you. (4) be cheaper and probably more effective than archery (ToE lends itself more towards longer, and hence melee-centric, fights).

The big question for me would be Katana vs. top of the line weapon (Renamed loch, Morg, BoTh). Katana would be easier and you could get the money soon, but your power is high enough you're already nearing the ceiling of usefulness of Katanas.

I would suggest scoring an upgraded Katana at or below NW in auctions (because that's what they sell for) as the quickest solution, saving up 3 or so million for one of the other weapons as a better solution.

"nearing the ceiling of usefulness of Katanas"

Really grant? My Kat will be taking me well into 300k PR

grant... i think the idea is to make uc workable.

Nah, it's to make Brock workable. :D If I have to give up UC in order to do that I'm absolutely happy to do so and Grant's input is very good and valuable. I'm waiting for the change month first, but he described one of my possible futures.

Mihalis' char Moby can consistently defeat Brock in 3-4 rounds. That's seriously depressing. Just over half my PR or MPR, half the HP, 1/3 the NW... oog. Props to him, but I need a bigger protein shake to cry in.