Martial Arts sassy: opinions + advice

[Eilo Rytyj]

Martial Arts sassy: opinions + advice

'sup all.

I'm in the process of planning my first Assassin ever. That's right, after all this time playing D2, I've never once made a successful sassy; it's only ever been to level ~10 and then I abandon...

I've decided to make her a MA sin, specifically a Phoenix Striker. She'll have all the normal trimmings of a 'sin: Death Sentry, CoS, Mind Blast etc. She'll be completely untwinked, aside from some ATMA-assisted Gamble funding.

However, I've decided I'll only be maxing 2 of Fenix Strike's synergies, which brings be to my quandry:

Fire and Lightning, Fire and Cold, or Cold and Lightning?

I'm really tempted by Lightning, because the "Chaos Lightning" animation of Phoenix Strike is just too cool, if not the best animation in the game. Fire has the good average damage and residual DoT. Cold has the ever-useful chilling effect, but it's at Charge number 3 on Phoenix... Decisions!


Venom: yes or no? Should I invest the full 20 points, or forego altogether and hold off until I can throw a Treachery together and use the CTC as merely some free bonus damage?

Shadow Master? yes or no? Is she really worth it in terms of damage output and tankage end-game for an untwinked sassy? I've had experience with Amazons with Valkyrie in tow, and Valks are certainly useful as a tank while I pluck away. Will it be a similar deal with a primarily melee 'sin? or will she just get in the way and be mostly weak?


Cheers for your time.

 

[stephan]

I've decided to make her a MA sin, specifically a Phoenix Striker. She'll have all the normal trimmings of a 'sin: Death Sentry, CoS, Mind Blast etc. She'll be completely untwinked, aside from some ATMA-assisted Gamble funding.

HC or SC? :smiley:

However, I've decided I'll only be maxing 2 of Fenix Strike's synergies, which brings be to my quandry:

Fire and Lightning, Fire and Cold, or Cold and Lightning?

I'm really tempted by Lightning, because the "Chaos Lightning" animation of Phoenix Strike is just too cool, if not the best animation in the game. Fire has the good average damage and residual DoT. Cold has the ever-useful chilling effect, but it's at Charge number 3 on Phoenix... Decisions!

The freeze effect of PS3 works the same with or without synergy, so as a crowd control skill it will always be available to you, whether or not you put points in the synergy.

Venom: yes or no? Should I invest the full 20 points, or forego altogether and hold off until I can throw a Treachery together and use the CTC as merely some free bonus damage?

One point never hurts as you can always use prebuff claws on switch, and you most likely want to get Fade anyway (so no extra prereqs).

Shadow Master? yes or no? Is she really worth it in terms of damage output and tankage end-game for an untwinked sassy? I've had experience with Amazons with Valkyrie in tow, and Valks are certainly useful as a tank while I pluck away. Will it be a similar deal with a primarily melee 'sin? or will she just get in the way and be mostly weak?

I'm very much of in favor of Warrior over Master. A Warrior is basically a Master without the silly AI (instead you can decide what she does now). Currently I'm playing an untwinked HC Blade Fury sin through act 4 NM and my Warrior has done all of the tanking so far (I'm using an act 1 merc for the inner sight). She is ~slevel 17 now and if I let her cast Fade on herself she is almost indestructable.

Normally the damage shadows do is not so high and they attack quite slow. You can let a Warrior cast Venom on herself though, and because you are a phoenix striker, in very unsafe situations you could even try to let her release charges (FoF and CoT are probably better here, as it easier to control what type of damage she does then). This, again, will be slow, but it's better to be slow than to be dead and IMO it's a quite fun thing to do as it gives you an extra element to your playing style.

As a last piece of advice: be careful with your points. You have a lot of prereqs and a lot of skills that you potentially would like to max. Don't go blindly maxing synergies making the points you have invested to get your shadow useless. It's probably better to have ~15 in each synergy and a strong shadow than no shadow and 20 in synergies.

I haven't heard you about claw/shield versus claw/claw yet. What is your idea for that?

 

[Silent Shaddow]

I'm very much of in favor of Warrior over Master. A Warrior is basically a Master without the silly AI (instead you can decide what she does now). Currently I'm playing an untwinked HC Blade Fury sin through act 4 NM and my Warrior has done all of the tanking so far (I'm using an act 1 merc for the inner sight). She is ~slevel 17 now and if I let her cast Fade on herself she is almost indestructable.

Normally the damage shadows do is not so high and they attack quite slow. You can let a Warrior cast Venom on herself though, and because you are a phoenix striker, in very unsafe situations you could even try to let her release charges (FoF and CoT are probably better here, as it easier to control what type of damage she does then). This, again, will be slow, but it's better to be slow than to be dead and IMO it's a quite fun thing to do as it gives you an extra element to your playing style.

Personally I find a shadow master alot like a seat belt. They are a pain in the arse until they save your arse, If your playing HC then I would recommend the shadow warroir as she could make all the difference when your about to kiss your sin goodbye and then all those frenzytaurs start smacking each other instead.

As a last piece of advice: be careful with your points. You have a lot of prereqs and a lot of skills that you potentially would like to max. Don't go blindly maxing synergies making the points you have invested to get your shadow useless. It's probably better to have ~15 in each synergy and a strong shadow than no shadow and 20 in synergies.

