User talk:Quizzical/PUG

Weapon Mastery
Hey Quizzical - thanks for posting these essays. I just found them the other day and I've been reading through them. Good stuff and very well thought-out. I wanted to ask you about one of your points in this particular writeup. You mentioned that anyone with a martial weapon should have a total attribute rank of at least 12 (counting runes). I've been experimenting lately with vanquishing with a pair of Paragon heroes and so far I've had very good luck. One hero is Motivation and the other is Command. They each focus mainly on defending and buffing the party and each only have one attack skill. They both use Aggressive Refrain, and I (playing my Ritualist) keep either Great Dwarf Weapon (for spread out foes or single large foes) or Spliter Weapon (for clustered foes) on them constantly. With Agressive Refain and the weapon spells, they actually keep up some pretty good DPS with just their auto-attacks, leaving them free to spend their energy on the party buffs and defense.

My question is about attribute point spending for Spear Mastery in a case like this. In my case, each Paragon only has one skill in Spear Mastery, and really I could even get rid of those if needed. Their skill bars are mainly Motivation/Leadership and Command/Leadership. I was thinking that I could just keep my Spear Master at 8+1 to meet the req for their weapons and spend the points in other areas.

In your opinion is that appropriate, or folly? Should I bump them up to at least rank 12 in Spear Mastery even though they don't use skills for that? I'll admit I don't have a good understanding of what ranks in any kind of weapon mastery really buy me outside of their linked skills. I know higher mastery gives me a small incremental chance of a critical hit during my auto attacks, but if I don't use linked skills, that small crit chance hardly seems worth the attribute point spend.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this. Shadowlance 16:37, 23 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Paras are an exception to the 12+ rule, cause their role is to buff. The DPS is a nice addition to what they already can ;) --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG|Ohaider!]]-- (s)talkpage 16:40, 23 April 2008 (UTC)


 * The reason to get to at least 12 in martial weapon skills is that up to 12, each point in the linked attribute greatly increases vanilla weapon damage, while each additional point beyond that has far less of an effect. At 9 in spear mastery, you'll do 23% less damage than if you had 12 in spear mastery, assuming, of course, that you meet your weapon requirement either way.  That being said, in hard mode, defense wins, so if you go too light on damage, that usually won't cause mission failure, but will only make things take longer.


 * I'll also add the caveat that general use build suggestions often just apply most of the time, not always. Most of the time that a level 20 player wants to use a martial weapon with less than 12 in the linked attribute, the player is being an idiot, but not always.  Quizzical 19:38, 13 May 2008 (UTC)