soteria wrote...
I stopped to consider, for a moment, the groups I have actually played with. Str/dex rogue, Alistair, Wynne, and a "floater." SnS warrior, Wynne, Leliana, Sten. Mage, Leliana/Zevran, Shale, Oghren. Cunning rogue, Alistair, Morrigan, Dog. Archer warrior, Sten, Alistair (DW), Leliana. In every group, with the possible exception of the last, bard is a clear loser to ranger in terms of damage, and ranger adds more flexibility to the group.
All right, let's look at these...
*Str / Dex Rogue, Al, Wynne, XYour Rogue would be best off w/ D/A here, so neither Bard nor Ranger is applicable
*S/S, Sten, Leli, WynneLeli is CUN archer, yes? That build has ATT issues...I respec'd one of my DEX archers into a full CUN build and with Farsong
and Dueling
and SoC
and Aim her ATT was 130 - at Lvl 24. A good number vs. trash but expect to miss ~20-25% against tough Bosses. Drop SoC, and now you're down to 118 - not so good. At this point, against something like a Revenant you'll be lucky to land even 60% of your attacks and even lowly trash mobs will cause ~10% of your arrows to go sailing off into the wild blue yonder, at 60-100 a shot. Moreover, when using Aim, SoC increases her crit chance from ~16% to ~40%, (an increase of ~150%), so of those 10% missed shots, 40% were 100 pt criticals.
As to S/S and Sten, these are the two slowest, hardest hitting builds in the game. Slow means a missed attack costs you a lot of time and hardest-hitting means that miss cost a
lot of damage. Granted, warriors have an easier time of it than does your CUN archer but at the same time, it's nearly impossible to have too much attack.
And as helpful as more ATT is, crits are the more important aspect for these two guys. At the high end, with PS and SoC, both of them will be sporting a crit chance north of 30%. Have you
seen what crits look like from these two builds? How about a 2x crit Sunder? Or a triple on a Pummel? That's a
lot of bonus damage. And despite what I wrote earlier, it's true value is not something that can be figured mathematically, as in
X number of additonal crits, doing
Y additional damage for
Z avg damage per swing. That kind of calculation is meaningless. Instead, look at it this way:
Sten unloads a Sunder at a 200hp whitey. Neither hit crits and he does a total of 190 damage. Now what do you do?
- Initiate a glacial auto attack (2.8s w/ PS) for another 100+ damage? Congratulations, it only took 5.5 seconds to kill a single whitey. and 90+ damage was wasted in 'overkill'
- Finish him off with Mighty Blow for 130+? Great, it only took 4.75 seconds this time, however doing this you wasted 120 damage in overkill and burned up 2 talents and 70+ stamina (and got back ~25 from DB)
- Have someone who's faster finish him off? Marvelous, now you've tied up two people to kill a single trash mob and Sten recovers zero badly needed stamina.
Or instead, he scores a crit on that initial Sunder, one-shots the whitey, unloads another Sunder on enemy #2, crits, one-shots and is moving on to #3 in the same time period. Crits: Very powerful, not easy (or impossible) to figure on paper. Obviously these are all arbirtrary values but this kind of scenario arises quite frequently with 2H, and to a lesser extent, S/S.
But pets offer more flexibility? How? CC? Leli has Scatter, Sten has Pommel & Sweep plus whatever he gets from Stunning Blows (which fires more often w/ SoC), your S/S has three, and that's all ignoring the fact that Wynne can most likely shut down the entire battlefield all by herself. So you would trade all of the combat bonuses listed above to get a Bear for yet another CC ability when you
already have more than enough?
Are you perhaps referring to anti-mage? Again, in addition to the dozen or so anti-mage options available to Wynne, Leli has AoS and your S/S has (most likely) Smite. How is a Spider's web bringing anything new to the table, especially at the expense of a massive partywide buff?
Shatters? CoC has an 8 sec. freeze so any build will be able to get off 2 attacks. Sten has MB and CS, S/S has Overpower, Leli has the otherwise worthless Critical Shot, and Wynne has Stonefist and CP (potentially). Additionally, w/ SoC, your S/S is almost guaranteed another with Assault and Lel has a 40% chance with a normal auto attack. Just how many guys did you freeze with that CoC, anyway? And yet you would rather have a Wolf with yet another Shatter as opposed to +12 Att, 7 dam, and 12% crit for all party members?
Seems to me that SoC is the clear choice here.
* Mage, Shale, Ohgren, Lel / ZevAgain, Zev would want to run D/A and Leli, like I mentio-...Wait, you're running a CUN archer
with Shale and you don't want SoC?!? Leli is looking at ~65% crit chance, 2/3rds! - w/o abusing RM. If you want to get evil you can put her in Auto-crit mode. Super easy choice, here.
* Cunning Rogue, Al, Morri, DogMore numbers: respec'd one of my backstabbers into a full CUN Assassin / Bard build. With SoC she had an ATT score of 106 @ Lvl 24. Drop SoC and you're down to 94. Gross. Even +20 flanking only brings this up to 114 - a decidedly pedestrian number. Of course, the fast dagger attacks are going to get more mileage out of SoC's flat damage adder than any other setup. Personally, I don't like CUN Rogues as it is, and not taking SoC makes them even worse.
As to Dog, I haven't done a full run with him, but IIRC, even with a full STR build and a good collar, his ATT rating isn't much over 100. And outside of Overwhelm, I remember him as a quite feeble fighter. ATT, Damage, and Crit bonuses can only help...
I apologize for whipping the hell out of this dead horse, but in all of these situations, SoC seems so obvious that surely I'm doing an exceptionally poor job of articulating the point.
Retour en haut
) Plus I really dislike cun builds.
