My lycanthropy troubles :/

Amberlea

First of all, thank you Seir for the wonderful guide you put up a while back. Yes, I have read it.

I've been trying to learn how to fight as a lycan, but I've just been having a really terrible time and need some advice. Against some people I can manage to get a little bit ahead and mangle/destroy some limbs, but what I've found is people with really good systems I just can't do anything to, even if they stand there and let me beat on them to my heart's content.

I've tried clawing around on bodyparts to make them break, but it just isn't working at all. Because of parry I can't focus any one spot too much, and people prerestore really really early. Even if I can get them to fall behind on a certain limb by watching what they care most about, they will end up parrying that one while they cure the others. I mean, maybe this works if you are dextrous stat pack and have plus balance speed, but I'm resilient and I simply can't seem to make any progress like this.

What I normally try to do is claw around on different bodyparts to get them prerestoring. My howls are on paralysis, blurring, inflating, and I spinerip as soon as they hit. Hopefully, if the timing is favorable, they have prerestored an arm or something right when all of that hits, which gives me a little bit of time. I've tried just clawing the crap out of people, as mentioned before, and it just isn't working. Instead, I've started hamstringing both legs and baying inflating when I balance from this. If they've already used their tree tattoo with my howls, and hopefully the endgame aff curing ability is off balance, I can actually have them with a broken leg when I balance sometimes... Awesome, right? Except no, because they will just parry that broken leg, so I can't really capitalize on it. I had hoped that people being prone would stop parrying, but it doesn't

Even if I do manage to mangle a leg, surely they will start to parry it. If I try to hamstring the other leg and rend an arm they can tree, or use the restore ability or whatever, so that doesn't really stick either.

How am I supposed to get around a good parry, if we can at all? Or is there just no hope until I can switch to a +balance statpack (after endgame I guess, because I HAVE to have resilient if there is any hope of hunting)?

I really don't know what to try next. I mean, maybe change blurring out for stupidity in my howls, but that doesn't sound very reliable?

Toz

For bashing as lycan, muscular > resilient until ~level 92. You will need end-game to do well as lycan for pvp as well, because that +2 balance is invaluable and means if they pre-restore you can capitalize on it via rend/hamstring -> mangle -> destroy.

Amberlea

Thanks @Toz for taking the time to read and comment I'm pretty happy with my hunting right now as resilient allows me to comfortably visit areas that would otherwise be out of my reach. The balance bonus would definitely be nice, and I'm excited to try out the additional tactics it opens up when I get to endgame. I'm still a little concerned that mangling a limb will basically always have a 50% chance to fail if I can't find a decent way to stop parry. I also feel disappointed with the idea that combat is undoable until endgame, at least as this class. I've had a lot of success with combat in other games before reaching endgame, even if there is a little bit of a handicap. I guess I'm going to keep exploring options in the meantime.

Toz

Aetolia's pk is balanced higher than most other games, but end-game is also much easier to reach - there are options for even neutral balance statpacks, though. And don't forget, paralysis stops parry, as does broken limbs - they apply restoration, rend both arms and their parry is gone. Or howl with paralysis then spinalrip off of that.

Macian

It's been years since I fought as a lycan, so take my advice with a grain of salt...

I always felt that auto-spinerip wasn't worth it. To me, Lycan is about being opportunistic with your breaks, and losing balance in order to spinerip on every road/howl goes against that (the affliction itself isn't actually that good, when you consider that Lycans don't push herb balance). One of my main goals was always to get the dual arm break in order to disable parry. If that happens alongside howls, or when they pre-restore another limb, it opens them up (potentially) for taking out their legs, or further disabling their arms.

Have you mixing in flurry to build up limb damage and force pre-restore alongside clawing? It's not a great tactic to just flurry the crap out of someone, but in terms of forcing pre-restore to multiple limbs, I think flurry has a much higher limb-damage-per-second, so you'll be forcing pre-restore faster and more frequently. (I seem to remember that flurry itself is too slow to take advantage of pre-restore on one limb, but if you're tracking well and pushing multiple limbs, you can potentially get ahead, or even set up a resto break from a bodypunch+claw or spinecrack+claw combo to avoid parry.)

