my barb is going on the riot quest in a couple of days, so I'm doing my best to circle once beforehand. usually tasks given me throws me into things that are over my head, so i'm expecting it to be a challenge. I use ME as primary weapon, and 2he as my secondary. I'd also like to reduce the RT i presently have with the 2he.


My present stats are as follows:

circle 46:

Strength : 28 Reflex : 28
Agility : 28 Charisma : 25
Discipline : 25 Wisdom : 25
Intelligence : 26 Stamina : 30

I'd like to either increase STR, AGIL or REFlex, whichever would do me the most good.

Race is human, so the cost would be identical.

Also, which abilities would you recommend for questing?

These are roars i have :
Everild's Rage
Death's Embrace
Death's Shriek
Serpent's Hiss of Warning
Banshee's Wail

I also have the normal berserks and dances to my circle.

I can't scare peccaries or elder brocket deer <the critters i normally hunt> with shriek yet, so i don't think i'll be
able to use that one.

I have noticed a reduction in RT for my bastie sword when i dance panther, which gives agil/reflex boost.
However, this dance doesn't seem to last the amount of time I'd need it to be up.

The one time I tried out baby gryphons I was able to survive in there by using berserk stone.

So any tips I can get before questing would be appreciated.

Thanks.



>


<<as I firmly believe that upstanding citizens have the inalienable right to strike down musicians whenever possible.>>

Discipline discipline discipline.

Discipline all night all day.

You'll gain way more from your dances by raising discipline than you would from any other stat increase at this point, until it becomes unreasonably expensive(like 2-3x as much).

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

If only it was that cheap...

Discipline's really nice since it powers dance time and helps with shield blocking and hiding (if you plan on being a stealth user), but I think that would be a sub-optimal build for Barbarians. They rely heavily on physicals (especially reflex) because of their quick advancement up the critter ladder, and more points in wisdom/intelligence for quicker exp gain never hurt.

I don't think the benefits of treating discipline as a godstat outweigh the penalties of neglecting other stats. This will be even more true in 3.0, I think, when dance times will be increased substantially. Having said that, barbarians are very versatile. If X is at least a reasonable number (40+), you could do fine with that build.

I took everything to 20, then physicals to 30. Then everything to 30, then physicals to 40. etc. At that point I started to customize. If I raised something first, it was agility, because I wanted to be able to hit first and foremost, because I could pretty much let the berserks take care of defence. If I was trying to be stealthy I might take disc half way to the next tier, then physicals, then everything to that tier. Then disc half way to next tier, etc etc. That is just the framework that I use I do vary from it somewhat based on my current needs and such.

Until you get everything to 30, train whatever is cheapest.

If you use roars in training.

Yea, 20ish is a good base to get your other stats... but after that, I'd pump Discipline/Reflex. At lower level, you'll get a good return w/ dances by putting some extra points in Disc, combined with that it dabbles in a lot of other contests too - it's a good investment up until it's costing 1.5-2x as much as other stats... Reflex is always useful, raise it up if you want to be able to move up the critter ladder faster(My 30th MM was dancing with 4 crocs w/ 46 reflex @ 110 in defenses, no buffs).

They've always been my 2 priority stats.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

breaking mid 40's in a stat by lvl 30 sounds like a -2 modifier i.e. prydaen.


Re: sub 40 barbs I found berserks to be god mode and dances have too little benefit and survivability, so I personal opinion is that if you plan to zerk it out during low level barb don't worry too much about building stats for dances yet.

<Re: sub 40 barbs I found berserks to be god mode and dances have too little benefit and survivability, so I personal opinion is that if you plan to zerk it out during low level barb don't worry too much about building stats for dances yet.

As a 25th Barb, this is totally true. I can Berserk Stone & Blood together back to back multiple times and be basically invincible unless I'm in some place that I really don't belong. I've experimented with Badger a bit and use Cobra to help backtrain weapons, but overall, dances don't seem to help me nearly as much.

>> sub 40 barbs I found berserks to be god mode and dances have too little benefit and survivability, so I personal opinion is that if you plan to zerk it out during low level barb don't worry too much about building stats for dances yet.

It's all about the STR/DISC, esp at lower level - I say pump Disc since it's far more useful overall.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

It's the low stats that keep dances from fully blossoming - Strength and Discipline.

Getting a good head-start on Discipline helps to relieve this.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

right now mine are at:

Strength : 32 Reflex : 30
Agility : 32 Charisma : 25
Discipline : 30 Wisdom : 25
Intelligence : 28 Stamina : 30

as a human barbarian, 52nd circle. I'm planning on getting everything to 30 then boosting discip and reflex, but i'll still be playing it by ear to see what shakes out with using forms rather than dances once 3.0 hits.

Right now I use badger most of the time, but if i get into difficulty berserk stone is still my go-to.
I did want the strangth though because my secondary is 2he, and we'll need the same in our secondary weapon as in primary weapon once 3.0 reqs go live.

/---
Oh and last one, DR at any given time has a population of weenies that will criticize at the drop of a hat, don't take things personally it happens to everyone.
Leucius

Looking at what I had written down for them, the percentages are Conc based and the stat boost is Disc/Str. So unless they changed em in the last 6 years since I wrote that, it'd still be the same.

