Moar Strategy tips prz? (in General)

So, I'm pretty dang happy about my current strategy (which was so graciously suggested to me by Hatch). I made a (http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002IrI) thread about this not too long ago, and many have given notable suggestions already (Other Forsaken, Ulord, Talion, Hatch :).) - but what I REALLY want to know to know is how the people I'm FARMING feel about it.

Any further suggestions for my current strategy are greatly appreciated. I'm hoping someone will be able to outline some overlooked flaws and possible areas for improvement, so here's a detailed description of my strategy:

Minion 1: Mikuru (19.6mil trained XP)
HP: 5.6mil
CoC: 13.3mil
Prot: 700k
(Eva: 0 xp - only trained)

Equipment: AoI, NSCs, MCM, CoI, HoC

Minion 2: Haruhi (10.6mil trained XP)
AMF: 4.1mil
AS: 6.5mil

Equipment: Corn, RoS lvl 1,450,000, (AoF)

Minion 3: Yuki (7.7mil trained XP)
DM: 1.2mil
GA: 6.5mil

Equipment: AoF, EH


Some things I've been looking at:
-I sometimes find the huge excess of HP a waste (not really, but I think it's not very efficient) against certain builds
-I am thinking maybe of switching DM on Yuki to AMF
-Also thinking of switching to a RoE on Mikuru, but I don't know what I'd do without my RoS ;__;.
-Adding another minion will be feasible only after I've grown to 1.5mil MPR, at the very least. I made a big mistake when I hired my third (and a slightly smaller one when hiring my second ;x) at such a low MPR
-I designed this as a Magekiller build, specifically against RoBF users. Having lots of trouble doing this, unfortunately.
-Don't suggest Evasion, because I know how many Tanks are farming me anyway. I don't really care if they do, actually. (see above point)

Specifically against mage teams, I'm having trouble against multiple MMs, and MM/FB. If anyone can offer tips to counter any of these while retaining the general shape of my build, I'd love to hear them.


Also, I would post in HTML, but the stupid paragraphs are too hard to format.

Take prot off yout CoC minion and only train CoC, Health and evasion on them. If you really want Prot, put it on a different minion. Your CoC, evasion, and health are far more important.

I would re-ink the RoS to a ToE. As a CoC team you are useless for 3 rounds of combat, so survivability to that point is essential. I know you have the HoC but almost everyone else does too.

I would also get rid of GA. GA is most useful when you have a lot of health. As a matter of fact completely retrain the third minion..

I would either go with EC, EC/health or all health and as much wall gear as possible. EC will help you against physical damage teams. EC/health--if trained properly might allow you to fight both mage and physical damage teams.

The best would be to just train health though. It will allow you to fight the teams you are targeting. It may allow you another couple of rounds of combat against RoBF teams and MM or FB teams. Wall armor has come down in price so this might be a good time to get some too. It would also allow you to move your AoF to your Second minion. Lastly see if you can get a A Cloak of the Istari.

Just my thoughts.

i agree with yoyo!

yoyo- Your suggestions make sense, but they are for an entirely different strategy than this one. I've laid out the aim of this particular strategy in segments to address each of your suggestions.


"Take prot off yout CoC minion and only train CoC, Health and evasion on them. If you really want Prot, put it on a different minion. Your CoC, evasion, and health are far more important."

Protection is a low-investment ED, It isn't taking too much XP away from everything else (don't put it to 700k though. It doesn't go up much past 200k or so...), which is why it is best suited for a minion with heavy XP invested in other stats. Evasion could be useful against MsK, but all other tanks should be dead before they get to the CoC mage, due to GA and AoI.


"I would re-ink the RoS to a ToE. As a CoC team you are useless for 3 rounds of combat, so survivability to that point is essential. I know you have the HoC but almost everyone else does too.

I would also get rid of GA. GA is most useful when you have a lot of health. As a matter of fact completely retrain the third minion.."

