Looking for strat advice (in General)

Hi :)

I am looking for some strat advice. Its more of a general sense than a specific sense. Sefton's NCB runs out tomorrow. I have plenty of $$$ to buy a 3 minion. My question is, would you in my shoes, buy the minion and continue on, or would you let Sefton go and start another NCB.

I am currently leaning towards letting Sefton go and starting a single mage with my big ToE. Part of the reason is I see how effective they are against me. The other reasons are, mages are VERY cheap to run. I would not be purchasing any gear for him. Maybe a rental now and then, but basically a naked mage with a ToE. No ammo to buy, no gear to bump, talk about easy. I have resisted the mage, but the inevitable has occurred, where I realize that without constantly pushing the weapon allowance envelope (read making your weapons JUST under the allowance) tanks pale to mages. The easy counter is go ToA tank, and yes ToA tanks are very effective against Sefton, but, I bet not as much against big single mages. And, the ToA tank forces you to play the bump the gear game, and the rewards for a non-NUB do not come close to supporting a ToA tank and gear. As I will not be spending (or receiving) USD to help any of my characters, so I do not think the ToA is viable for me. That said, run with Sefton or bend to the inevitable truth of the single mage, that is my question.

It's a Changemonth. I'd run with Sefton for a little bit longer and see what unfolds...

Go mage. Single mage isn't the super strat though it's just the easiest to run but then you know that.

The alternative ending to this story though is that as you already have the huge ToE and you won't be spending any cash on gear you can save it all and buy minions the next time you get near to where you are now and have a super huge mage team. If you want a goal in the midst of that then creating the most powerful mage team in the game would be a possibility...

(I think the real reason mage teams are starting to show through as top ten contenders is that the Uber weapons near the top are starting to cost too much to improve. Whereas dd spells just keep growing.)

You and I are thinking alike here Johnny. Without camping, the uber weapons either cost USD or you do not grow them. It appears my tattoo is good to the max tattoo level above 500K MPR, so yah we are thinking alike.

If you don't fight more than you do now, starting again won't help you. Well, this might be moot as new bonuses have just had an unexpected bump in thier power.

Do you want to try for the top spot or just play to have fun? If you want to level a tattoo, then starting again with a NCB character might be the right choice.

If you were in a clan, it might be better to start again to free up some more room.

DD will always (after a set amount of time) outdamage Str + Weapons. It might be that time is now with the upper characters. As you rise throught the ranks again though, you'll find yourself out damaged by tank teams for a while.

how many times can you restart NCB>

Good points GL!

I fight erratically now. Some days I hit it hard, some days I do not log in. Heck if it wasn't for the often fun forum discussion I get into, not sure I would log on as often as I do.

I do not think I will be fighting more or less with either Sefton continued or a new char.

Another good point of information, why am I playing. It is not to get to the top spot that is for certain. I have screen shot of me being the top char (yah TAB was retraining and trying strat changes, and he made one that let me beat him, I took advantage and snapped a quick screen shot of Gyaxx on top, it did not last long) I do not delude myself that I will reach that top spot with amount I play. Heck Sefton grew quick and I do not think I bought more than 100 BA total through his entire growth period, so yah I'm not in it for the glory of #1.

I most likley will not join a clan. I will not play enough to promise to be of assistance.

The ToE is amazing damage reducer, I think the mage will do ok in relative damage compared to tanks (read: the damage I do him vs. the damage he does to me)

Thanks for you input GL!

Haterz, you can start once every four months. Well, come tomorrow we'll know if you can start another NCB character. ;)

Sef, if you're tattoo doesn't currently hit your max level, then you'll be able to power level it a bit more with a NCB character. It won't grow until your max surpasses it, but for me I imagine that to be about half way into my bonus time. After that, up it goes! :) Plus, I'll be using the tattoo at max efficiency until I am able to level it again. ;)

Yah, that might be the ONE thing I hold onto Sefton for, just to put a few more levels on the tat before I switch to the new NCB with ToE single mage. Hopefully I will not have to retire Sefton in order to start a new NCB char. Anyone know if I will?

