Friday, April 26, 2013

The question of ranged combat

I was having a small bit of altitus and decided to play my human tempest. I rolled her up at veteran status 7, so she started off with an odd smattering of gear, and a strange feat selection. I've kept her on that path but when I have exotic weapon prof: Khopesh, why would I take improved crit piercing? What is that path thinking?

Anyways, she's been banking level 12 for a while now so I leveled her up, and decided to run a quest. I wanted some adamantine ore so I could put the ritual on my main's crafted robes to help out with wear a little bit, so I thought Relic of a Sovereign Past on normal would be a good quest to try.

Everything went mostly smoothly, using my crafted keen khopesh of lesser vampirism and a festival icy burst holy of pure good handaxe, i tore through those Duergar without trouble. But I was running short on time so I rushed to the end fight, and never did shrine in the quest, so I ran out of sp for healing, and she's always been a favor runner so pots and wands were non existant.

So I was at the end quest, looking at King Dolgrim and thinking...maybe I can kite? And I did, and it worked, thanks to precise shot, diehard, an endless flask of rum, manyshot. and luck.

Running for a silver longbow will probably be in her future, even if I don't use her ranged abilities much. Or, if trying to get one, why not get three? (Then I can have two, one each for my ranger and fvs and sell one =) )

I also took a look at lamannia to see what a FVS monkcher looks like in the new enhancement system, and put it through it's paces.

First off, feat changes: Mental toughness is no longer required, meaning that you can get the feats you really want for ranged dps sooner. But Ten Thousand Stars is now a feat. So no net change there, except 10K stars can be a bonus feat, where mental toughness is not.

2nd, enhancement changes:
Current: You had to spend 16 action points if your a ranger, or 24 points if your a elf or half elf to qualify, and then spend 4 to get the arcane archer enhancement. (min level 6 or 8 respectively).

Alpha: Elf or Half Elf spends 10 points in tree and 4 AP to unlock AA tree. Ranger gets the tree for free.

The tree itself looks okay. If you don't need every single power (I doubt most people do), you can streamline it quite a bit I would think. I didn't do that, as I spent almost all of my points in the AA tree, to see how powerful it's ranged ability was.

I leveled up to 25 in the test dojo, got shridai champion, and ran chronoscope on heroic normal with a bow of sinew. I didn't have to melee at all except to get ki back for 10k stars (another problem, no points left for monk enhancements).

It went okay. I don't have much to compare it to. But I'll probably want an abishai set some day so I might start running that raid on live.

Overall I think the FVS monkcher will not die due to the enhancement pass.

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