Im not sure what you intention is to gain from a summon, but almost certainly with my phoenix striker the objective for me was that last second safety net and minion stack. I would advise against using a shadow warroir as your main source of damage unless you happen to be running round hell with out armour on

My biggest philosophy on assassins and certainly where I stand on these things is that all the melee sins (not trappers or BFury sins etc ) should use atleast 1 summon and a combat merc, reasoning is that a sin should be fully exploiting the free teleportation of dragon flight to concentrate damage for that initial corpse, create minion stack for safety in melee situations, the ability to move instantly to combat range allows for battle field management, added survival as it decrease ranged worries and instant leeching keeps that act 2 merc alive.

Edit: Just spotted that your refering to a HC blade fury sin.


As for elements? Lightning and Cold damage Imo, and keep your vemon at 1 point wonder.

 

[JoeJTang]

For the elements, I've always been partial to having Claws of Thunder as my main charge, since it does the most damage, and Fists of Fire as my secondary. Blades of Ice never did too much damage compared to Fists of Fire, so I left it as my final priority. Base level 1 after + skills was efficient enough for me, and Phoenix Strike can be used for Freezing anyways.

 

[stephan]

Im not sure what you intention is to gain from a summon, but almost certainly with my phoenix striker the objective for me was that last second safety net and minion stack. I would advise against using a shadow warroir as your main source of damage unless you happen to be running round hell with out armour on

I'm not advocating a Warrior as a main source of damage at all.

What I ask from my Warrior is to run up to an enemy, stand there, take hits and don't die. I don't care if she does any damage whatsoever (the fact that she does so little damage anyway makes her a very good tank in CS, and probably the only tank that really has no problems with IM). The thing is that, untwinked, a 1 point shadow has the tendency to die very fast in situations you really need her. The only thing I was advising to not pump one synergy after another and neglect the shadow in the meanwhile.

 

[Eilo Rytyj]

Cheers for all the info all.

First up... I've started her on SC, so... well, I'm not planning on dying anyway, I still play all chars with the HC philosophy of protecting yer behind before anything else. But, like with all my SP chars, it's /players 8 all the way. I'll be using CoS liberally, which will ease the burden of survival a little. 1pt Cobra Strike will take care of all of my mana leech issues (hopefully). I wasn't planning of picking up Dragon Flight, but now that you mention it I guess having a skill is better than not having it, so it should be worth spending those extra 2 skill points to get it.

stephan, regarding your bit about the synergies and minions... personally I'd rather spend the full 20 points on each of the two synergies I'll be maxing (FoF, CoT or BoI), and then shop for the +shadow prebuff claws to cast a Shadow at the start of each game at the highest slvl possible. It's what I've done for all the 'zons I've had with Valks, and the defunct Hunter Druid I once had, and any prebuffable skill pretty much.

It'll be 60 points all up for PS + synergies, then MA prereqs, along with the few in Death Sentry and it's prereqs, and various skills in the Shadow tree. I'm looking at no more than 80 skill points altogether, not counting if I invest in a Shadow Warrior/Master.

The reason I want to max two PS synergies is I guess pretty obvious: I don't like Immunes. I want to have at least 2 of the 6 of the game's elements at my disposal at any one time. With 2 synergies maxed, I'll have 2 of Fire/Cold/Lightning, Physical damage from the weapons themselves, Death Sentry's Fire/Physical, and Poison if using Treachery or I decide to invest in Venom itself. All in decent enough amounts of damage to be able to kill efficiently in Hell, too.

I dunno about the Warrior over Master. From what I've heard, the Master is kind of like a mixed bag; she'll do her own thing, but she's influenced by your own skills i.e. a Trapper will see a Shadow throwing out traps more often, while a PS'er will see her letting loose in melee. Warrior requires that you set your own skills to directly command what she does. Playing with mindless minions who only do the same thing over and over (I'm looking in your direction Valkyrie), I guess I wanna see just how good the AI is at thinking for itself.

I'll be trying to keep her C/C as much as possible. I've played her a total of 20 minutes so far, she's lvl 6 and just cleared the Den of Evil... We'll see if she needs a shield further on, but I wanna try and make use of the Weapon Block skill, and invest a couple more points into it if the need arises.

I'm also undecided about Fade vs BoS. So far all I'm going to do there is have them as 1pt wonders and use each situationally. I love the IAS/FRW of BoS, but if I do end up using Treachery as my end-game armor, then I'll use the CTC Fade on it exclusively and keep both Fade and BoS as 1pt'ers. That's probably what's going to happen - Treachery as end-game because this is as untwinked as possible here, no flashy uber Enigmas or Bartuc's or whatever, just what I pick up/gamble along the way.

so yeah, at level 6, she's just picked up FoF, and MAN I was surprised how fun it is to cut something a couple of times then... BOOM! Asplosions!!1! all monstrs fall down! Good times

At least I'm now decided on ONE of the two elements I'll be using - Lightning. Now it's just down to Fire vs Cold; pure destructive brawn versus slow, painful subtlety...

 

[stephan]

I dunno about the Warrior over Master. From what I've heard, the Master is kind of like a mixed bag; she'll do her own thing, but she's influenced by your own skills i.e. a Trapper will see a Shadow throwing out traps more often, while a PS'er will see her letting loose in melee. Warrior requires that you set your own skills to directly command what she does. Playing with mindless minions who only do the same thing over and over (I'm looking in your direction Valkyrie), I guess I wanna see just how good the AI is at thinking for itself.

I can already see you scratching behind your ear when she starts dropping Meteors on Fallens in Hell. It's an old rule that when a feature is portrayed as 'smart' or 'automatic' in a computer program, it's something you'd like to turn off after experiencing it for 5 minutes. :smiley:

Don't say I didn't warn you. :tongue: