Early Impressions: Power sets

[Falconeer]

Same in one of the shotgun external cells. "Body piercing", 21 AP in Close Encounter cell. Whenever you penetrate you gain a stack that gives you +30 penetration, up to 5 stacks for 150 penetration. That works well with "Beanbag rounds" that gives you 10% penetration for 8 seconds if you open with Kneecapper, and "Strike force" which boosts by 7.5% the penetration chance of your strike attacks, like the "Striker" builder. This is all in the Shotgun tree.

[tmp]

Blood (maybe Fist) has a penetration boosting power of +30 for each stack of affliction done.  Only useful for DoT builds, but quite handy if applicable.

Think there's a passive (Mind over Matter?) very early in the elemental basic set which sets affliction state (with tiny dot) whenever you crit or smth. So with some decent crit abilities that could be nice base to keep the penetration buff(s) up, i suppose.

edit: another trick, elemental set has also ability to guarantee critical every 8th succesful hit. If you take that one and keep eye on the counter to unleash your high damage skill at that point, you can tear stuff quite spectacularly -- early shotgun+hammer setup would allow ~3k worth of burst with ql2-3 gear pretty much every time the crit buff went up.

[palmer_eldritch]

The trouble with this game is you always want to try something new. I've done some theorycrafting and I reckon pistols and blood, built around focus attacks and crit, and using some of the passives from elemental, could be awesome. So now I want to spend my skillpoints on that.

[Sky]

I went with sword/AR for starters. Kind of thinking of a tanky thing, I liked that in TOR. It's very difficult for me, since the skill screens don't scale with the UI  So I have to keep moving closer to the tv to read the minute text, ditto for mouseovers like item and hotbar text.

Anyway, pulling with the AR healy shot and using the aoe sword stuff mostly, popping martial defense for tougher fights. Seems fairly survivable, only been killed once though I'm still in newbland for the most part, a few quests into kingsmouth. Mob difficulty seems to be all over the place, guess I'm not good at conning them, heh.

[Miasma]

The con is based on the color of the icon beside the name, not the name itself.  The color of the name indicates their aggro radius.  This gets confusing because as you get better gear the color of the name will change but not because of the con but because they seem to implement the idea that you shouldn't be pestered by trivial enemies aggroing you as you walk by.

The icon can also mean group mob, single mob, tough mob.

A long explanation.

[Sky]

A long explanation.

That helped a ton, thanks! Guess I better focus on talismans for the next dozen SPs...

[HaemishM]

Well fuck me, I didn't realize that about the talismans. Very good to know.

[Nebu]

Dumb question: Is it better to follow one of the prebuilt decks or can you be equally good making your own combo?  Do they have some synergy in these sets that surpasses anything that you can build on your own?

[Seraphim]

Haven't dug that deep into the outer circle yet but the decks are more to get you started, they work well but reading through Yokai's guides and using that neat deck builder tool you can do better.

[Lantyssa]

You can make as good or better on your own.

[Nebu]

Good to know.  Thanks!

[Threash]

God damn, if there is something that will suck me into a game is talk of builds.

[Nebu]

God damn, if there is something that will suck me into a game is talk of builds.

I'm afraid that you're in hell then.  Lots of tinkering to be done here.

[HaemishM]

500 skills that can be gotten by anybody, no set classes, 9 different weapon sets that can combine to make different pre-built decks or your own, and the decks are different per faction.

Yeah, it's a building wet dream.

[Flinky]

Its also good to remember that on the right side of the abilities screen is a tab with a search function. You can open that up, put in the search term "Penetration" (someone was looking for that earlier, I think) and then choose either All, Active or Passive skills and also weapon type. It'll then spit out a list of all the abilities in the wheel that cause, or trigger from, Penetration.

[palmer_eldritch]

Having done a few dungeons (well, three so far), I have discovered that groups often prefer you to be a ranged DPS, if you are a DPS. Melee characters are not always welcome if they are not the tank.

[Sky]

If it's because of aoe stuff, having  backup deeps should suffice, yeah? I use my sword up close, and then dodge out of aoe while using the rifle until I can get back in.

[Zetor]

It's much easier to spread out / switch to adds / etc if you're ranged (melee need to spend a lot of precious time repositioning). My biggest problem as a dps (before I invested in an ele/shotgun build) was the really short max range of shotguns - that, combined with the 'point blank' damage bonus pretty much forced to fight like a melee dps'r anyway.

edit: I strongly recommend to choose a healing weapon (assault rifle / fists / blood focus) and keep its skill within 2-3 of your 'main' weapon skills and keep a healing weapon in the inventory even if you're pure dps or tank spec... a random green weapon is fine. There are some missions ('rogue agent' f'rex) with very tough 'attrition'-style boss fights where you need some way of staying alive for a minute or two. It *is* possible to do them without healing skills if you're really good at kiting / have no lag / got the enemy attack patterns down to a science, but it's infinitely easier if you have some sort of sustain.

