Mages, the secret to not getting owned by sword is...

[nuke2033]

skill.

[Silver]

Or just a set of tinkered armor, and of course, as you put it a high item enchantment SKILL and mana c to bane it

[meridian59gar]

Actually you're wrong, replier. Any sword that doesn't suck totally will slaughter a mage now. I don't care who you are, when you get hit for 80-100 every second and any worthwhile heal takes 4+ seconds, you're dead.

THANKS WEEPING WEAPONS
THANKS TURBINE

[nuke2033]

Full swing sword does not hit every second, it takes about 3. And it doesnt ALWAYS do 80-100 dmg, if you actually took the time to bane you would see some hits only do about 40, unlike war spells which always do a high amount of damage. Quit crying and learn how to play.

[Shon_Tsu]

80-100 every second? Man, you gotta show me some of that!! If I could do 80-100 damage every second damn right I'd slaughter every mage I came accross.

As it is if a mage has any inkling of skill the most power I can use is half bar. If they're in tinkered armor that equates to 20-30 per hit and 80-100 on a crit. It also means only 1 swing per war spell, and if they can mix up some good fastcasts in the middle I might only get one swing per 2 spells. If they're smart enough to mix their regens up with wars instead of all at once it means my moments of opportunity are 2 half power hits or one full power hit at most, perhaps 2 full power hits if they need to heal at the same time.

If on the other time they show no skill I can use full or almost full power and still get one hit per war spell most of the time. Then they stand there and regen stam/mana all at once and I get 3 or 4 full power hits at one time and if I get lucky and 2 of them are crits then its pretty much all over. Then they run here to tell everyone how overpowered sword is.

People (mages mostly) have a tendency to compare the lowest war hits with the highest sword crits on full power when comparing damage. The fact is that most of the time sworders are hitting below full power and crits come rarely. The double crit that people come to the boards crying about are as rare as hens teeth, and compare with the freaky war crits of 280+ through aegis that so rarely get a mention.

[Last Man]

I think if they do ANYTHING (and I'm unconvinced as a level 111 mage in GSC that sword is overpowered,) as someone else suggested, perhaps nerf the aegis down a bit.

As long as the mage gets few "no casts" a skilled mage can beat a skilled sword user a fair amount of time.

When I get a suit tinked up, I'd imagine I will be hard to beat by a sword who's not >180

[Virindi Clown]

Sword DOES do 40-80 with MAXED OUT STRENGTH against WEAKER armor than fully tinkered al 200+ base stuff with BANES because the crit is 160 in that situation, which I know for a fact you do not see against properly equipped folks. You MIGHT hit some higher end gaunts or shoes for that much damage, because they are often a little weaker and have no clothes under them, but I still didn't see that too much in my day.

The 80-100 a second is ridiculous, unless you run around without buffs or something. Seriously, just don't talk if you're going to exagerate that much. It would save everyone the time of reading it for no reason and saying something about it.

I honestly can't believe there is this much complaining over this issue. It really just shows how completely stupid some people are with their characters.

Honestly, the only "skill" it takes to kill a melee, even if they are pounding you, is to keep firing various war spells when they try to attack you.

The melee, on the other hand, has to go nuts dodging and pray for his life.

The mage can stand there and attack, and the melee has to work extremely hard and then get LUCKY for enough crits and big hits in a row to kill the mage when they are down, without getting lagged or shot.

Why are people so eager to make it look like melees just run up out of nowhere, stand in their faces, tank all their wars and just kill them in 3 seconds?

NEWSFLASH! That's usually what people who know how to play mages do to melees, and that's how it's been since the game came out!

How do weeping weapons make it any different? Mages have MORE strategic options now and ways to confuse their opponent than ever such as animation break casting, a billion different war spells, and all sorts of junk, so try using it.

Melees still just press attack and run around trying not to get hit, just as they did back in '99.

[WhiteOleander]

The only problems that people see with melee today is there not used to being hit that hard. I remember when I was a grief melee and all I had to do was whip out a shield and another melee couldn't kill me.

When Phantom came along I would just debuff other melees life magic, by then I had melee d so if I debuffed the **** out of them I would evade like crazy.

When AR came along all I had to do was yet again shield whore, I would own archers, other melees, and mages of all levels just because I was one of the only 100+ grief melees on the server.

When weeping came out it was a different story, I couldn't just whip out a shield to save me. I actually had to be a good melee, and I am very good at melee in AC, but I found that other extreme temps could cast on me. Since I didn't grief anymore I found the amount of damage I was receiving from them was incredible and they would evade me 1 out of every 3 hits. I won most of the fights I fought meleeVSmelee just for the simple fact that I had better equipment, was a better player, and finally thanks to turbine for nerfing healing.

MageVSmelee is a different story however, it has always been fundamentally the same throughout AC. Melee attacks, backs off, attacks again etc.

What has changed though is the amount of damage dealt. Hollow damage used to be ok because base armor al's were about 60% less than the top end mages wear today. Everyone wore GSA(a few wore GSC but when PP was nerfed no one got GSC anymore) and PP gsa's base al is 190, post patch was like 150 I think(I forget has been a long time since I have seen or worn any). Hitting with a hollow against al 150 Trim, an olthoi helm, and al 150-190 Amuli was very good. You did alot of damage, but not too much to be overwhelming, since matty coats and dread coats had a low AL against slashing they weren't much better. Also, for some reason people got the fashion bug and walked around with Matty Arm Guards(I used to love to see those because I knew there DI's were mine).

