Passive Strategies (in General)

Hey.

Well, the idea for making this post came about when I was thinking about how to beat Mikel. After looking at a few other characters, I decided that the idea probably had legs.

Assumptions/Basis:
1) Most characters at the top don't use _too much_ in the way of ED, probably because they are scared of DM. There are, of course, exceptions.

2) Attempting to out-tank any tank is a reasonably useless endeavour unless you have a fair bit of NW to back yourself up.

Solution:
1) A four minion RoS team. 3xAS and 1xRoS'd-GA. Maybe a throw-away 100k DM or AMF or EC on each minion.

Every minion wears an AoF and a corn. A couple of the minions have a nice, big BoNE or Morg, and those two train, say 2k into str and dex.

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Why:
Because it would beat Mikel (I think). Thanks to the RoS, his big DM is not very useful; his tank gets GA'd into oblivion, and the wall gets cleaned up by the two weapon toting enchanters.

Further Advantages:
I then thought about it from a "Ok, but does it work in general?" sort of way. And it has a bit going for it. Firstly, lets say that 2 of the minions trained a bit of DM, and one trained a bit of AMF, and one trained a bit of EC. Your DM is always useful to cut down base prots and so on, the AMF makes sure that base decay mages slaughter themselves (even before GA comes into play), not to mention little FB's aimed at low HP enchanters. And the EC would give the two enchanters a better shot at taking down any walls that remain.

Disadvantages:
EC would spell almost certain stalematelcy (okay, I made that word up) since my E's wouldn't be able to hit anything.

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So, the main disadvantage is that you might suffer a lot of stalemates if EC is involved... but so what? You won't fight them, and they won't fight you.

DM doesn't bother you _too_ much (thanks to the RoS) and AMF is completely wasted experience against you. Large DM's are still the biggest problem that I can see, but assuming that we have a 4 mil level tat, then 1 mil of the DM would be blocked. The largest DM in the game would therefore be chopped by, what, not quite half. Since the original DM would have been enough to nullify 80% of any of the ED's (pre-ros), the "new" DM effect would be about ... say worst case 50%. So, my hand-waving maths comes up with (assuming each minion trains 2mil trained level into each of their major EDs) about 3 mil _effect_ AS and 4 mil trained GA (whatever that relates to in effect - never could work that out). Yes, as far as I can tell, AS stacks by effect rather than by trained experience. At least, my two do.
In other words, each of the four minions would get _at a minimum_ 2 million HP. 4x(2Mx0.6) = 4x(1.2mil). That is, for every enchanter that dies, the attacker should suffer about 1.2 million HP damage. And it should be far higher than that. No tank can survive more than 3 rounds of that, I think.

Evasion would be a problem, but from what I can see, the use of evade walls is relatively low compared to the amount of trained evasion on the damage dealers - whose evasion we don't care about anyway.

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OK, so most of the maths used here was hand waving, but you see what I was getting at.

So, ideas and thoughts?
I know that passive strategies have been discussed before, but this came about from deciding how best to defeat a particular opponent, and then noticing that with minor adjustment, it could work against many.

Cheers,
muon.

The problem with GA is that it must be trained pretty high in order to work to its full potential (60% return). In most cases, GA will only do about 30% return because of the massive damages being dished out. So your strategy will not be very effective. RoS is also not very good at protecting your EDs from DM.

Your response got me interested. I decided to do the maths in more detail.

Assume each minion has trained a trained level of 2 million into their ED. We will (for the sake of argument) assume that our opponent has 4 minions, one of which trains DM, or a single minion who trains 1/4 of its xp into DM. In either case, we assume that the opponent DM is the same as our ED's - 2 million trained level.

This effect will be 1.6 million (80% of trained level) and this will be cut by our RoS (which is level 4 million because we mugged Ranger and stole his) down to 0.6 million effect. Or, at worst, 0.8 million effect (if the RoS reduces trained levels instead of effect...)

So, after DM, our ED's will be:
3xAS at 2 mil trained level gets reduced to min of 1.2 million level.
1xGA at 2 mil trained + 2 mil ros = 4 mil trained gets reduced to a min of 3.2 million level.

To quote the wiki on AS:
"With 4 minions you get 4 * 36.25% Ablative Shield efficiency. Total is 145% effectiveness."

With this maths, each minion will receive:
3x(0.3625 * 1.2 million) HP = 1.305 million HP. At a minimum.

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Under these (admittedly contrived) conditions, with the largest tat in the game and assuming equal experience on all minions on both our and the opposing side, we have a minimum of 3.2 million trained level GA, and 1.305 million HP on each minion.

No matter _how big_ the opponent's strike is, if it is over 1.3 million, then 0.6 * 1.305 should _at the very least_ be returned. In which case, we deal 780k per death.

So you're right, the RoS doesn't protect our AS enough to guarantee opponent damage dealer death.

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One thing that I noticed, though, is that any GA over the HP level of the enchanters is a waste; thus, if the RoS were placed on an AS enchanter instead of the GA enchanter, the reduced GA would be much closer to the original reduced HP level of the enchanters. This would result in less wasted xp by "over learning" GA with respect to the hitpoints on the enchanters.

Hmm, interesting; obviously the RoS isn't supposed to protect against opponent DM, but rather just to be "an extra minion worth of ED".

Cheers,
muon.

the biggest GA in the game currently does only about 600k max damage to me. But that is why I have almost 3 mil hp too. Enough to kill 5 minions, but then if you are using 5 minions, you won't have the RoS boost.

Novice and NWO do the most GA damage to me, but I usually live or die killing their last minion, while my mage wall is still left standing.

The biggest flaw I can see is the lack of damage.

Sure, you can beat single minions or teams where every minion is one with a good weapon or a DD that will hurt themselves enough to not stalemate. But you can't beat walls, evasion walls, any team with a decent AS, EC, highly trained Decays, BoTH/MH/VA you'll have trouble against, and possibly more.

I don't think it would work that well, honestly.

Check out novice's character for a good example of a semi-passive character. Admittedly, he uses a tattoo for damage, but you need some kind of damage source as tyriel pointed out.

If you're aiming just to kill one person, its much easier than that. For mikel, try single minion mage 75% evasion 25% CoC and no hp. His archer will never hit you and his wall can't train a DD to kill you because it uses mage shield.

Also something to note is he is completely defenseless against base decay.

Mikel would hit that guy...I don't think the evasion curve is kind enough to get you to -400 to hit...

TOE's will kill your GA damage as will high AC on the damage dealer (eg Oxcha). Also Morgs/BTH leech back about a third of the damage your GA does (assuming a very generous 60% GA damage).

The strat could possibly work against Mikel if your GA was big enough, it could maybe work against a couple of others in the top 20 as well if your Morg wearers could do enough damage to kill all Enchanters/Wall's in 25 rounds.

Overall I think it's a strategy better suited to middling score ranges rather than the very top since it's a strategy that is excellent against a couple of types of teams (Archer, non ToE/big DM mages etc) rather than a general strategy that's reasonably good against all teams.

Surely if one was concerned with beating only Mikel then EC rather than Evasion would be the way to go. The Evasion required to be unhittable by Mikel is unreachable at the moment whereas the amount of EC required to reduce Mikels strength to 0 is more realistic, I believe Ranger allready has enough to do so?

One would need a massive EC to lower Mikel's str to below 0 as even 100k str with his elb would be enough to put most characters millions into the negative HP.
Right now with my 2 EC's I can put his str into the negatives, however if he uses his AOM, then he has over 200k str left.

The problems with GA are well described above:

1) TOE really reduces GA damage to very manageable amounts
2) DM can dispel it