Skills: Strength vs Find weakness

[Veroule]

Hrm, been a while since I logged on, but here is the basic gist of how I am built. I am actually a pretty solid hydra mage. I would be a fair bit better, but I wasn't able to figure Samhoc out yet.

First is equipment. Put those 5 heads and 5 necks to good use. Buy yourself 5 Imperial Crowns of Samhoc, and enlarge them. Next buy up 5 amulets for each element except life, also except death is you do not plan on having a high enough lore to do destruction. Next buy a good stock of reagents for your spells. I also carry 3 bags of potions 200 each of full heal, mana, and health. They are good for those binds when you mana is low.

On to skills, my personal skill set figures for level 25, archmage are as follows:
Unarmed 20 (25 trained -5 from magical effects) 20 seemed to be needed to hit some guys.
Meditation 27 (15 trained 12 from magical effects) I may yet lower this.
Lore 13 (all from training) I like DB, destruction, and prismatic shield.
Air 6 (3 from training 3 from magical) I have 2 falcon ammys
Fire 7 (all from training) Magic number to cast 88% resists
Water 7 (all from training) 90% is cap on resists that difference isn't worth the skill point.
Life 5 (2 from training 3 from magical) Spell duration seemes good here.
Death 3 (all magical)
Mind 3 (all magical)
Spirit 3 (all magical)
Incantation 7 (all magical) Spells cost around 25% here, no need to go higher.
Enchatment 7 (all magical) That is 3 Imps and 2 Wizard's Caps.
Conjuration 7 (all magical) Did I happen to mention that eq is important
Evocation 7 (all magical) and I am quite rich.
Strength 8 (2 from training 6 from magical) All that gear is heavy.
Earth 1 (all from training) Strength spell is 3+Earth/2 so this point gives me 1 more strength when I use my ammys while casting, bonus for petrify resistance that 4% is free.
Dodge 3 (all magical) Girdle of Evasion, I chose 1 more free point I have Girdle of Strength as well and still am debating with myself.

Anyhow that is my planned skill set. Oddly I plan to use a low dodge, and very weak mage skills. I feel that the weaker element skills will be covered by using the higher level spells. No cheap fireballs for me. My testing in the MMA showed pretty solid when I was at level 20 for my healing scenario. Hydra hp is quite good, then when I get archmage my sp will be near 400. That should allow me to prism up, heal, and melee until just about anything runs away. Then they get to enjoy sucking down DB, thunderstorm, icestorm, or destruction depending what will be most effective.

Hopefully sometime soon I will actually return to active Wyvern status and resume building of my horrific vision.

[anatil]

it all depends, strength adds +1 dmg to each hit, find weakness makes you hit with more exactness (hitting were it hurts most), so to do more dmg you would have to train more find weakness, but to hit harder (cuz if you hit were it hurts but you dont hit hard enough it's not really gonna do any serious dmg, is it?) so i would recomend you to untrain your strength, train find weakness, and use potion + girdle of strength


oh, and it's a bit treaky to balance magic and melee (even if your doing bearly any melee and mostly magic), for a hydra like you said recoil kinda gets ya, so you have to use magic while fighting or just go to cobra and run like heck

[Veroule]

I have been thinking more about specifically which is better and need a few details to do a final work up. Currently using figures of 1% chance of critical per point in FW and +1 smash per point in Strength then a player dealing 100 damage per swing without either would benefit equally on damage per swing each way.

Strength's bonus is actually quite different then the +1 smash per point in it. The actual calculation for the smash damage bonus is something like "((BaseStr*(10+StrengthSkill))/10-70)/10". The base strength for a hydra is 140. So every 3 points in the skill adds 4 smash damage. With another bonus smash each multiple of 5 skill points. So for 20 skill points you get bonus smash damage of 35 per hit.

So the details I need are FW exact effect per point, and a quite a few damage per swing figures with related stats so I can figure up the bonuses for each. Preferrably the damage figures should be from a hydra attacking an unarmored foe.

[Veroule]

The only reaper I ever ran into was in the MMA. I seemed to be holding my own then was quite mysteriously dead. I actually appeared in a temple with decent HP and SP in hydra form, and looking back at the displays I think it was a bug in the arena code, but the costs of doing it enough times to find out for sure were just too high.

Actually I have a fair bit more trained into strength then the planned numbers I posted earlier. This is mainly because of my insane inventory of stuff. I just need more to carry it. If I recall correectly I had intended to revise my magical element plans to L27 to support the additional required strength. What can I say weak elements+high lore spells work for killing blows. Melee works for beating things down. Hydras don't run all that fast, so it makes sense to beat down with melee and kill with those fast moving spells. The high lore level ones only require that I pick a direction and the devastation just happens.

[Veroule]

Falcon is an LQ prize. It gives flight and +3 air.

[Veroule]

Your final unarmed after guild penalty has to be at least 20. Anything less and there are a lot of things you can't hit at all. Most notably diamond golems, which are also immune to most magics. Considering that your unarmed is so low right now I would actually suggest unguilding until level 25. The costs of training unarmed to 25 trained while you are guilded will be around 2M, whereas if you are unguilded it will only cost around 500K.

[Veroule]

Thrunderstom has some decent damage, but you can only fit about 160 lightning stones into a bag of great holding. Also at 100 gold each you would find that the price of using the spell that frequently is prohibitive. Prismatic shield on the other hand has a much lower cost per cast of 29, tags all 3 elements while you are fighting, improves its damage based on your elemental skills, has a duration of (air+fire+water)*10 seconds, and finally if fighting a larger monster hits for each tile of the shield they stand on. Much better use of lore points, mana, and gold. Remember the hydra mage's strength is in being able to melee the monster down then kill with spells so it doesn't have to chase. Prismatic accelerates that melee.

All told though the high 10+ lore cost spells are very difficult to work in to a skill set.

[Veroule]

I paid 450k for each of mine. If you truly want to be a clone of me, then you are going to have to make vast sums of gold. A fair bit of my maximum power comes from having 5 amulets for each element and aliases to quickly switch between them for casting resists and other things. That is part of how I intend to operate as a mage with only 8 trained fire, 6 trained water, and 3 trained air.

[Veroule]

It does fire, air, and water. Just about as frequently as a hydras attacks go off. I would suggest spending 2k gold on a potion of prismatic to test it. Keep in mind that the potion is set for level 5 which I think means it works as 5 in each element.