My strat time! (in General)

So I'm not sure which way to go, or if you have an alternative route that you would like to express then please do :). (I do have an amulet of junction)

Strategy 1

1 minion
Pure archer with a ToA or Hal

Strategy 2

2 minions
First will train HP, PL, and DM
Second will be an archer with either a ToA or Hal.

Strategy 3

1 minion
2/3 AS 1/3 DM and Hal

Thoughts?

Id go with the 2nd strat if i had the money ):

the 3rd strat, my only criticism would be that you'd have to depend on the Hal Familiar for damage dealing. I dont really recommend relying on tattoos for damage dealing

Just run a junction/hal single minion and train nothing but DM.

Jiraiya think EC for a sec :)
I would prefer the 2nd strat

Why not junctioning to a SOD user with evasion instead? It'll give you some exbow and Hal protection (your biggest enemy in ranged). You'll need some DM of course.

The point is, every single option presented is for the most part bland and a basically a piece of a rock-paper-scissors scenario.

That being said, you're obviously inquiring about which strat would be the easiest to run.

The answer is HAL / DM, and you fight 4 minion teams that rely on AS and GA... (there are pllleeennnntttyyy).

So while you can argue, Oh EC will rock that, my answer to you, is that he is not looking for a strategy that's going to beat everyone out there. Chances are if he goes with a rock strategy, he's not going to be fighting minion strategy teams.

Hope that made sense, because I don't know an easier way to explain it.

My post was in response directly to nayab, and here it is without the mistake.

"So while you can argue, Oh EC will rock that, my answer to you, is that he is not looking for a strategy that's going to beat everyone out there. Chances are if he goes with a "rock" strategy, he's not going to be fighting "paper" minion strategy teams. "

Essentially, he's not going to be fighting teams that are going to be a counter to his strategy, and being a single minion DM Junctioned Hal, he is going to have the most targets.

ZZZZ

I say strat 3 because both 1 and 2 are vulnerable to GA. the DM on strategy 2 probably won't be very large since you're training both HP and PL. Strat 3 has a big enough DM since its on 1 minion, not to mention large portions of supporting HP.

and you can still train PL on the minion with AoJ in play (for strat 3), right?

woo triple posts

and for the EC thing, I honestly don't see very many EC's out there. Kwai Chang is just about the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, and B Ark. Thats it.

EC isn't a threat IMO, because of its rarity in teams.

/end essay.

Jir, I don't feel like hiring later on and I also don't want 4 diluted minions. SoD would be cool but could be hard to get a hold of before tomorrow.

EC doesn't matter. A NCB works best if you can defeat people high up. You just avoid the people who beat you. THe goal of an NCB is not to create an undefeatable character but rather to create a team that can beat teams much higher up.

What about a slight mofication to that second one. Minion 1: all AS, AoL, BoF, BoE. Minion 2: 1/2 DM, 1/2 GA. with hal on second minion

I basically followed strategy 2 and it is working well for me. Here is what I did.

Start out with a single minion Archer. You can beat folks quite handily at lower levels with this strategy and very little equipment. Don't bother with DM, just focus on maintaining the biggest hardest hitting Archer you can. Your main struggle will be keeping your ELB up to par, but not over sized (actually a little over sized seemed to work best). If you do, even GA will not cause much of an issue since your damage will be a lot higher than the GA can handle effectively.

When you get up high enough, and assuming you have a nice fat Hal ready to strap on, start a second minion with junction and the Hal. Again, focus on beefy equipment for the Hal. If you are growing a Hal from the ground up you are at a severe disadvantage. I would recommend, in this case, to buy the biggest affordable tattoo you can. Buy the second minion when you hit the point where the tattoo is earning experience. You should be somewhere around 2M MPR by then.

Your options with the mount minion are to train evasion or hit points/AS + PL or DM. All are good options, or even a combination. The issue here is that your equipment is focusing on helping your familiar, so you are adding a lot more PR than you want when you train skills on this minion. I mean, why buy DM if your equipment is focused toward archery skills and stats and each point of DM costs an extra 20%? I actually haven't trained a lot of my experience on the mount minion for this very reason.

I like that I get a lot of bang for my buck with the equipment on the mount character. I also like tearing apart teams with a heck of a lot more hit points than I have.

Warning: This is a pretty expensive strategy since you will want to maintain as big an ELB as you can on your main minion. Since he will have a huge strength, that will have to be one MASSIVE bow. Eventually you will not be able to keep up with the minions demand without spending USD and will gradually fall behind the curve. Nor can you slouch on the other equipment either. You will want two decent pairs of Beleg's gloves, a fat TSA, big BoF for the mount, yada, yada, yada. With decent equipment your main minion can see a strength twice as large as the trained amount, and a dexterity of about 1.5 times as large as what is trained. It has some weaknesses, but every strategy does.

Good stuff mit! Some additional information is that I have a level 4.2mil tattoo, about 30 mil cash, and the majority of equipment I should already have. (archery wise and some enchanter) (I will need to get or rent stuff if I go mit's way).

That's a nice hefty familiar and should be about right. As a note, I've found my familiar dishes out about 25% of the total damage the team deals (actually more than I thought it would considering it is in a kill slot further forward and can't take advantage of a TSA or AoM).

When I said a massive ELB in my previous post, I was talking really big. At the moment mine is 175M which is the 2nd highest in the game, but my minion could actually tote one at 300M with no encumbrance penalties. At today's prices that sucker would cost about $1500 USD to buy. You may have noticed that there ARE no ELBs out there that large so don't expect to insta up! So, unless you are rich and don't mid dropping a lot of USD on a strat, you can expect to have to grow it the hard way like I did. If you can keep up with your encumbrance, you will completely rock, we will see large quantities of whining out there, and you will ruin my strategy by causing Jon to nerf it ...


... Why am I giving you this advice? You aren't rich are you? Oh boy...

xD, no I'm not. But I like archers for some reason ;)