Defence or Offense? (in General)

What is your mentality to character setup? Do you prefer to dish out the damage or reflect it back to your opponent?

More specifically, I'm thinking about starting a new character. Two minions, with one being a tank, the nature of his partner is what I need to decide.

Mage or Enchanter/Wall? My personal preference would be a Magic Missile mage, my thinking is that the tank will target the front of the opposing team while my mage attacks from the rear. However, this means my team will be open to most enchantments, e.g. GA, AMF, EC etc. So, what do you guys think, should I take the defensive stance and go with a enchanter/wall?

This is just a general question (to be answered generally), I understand there are many factors to consider.

I prefer defense myself, but we defensive players have a penalty to our strategic stance in the form of a 25 round limit.

So you are probably better off to go offense. That's what I'll be doing with my NCB, at least.

OddBird and NCB don't mix ... mark my words OddBird

YOU ARE DOOMED!!!!!

Offense without a doubt. E T is a nice strat if you only want 2 minions, look at Shade and Elros for some good examples of 2 minion strats, or myself for a 3 minion team.

If you are going to go with a heavy defense oriented strat, it is MHO that you shouldn't attempt it with any less than 3 or 4 minions: 2 damage dealers and 1 or 2 "defensemen". If you want to go with 2 minions, go as heavily damage weighted as you can, especially for the ranged rounds.

I prefer balance. Offense is great and all, but if you can't take the damage you can deal then you asking to be killed by GA. With defense you can take all the damage in the world but rarely kill them. Balance. ET always seemed like the best kind of balance.

E= Dm/ AS
T= ToA tank with archery.

Good defense and and offense. Lets you seriously dish it out in first 3 rounds, and then gives you the time to finish it off in the later rounds.

E = EC / GA (that's defense against mages and tanks alike)

T = whatever you want .. there are so many possibilities .. seeing as how you'd be 2 minion you prolly want archers with a huge ELB .. throw a VB / BoTH / MH on there for the longer fights

I don't agree with that chappy. The EC doesn't help much against mages unless you decide to go heavy tank. Now thats an idea though. Go heavy strength on the tank and make the E EC and then you really using the exp in the best way. And you can forget elven gear and go Tulks and HoE.

Im saying that the combination of EC and GA is a defensive set-up for both tanks and mages .. I know that EC is meaningless against mages, but it's VERY good versus tanks ... and GA does infact help against both mages and tanks. Tanks seem to be more prevalent now so you should expect to defend more against them than mages.

EC doesn't giev the same ratio. Give that E Haste instead and BAM tanks still can't hit you but now you can hit them. Unless you go heavy tank.

I would say offense.

Defense is nice but there are a few items that bypass defense making it not as useful as it should be.

Have NW? Go Offense,or if you need a cheap setup to NCB with, high enchantments (EC/AMF) and heavy defence can let you go the distance.

If you have a ToE, id say go with MM and your Tank. If you are using any other tattoo, id say go defensive and make your tank stronger with the enchanter

"EC doesn't giev the same ratio. Give that E Haste instead and BAM tanks still can't hit you but now you can hit them. Unless you go heavy tank. "

Unless you are planning to drop DBs on there, they are going to hit you anyways. PTH will always take care of that. Trust me, EC is VERY good against tanks, simply because it reduces *both* the number of hits and the damage they do.

Etheral Chains -- S U C K S --

*grins* You're only saying that because you have it trained on 2 out of 4 minions and you don't want Xiaz to learn your secrets.

So ET/TE seems to be the recommended approach.

Well, my tank will be balanced, I don't intend on using heavy armour (yet), I'm looking to boost my ToA with DX and ST bonus armour. ELbow and Elsword for damage. So Archery is a must I believe, the extra round is critical if I can dish out two or three hits.

The Enchanter, reading your responses I guess the general idea is to maximize the enchantments so they target both tanks and mages. I think I'll take GA, as that will affect both M and Ts. As for the second slot, I'll need to see how my battles go, but AMF if mages cause me trouble, or EC if tanks are beating me.

Thanks for the responses folks.

The best defence is a good offence?
I prefer Balanced.

Offense rules in CB. It always has, and always will.

As for EC, it no longer sucks. It reduces 50% of it's level in both Str and Dex.

Consider a tank that has trained 100K in both Str and Dex. Facing an equal sized Enchanter (and therefore a 200K EC), the tanks str and dex are reduced to zero.

Meaning the tank will no longer hit, and even if it does (due to weapon/ToA pth), it will do no (or now very very little) damage.

EC does not suck.

If you train a tiny EC and face tanks with large Str and Dex, then yes, it will suck. But what do you expect eh? ;)

"Consider a tank that has trained 100K in both Str and Dex. Facing an equal sized Enchanter (and therefore a 200K EC), the tanks str and dex are reduced to zero."

You forgot the one drawback -> An equal sized Enchanter would be able to get a lvl ~175k (wild guess) EC due to the increasing cost of Training. Other than that EC is great.

True. But it's marginal, and decreases as the levels involved increase. ;)