Jousting

[Delmania]

How do you do this? I've tried several strategies, and none seem to work too well.  Any useful tips out there, and maybe some useful mods to help keep track of cooldowns and defense charges left?

[K9]

For ToC:

Open with charge, then just stick on them spamming thrust. thrust does more DPS than any other attack, provided your groupmates are using their charges and shieldbreaker to keep shields off the targets.

For Dailies:

Get 3 shields, open with Charge then when you pass them loop away and use shield breaker. Close to your target spamming thrust, and keeping shield up during thrust's cooldown. When charge comes off cooldown strafe away and hit charge as soon as you are at range; you don't need to be facing the target to charge. Then just cycle through series of Charge+Shieldbreaker and then thrust while they have no shields.

Cool Line is the best cooldown mod available imho, and tracks cooldowns on all abilities.

[Nebu]

When the fight starts I shield break and close before they can charge.  After this, run through them followed by a jump turn + shield breaker then close distance.  When they run away, I let them and charge as soon as range allows.  I can often kill champions with a nearly full health bar this way. 

A safer method is to just back up while spamming the melee attack and charge them when they run away.  You'll never lose, but the fights take forever. 
 

[Shrike]

Jousting sucks. It's a stupid idea, a fucked up mechanic, and it causes high blood pressure. The dev(s) that thought this up should be wheeled and braided. Seriously.

However, if you MUST do this crap, there are a few tips. If it's just the daily stuff, then the basic strategy is break their shield, than hammer them with thrust in melee range (safe, but slow). When they back off, get a shield breaker on them, follow, then charge if it refreshes fast enough and you're still in range. Late fight, they slow down, so you can either spam shield breaker/thrust, or wait for charge opportunities, especially if their shield is down/low. A good tactic--if you've got low latency and are pretty sharp on the mouse turning (hinthint)--is to break, thrust, run away and spin jump and break again. Once you see a red shield, get on them and thrust. Again, if they open range, nail them with a charge if shields are low, or pursue and double shield break them if they aren't.

In ToC, well, if you're not actively being attacked, break shields, then charge when the opportunity is up. If they're actually going after you, then just stay put and thrust. Your teammates should take this opportunity of a fixed target to break and charge until it's down. Keep your shields up as well as you can, too. If you get focus fired by the NPCs you're probably toast. When the horse hits about 1/4 to 1/3 hps, make a dash to the reserve mounts and switch. If you don't, you're going down. Also, when the NPCs hit the ground, keep an eye on them and trample if they get up. When the last one is around 40%, start drifting towards the exit and bail as soon as he hits the floor. Remember: you don't have to outrun the NPCs; just your teammates.

All in all, the whole thing blows syphilitic goats, but there's the best way to deal with it. Hopefully this kind of dumb shit disappears in Cataclysm.

[AutomaticZen]

Get 3 shields, open with Charge then when you pass them loop away and use shield breaker. Close to your target spamming thrust, and keeping shield up during thrust's cooldown. When charge comes off cooldown strafe away and hit charge as soon as you are at range; you don't need to be facing the target to charge. Then just cycle through series of Charge+Shieldbreaker and then thrust while they have no shields.

Cool Line is the best cooldown mod available imho, and tracks cooldowns on all abilities.

Same deal:

• Get three shields.
  Talk to target.
  Spam charge.
  When you actually charge, spam thrust.  You'll get two hits, one for the charge and another for the thrust.
  Loop back around spamming shieldbreaker, and close on your target.
  Spam thrust, while keeping shields up.
  Eventually your target will walk away to charge you.  Return to step three and repeat the cycle: Spam charge

[Ingmar]

For the dailies, if you want to do it a slower-but-100%-win-every-time-no-fail way, just spam thrust and when he walks away to charge do a shieldbreaker then immediately follow him continuing to use thrust. He'll never get far enough away to remove a shield from you and you will get a couple thrusts in on him with one of his shields down before he puts it back up. The only real risk with this method is forgetting to put your shields up for long enough that the buff falls off. 

It takes much longer though since you're never lowering the shields on the target very far, so I'd not recommend it unless you find yourself totally unable to grok the other way.

[March]

I find it particularly frustrating because the abilities don't seem to fire when I push the button... there's a weird lag that I can't ever seem to account for; after 4 years of clicking ability buttons, I am inclined to think that the problem is not me and that it lies elsewhere.

That, and I frequently experience strange episodes where I go from 3 to 0 shields from an opponent in melee range.

Its like jousting uses code that behaves completely differently from what the game trained us to do. 

[Hawkbit]

I got crusader title on my DK farmer to buy some BoA stuff for lowbies.  I keep doing 8 of the 9 dailies they offer to keep money flowing in daily, but the jousting quest is the only one I skip every day. 

Nothing better than getting a charge and throw, but instead of taking two shields off, he gains one and takes two off me.  If there's any amount of latency at all, give it up.

[K9]

I should point out that anyone can DPS the champions once they are in combat with you. So the easiest way is to bring a ranged friend, kite the champion with shield breaker to keep the shields down, and let your buddy kill them.

Makes doubling up for Threat from Above easier too.

[Cadaverine]

I find it particularly frustrating because the abilities don't seem to fire when I push the button... there's a weird lag that I can't ever seem to account for; after 4 years of clicking ability buttons, I am inclined to think that the problem is not me and that it lies elsewhere.

That, and I frequently experience strange episodes where I go from 3 to 0 shields from an opponent in melee range.

Its like jousting uses code that behaves completely differently from what the game trained us to do. 

This. 

It seems like the npc can charge me when I'm too close to charge them, and do a shield breaker at the same time.  As well as my abilities taking a while to fire.

[apocrypha]

Jousting suffers from terrible server lag. Thankfully I've finished with the jousting dailies now but when I was doing them I found that they were a LOT easier when it was early in the morning and there wasn't anyone else jousting on the field.

[Zetor]

Jousting with 600-800 ping [I play from Europe on a west coast server] is fun. 

Anyway, I just follow AutomaticZen's method, it works pretty well on the daily mobs. For the guys in the instance, you'll want to stick on the kill target if you're not focused (charge on cooldown while spamming thrust so they hit at the same time, then just spam thrust until charge is back up), and play keep-away if you are.

A useful trick I've found if you're being ganged up on by two of the guys in the instance is to charge away from them by targetting the third one if it's sufficiently far away (if they're all an you, you can just target the farthest one) and use the speed boost to get to a spare horse quickly. Of course this only works if you have 3 shields up and won't be gibbed if they all get a hit on you...

[Ratman_tf]

Jousting with those Commander dudes near Icecrown is an exercise in frustration. If you're lucky and there's 2 or 3 not-knobheads around it can be ok, but soloing that shit? Jesus Christ.

[Nebu]

Jousting with those Commander dudes near Icecrown is an exercise in frustration. If you're lucky and there's 2 or 3 not-knobheads around it can be ok, but soloing that shit? Jesus Christ.

If there's not much lag, I enjoy it.  Since I solo all the time there isn't much variety of gameplay.  The fliers can be a bit annoying, but you just clear those before pulling the commanders. 

[Ratman_tf]

Jousting with those Commander dudes near Icecrown is an exercise in frustration. If you're lucky and there's 2 or 3 not-knobheads around it can be ok, but soloing that shit? Jesus Christ.

If there's not much lag, I enjoy it.  Since I solo all the time there isn't much variety of gameplay.  The fliers can be a bit annoying, but you just clear those before pulling the commanders. 

I always get shit respawning on me while I'm on a guy. So I spend most of my time running back to the camp to switch horses.

[Nebu]

Yeah, that sucks.  I occasionally do them with a friend.  He clears adds while I knock down the commander.  Makes it a lot faster and more fun. 

There are often people looking for groups to do commanders and the ice dragon.  Give it a shot. 

[Soulflame]

It used to be very easy to solo the commanders, but there were two changes that made it much harder.

1.  Charge no longer ignores shields on the commanders.  Bye bye 45k hits on full shields.  Ah well.
2.  Scouts appear to nearly instantly respawn.

It's really #2 that makes it difficult.

As noted above, look for groups that are doing TFA/Citadel, or whatever your server spams in /1.

[Merusk]

Charge never ignored shields on my server so far as I remember.  You always had to beat them down to have a shot.

The scouts respawn according to how many folks are around.  When I do it on a weekend morning prior to everyone else waking up (Old man sleep schedule ftw.) I kill the scouts near my 3 favorite spawns and they stay gone until I've killed all 3.  On a weekday they come back pdq right after work, and near-instantly after 8pm est.


Favorite commander spots:  1) Charge up on the stairs behind the main gauntlet and fight them up there.  No scouts at all to contend with.   2) When the road forks to the left (east) just after you leave camp, follow it.   There's one Commander that patrols the middle of the road.  Kite him around near the next gate and there's only 1 scout to worry about.  Off to the north and south from this point are two Commander spawns that only have one scout hovering nearby.

[apocrypha]

If you're doing the commanders then why not just get a group for Threat From Above and continue on to do Citadel afterwards? Pretty much any time of day or night I've had zero problems getting 3 people together to do Chillmaw and Citadel is a cakewalk with 3.

[Merusk]

Most folks on my server do that, too.  I do it if there's a group forming otherwise I just solo both.  Only takes about 5 mins longer that way, less if you include the travel time for the inevitable group member sitting on their ass at the Tournament until you say "Are you coming or not?"

[Delmania]

After reading people's suggestions, jousting went from being a major pain in the ass to something that's relatively fun.  For the heck of it, I got the Lance A Lot Achievement last night.  I just wanted to say thanks to all the advice!