The trick here is that she has a buncha health due to the RoSE, which will help against AMF much in the way a ToE would, and the GA has plenty to reflect back. with her CoC being the last minion attacked, their damage dealer is dead long before they threaten her offense.


"I would either go with EC, EC/health or all health and as much wall gear as possible. EC will help you against physical damage teams. EC/health--if trained properly might allow you to fight both mage and physical damage teams."

EC is near useless unless you're using it to hit a DX threshold, or nuking an enemies ST entirely. with a mage, there's no threshold to hit, and with a 3 minion spread, entirely nuking a tank's ST is near impossible unless you're 8x their MPR.


"The best would be to just train health though. It will allow you to fight the teams you are targeting. It may allow you another couple of rounds of combat against RoBF teams and MM or FB teams. Wall armor has come down in price so this might be a good time to get some too. It would also allow you to move your AoF to your Second minion. Lastly see if you can get a A Cloak of the Istari."

A wall would be a good addition to her team though, but the GA is needed to kill the opposing damage dealer.



SOS- The only upcoming issues I see with your team are that you're planning too far ahead, and you're planning to put too much XP into Protection. you may also experiment with using a EH on the CoC mage instead of MCM (AC is still decent with EH, and it's only a 2% magic penalty) to cut down on FB damage received. You would also definitely want to get a Corn for Yuki ^_^

300k gives you about 28 protection. Retrain the prot to give you about that and move the rest into your mage's HP. You would do well to train evasion on the mage too...after a certain level you won't be facing many mages, just RBF and tank teams and the big weakness of a mage team - the mageseeker....

Then I would really consider switching the RoS to a ToE. The endurance will make more of the mage's HP than adding AS derived HP. Plus the damage reduction will enable your mage to last longer than having simply HP. From my own experience the ToE's damage reduction is worth more as 'extra' HP than you'll be getting from the AS. Also the ToE helps reduce any AMF backlash that you may have.

If you're targetting RBF users you don't need DM. Most RBF teams don't have defensive enchantments, so DM would be a waste of time against them. You could lose the DM and move it into GA, although again that's a waste against RBF teams too...

A ToE would help against mage teams, reducing their damage.

What you should be trying to do is make your mage as BIG as he/she can get. By that I don't just mean training up on the mage's stats. I mean that what you enchanters train should be boosting your mage and it's chances to make it to the killing rounds. My own personal preference for a CoC mage is always the ToE.

Just an IMO though. Good luck ;)

Sorry ignore my comment about prot. Too early in the morning to read properly what size it was!

I have a much similar strategy to yours, and I can see similar problems we are running into. Of course you're much bigger than me and might actually have more experience than I do. So take it with a grain of salt.

RoS is lovely because of the massive amount of hp you're getting but in my experience, lots of HP goes much longer with much AC. Invest a little in some AC, a little bit goes a long way in keeping under GA damage cap. Grab a Shadow cloak and some leather items. Minus 15k here and there really goes a long way.

I would definitely go AMF instead of DM, since AMF reduces damage and I've noticed you want to get around 0.20 to 0.30 AMF to maximize recoil damage. At that point you're doing more damage to spread damage teams than they do to you. Anything beyond 0.30 is just saving you HP, which isn't bad. :D

Not killing RoBF? Could you explain why not? I'm perplexed by that :(

A great big AMF sets you up to kill all those Single Fireball mages floating around, which is great farming. Though tanks are still going to eat you up. What I did for tanks was get the biggest Exbow I could find, and shut them down in early rounds. I don't know if that's possible with a mage, but hey it's a percentage reduction, can someone look into it for me? If someone is training archery they might have trouble with a +100 PTH maybe, but that's just an idea. Plus that's way in the future, I'm talking a 50 million NW Exbow at least. Probably not worth it.

Oh and I'd love to hear your experiences with EH, I"m debating using one myself.

Oh yeah sticking a base Decay on Haruhi might be a good idea, she's as good as dead anyway, if arrows aren't poking out her. But it's really a question do you want to blow on some NS?

