Characters with no aspect lore

[chattius 2,536]

Often the aspect lore can give stuff you can't replace with items: For example life leech from combat arts can only be boosted by higher ca-level and better aspect lore.

 

But what if you take the lore just for its x% damage. Do you really really really need it?

 

Let's consider a 3 aspect character. You want to have damage doing combat arts from all 3 aspects. Should you get all 3 lores, all 3 foci, combat discipline, ancient magic , concentration.... And have just armour lore for your defense?

 

One of my first characters was a high elf using all 3 aspects-foci but only having arcane lore. I was surprised that with special selected equipment my melee elf could do nice fire and ice spells. I never put much more thoughts into this, because an character optimized for a single aspect can be so much more powerful I thought.

 

Then a dragon mage challenge at the youth club of my daughters put the old idea in the light again. Several of the dragon mage spells can be used for damage and debuffing:

dragon strike to stun and reduce hit chance of enemies

mind strike to slow regeneration of combat arts

energy blaze to slow attack speed

...

 

But they are in different aspects. To have nice buffs all 3 buffs would be needed. To have high per cents in debuffs high combat art levels would be needed, which favours the foci. Now add that the familar can be modded for casting speed and gives nice intelligence. So the question arose: do we really need the lores?

If you take 3 lores and no combat discipline (to allow a second defensive skill) will it be that much more damage than no lore but having combat discipline. If you look at the damage numbers the x% damage from a lore and discipline are not that far away from each other.

So the big question is: Is the x% damage applied the same way for the lore and combat discipline?

(This is really a question, I haven't a general answer for this yet )

 

The dragon mage resulted in a character which kills mobs with a combination of dragon strike (wide range DoT, stun and less than half attack value for enemies), destroyer (fire and forget to hunt for survivors in a wide area), energy blaze (area DoT, slowing attacks), and gust of wind (mainly auto targetting on a distant survivor, so all gusts on a single target). It has shield lore, toughness, constitution and armour lore for non combat art defense. Add 3 buffs and that the damage spells are defense too. You are able to pull a big amount of enemies without much risc.

 

For mobs you use staff and shield, socketed with x% damage. At bosses you use a second weapon slot with x% life leech shuriken and a shield, both socketed with hit chance. So at bosses you have 4 defensive skills, 3 defensive buffs (protector is 20% physical mitigation for us), and 4 combat arts for defense, 3 of them doing DoT.

 

All in all this character is not the weakling my daughters exspected.

 

So the another question is: which other classes could be played without an aspect lore and has anyone experiences with them?

[essjayehm 58]

I guess any character could be OK without aspect lores, provided they are using mostly spell-based Combat Arts and have the Ancient Magic skill. Careful equipment selection and socketing can easily replace the lores. Casting speed and chance for criticals can be easily found!

 

Combat Discipline can add more damage multiplier, if needed.

 

The main thing that is irreplaceable would be to have all the modification points faster than level 199.(?)

[Dragon Brother 619]

I guess any character could be OK without aspect lores, provided they are using mostly spell-based Combat Arts and have the Ancient Magic skill. Careful equipment selection and socketing can easily replace the lores. Casting speed and chance for criticals can be easily found!

 

Combat Discipline can add more damage multiplier, if needed.

 

The main thing that is irreplaceable would be to have all the modification points faster than level 199.(?)

 

Casting speed yes, critical chance no...only the lores appear to effect a Combat Arts chance to crit unless it can be modded for extra crit (for Ice and Blood anyway).

[rnarchlord 0]

I recently created a Seraphim with all three Focuses and no Aspect Lore. At the moment she is level 30 (SP campaign) and seems to have no problem handling even 8-10 mobs at a time. She still has more skills to choose and I am debating whether I really need to add a Lore or not. She is "resting" as my 8 year old grandaughter wanted me to start a High Elf and a Dragon mage so she could see them do their thing. She had been making the choices of skills and what attributes to put points into in these, her creations and both are also currently level 30. Now that she has gone home I will be picking up the seraphim again and she how she does.

