New player questions

Pyrros

Hello! I'm an old IRE player looking for a new place to play (not an MKO refugee). I'm predominantly a PKer but I do enjoy RP, but it's proving a little difficult to get info via forums on a few things, so I had a few questions. I can usually frankenstein code together to serve my purposes well enough. Sorry if some of my questions are remedial, I come from a game with wide swings in viability of individual classes.

Currently I am in Enorian as an Ascendril. I am a shapeshifter because the grind seems a fair bit faster as one.

1) I actually like the flavor of the shapeshifter class once I started playing it, but information on it is scant. Is it viable in higher end PK?

2) Is Ascendril viable? What is the kill condition? It appears to be that damage is the only option, is this reliant on retardation?

3) I have roughly 9000 credits to invest, possibly more. Are there necessity artifacts I should prioritize?


Thanks for any help!

Rolsand

If you haven't bought a pig nose yet you probably should.

Valingar

Hey,

Question one, shapeshifter: it's a very weird class. I've used it extensively in the past, but not lately. Bright side? It's incredibly annoying to play against. Being a shapeshifter, you'll have the knowledge that your opponent is frustrated as hell the entire time you fight him, due to the strength of your passives. The kill conditions, though, are tricky, and that's why it's not too much used.

There are basically two ways of killing with shapeshifter: Devour, which has a beautiful deathsight, but is very intricate and takes a long time to get to and is a difficult kill to pull off. The other way is to damage kill, usually by forcing several high-damage jugularclaws in: one way to do this would be to thigh/groin/etc lock someone so they can't parry you. Or if they have poor parry, you can just jugular head repeatedly and anyone will die.

Two, Ascendril and it's shadowside equivalent, Sciomancer, are both damage classes. They have no other kill method, really. But their damage can be pretty obnoxious once it ramps up, so you got that going for you. They are definitely viable classes to use. Strengths: great damage, passive affrate, hard to hinder, good hinder, weaknesses: runners. EDIT: also, no, retardation isn't used much, since it slows down vibe tic rates and only lasts 30 seconds.

Three: There's a lot of arties that're useful, I won't go to detail there. Spirit anchor (halve resurrection times), eq crown (7% reduced eq times), gem of adaption (change statpack on every class change, MUTATE and REVERT counts, so you can switch very often) are some of my favortes.

Volcath

Question: How important is race choice? 

Emelle

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe these days race choice really only impacts the raceskills you get, whereas your statpack is the thing that influences combat.

Toz

That's correct, and (most) racial powers can be bought once you hit level 100 (raceskill points) - do however have a look at HELP HERITAGE.

Xavin

At level 99/100 now you retain your original racial skills and gain your heritage. Make sure you're happy with the one you're going to get ahead of time because you cannot change your heritage after you've hit 99.

Aishia

Is heritage auto set I thought you selected it?!

Xavin

It is auto-set for anyone that hits tekal. It only has to be set by people that had tekal before the heritage system was implemented. Which is why there are probably people that are end-game without a heritage still.

Seir

Xavin said:

It is auto-set for anyone that hits tekal. It only has to be set by people that had tekal before the heritage system was implemented. Which is why there are probably people that are end-game without a heritage still.

Yeah. The only ones that I know without a heritage are folks like Pilar and it's for role play purposes.