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IM: Dannyboy00001111

"Fool proof system do not take into account the ingenuity of fools, nor the power of numbers."

>Many barbarians choose to use dances anyways because they dislike the systems of penalties associated with berserks, which is quite fine. Also, like I said, discipline's an awesome all around stat regardless.


Personally I rather like that there's drawbacks for Berserks. Toughening out hardships just seems like a very masculine, very Barbarian thing to do. I'm sad that they'll go away in 3.0.

I'm glad that dances will be renamed Forms, though. I just have a hard time not having mental images of big brawny barbarians in leotards spinning around performing Swan Lake.

>believe me, there is absolutely nothing effeminate about Barishnikov dancing ballet. :-)
>If you can get an old video of him dancing - its a treasure worth the view.

After a quick google search for "Mikhail Baryshnikov Don Quixote" and other youtube clips.. my position remains at agree to disagree, heh.


>There's only one thing I really don't like about berserk, you can't see the stuff the critter drops, so you have to make sure you grab it right away so it doesn't either poof away, or you miss it in the scroll. <still hoping for maps!>

Technically StormFront's room window bypasses this, but you can just type "Stow box" and hold down CTRL+Enter to spam collect all boxes, and do the same for "Stow Gem" and "get coin" and you'll never miss out on any loot except for random ultra rares.

I use storm front but regardless of which char I'm using I never really use the room window to read loot and do exactly the above to collect everything. I never know what i've actually collected until I looked into my backpack.

I like to jack up discipline to make hiding more tolerable. There's nothing worse than stealth holding back your weapons.

For those barbs who don't train stealth, its a fail, sorry it just is.

>>For those barbs who don't train stealth, its a fail, sorry it just is.

For PvP I actually disagree. While being trained in hiding and stalking is effective, you can become one of the best pvp Barbs without it.

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Individuals, families, countries, continents are destroyed at the heavy hand of Vinjince.

-GM Abasha

>>For PvP I actually disagree. While being trained in hiding and stalking is effective, you can become one of the best pvp Barbs without it.

It's also worth highlighting that knowing how to be stealthy might not be as be-all-end-all in a 3.0 world.

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"You always have to be a know-it-all. And you don't. Know. It. All." - GERSTEINJ2

>>The percentages aren't set - they have a ceiling, but they aren't set. Concentration is the main factor in the quality of a dance - Strength/Discipline affect stats. Being that Discipline is the main factor in Conc, you could say it's the most important for quality of dances. I was probably hitting the ceiling on dance strength at about 50-55th(estimate).

I don't believe you were seeing a boost in dance performance, but a huge penalty to berserks. Berserks definitely start losing some strength once your mentals tick a little higher than your physicals (somewhere between 3-5 points is when I could first measure a difference with roundtimes). I honestly have no clue if said penalties have a ceiling, as the stats you posted are much higher in discrepancy than I ever had :).

If they're not capped, then dances may have seemed more powerful comparatively simply because your berserks were being so massively penalized.

I can't look at the game code and say with absolute certainty that discipline only affects time, but I can say that the vast majority of a dance's power is determined by ranks, or offensive factor, or whatever you wish to call it.

***************
Strength : 28 Reflex : 25
Agility : 25 Charisma : 29
Discipline : 25 Wisdom : 25
Intelligence : 25 Stamina : 25

Twohanded Edged: 229 80.00% clear (0/34)

Two notes. First, this was immediately after the change that removed circle from the dance equation, as I wanted to test the new dynamic. Second, I saved the TDPs explicitly for testing purposes.

I measure my average first hit against red leucs, each time with a fresh opponent, 25 different times. I then danced Cobra dance (~12 minutes, 22 seconds) using the same procedure. Average hit unbuffed was solid, average hit buffed was very heavy. I then raised discipline 5 points and tried, and noticed the same damage results, though my dance time had gone up to almost 14 minutes.

This done not within itself say that discipline doesn't factor into a dance's buff "power," as damage values are a range like everything else. Additionally, 5 points of discipline may simply have not been enough to notice a statistically significant increase in power, especially at such lower ranks. The difference might be more pronounced at higher ranks, though that would be tricky to measure, because current combat scaling means mostly one-shots or two-shots at high ranks when you're dancing.

Conversely, with my mentals now only 3 points higher (on average) than my physicals, my maximum berserk time in combat has already dropped ~4 minutes. I haven't tested to see if this comes with a reduction of stat boosts and such, but I suspect it does. You at the time of your testing had a much larger gap (20+ points) difference.
***********
tl ; dr I can't say with complete certainty you are wrong, but I explicitly tested this a few years back, and I came to the conclusion that discipline was not significant enough in determining a dance's "power" to recommend training in for the purposes of making your dance more "powerful," in the same way you would train agility for TM or discipline for stealth success.

If you are a dancing barbarian, regardless of level, you should still focus on discipline to some extent for the buff duration alone (especially if you wear chain or plate), but I cannot recommend training it and expecting to actually make your dances perform better. Berserks are generally better at lower levels. Then again, raising your mentals to 9000 at circle 10 seems to have worked out quite well for Gorteous, if only for the experience pulses, so maybe we should consider it anyways.