[Nebu]

It's much easier to spread out / switch to adds / etc if you're ranged (melee need to spend a lot of precious time repositioning). My biggest problem as a dps (before I invested in an ele/shotgun build) was the really short max range of shotguns - that, combined with the 'point blank' damage bonus pretty much forced to fight like a melee dps'r anyway.

I've been playing shotgun/hands and agree that shotgun feels very much like a melee class.  Melee seems to have a rough go in this game.

[trias_e]

It's much easier to spread out / switch to adds / etc if you're ranged (melee need to spend a lot of precious time repositioning). My biggest problem as a dps (before I invested in an ele/shotgun build) was the really short max range of shotguns - that, combined with the 'point blank' damage bonus pretty much forced to fight like a melee dps'r anyway.

edit: I strongly recommend to choose a healing weapon (assault rifle / fists / blood focus) and keep its skill within 2-3 of your 'main' weapon skills and keep a healing weapon in the inventory even if you're pure dps or tank spec... a random green weapon is fine. There are some missions ('rogue agent' f'rex) with very tough 'attrition'-style boss fights where you need some way of staying alive for a minute or two. It *is* possible to do them without healing skills if you're really good at kiting / have no lag / got the enemy attack patterns down to a science, but it's infinitely easier if you have some sort of sustain.

Personally I think it's best to focus on dps.  Just max dps gear with a little health so you can survive for a while.  My build become much better when I just focused on doing as much damage as I could without worrying about self heals so much. 

For sustainability, because you will still need some on tough fights, pop a consumable.  Make a few.  No shame.  Finally, there is also a self-heal in one of the misc trees that is a godsend for dps classes as well, since it doesn't scale with healing gear.

[Zetor]

Well, you don't need to actually use the heal weapon, just keep it in your inventory as insurance (and learn - but don't equip - a weapon skill that heals you based on damage done, ie. anima shot... stuff that scales based on your heal stat is useless past kingsmouth without heal gear). I'm using a 100% dps setup with no tank gear, and it works fine for most of the content. It is just that there are some missions ('Rogue Agent', second faction storyline) where even a single shot of a consumable won't give you enough survivability... you either need to be able to avoid incoming attacks from 2 enemies at once (without cover), or have some insane burst to one-shot one of them and then focus down the other while running to cover... and then deal with the boss without resting. I couldn't do the second option even with my bursty ele/shotgun spec - I'd only get down the first guy when I was already more than half dead (with a consumable already used, active dodge used, getting to cover to avoid most of the other guy's attacks, etc). From there they could wear me down slowly and I couldn't do much. So I just switched my shotgun to a random QL5 AR (didn't even switch out my dps gear) and replaced the three shotgun skills with anima shot / AR finisher / random elementalist elite skill, and won the fight easily by weaving in anima shot between my attacks to keep that green bar up.

I agree though that the 'Turn the Tables' skill (in the pvp 'misc' tree) is a good alternative to the healing weapon, but it is a fairly deep AP investment.

[cironian]

Bogeyman (awesome to have something like that in solo play btw) made me switch from Blade/AR to Blade/Blood. I just couldn't kill the bastard without the extra healing blood gives. Now I take longer to kill each enemy but I can easily survive stuff that was a big threat before.

[Rasix]

After playing Polaris, I'm completely paralyzed as to what I want to play. 

I could play DPS, but there's a lot of DPS out there.
I could tank, but it doesn't seem like there are any healers.
I could heal, but no one seems to be able to NOT stand in the fire.  Plus, there are a lack of legit tanks.

 

For one group I ended up using all of my saved AP and a weapon drop I got in instance attempting to heal them for the last encounter.  It wasn't doable, they were all way too squishy.  Did I mention I was the only person that could tank?  Or get out of AoEs? Heh.

Second group we had a blood mage, two fist guys, and everyone (except the guy with sub 2k HP) was pretty sturdy.  I'm not sure who was even healing, but it was a 20 minute stomp compared to the healer-less 1 hour long slog. 

Bodyguard is definitely tanky or I could melee range DPS.  Dunno, I may end up just grinding AP and picking something else entirely.   

[Sky]

After playing Polaris, I'm completely paralyzed as to what I want to play. 

I could play DPS, but there's a lot of DPS out there.
I could tank, but it doesn't seem like there are any healers.
I could heal, but no one seems to be able to NOT stand in the fire.  Plus, there are a lack of legit tanks.

 

I haven't hit Polaris yet, but I'm kind of in the same boat. I just filled the inner circle of both rifle and sword and feel that specializing a bit at this point would be a good move. I like tanking from TOR, but I'm set to be a decent off-heal deeps with AR. But I also worry about the stupidity of humanity, my fiancee is always smirking when I play TSW, she's waiting for me to get fed up with retards and move on to something else.