Mmkay. To address Protection:

I realize that my Protection is a bit high, but I'm not concerned much about it at this point because I'm simply saving up XP - my current CB % is a horrid 35 - 40% average, and the MPR at that score isn't really much of a challenge. Also, as I grow, the XP I have trained in there will become relatively smaller and smaller; I haven't been putting any there since I got to this level.

And, just a note, my current raw level (62,369) gives me 20 Protection, with the penalty from the HoC.

To address Evasion:

Specifically to Yoyo, I don't have enough XP on my mage to spread around to Eva, HP, AND CoC at the moment. A valid option once I grow, however. Also, I would pick Evasion over EC any day, simply because it gives me more boost options and I can use it with Mage-busting equipment.

Evasion is there to counter Tank damage. As of right now, the only option I would pick is to retrain Yuki to Eva, stick a MgS on her, and stick an AoI on Haruhi, giving me AoI/AoI/Eva Mage wall.

To address DM/GA:

In terms of DM, I just picked it to fool around with because I had my Tat inked to a RoS ;P. I know I'm going to untrain it eventually. Also, there are at least a few who use multi-minion RoBF teams with EDs - one on my list stands out (Annihilus).

GA: Oh, but it's so much fun! Yuki is basically my retrain minion. As a magebuster, I attempted to do two things with Yuki: knock out their Prot, and deal damage in the first three rounds. A few days ago, I was capable of knocking out some SFBMs with just GA damage, and the occasional 4 rounds where I hit once with CoC.

Now.. for the big one: RoS vs ToE:

As a matter of fact, this Tat was originally a ToE when I got it (at around 1.1mil). It worked fairly well, and I had almost the same list as I did now. The only difference was that I had a larger amount of de-centralised Tank teams on my farm list and less mage teams. So I tried out the RoS. Guess what? The massive boost in AS and the 0.06 off the strongest AMF on my fightlist (from CoI) gave me a lot of extra leeway when it came to surviving until melee.

I realize that the ToE does the exact same thing outlined above, and I'm sure that if I switched back now (with a little retraining), I'd get the same results.

To Hatch: What exactly do you mean by planning too far ahead? I am expecting to get to at least 1.2mil MPR ;x. As for the EH, I'm only using the MCM because I bought it, and I haven't seen any decent EHs for rent, apart from the one I'm using on Yuki. I also had a Corn on Yuki, but I took it off before I started training DM because it wasn't boosting EO and ED, and because the PR addition wasn't needed to win. Also, Walls >:(. You just want me to rent your +90 AC again.

To Yoyo:

The main problem with fighting both Mage and Tank teams is that invariably, you end up losing to specialized ones. If you focus, like the RoBF strat has taught many people, you can farm very high. By the way, I actually have a bunch of Wall gear that I was using before - Yuki was originally a Wall ~_~. I will certainly look into training HP individually, as I find AS is very hard to keep at a good level with mid- to large-sized DMs nuking it, especially since I'm switching to a RoE soon.

To JW:

I really don't have much to say about your suggestions. I will definitely try out the ToE again. As for making it to the killing rounds, I usually do quite well at that with my current set-up. Of course, not against Archers or Tanks. I looked into a PL Enchanter, but it was too many penalties for me.

To everyone else:

More please!

"I usually do quite well at that with my current set-up"

That's coz you are only MPR: 891,257 :) Sooner or later you will rejoin the TOE group hehehe, unless there's some big changes to Tattoo domain

My first major team was a ToE/CoC combo. That's probably why I think they're made for each other.

If you're specializing you may not be worrying about tanks; but from a defensive point of view you could cut down on farming if you swapped to a ToE - thanks to it's damage reduction, but what would really help is evasion. Really.

I have an evasion that I no longer train - it's sitting at 1,100,703 in raw level which gives me 111 evasion. That's quite a big investment for me - over 25% of my char, but I no longer train it, because a lot of tanks around my level and almost all below cannot get past it. Even a smaller evasion would help cut down some of the hits you take, perhaps enabling you to add some tank teams to your fightlist and widen your 'speciality'. ;)

Definitely; re-inking the RoS to a ToE is a very Good idea.. And like NK said, your only at ~900k MPR.
A Wall would be good too.