With the way pre-restore is these days, Lycans seem like they're much in the same boat as monks. They need to track how people are pre-restoring and parrying. A lot of people either parry the limb with the highest damage, or parry the limb that just got mangled. As long as you can get a dual mending break, you should be able to take advantage of either tactic by mangling one leg, and then switching to the other (or even back and forth), rather than trying to mangle > destroy the same leg.

Like I said, years since I fought as one, and times may have changed too much for this to be relevant, but...

Amberlea

I think I'm going to focus a lot more on breaking arms first now. I wasn't aware this stopped parry. I think I'll still have trouble though, as more often than not one of the arms is going to be cured before I balance, and of course the still broken one is which is going to get the parry. I like this a lot more than paralysis because I just don't have a way to make that stick.

I don't really like spinerip all that much. I've basically just been using it like a guaranteed prerestore to try to tie up their salve balance before I hamstring (rend now). If they've prerestored something else a little before that hits it can put me a few seconds ahead which I need for actually having a limb broken when I finally balance again. I suppose I could just trade this out for clawing a bodypart twice which is likely to get a prerestore, at least out of the people who have been letting me practice on them. If so it can make optimizing my attacks a little easier as I won't have to worry about my timing being perfect. I could also trade out my paralysis howl for something else, because that's not going to end up sticking. Maybe forceful to knock people over for locking the armpit, as they likely won't be prone if I'm doing the arms instead of the legs.

I haven't played with flurry. The syntax doesn't specify targetting a specific limb or anything so I figured it was just supposed to be a damaging attack. I'll have to try it out and see.

Thanks for your insight I feel a little better knowing there's at least something I can aim for to get around parry.

Macian

One thing to remember on the parry bit - for some classes taking out the arm with the weapon in it shuts down parry. I don't recall 100% what happens to a two-handed weapon, but I suspect you need to take out both arms.

In the first case, however, if they are wielding in say, their left hand, then you could do hamstring right, rend left, and hopefully they'll cure the leg first.

If I remember correctly, flurry is roughly 13% limb damage per hit - there are three hits in the attack. The damage is crap, but it completely ignores parry. The advantage for you as Resilient is that the balance is exactly the same for neutral balance as it is for +2 balance (this change was made because +2 bal used to be able to use nothing but flurry, and get ahead easily).

I used to see some success with forceful and head damage for the throat lock (90% sure throatlock only requires level 1 head damage).

Don't forget that you can armpit lock from torso damage, too, so the same thing applies with forceful there.

Irruel

1. Prerestore
If people pre-restore when you have balance, use rend/hamstring and then mangle before they regain salve balance.
Better systems will apply restoration only when you hit them, ensuring that you are off balance for the longest period of time possible. Still, keep an eye out for that - if their system is overdoing the prerestoration, they might be giving you openings.


2. Howls
paralysis+stupidity+anorexia
There are other good combos, but this one more than any other directly helps breaking. How?

Paralysis stops their parry.
Anorexia stops them eating bloodroot to cure the paralysis
Stupidity soaks a focus, stopping anorexia from being focus cured right away

Here's the key point:
Being off salve balance means they cannot cure the anorexia, and by extension, the paralysis.

What you want, is to break (resto break) a limb a couple of seconds before howls hit. Howls tick and you don't have balance, but it doesn't matter because they are off salve balance and will still be paralysed when you regain balance. At this point you can destroy their limb without needing to worry about them parrying you. Or you could spinalrip, which is probably not the best choice, but also not a bad one as it is yet another resto app, along with steady resto damage to the torso, and faster than salve balance so is putting them behind. The downside is that you will lose the chance to destroy their vulnerable limb.

(But, if all this happened after you've screwed up multiple limbs, a spinalrip is an excellent choice).

3. Learn their parry, then exploit it
Everyone parries differently. Some systems auto parry the last limb struck. Some parry random limbs. Some parry semi-randomly, with weighting systems toward certain body parts. Some parry manually or semi-manually. Spend a bit of time at the start of the fight, figuring out what sort of parry you're up against. If the parry follows the limb strikes, or some other similarly predictable pattern, then exploit it. There is always a way.