If your going to restart over with a new NCB do the following:

Go single FB mage but use a named ROE to start.

When you reach about 1/2 the top MPR, then change to your TOE.

There should be plenty of higher characters you can beat without using the TOE for a long time, IE high level farms, people with poor strats, and forgotten characters. This gives you the chance to maximize your rewards by fighting as high up as you can, while getting that extra xp from the ROE.

Thank you Ranger! I have a RoE and a naming due to me from winning Barzoo's poetry contest, I think I will take him up on it for the RoE :)

You won't have to retire Sefton but if you intend buying any BA you will certainly want to.

Thanks borderliner, yah I never buy BA anymore, don't even spend the ones Jon gives me, but thank you for the info :)

My suggestion is that if you ever buy BA, buy it when it counts the most, during xp time. As for single mages, they grow too slow for my liking.

not sure what the targets are like at lower levels now but last time I did it if you fight smart enough they grow ok. The pain is in fact the speed at which you do grow, you have to look for new targets constantly and with draw rewards halved you have to get pretty good at determining who you will beat by inspecting them.

The target's are mostly mages. Even the tanks are mages because they have DD trained. I'll grant you that an anti-mage strat can go a long way and that FB does a nice brainless job of cleaning up ineffective strats.

Yet, as you say the trick is to know who you can beat before you click fight. You're always moving on up and your fight list needs to evolve quickly. This makes low level fighting completely unlike the upper ranks. The difference is like night and day.

Now I want you to note my last tourney character. By my estimates, if I had fought during xp time then I would have beaten the leading character by a margin of 15k. The trick? Why guess if you can win when you can know!

Dropping your enemy tanks DX to zero effectively gives them a zero percent chance (excluding weapon enchantments to accuracy) of hitting you. Since DX is public, all you need to know is the value of your EC. In all honesty I could have made that team work with 20 HP on all characters. I only trained HP to get a higher MPR by spreading out my xp toward the end. I know that sounds silly, but if you pick your fights, you can get by with base HP. This leaves you free to train more points into ST, a small amount into DX, and a whole lot into either Evasion, BL, or UC. (If I was to do it again I would go UC.)

Now this is in no way the easy route to faster growth. It requires the painstaking process of finding your opponents. You have to avoid fighting teams with EC, Haste, GA, DD (unless they are only Decay), and (as I found out the hard way) UC. Now like I said, most teams have mages, so prepare to be annoyed... very annoyed when looking for foes. Then again I was pushing myself to the max in order to overcome a handicap in a tournament setting, so maybe I was dropping people from my list a bit too early for sanity's sake. The final result was worth it though, I could easily just pick out a foe 5 to 6 times my MPR and know that I could drop them.

Also, don't forget to equip an entire base armor set and a nice base weapon when you start, even before you click fight for the first time. AC provides a fixed amount of protection, aside from a percentile component, that allows you to take zero damage when you start out. With heavy armor, I was able to get 55 points of AC with base equipment from the store alone. This amounted to no damage from any physical attacks less then about 100 points in damage. Base = free PR so there is quite literally no draw backs.

Vestax, I have used the EC strategy, and have recently returned to it, as far as quick growth goes there is a far better way that you can select opponents far above your PR and know you can beat them - using 3 DM Enchanters plus a FB mage with 1/2 HP 1/2 FB.

Selecting opponents is much more simple than in the EC case, simply go to the character attributes page for Ablative Shield, find the largest AS that you can completely fizzle (should only take a few fights to find) and search opponents below that level that have very little HP trained (i.e. they rely mainly on AS for HP. As long as the team does not use an RoS you will beat them in the first round of combat

In my experience (I've tried starting out with both a heavy EC team and a heavy DM team and I do a lot of favourite list tweaking), there are a lot more of these Ablative Shield teams than tank teams that do not have GA, UC, Haste or a big ToA.