Without a 200+ AC minion to back it up, a RoS is better than a ToE. I run a GA + AS mage team as well, and I have tried both ToE and RoS. The RoS is better. Tanks just do too much damage for the ToE against a 20 dex low AC minion. It would have to be a massive ToE to prevent a non-gimped tank from overloading it. Against mages, the extra HP + GA damage from the RoS is better than the protection from ToE. This also helps make you slightly less vulnerable to DM as well.

Don't let the ToE folks confuse you. With a high AC and trained HP, the ToE is better. But with the setup you have, RoS is better.

Just saying you're overshooting a bit. I'm a bit over 1.7m MPR, and I have less than 8.5m in raw levels. You have stats layed out for 37.9m in raw levels... It's safe to say the exact numbers you're shooting for would put ya well over Koy's MPR... :P

The ToE is a GREAT tat (my favorite, at least ^_^), but it's main use comes when coupled with other forms of damage reduction. Considering none of your minions have more than 100 AC, archers and BL tanks with large ST/weapon x will easily outdamage the ToE cap, making it relatively uselss for that aspect of things. if you were to get a wall (which would help your team at some point), I would definitely advise the ToE over the RoS (my least favorite tat atm). But as it stands now, with low damage reduction, IMO, you are better off with the RoS so you have more HP for your GA to retaliate more damage, and wipe out their damage dealer.

Also walls >:) AC rocks! :P I'm also a firm believer that strats meant for long battles *need* at least one heavy-AC minion, or a heavy emphasis on GA. ^_^

I like your strategy.

As far as protection goes, do not listen to the nay-sayers. More protection is always good. A lot of characters out there train a small DM just to get rid of Protection. Do not underestimate the power of an extra 20% damage reduction no mater how small that can seem to be.

I would keep the DM and train it up to level 500K if I were you. Then leave it at that forever. It will kill most trained Protection out there and some VA as well as reduce the effect of opponent GA. And for teams that train AS, that is a 500K HP reduction on every minion before the fight even starts. That is not negligible.

If you really feel like retraining DM, switch it to EC. 1.5M EC will completely get rid of the DX on a lot of tanks out there. The ST reduction would also help maximize you GA backlash.

If you really do not like EC, then convert all that XP into HP. But as I wrote, I would keep the DM.

In the future, I would think about something that as been indirectly suggested somewhere else in this thread: Hire a Mage Wall with mage armor and put it in the back.

"that is a 500K HP reduction on every minion before the fight even starts. That is not negligible. "

500k level DM will not reduce 500k ED. DM's effect is 80%, so a 500k level DM will reduce a DD by 400k. Just thought I'd point it out, I agree otherwise.

Just since I see we're making corrections here....a 500k DM will reduce a DD by 0.

0=)

Your setup is excellent for a growth stage character imo. There are two ways to get high reward: 1) hit higher enemy; 2) drop PR.

At 1.9mil score, you'll be hard pressed to find new targets above as there are a lot of characters with big MPR blocking your way, so the viable approach to this is step 2). As Hatch found out for himself, heavy AC set incurs a serious PR cost, one that is not justified where he's fighting. I think you made a good choice switching away from wall/ToE. As effective as that combo is, it's a PR intensive one and hurts your growth.

As to where you should go from what you got, again your goal is to drop PR while trying to keep the same list. That is the measuring stick of your success.

One point that I am not qualified to make but will try anyways is the size of your GA. I feel it is a bit small for your level. Since you have so much hp from RoS already, it's more efficient to learn ga on your minion with more exp. GA maxes out in effectiveness at 2.5* damage. I suspect it'll help you kill of mages in multiple minion teams before they start becoming a pain. It'll help against archers with low hp as well. A larger GA is also harder to dispel, especially with your RoS protection.