Going to be another few days before I can really play much, but it would be nice if we could coordinate something with the f13 folks. I may not have a great build or be some leet player, but I think not being stupid counts for something 

Thinking of starting a Templar and going deep into one tree (pistol?) before spreading out like I did with Komoto.

And did you say sub-2k hp? How is that even possible?

[Falconeer]

Sky, I'll be glad to join you and anyone else for a Polaris group since you haven't hit it yet. I am QL3-QL4 at the moment so I am a little over its intended level but in no way able to overkill it. If we can find another 2 or 3 that are up for it we could have lots of fun there.

[Maledict]

I've tanked Polaris a couple of times, and have been building a dedicated tanking spec rather than dps (which will probably screw me over for solo play). Happy to run it for folks anytime I'm around.

[Tyrnan]

I also haven't gotten a Polaris run yet either. Since I haven't really been playing that much while waiting for the chat fix and first major patch I'm still only QL3. I have a couple of DPS builds or a healing build (with a set of healing gear to go with it) that I haven't actually tested out yet but could give it a try if people are willing to be guinea pigs for me

[Maledict]

Polaris is Ql3 - most of the groups I have done it with have been 2.5 really. The hard parts are either non-stat related (HIDE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HIDE) or the stat burden is solely on the tank / healer. There's a number of bosses where it falls on the tank to keep the group alive from AE things and if their gear isn't up to it the healer won't be able to keep them up.

[Tyrnan]

Hmm, not sure my healing build would be up to the task then. It's mainly inner ring abilities and doesn't have any AoE healing yet so I'd probably be better going as DPS.

[Numtini]

The cheap healing build for Polaris is to get Hematic rites, it's outer ring, but 9 pt first tier in blood, it gives an AOE shield/heal. You can pretty much heal with just spamming a builder and that and occasionally dropping angelic aegis to catch up.

[Tyrnan]

Oh thanks for that, I have blood outer ring unlocked already so I'll grab that next.

[Numtini]

It's surprisingly functional, but incredibly spammy. I got it from tswguides

[Ginaz]

Sky, I'll be glad to join you and anyone else for a Polaris group since you haven't hit it yet. I am QL3-QL4 at the moment so I am a little over its intended level but in no way able to overkill it. If we can find another 2 or 3 that are up for it we could have lots of fun there.

I wouldn't mind doing Polaris even though all my gear is QL5/6.  Just changed my spec around last night to focus more on strike abilities in hammer and shotgun (going for Puritan build atm) and I'm really liking it so far.  Single target dps is very good and survivability isn't bad with the weakened effect and the defensive buff from Aftershock.  Anyway, if you see me on tonight I'd be up for a run.

[Miasma]

After playing Polaris, I'm completely paralyzed as to what I want to play. 

I could play DPS, but there's a lot of DPS out there.
I could tank, but it doesn't seem like there are any healers.
I could heal, but no one seems to be able to NOT stand in the fire.  Plus, there are a lack of legit tanks.

 

I haven't hit Polaris yet, but I'm kind of in the same boat. I just filled the inner circle of both rifle and sword and feel that specializing a bit at this point would be a good move. I like tanking from TOR, but I'm set to be a decent off-heal deeps with AR. But I also worry about the stupidity of humanity, my fiancee is always smirking when I play TSW, she's waiting for me to get fed up with retards and move on to something else.

Going to be another few days before I can really play much, but it would be nice if we could coordinate something with the f13 folks. I may not have a great build or be some leet player, but I think not being stupid counts for something 

Thinking of starting a Templar and going deep into one tree (pistol?) before spreading out like I did with Komoto.

And did you say sub-2k hp? How is that even possible?

I imagine at endgame, once people have plenty of sp/ap to play with, most people will have a DPS spec and either a tank or heal set.  Healers definitely seem to be the rarest judging by lfg spam right now but I chalk that up to the fact that it is a slower way to level so most people are avoiding it right now.  I will probably wind up a healer but I'm not going to do that while I level.  It is pretty easy to go from a dps spec to a tank though so that role is easily filled.

As for the sub 2k hp it's actually pretty interesting.  Since it was the first dungeon the guy probably just didn't know what he was doing but later on, even at QL10, the same thing can happen.  Blue and purple pieces only have one stat, but a lot of it.  Health for tanks, heal rating for healers and attack power for dps.  So if you are dps/heals and wear nothing but blue and purples dedicated to your role you get zero increase in hit points, will be floating around 2k and can get one shot by any boss.

A long explanation.

[Numtini]

Healers seem plentiful on Arcadia. Groups form quickly and we're rarely waiting for any particular class.