Question ABout GA (in General)

I'm trying to figure out GA. I want to use it with my next NCB and was thinking about an straight GA minion, in addition to the "warrior" I got planned.
Exactly how does this work? Does it only reflect DD or also other damage?
Im confused by the wiki by the way.

And actually any strat advice would be great.

I was thinking about a GA enchanter
an etheral chains minion
and an archer who wields a VB during melee

Well about GA - it reflects up to 60% of all types of damage (except RoBF) and that's achieved approximately when your GA is 2.5 times the damage dealt.

furthermore, the damage it does is the same type as the damage its retaliating against. i.e in retaliation to FB it'll reflect magical damage, and in retaliation to ELB, it'll reflect physical damage (very important with AC involved). wouldnt be very useful with straight EC and an archer, as thats not much HP to strike back with...

lol its not "reflect" nothing is reflected lol.... GA just deals up to 60% of the damage received back on the enemy minion....

Yeah, I'll add to this by saying that the percentage of damage inflicted back seems to drop sharply the lower you are below 2.5 times the damage inflicted.

Hence, against good archers/tanks, you might deal somewhere between 20% and 30% of what they deal to you _if you are lucky_.

Of course, this is still a large amount of damage, but since there are insane amounts of damage being inflicted on _you_, each time you manage to use your GA in this way, one of your minions will die. Hence, you need a lot of minions for GA to be successful against tanks (I have found).

Of course, I haven't experimented with walls - it may be that a two minion team: WE where the enchanter casts 100% GA and wears a ToE, and the W has 400 AC and casts a base prot, that the damage returned will be correspondingly greater than the damage inflicted on the wall (due to the reductions from AC, prot and ToE) - but I'm guessing here, since I don't know the order of calculations. If the GA return calculation is done _after_ the incoming damage inflicted reductions calculations, then this won't help.

In short, if you are going one or two minions, I would _always_ suggest AMF over GA - AMF can't be dispelled, is _always_ effective vs mages, and the exp will be no less wasted against big archers than if you trained GA ;-)

But, some folks have some very successful GA strats that don't rely on 5 minions and heaps of HP, so they may be able to correct my mistakes in this post :-)

Cheers,
muon.

true, DM dispels GA, but my AMF+decay+RoBF single minion char gets waylaid by huge GAs in opponents...i don't have DM to dispel their GA, and whatever dmg my RoBF does, half of it is reflected back on my char...so you'd just have to finetune the strat considering your present and likely opponents, esp what's your strength, and where you lack, and whether GA can remedy the situation.

chuck1234, 8:44 PM EST
"true, DM dispels GA, but my AMF+decay+RoBF single minion char gets waylaid by huge GAs in opponents...i don't have DM to dispel their GA, and whatever dmg my RoBF does, half of it is reflected back on my char...so you'd just have to finetune the strat considering your present and likely opponents, esp what's your strength, and where you lack, and whether GA can remedy the situation. "

Chuck your Mistaken... its not the damage the Robf does that gets reflected back at you... its the Decay damage that gets dealt back at you. There is no return of damage from a robf.

unless you train decay like any smfb mage :P A couple thousand level of AMF alone can destroy your minion.

Thanks for correcting my error, Draco, it's the decay damage reflection that's killing my char, not any RoBF damage reflection; esp when decay cuts out half of 400k+ minions, and about a 100k gets reflected back on my char as GA, that shows the utility of GA in some instances at least.

and koala, i'm indeed training decay like any other DD spell, think of the decay on Violent Femmes, that's the eventual level I have in mind. Since I have NSCs effective +14, the problem is with the GA backlash more than any decay damage reflection from opponent AMF.