Now you are going to be weak against msk, but you can't beat everybody. Evasion is generally not compatible with what you want to do here as you want GA to do damage. It may not be a bad idea to get a big pair of DB though, to get off at least one CoC. You should only need one round of fire really. (does DB's effectiveness increase in ranged rounds? not sure)

OK so you want a RoS Team designed for mages :)

1 minion Damage Dealer (your choice of styles, add base Pro if not using a Mage Shield)
2 Minion with AMF/GA trained (your targeting mages, so you'll always want to keep beefing AMF up, and beef GA as needed)
3 Minion with DM/AS Beef DM up to certain level, then go heavy AS (or Vice Versa, because there is such monster DM's at the high end, you won't really need a monster DM yourself, just enough to help you vs GA and nuke those base Protections and reduce other teams AS"s a little so you can kill them faster).

Later if you add a 4th, you'll want AMF/Pro on him or DM/Pro depends on which you'll need more and untrain that base Pro on your Attacking minion and put that over into his stats/skills and maybe if you add DM, untrain the DM on your AS minion and make him all AS.

You'll want the RoS on the AS Minion, follow it up with some AoF's and Corns, and MCM's.
Main Attacker will need HoC and either Tank/Mage gear, and definitely an AoI. If you want, you can skip out on evasion and just invest in a pair of DB's and I mean invest CB2 into them heavily, that will help you massively vs Tanks later on. For now, your focus is mages.

Another note, your last minion should be all AMF and a small Pro, that way you can keep growing your AMF and start pumping your GA up that is on your AMF/GA minion.

That will help the best in the long run vs Mages.

First off, just to clear up any discrepancies, the values I've placed in my original post refer to the AMOUNT OF XP CURRENTLY TRAINED, not the levels I have in there (or plan to have). Sorry for confusing anyone ~_~.

To those basing my Tat choice off of low vs. high AC (and low vs. high HP):

I have Wall gear. Not all of it, and not the best, but it can be upgraded. I'm working on boosting my AC right now with cheap equipment, but once I'm out of the hole I'll start investing into AC. So that's my explanation for my low overall AC at the moment.

Regarding HP, I'm almost definitely retraining my AS into something more fun. It's just too easily nuked by even a moderately strong DM, and with three minions (I'm not planning to get a fourth for a long time, unless it's a Familiar), it's just not worth it. Besides, I'm getting a nice named RoE, and my reliance on EDs at the moment wouldn't do so well without it ;x.

Regarding EC and Evasion:

I would still definitely train Eva over EC. EC would only be an option if I kept it ALONG WITH GA, which I probably wouldn't do, considering that Tanks often overwhelm my relatively small GA, and, even coupled with the XP investment into EC, the damage is still way too high. It would definitely be an option against the not-so-uncommon SoDs I'm seeing, though..


Mikel: I agree completely with your switch between training AMF/AS and DM/GA to AMF/GA and DM/AS. DM and GA are both less important than AS and AMF in my strategy.

Talion: The only thing I have against keeping DM is that it's completely unusable with AMF if I don't have my RoS equipped, because of my reliance on AMF. As stated above, I'm considering switching that DM to AMF to give a larger effect.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions - again, they've helped me decide what to do next. I'm still seeing a noticeable lack of input from my farm list though(apart from Ant and Ulord :)).


Now, anyone have any ideas for when I have a RoE on my CoC mage? o.o.

You won't be need to worry too much about me. Despite all the heavy farming I'm receiving, I am not confident at all that I'll do any better if I retrain.

With regards to RoE, you should be careful how much you use it. Not levelling your tatt might be a mistake once you get high enough. The best tatt you'll find on the market, very infrequently too, would be just over 2mil. You'll need to grow your own, preferably while you still have nub bonus.

My suggestions for mage hunting.

Minion 1
Drop the hp and put it into your CoC
If you really want the DM put it here

Minion 2
All AS

Minion 3
AMF
GA without Prot.
Prot. no GA all into AMF

"Just since I see we're making corrections here....a 500k DM will reduce a DD by 0. "

Typos at 2 AM FTW!