Concentration

Exalted Warrior Focus

Celestial Magic Focus

Revered Technology Focus

Sword Weapons

Armor Lore

Shield Lore

3 empty skills

 

The first character I created was also a Seraphim but with just Celestial Magic Lore and no focus. She too has been "resting" while I focused on several other builds. My first seraphim is level 46 and in Griffinborough (SP). She does considerable damage but her CA level is limited due to lack of Focus. I am considering adding a Focus as one of her two remaining skills.

Sword Weapons

Ranged Weapons

Armor Lore

Celestial Magic Lore

Divine Devotion

Shield Lore

Tactics Lore

Concentration

2 empty skills

Edited August 10, 2010 by rnarchlord

[cheesehead 0]

I guess any character could be OK without aspect lores, provided they are using mostly spell-based Combat Arts and have the Ancient Magic skill.

 

I have an Inquisitor at level 97 that has Astute Supremacy Focus, but not Lore. With Clustering Maelstrom at level 30 or so, I still do plenty of damage without Ancient Magic. What's left is always a mostly-dead champion, which I mop up with some melee for a little RPH and move on to the next mob. Frenetic Fervor modded for Faith takes care of casting time issues.

[Shattered Rift 2]

First, I should point out that I only have experience with Fallen Angel.

 

As others have pointed out, you can compensate (to a degree) for the shortcomings of not having the relevant Lore skills, but that eats into your armor and weapon(s) slots. Depending on how you balance this, you're still losing something as a consequence, either damage or skills or... what else do people slot into armor? It's been a few months since I last played.

 

Personally, I was in the process of designing and testing a triple-Aspect Temple Guardian (described here: http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=15383). In his case in particular, I considered the Lore skills necessary for general damage output, so much so that I actually came to the conclusion that the Lore skills were more important than the Focus skills. (For the Fallen Angel version, I still intended to use both. The Ice & Blood design was going to need to sacrifice a skill, but I hadn't yet determined which.)

 

Short story: triple-Aspect Temple Guardians aren't really that synergetic. Lost Fusion and Source Warden don't meld particularly well. On the other hand, the build did "work," at least up to Level 25 or so (when I stopped playing and went on to other games I'd been neglecting).

 

Unfortunately, I don't recall my exact rationale for considering the Lore skills superior to the Focus skills, and I'm pretty sure that most people agree that the Focus skills are the more important of the two (even though I came to the opposite conclusion for the particular build).

[r00ster 1]

It depends on character, and what skills and Combat Arts you will use.

 

I.e. If you make a seraphim, and wish to depend on the health regen mod from celestial, it will not have enough hp regen without the lore.

I had to recreate a toon on my switch of servers because it USED to be enough, but I forgot we had it nerfed.

 

Shadow warriors is a great soldier for these kinds of things tho,

 

I.e. taking astral lord focus just to mod shadow viel into a buff, will provide better defense (because nothing sees or attacks you...) than choosing a defensive skill (other than constitution and armor lore, as they are 'musts' in my book).

You would never need the 'lore' in this case.

 

Many elfs also forgo the delphic lore, but this comes with prices, no superior health regen from grand invigoration, no 'garaunteed' blocking spells with expulse, as it's not always about damage, but also how the lores/focus affect the mods, and subtle aspects of an... aspect.

 

It's possible any way you want it, but things like these should be considered when choosing is all. That said it takes a vast knowledge of all the numbers 'behind the scenes' of the game, ca mods etc etc to realize to full potentials.

 

Cheers,

[chattius 2,536]

Yes, we should do a list which modifiers on which Combat Arts win from the lore and which are not.

All mods which do fixed life leech on weapon Combat Arts seem to win, every mod which does base armour, hp regeneration or more hitpoints too.

 

When I looked at the character of my daughters yesterday it was level 142. Mentalism focus was at 75, the other 2 just 31. Ancient magic and combat displine were mastered. Same for shield, armour, constitution, toughness. The tactic is to run a wide circle and then fire a 4-area-ca combination in the mid of the collected mob. With a rare yellow shield with scalable block chance there seem no melee hits coming through. Spell block is close to 100%, reducing DoT damage is 90%, ranged block at 65%, damage mitigation at 16% all channel and around 35000 hitpoints.

Since its offensive spells are part defensive too it even protects to some degree the lore-less Dryad shopper in the party.