Many, or maybe even most, people will parry the limb you just mangled, preventing the subsequent destroy. Figure out early on if they do this or not. If they do, then when you break a limb, don't follow it up with a destroy - break then rend/hamstring. They'll be off salve balance long enough for you to mangle one of the others.

Listen to Macian's advice about double parry people, it is good. I won't repeat that stuff. I think he taught it to me back in the day anyway.

Lastly, if they parry around a lot, punish their head. You might force them to change their parry mode to favour the head more, or you might manage to land enough head damage to use Macian's forceful howl+necklock combo. Or even start a staggered skullwhack chain.

4. Don't always claw+claw
Last, and I think most useful, piece of advice.
rend tar left
claw left arm of tar

^ Makes it slower to get a break, and harder to safely pre-restore, depending on their system. Test it out, for some opponents it is worth using.

Amberlea

Thanks! Lots of great info in there and things to try.

Using those howls at different points before it never really stuck much, but I think that's because I was clawing all the time and their tree tattoo was always there for it. If I double rend/hamstring more now then there is a fair chance it might stay on for at least a few seconds if they tree to fix one of the breaks.

Thanks everyone for some really good pointers. I'll post how it works out in a little while after I get a chance to play more with all of this.

Macian

One other random thought:

Disrupt+forceful howls in combo means they're prone for at least two seconds (forceful prones, disrupt requires concentrate, which is at least 2 seconds eq to do, so they can't stand). If you can set up some torso damage,and then gut 1-2 seconds before the howl hits, you've got prone + enough torso damage to armpitlock, and a 2 second window during which they can't stand. You might be able to pull the same thing off by baying disrupt when howls hit, too, but baying was after my time, so I don't know 100% how that works. 

I always think of torso as a sneaky way to get a lock and rip - most people prioritize limbs over torso, so you can often slowly build up the torso and use Gut. Spleenrip is also an sweet secondary kill route. If you're fighting someone who parries a lot, as Irruel said, punish their head with Jugularclaw. Alongside spleenrip, this can be lethal (in fact, it was the primary kill route for Lycans before devour existed). Even if it's not going to kill them outright, there's enough threat there to make them parry their head more often, which lessens the chance you'll hit parry.

Macian

All this lycan talk has made me decide to switch a class out for Bahkatu again. 

So, to contribute to the discussion (rather than giving random advice)...

I was checking out limb damage numbers, and clawing is 5.17% (vs 5200 hp) whereas Hamstring/Rend are 2.55%

Given those amounts, and the ability of hamstring/rend to eat salve balance and prevent pre-restore, I'm beginning wonder if there's much point to clawing at all. 

Toz

Clawing is good to hurry up the limb damage to make them pre-resro, but I stuck primarily to hamstring/rend

Irruel

@macian
I basically always use claw+hamstring or claw+rend, it's a good compromise between the two, I think. If they prerestore after the mending app, and you use the server-side queue to do a double rend/hamstring, you will get a mangle from it. It depends a bit on whether they have a tree tatt ready to go or not.

Which brings me to another point for @amberlea about howl combos - an advantage to not using paralysis howl at all, is that people usually try to tree away hidden affs, and that means less treeing away mending breaks.

I'd really like to be able to track their limb damage well enough to get the final break with claw left and hamstring right, but with parry systems as they are though, targeting two different limbs isn't what it used to be.

Ezalor

It's also kinda impossible to track limb damage because Lycans are "bugged" and their limb damage varies based on target's max HP.

Actually I guess you can just quickassess before every fight and try to figure out the formula to do so.

Irruel

@ezalor
So before, you could get close to a break then change to split-limb targeting until the break happened. The damage tracking didn't need to be perfect. But now, to succeed in a split limb combo on the legs, I need to target arms a round or two first, to make sure all parrying is away from the legs, then go back to legs. And when the leg still doesn't break, back to the arms to refocus parry up top again.

It's just not worth the bother.

Amberlea

I've been doing a lot better trying out the different suggestions from you guys, thanks a ton!