When they upgraded hollow it did signifigantly more damage, also since not alot of peeps fully baned(was before spell timers)a Siraluun Matihao was my best friend. They improved upon sword hollow to the point that people were switching from UA to sword because UA characters took until about level 100 to mature, but a level 60 sword could hit as hard as a level 100 ua so peeps started re rolling(although around level 80 sword hollow peaked and the only noticeable damage difference you saw were lvl 126's, and higher crits).

When phantom came out UA owned again, it was so sweet against a mage I could kill them in less than a minute if they weren't careful and unless they red linked it would take like 10 minutes to kill a good mage with a hollow.

When AR came out I was a sword, AR sword did alot of damage VS mage and we got crits we never saw before. The problem was I would just end up going Phantom for the crits against a mage wearing al 400 armor because they couldn't shield whore to avoid death, and AR tended to hit low against it.

Then came weeping, GSX, and the AEGIS, whatever dev came out with all 3 I want them to pass that shiz. Weeping ignored shields, it was non drop, did more damage than AR, and it was possible to easily obtain 4 of them all of the same element, not only that but when they came out you couldn't debuff them. Since I was a grief melee I easily maxed out my AEGIS, and I had a horde of plats so I started trading almost immediately for the new GSX stones.

All the sudden within a few patches, a extreme melee wasn't an indentured servant to a mage for a hundred levels anymore. They could stand on there own but not only that be equal against a mage 1v1. It wasn't required that a melee have excellent skillz to kill a mage his lvl, (a mage before weeping would jam the whore key, oops I mean war key, get too low health, hit s2h 1, get to low health again, hit s2h 1 again, get to low health again, hit m2h 1, get in trouble again back up whip out a fully baned shield chug elixirs, and be back again for a rinse and repeat, it took a few lucky crits at key times to kill a good mage, even to kill a bad one) the only thing it required was he had to know how to dodge. We(all melees)used to have awesome dodging skills because that was the only way to kill a mage.

With weepings added however mages were getting dealt damage they had never seen, or experienced before. So there were complaints that there had to be some way to stop that luving beat stick(we call the weeping sword). So they made weeping weapons debuffable, which wasn't a problem they were relatively easy to get(I had 4 of them, all the same element). Then they gave melees the ability to debuff the chest armor on anybody who was not expecting it, and/or got caught off guard. That was too much of an unfair advantage but I did make a load of plats selling DI's and tinked armor. They took it back in a hotfix but made weeping weapons non-debuffable again.

It has been getting apparent that to be competitive against a weeping weapons you need to have top end tinked armor. This is hard to get because they had like 2 patches of really good shiz then they changed the DI and loot system. Unfortunately it is what you need to be competitive as a mage. I would tell you to go get yourself as much steel as you can, steel is like 5 plats a bag and that is really really cheap.

To put it another way tinked armor today is like what the matty robe was before hollow, "just something you need to be competitive".

[Xirius]

Lol, nice post.

I am new to the 'modern' AC (haven't played in ~ 2 years), and that brought me up to speed rather well.

[_b0o]

eh its not that hard to kill a swordsman lol. i've killed lvl 126+ swordsman on lvl 80 mule mage in PP gsa! and my lvl 130 mage a ton of times. key is managing stam to hp and ur bolts/streaks.

[Lubo]

I get hit for 80-120 regularly by high level swordies. I bane and buff like everyone else.

The secret to not being killed is to run when you see the sword come out!


If you don't exploit (I guess it's not an exploit anymore after turbine waffled on this issue) and fastcast, you're most likely dead.

[Blau]

Skill *and* preparedness.

[Last Man]

and decal running. (I wont double bane GSC manually, I'd rather die more.)

[kioskies]

"when you get hit for 80-100 every second and any worthwhile heal takes 4+ seconds, you're dead."

You're absolutely right, which is why its a good thing swords dont hit for 80-100 points a second.

Oh and, end urself

[Blau]

That's the "preparedness" part I was talking about. If you're getting hit for that much, you forgot something at home. Armor perhaps? Buffs? Dunno, but *something*.

[Slpoheklmnuov]

sword hits fine but they don't really have much to say on the issue of having these 380 health max res sword guys that you hit for 90 being nigh unbeatable unless they lag in place.

*shrug*

[Jess The Great]

sword is a bit too powerful imo, but if you are a good mage you can kill most melees, they are just annoying...circles and circles :rolleyes:

[D'evils]

Now that they nerfed S2H 1, mages are going to have a harder time killing melees.

[Frank The Knife]

Nah if a mage has the hold/circle cast down they can almost tatoo a melee with wars at will.

Mages who cry about melee's just dont know the expl...have skill.

[D'evils]

I use a different variation of the circle cast that causes the melees sticky melee to lock up and they get stuck. Works great.

[arcgremlin]

swords are fine 1v1
in groups i'd say they may be a little over powered
but they don't really need nerfing too much


but when i come across those few maxed out 100 innate endurance sword chars with every ward and spec resist i sometimes wish the aegis didn't protect so well =\