Strat Talk: EET w/ RoBF (in General)

I suppose I forgot to continue on with my series of strat posts. Anyhow. Here is the next one. The notation is the one I've been using for half a year now in-house. The numbers represent the ratios of the skills/spells. 'Low' is a somewhat ambiguous term, I know. The point of the FB is to clear away enchanters while keeping the FB backlash low enough so that the RoBF covers all of it. The original version had a ToE instead. It's meant to be a low-cost build, so a lot of xp is 'wasted' on ST.

(HP, FB, Haste)             (1:low:6)      (MCM, Corn)
(HP, FB, AS)                (1:low:6)      (Corn, RoBF)
(HP, ST, DX, Archery, Prot) (2:4:1:1:base) (TsA, EC, DB, BG, HoE, MgS) (VB, ELB)

It's not bad, I'll give it that.

But to point out the obvious, this strategy is going to be very NW dependent. If you have a high NW, you will be succesful. If you don't, you will do very, very poorly.

If you can get that ELB and VB to be huge, and manage to keep that MgS big enough to keep all mages at bay, you should do ok.

But your problem is that tanks will walk all over you with their ToAs. Haste is not going to make up for it, especially when you aren't training DX very much. I suggest you do what I've done to counter ToAs and keep ST tiny and DX absurdly high, it is more useful than you'd think.

Also, against mages you're going to be at their mercy if they use DM, or if your MgS isn't as big as it needs to be.

All of that being said, I did mean what I said on the first line of this post. It's a good strategy, you just need to know it's limitations and only go ahead with it if you are confident you will be able to make up for it's faults.

MrChuckles, your right about the mages, except there is always that possibility that FB mage will lose solely because of the RoBF. If that does indeed happen then it would still be a worthy strat. Also, the hope would be that the backlash from the RoBF would soften up other Tanks.

Your right, it has promise, but it is far from having issues and is certainly not the best strat idea at my disposal. Just hoping it would be unique enough to cause sparks in people's heads.

sorry to take this off topic but what about a 4 man team of FB mages with a RoBF?

Death by AMF.

The RoBF would probably be better on the Tank. But that would lower his AC, Str and Dex.

With it on the middle minion, you're protecting an enchanter from Fireball damage, not your main damage dealer, and you have low HP if you want that minion to last until Melee to return damage from the Aura. If you face DM, the RoBF won't last long as you have little natural HP on it's wearer.

A ToE might do a better job at reducing your firendly FB splash, and do it for your whole team. It would help with AMF backlash on the middle minion and help versus physical damage (plus make you Tank nearly immune to magic damage. MgS + TSA + ToE stops magic nicely!)

A RoBF would probably be better used on a MT Team, wiht it to keep the Tank alive in Melee by stopping large freindly fire damage.

I agree, the biggest problem with this strat is that it relies on the RoBF. :P ToE was the orginal idea and is probably more effective at keeping the Tank alive and is the only counter to limiting AMF.

As to further explain what I meant by "Death by AMF". A 4 minion team of FB Mages means each mage has to invest in HP and FB. This large amount of xp dilution is horrible. Any mage in a 4 minion team, even those that use AS from enchaters, has a problem a major problem against AMF because the opponents EO is always bigger and always deflecting more then half your potential damage. Mages are better when they can concentrate their power.

The purpose of the mages in thie team is not to be the main guns in any way. By keeping the spell low your hope is that AMF and GA won't kill you before the opponent does. Yet, I'm thinking MM might be a better idea. Anyone have thoughts on that?

I've always been of the mind that minions should do what they are paid to do. That is a tank should be a tank, a mage should be a mage and enchanters should sit on their backsides and soak up the damage.

Dilution is a problem when you do hybrid minions, a little bit like those strange families where the mother and father are brother and sister. Those low FB's are going to do you more damage than good, because they're going to be killed by AMF. ETM would be better here, with the mage doing MM, or even CoC. Mostly because your tank is set up to be an archer, which means he'll be taking care of those enchanters for you. If you are going to have enchantments then I'd stick with AS.

Johnnywas and his silly notions that make sense and is what I generally follow. Bah! Have an imagination! :P

Do you know what you're letting yourself in for by following me? Just don't drink the Kool Aid.....

Too late. Where do you think that outrageous outburst kame from.

lol!

Without DM, FB faces a huge problem from GA and multiple minions. Granted, with a low FB damage you'll only take low GA backlash. But coupled with an AMF backlash, you'll be killing yourself quicker than you do your opponents. :(

MM faces less of a problem from GA, as you only hit one minion. But you'll hit for more. Unless you hit a wall. In which case, you'll erm, hit a wall! ;)

I tihnk the thing I was trying to mention is why keep your FB damage low, so that the RoBF covers it, when it's not the main damage dealer that's getting protected by it? Maybe drop one of the FBs and have a large FB.

Go EMT with the RoBF on the Tank. Who cares if the E doesn't make it through melee, ;) You'll have the M blasting away and your tank shielded from the splah by the combination of TSA, MgS and RoBF. Hmmm, but then you couldn't use the MgS...

Gahh...

"Those low FB's are going to do you more damage than good, because they're going to be killed by AMF."

Low FBs will not have a high enough backlash from AMF to kill a minion with AS. If you're up against a decent DM though... well, on this character you're not in too good shape with or without those enchanters. You do make a good point though about minions doing what they're supposed to do... hadn't ever seen it that way myself, I always looked at a character as a whole, rather than individual minions but you still may be right.

And Johnny/GL, wouldn't EET be a step up from ETM? With a mage your spell is going to be vulnerable to AMF and your tank is going to seriously struggle with only one enchanter helping it on a 3 minion team and no ToA. EET however has more potential, you can couple AS with AMF to deal with mages, and you can pump that haste up nicely to rival tanks.

I'd agree with you on that one MrC, mostly for the reasons of dilution applied to a whole team. You're weakening yourself somewhat if you have both kinds of damage dealers on a team - all that invisible PR stuff that I've gone on about before now. But if you're going to do EET, then in my mind you might as well go the whole hog and do EEET. Although your tank will be weaker you'll have more of the meatshields to protect him. And if you're going to do that then you might as well ditch the RBF and get a RoS, but that's a whole other strat discussion....

Oh, and for anyone reading who hasn't got a clue what I mean by invisible PR:

What offensive enchantments, your AMF and your ECs etc are actually doing is lowering your opponents PR during battle. The same is true of the axbow/exbows and any of the items that reduce the effectiveness of a DD spell. So you may be a mage of 100k pr. But up against AMF you may be operating as if you were actually 80k pr.

So if you have a tank and a mage on your team you may be thinking you have a good all-round strategy. And in some instances this is true. But you also double the chances of your invisible PR being lowered, as you make yourself vulnerable both to tank eating teams and mage eating teams.

But Johnny's invisible PR is really specialisation versus generalisation. :)

Yup, you're right, that's invisible PR in a nutshell. From a nutcase. ;)

Well, I'm convinced that the DD needs to go. Also, the team should go ToE over RoBF in that case. Keeping ToE on the middle minion would be better for reducing Mage damage in my opinion, and perhaps Tank damage too, since I get to keep the MgS, TsA and EC. Not to mention the fact that the Tank will have better stats that way.

God I wish the RoBF was a bit better at dealing back damage. It would make the Haste enchantment much more useful.

You could always consider a RoS. It'll boost your AS, stop it (and your Haste) being reduced by DM and allow you to use AMF/EC + DM. :)

But RoS's work better with four minion teams.

Honestly, I've seen soooo much advice get reduced to "Well, what you really need is a RoS on the AS minion." I'm thinking I just might flip like a ninja the next time I hear someone say that. No offense GL, its just how sick I am of seeing that.