My next 2 minion Strategy (in General)

Becuase I can't stop tinkering. ;)

Not that I'm going to change my current set up at all, I'm seeing this through to the end.

But if I do decide to restart, here's the next idea I want to try;

1)
Trains: EC, Decay, VA
Wears: AoI, ToE, BoF

2)
Trains: HP, Str, tiny Dex (like 100/1000), BL (maybe a 100K AMF, to stop base Decays)
Wears: AoM, HoE, TSA, TG, SC, CML, BoM, Morg/MoD

(I wanted a UC character, but UC sucks. So I'll name the Morg/MoD to something like "His bare fists" or the like!)

EXBow I'm not worried about. EC combined with the highish AC and high HP my Tank should have.

Thoughts?

Mages will pwn me though. ;)

Uhh.. Dex? :D

No need. ;)

That's what EC is for. ;)

the Toe might be a it redundant if you are putting about 40% xp into ec

Why not drop EC, and instead go for AMF? just as rubberduck says, why EC when you got ToE?
ToE is enough defense against physical, try AMF instead.

Actually you should worry about exbows. High AC is relative. You will have about 250-300 AC which is nice bit not real high.

Using CML with low dex means 2-3 hits a round at least.

As for high HP, that is a joke. I have 22 million HP and 1 hit from an exbow drains me completely.

It is the image drain, maxed about 10k that will take you into the negatives very very quick.

My advice is to just plan on using the tank as nothing more than a HP tsa wall if you fight exbow useres as there is no real defense vs them.

Do not plan on it getting fixed or on people finally realizing what a stupid unbalanced item it is. Just live with it and plan to lose vs exbow useres unless you have a hearty other attack.

Inate drain

Two N's. :)

Actually, two n's, zhegao. iNNate would look silly. :P

Also, Ranger, which people are you saying do not realize the ExBow is stupid and/or unbalanced? Because, every thread that I've read on the subject seems to contain everyone pointing out flaws with the design of the item, and I do believe that the majority of the community thinks that there should be a change.

The main one of course is Nightstrike. But if you go through the other exbow threads, you can certainly find a few others that like the current method of exbow strength drain.

let's keep this thread on track, if we want yet another specialty crossbow discussion please take it out of this thread!

The one problem I see is that if someone else is running EC (not many people are but still) and they train their EC to completely wipe your Dex and then put some +100 DBs on their first minion, then your batting average might be around .000. It might not be common, but it just turns out that I do this so it definitely popped into my head when I first saw this.

Not really sure of what you mean Dude.

The initial poster himself actually brought up the exbow. And the initial poster himself stated he is not worried about the exbow.

I was replying that specific statement is totally incorrect and if he bases the rest of his strategy on that flawed premise, he will run into problems down the road.

Yes, I went overboard a bit with the "stupid etc.." comment, but that is just years of frustration chiming in.

the worst drawback to EC is the AS/GA teams

the first post was fine, if you and areo want to continue that discussion though i would appreciate it going into a thread of its own. : )

Oh and 1 more thing, if you even have a small exbow+EC, then it does much better to negate melee damage than ToE, which frees up your tattoo slot for something to diversify your damage. I use EF, but i think robf is viable as well. At one point, I even considered running RobF+Dbs but i thought that might have been overkill with a big EC.

WW is also right on the AS/GA teams. You could run robf to negate this but then with the exp going into EC, you're opening yourself up to other robf users who have more exp in HP (unless you forget about amf to compensate for this). I never considered the possibility of going robf without amf (or a tiny amf) but since no one does it, I am guessing the results are not pretty :/

EC is like peeing in the wind.

I tried it to stop exbow users and they just got smarter and had strength and dex above my EC level.

It is far easier with items to boost strength and dex than it is to boost EC level. And with the iNNate exbow drain, they really do not need to hit for much damage. And with CML they will hit often enough to completely drain you before you get to melee.

AMF is another spell which is almost peeing in the wind. With high level tattoos unless you are like Mikel using 3 full minions towards AMF, it is a lot of wasted xp for the benefit. The NSC just eats AMF for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I have found the optimal level of AMF is about 1-2M just to help vs decay. Anything more is just wasted xp for the benefit.

IE to get to .01 AMF vs Areos tattoo, and yes it is the highest, I would need over 4.5M levels in AMF. So the 4.5M levels of AMF is basically dead xp doing nothing.

One of the better ways, aside from the RBF, to take on AS/GA characters is to have a higher hp tank with the TSA for regeneration.

But you will also need multiple damage dealers, possibly using a tattoo, to spread the GA damage around. The more AC the better but do not overburden your character to get a very high AC.

Oh I throughly agree that facing someone with EC will mean I'm down to PTH versus -PTH to deal damage.

But who uses EC these days? ;)

Bar a Mageseeker, how do I stop SG (and even CoC) Mages pwning me?

Or do I just accept that I don't. lol.

I was typing about you using EC. There is a reason hardly anyone uses it.

Vs SG, you just have to do a lot of damage with your SoD. And perhaps use an EF yourself :)