Life After The RBF.... (in General)

Just a little note on progress. Switched from a single RBF/Evasion/AMF minion to a single ToA tank with SoD and smallish rented Morg. Dropped my PR because I had been using a Corn, added 30 million or so NW in weapons which is only half my WA and gained a nice free VA in the process.

Had to change my fightlist; a lot of the people I could beat as RBF guy I couldn't as ToA tank. But that's how things are. I actually gained higher MPR/PR/Score people on my fightlist though, and a lot of them are RBF teams. Which is interesting.

I've gained in rewards, challenge bonus and lowered PR in one fell swoop.

And while scores are going down mine has risen. Which is nice!

I'm pretty pleased. :P

I find Corns to be terribly inefficient, especially on robf treams. I rented a 6mil +10 corn yesterday and the skill penalty is annoying. Also, it has a huge pr weighting for some strange reason (items much more powerful such as MgS and Beleg weighs a lot lower) so upped my pr a good 40k.

All in all, still getting 100% reward with my robf :). Shall reap this as long as I can. Then I'll join the other cookie cutter camp of toa tanks.

Oooh. Maybe I should drop my rented Corn too, then o.o. It'd certainly put a lot more opponents in the 100% CB category.

Ah this certainly is better. A nice pair of rented +10 Beleg's and POW more people added to my fightlist. People who could beat me conclusively when I was a RBF char.

;)

Aha, a much bigger rented MH and still room under the WA.

:)

Yeah Johnny, I'm thinking of switching to a ToA tank too. I have an ELB, ELS, EH, DB and BoM already. My only issue is deciding wether or not to keep Boom, my AMF minion. What do you think?

I am not sure whether you have shown the RoBF isn't as powerful as everyone says or if the WA just makes it immensely easier to maximize rewards (at lower/intermediate levels, anyway).

Maybe a bit of both, but I'm far more interested in the latter. Anything that jacks with rewards makes the game inherently broken, in my book. You aren't even close to your WA, and yet your team gets better rewards than when you were using an item considered to be one of the most powerful (and cheapest, i.e. low PR) in the game.

Score doesn't really even matter except that it is a reflection of the rewards you are getting because you are able to hide so much power.

Very illuminating.

The WA certainly is a huge factor, but so is the ability to upgrade physical damage. The addition of +10 Beleg's doubled my average damage output in ranged and landed me three or four extra opponents on my fightlist.

That's simply not possible with the RBF, and obviously with mages also.



But yes, this might be more about WA and hidden PR than the ups and downs of an RBF...

;)

well it made it easier for me to start beating you johnny, your robf stopped every MM blast I had, including that big SF I have. Your SoD doesn't manage to hit my evasion character at all

Excellent observations, JW. Maybe now people will stop yelling at me to do research and present examples that are "real".

Nice work! Nobel Prize worthy!

I think Johnny had too much HP on his RoBF ;)

Sute, I made that exact point in DD's thread. ;)

RD, JW rejiggered his HP/AMF ratio when he was still in RoBF mode, and it still didn't help, IIRC. Maybe he still needed to lessen the HP, but where would he have put that extra experience?

I would point out that this is also about target selection. Maybe there are just more targets susceptible to tank ranged damage out there. Then again, to hear some people tell it, Evasion has basically ruined the lives of most tanks, so if there is that much Evasion, I am surprised that JW can find so many targets... Lots to mull over on this...

I had already moved HP into AMF previously. For this rebuild I retrained my AMF mostly into ST/Dex.

Evasion is still a problem, but I do manage to hit most evasion minions on my fightlist in either the first or final round of ranged. The combination of the HoC and the ToA Pth Bonus serves me well I think.

Either that or people aren't pumping xp into evasion as much as would benefit them.

Oh I didn't realise that, sorry. As you say using score/PR comparisons is fraught with difficulties. Eg I notice that JW hits non clan members (so not ideal when comparing to other chars which only hit clan targets (some only hit 3 pointers too))and also doesnt have a high win ratio atm. Maybe he is hitting some higher score targets than before but his win ratio might only be 70% for those etc etc.

Nah, you're right there RD, I'm hitting a few non clan at the top of the list.

However, I'm not in a clan at the moment, so CPs aren't vital to my existence. Also, some of the opponents on the cusp of win/lose/draw gain me better rewards over two battles than lower level opponents gain me in one.

And even without clan bonus my rewards are better than they were as the RBF guy.......

Meant to add, so yes, score is probably not worth using in any comparisons, seeing as mine drops rather more slowly than if I was being farmed into the dirt.

"Also, some of the opponents on the cusp of win/lose/draw gain me better rewards over two battles than lower level opponents gain me in one."

I have a very hard time believing that.

Unless the difference is something like 0% rewards bonus compared to over 50% rewards bonus, then I could maybe start thinking that it could sometimes happen that one fight at 50% earns more rewards than 2 fights at 0%. Sometimes...

But I doubt that you are in that situation.

If I was to stick solely to Clan members I would have to end up 'bottom feeding', that is farming much lower level chars, simply because by fighting high like I do I use up the available clan opponents I can beat very quickly.

A higher level non clan player gives me a good boost in score and up to 100% challenge bonus, whereas some of those lower level players give me a challenge bonus verging on the negative.

So yes I do get more from a double tap than I get from a single fight.

Having just run through a few fights I can confirm that the top end of my fightlist is a challenge bonus of 74% currently. The bottom end right now give me a negative bonus.

Ok, then I stand corrected.

And from the third column on the 2nd page of the standings to the third column of the front page in two days.....

;)