I've been thinking about attempting a nuking PS.
No, I haven't been drinking heavily. Just had a long drive to work and dangerous amounts of time to think.
Warlocks and Elemental Summoners have the option of being a nuking summoner largely due to the fact that the potential for infinite MP counters the decreasing power and increasing fail rate of their spells. Phantom Summoners, lacking a Master Recharge ability on their summons, consider that option a no-no the moment they start getting their first failures (somewhere around lv45 for their lv35 nukes).
PS' level just fine as melee summoners, so those of you expecting a game suggestion, move along ;)
Has anyone tried a PS/SE duo with the PS nuking? It's a different arena than the "servitor MP battery" method, as it's another character doing the recharging and the summoner can't recharge back, but has it been done?
With TP deactivated and not using Soulless, I'm 90% sure there'd be enough MP to go around. I'm also fairly certain that, using either TP or Soulless, regen rates of the two characters would cover nuking. I have serious doubts about using both at once, except maybe at higher levels where Fast Mana Recovery has done some serious stacking.
I had a few thoughts about this on the drive...like I said, long drive:<ul type="square"> I consider controlling 3 units at once a benefit of this setup. I picked a summoner for a reason, one-at-a-time play is too mundane for me. This duo is kind of like PS^2...woot ;) The SE would have to be coming in and out of the party periodically, since the PS has an experience penalty. Light Armor + TP, full array of buffs, full-powered servitor, cubics, and partial nukes. PvP me? :D In PvE, if you have outside buffs anyway, wouldn't a Necromancer basically do all of the same things and better? The main thing that keeps a Necro from being a real summoner is the lack of servitor buffs and heals, which the SE has in spades. So...thoughts?
well, the last time i tried nuking was around level 54 or 55 in the pits in cemetary. And to be honest i did pretty well (back in c3). About 2 nukes (shadow spark/twister) would take the mob down around half hp, then i'd melee it the rest of the way down with shadow. The kills were pretty fast and the nukes kept aggro, but nothing cld couldn't handle (ghp's if i had to body to mind as well). Mind you i have a clan hall in aden which probably helped a good amount, but my spells only sometimes failed.
I guess at higher levels you could try nuking, with recharges/empower combined you might do fairly well in the 60's range (wtih bsps of course). But i'd highly recomend you'd do it just to do a nice chunk of damage to the mob, then finish it off with melee'ing.
EDIT: also, if anyone's seen me pvp, most of the time i'll throw off a test nuke or two, if i see that one of them didn't fully fail and do around 100 damage, then i'll start spamming nukes like crazy (i'll have an acumen pot on) with that strat, very few classes could beat me 1v1 in c3. (only classes i had trouble with were warlords, them hitting me and my summon is too much, but i still want to try keeping my summon back and nuking again now that there are pet bsps. And nukers) Of course if for some reason the person had really high mdef or really good buffs i'd just start melee'ing them (although my setup is a bit more defencively geared)
Thanks for responding, I was starting to wonder if anything like that had even been tried.
Half-HP with two nukes is actually better than I expected. I currently have a -8 int build from when I was soloing melee, so I couldn't give it a fair try. If I'm to be dual-boxing, though, I have different options...it appears that nuking is one of them.
Iiiiinteresting.... :D
Hard on the wallet? Not that it would stop me, but it's good to know...
Edit: good to know it works out in PvP as well. Thanks!
Well, but later on you will have to accept that your nukes will only do 1 damage 90+% of the time. For comparison, I tried using my SE's disrupt undead (also lvl 35 nuke) on doom knights at FG (lvl 65). With self-buffed emp3, of course. It fails nine out of ten tries with 1 damage and the one time it does not fail, it does half damage. You just CANNOT use the nukes effectively anymore in mid-60s, and even in the high 50s you would probably do more damage over time just hitting the mob with a large object. It is just not effective to let the mob hit you while you do 1 damage nukes to it. There simply is a point when you have to say goodbye to the lvl 35 nukes.
There was this one nuking PS on L2Pets, I forget what level he is (mid 50s to mid 60s I'm pretty sure), but using an overenchanted mage weapon he two shots stuff. I'll try to find that thread for you.
For comparison, I tried using my SE's disrupt undead (also lvl 35 nuke) on doom knights at FG (lvl 65). With self-buffed emp3, of course. It fails nine out of ten tries with 1 damage and the one time it does not fail, it does half damage.
Would Disrupt Undead (Power 36) have a different fail rate from Twister/Shadow Spark (Power 44/55)?
Either way, it sounds like by 70 neither one would work. Drat.
You just CANNOT use the nukes effectively anymore in mid-60s, and even in the high 50s you would probably do more damage over time just hitting the mob with a large object.
I've been thinking about that too--even if it's viable, it might not be worthwhile except for the novelty value.
Actually you CAN use nukes into the mid 60's. I think it's ineffective so i usually avoid talking about it but it turns out the most important factor is your level compared to the mobs, that means that into the mid 60's you need to be nuking greens or lower. SO your idea can be done just not terribly effectively.
I know that with my current low int stat i do more damage on average doing melee, but then again i've geared my toon very strongly towards being able to help the pet. If you are using a pretty strong weapon i don't see why you couldn't do it pretty effectively BTM and recharge should be enough to keep you going and you might consider usign B2M in conjunction with nightshade, it's more roundabout than the recharge pets but I think it could work. And obviously your cubics can helpwith this a lot as well.
the nukes of a summoner (lvl 35 skills) have the same power as lvl 74 skill aoe nukes so it only makes sense that they will still do damage, even at higher levels with the right nuking gear, you just won't do very much damage.
I know that with my current low int stat i do more damage on average doing melee, but then again i've geared my toon very strongly towards being able to help the pet.
Yeah, that's why I had to ask rather than testing myself. I have -8int, while a proper nuker should have +4int...a difference of 12 pretty much makes any test I could attempt invalid. I suppose I could make some halfhearted attempt to guess based on my drastically-reduced stats, but it seemed kind of pointless.
Very interesting about that fail rate, hmm.
Really the best thing would probably be to have a level 65-7x Spellhowler say how often they can get their sub-40 nukes to stick on a green target, but I'm not sure if any would even want to test.
Actually, I started to roll one back in C3 for that very reason. He went on a long "vacation" when the C4 changes were announced--I was sick of hearing about them.
Even if I had an active necro, though, I'm partial to the PS in general. I'm not sure if I'll ever try to make him a mini-nuker, but it's something to think about.
Ok this is old, as in C1 old but in those days given everything else the same the difference between a DE and LE damage wise with spells was 14%, due to the effects of stats being on a sliding scale rather than an even one the difference for humans was abotu 7%
Lets first off assuem the same math applies and that the scale has even divisions based on base human DE stats. That means that 3 int is roughly 7% of damage, that means you should be down 28% from what an SH who differs only in int would get.
That's not too bad, yes the spell power is highly lacking but i think that you have a viable arguement for it working. I'm not saying it'll work well, in fact i think the opposite but it will work and i think it'd probably be fun to try.
Away from game now but when i get back i'll do some testing with the 60+ nuking to get some real data. Also not that my nukes sometimes worked on antharas. Not often but sometimes. Sure it was only 40 damage but the key thing was that they could land.