Melee Combat Woes

I think, locking all active skills at 40 is the optimal way to play, for Mid Levels.
All your passive skills should go to 40 as well, e.g. Strength of Earth, Bulwark of Earth, Healing Mastery, Deflection, etc..
Then you can work on raising Health, Focus, Str, Dex, Int, Heavy Lifter, your main Melee or Bow damage add passive (e.g. Blade mastery), whichever are your priority places for points, beyound 40.
This lets you keep the low focus cost, and level up with decent number of glyphs with decent damage.

For Healing I took every skill in the entire tree to 40, which gave me 40+ attunement and had more effect on my heals than the 50+ points I put into healing mastery.
However If I knew then what I know now, I would have skipped the healing tree all completely and just picked up the 40 points in Heal Creature from the Taming line, it's 1/3 less focus, and heals almost as well as Healing touch with a 15 yard range, and can be used on self, players, or pets.It didn't require 40 in every Healing active skill and 40+ in every healing passive skill to get that good. (my guess that spell is probably on the nerf radar already, so I guess I'm prepared when that happens.)

I think End Game, is the only time you'd want to start taking active skills beyound 40.

 

You could use fire arrow temporarily for engaging mobs that tend to flee. Regardless of if it does 0 damage at range, it will still apply the DoT. The DoT will also do 0 damage until you get close enough, but the moment you're within range it will tick for damage and aggro the fleeing mob. You won't have to chase the mob down then.

 

@Rofo Yea, currently I am a mid level player, at adventure level 43 or 44. The starting reason I stopped at 40 for skills, was mainly to get to whatever I needed to get to, that was about it. Then I just subconsciously kept turning skills off once I get to 40 and move to another one. I don't train any of the str/dex/int/etc. until I have all my active/passives for abilities to 40 first. Oh, but I already got str/dex/int/heavy lifter/focus/hp to 40+. As for the Heal Creature.....didn't know that. I haven't done any taming at all, now or previous releases. Though I have been tempted to join "everyone else" and just buy a spider and make him do all the work, as it would more than likely be better than my Air Elemental, or any magic summon really.... >.>

 

(I'm also "mid level")
Next Release they are fixing taming, (well changing it... so who knows if it's a fix or not)
However at adventure level 55, a Large Red Spider is just as effective damage add as my leveling partner who is also 55, except I don't split xp with the spider.
(It does have it's own issues, slow travel speed, and you really need to unlock rezz before you go grinding with a vendor pet)

I would encourage you too take advantage of this release to try out taming, there is still plenty of time in the release to power level taming if you decide you want to keep your spider, after this release.

 

@Rofo I thought about it. I've got my pure mage setup, bludgeon mage setup, about to setup and train up a dual-wield dagger build. I don't suppose taming would hurt any. Only thing is, it gets pricey and making/saving gold (regs cost) is not one of my strong suits. Unless I'm missing some super secret method of taming to raise that up to get the rest of the goodies. But either way, Large Red is the way to go?

*Edit: Large Red until we can get the good Ferocious ones, of course

 

@EtherBunny Base spell damage has a ton of modifiers multiplied after, just like base wep damage doesn't increase very much.

Int, affinity, mastery skills, staff / enchantments and glyph stacks

 

@Snazz Yea I know the modifiers; Int and attunement mainly. I was just referring to the spells pre-modifier. Same with melee. I was just pointing out that even if you raise the skill to 50+, the base of the skill (what you see in the tooltip) does not increase that much at all. I'm not saying I would rather them be insanely increased, but I would like the work put in to increase the base a little more. In 20 levels moving up 1 point of damage does not feel like much of an accomplishment to me, besides adding 20 to whatever the skill level was.

 

They have to be careful of scaling when so many mods are multiplied after. Write down your L20 estimate then fact check it when you get to that point.


My bet is that your tooltip will be higher.

Every 20 lvs you also get another glyph, which is worth a lot for a shuffle deck user

 

Agreed on all points.

 

The only way I know is lame but is cheap and works..

1. get 10 taming collars, and 1 empty summoning whistle.
2. Lock all your skills and build up an XP pool of 50k xp.
3. Go to a 2 or 3 skull area with Large Timber wolves, Make the wolf flee from you against the server wall so it has no place to go.
4. Tame wolf repeatedly failing with a <1% chance until taming skill is 20. (this should cost you no collars, unless you tame the creature).
5. Go to town, Train "Heal Creatue", "Obedience", "Collar Recovery".
6. Turn all 3 skills up, and cast "Heal Creature" repeatedly until until all 3 skills are level 40. (this should cost 15k xp from your pool)
7. Train "Resurect Creature", "Combat Training", "Concentration", "Refresh"
8. Lock "Obedience", and "Heal Creature", "Collar Recovery"
9. Raise "Combat Training", "Concentration", "Refresh" to 40. This should cost another 15k xp from your pool.
10. Lock "Concentration", "Refresh", Unlock "Collar Recovery".
11. Go Buy a spider, (there's a guy in Owl's head selling them for 5k.)
12. Go adventuring as normal with the pet in tow, using the "heal Creature" for both your healing and the pets.
13. Lock "Combat Training" when it hits 62. (that s +6 levels and the most bang for your xp buck at this stage)
14. Continue Raising "Collar Recovery" until you can't stand it any more, (60 minimum, 80 is better, 105 is Ideal)
15. While adventruring your "Ressurect Creature" and "Summon Creature" should raise naturally on their own,as your pet dies, or you need to resummon it.

After you've raised your "Collar Recovery" to atleast 60, Head back out with 30k xp pool, and 20 collars, and raise your taming to 60.
This should cost you no collars except for the success so make sure you use mobs that have <5% chance to tame. Preferably something that is just barely <1%.
(you can beat a mob to less than half health, and if the chance to tame raises above 1%.. that's your ideal practice taming mob at full health)

Important Note, even if you have your Large Red spider out while practicing your taming, make sure you have your practice Summoning Whistle equipped, so you don't lose your spider.

Assuming you've got the collars, and whistle already and the xp pool to go straight to 60 Collar Recovery and 62 Combat training using just Heal creature, this whole process should about 2 hours.

* edit to add I used a grand total of 7 collars to get to 60 taming, 4 of those because I tamed wolves with <1% chance on the run up to twenty skill. 3 of those I failed to tame a Patriarch bear in Deep Ravenswoods with only 60 collar recovery)

** getting to 80 cost 12 more collars. 7 were intention tames of large red spiders, 3 where accedental tames of Patriach Bears, and the other two were losses from failure.

 

@Rofo Awesome, now to try and save some money/mats to make the whistles and collars. And save up the XP.

 

Agree. Melee need buff up, Archer need fix is to OP and add Instance or Dungeon System

 

you don't get glyphs every 20 levels. you get them at 1, 10, 20, 40, and 80

 

i play sans auto attack and stack by holding the corresponding numeric keys. combos are great and saving on focus when low is a must for me, at least at this point in my leveling.
edit: i set up my deck so my combos and stacks are next to each other, this helps (I play guitar so i guess the acrobatics are easy for me but i can imagine this being hard for people)

i wish we could bind a key for charging attacks rather than mouse.

 

You can re-bind it. I have mine bound to 'Q'