Self Sufficient Melee Elf Guide - HC 2.40

[chattius 2,674]

The Idea

 

Important for patch 2.43

This guide was for 2.40. In patch 2.43 I would change enhanced perception for a weapon lore. Reflections seem to be less harmful, so a reflected double hit is no longer a certain death. For more damage, change enhanced perception for a weapon lore. The weapon lore gives a fixed amount of attack value and the alchemy trophy a percent value. In combination they really shine. This is the way I would go now, not knowing what beasts/combat arts the addon will bring. Alchemy gives more flexibility.

 

Bargain, Perception , no alchemy , but a weapon skill is of cause working too, just need some jewels/smith to boost the hit chance against bosses.

 

The old bargain, perception and alchemy, but no weapon skill build is of cause still playable. I saw no reason to restart my character because of the patch. I was just socketing more rings with damage x-x. I raised my base damage, because I take now less damage from reflections. My character is now level 161, hardcore, niob.

 

Important for Ice and Blood

The AddOn brought regeneration per hit. You can now recharge combat arts with weapon hits. So way higher Combat Art-Levels are possible.

The AddOn brought nasty enemies with x% life leech attacks. Since it is x% life leech more hitpoints are no protection. 3 hits with 35% life leech will kill you, it doesn't matter if you have 20000 or 40000 hitpoints. But it will take longer to recover 40000 hitpoints before the next life leech hits.

The AddOn brought a rune cap of 200 runes.

 

Read the following guide and discussion knowing that it was mainly for 2.40

 

Links to articles about melee elves:

 

Videos:

If you want to see a video about a melee elf in action, soldats did one:

 

 

The shield maiden, to test if you like melee elves, which can be changed easily into an ice elf if not:

http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=12525

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=65974

 

Magic coup build (maths about magic coup and one of the first in english forum):

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=53875

 

Elves with two-handed weapon (discussion):

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=61751

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=60343

 

Stormy Melee Elf by Geekster (guide):

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=56615

 

Melee-Elf with perception and bargaining (experimental, but working build):

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=59869

 

PvP-Melee-Elf my oldest daughter is using to slaughter classmates:

http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/sho...ead.php?t=64466

 

The Guide

This was never planed as a guide. I wanted to gave a report about playing a very special elf: A melee elf which is not using any weapon lore. The elf is now level 131 hardcore.

Playing was mainly done at lan-parties with friends, because the internet connection at our countryside village resulted into too much lag. The idea to this character started when our playgroup created some extra rules: The start chest should be empty and each build should at least use 3 general (green) skills. And of cause hardcore. We play every two weeks at weekends at volunteer fire fighters when doing night-watch. So I had 2 weeks to put some thoughts into the character.

It is hardcore, so the main reasons for dying should be covered:

You die because you take more damage than you have hitpoints

• all attribute points go into vitality and choose constitution
  

You die because you receive damage quicker than you are healing

• the regeneration buff will be modified for life regeneration, together with arcane lore this will result in a nice regeneration even in combat.
  
• the main attack magic coup will be modified for life leech and not mana steal.
  
• we will use reflection, blocking and evasion to have the chances that we are hit are reduced by multiplication of each of the three
  

In patch 2.40 reflections will become a major factor

• expulse magic will be used to remove reflection buffs from enemies
  
• magic coup will be limited to 40% of my hitpoints- 70% seems save in 2.43
  

You die because you are surrounded by too much enemies

• expulse magic will be used to split up groups
  
• teleport will be modified to give invisibility at landing
  

Fire traps may stack at your location and can give the damage the same tick

• fire mitigation from the fire skin buff is used
  

So far we have arcane lore and arcane focus for our main attack and the regeneration buff.

We have concentration and inferno focus for the fire skin.

We have shield lore and armour lore to allow high blocking.

We have constitution to boost our hitpoints.

 

That are already 7 skills. And the rules said 3 green one to be choosen. Should I sacrifice one of the skills needed to give a good defense in exchange for a weapon lore? I decided against it.

 

What will a weapon lore give:

Attack speed?

Not in this case because magic coup gets it speed from arcane lore.

Hit chance?

My play experience showed that a weapon lore is needed to hit bosses. If your are hitting champions at 100% without weapon lore already then weapon lore could be replaced by alchemy for boss fights.

Unlock weapon modifiers?

Most unique one-hand weapons don't have modifiers which have to be unlocked. By not choosing a weapon lore I will hit equally good with any weapon. So I am more flexible in my build:

• Shafts with reduce physical resists on enemy
  
• Daggers with ignore armor
  
• Polearms with hit chance to hit several enemies
  
• shurikens with x% life leech to kill bosses
  
• Bows, pistols, magic staves....
  

All possible

 

And to get equipment I will use bargaining and enhanced perception. Bargaining to buy the +all skills Jewels with enemy can't evade chance. EP to find uniques.

 

 

The character

 

Attributes:

All points go into vitality.

 

The skills:

02 bargaining (1)

03 arcane lore (2)

05 arcane focus (3)

08 armour lore (8)

12 constitution (10)

18 concentration (6)

25 inferno focus (7)

35 shield lore (5)

50 alchemy (9)

65 enhanced perception (4)

 

The brackets give in which order I will do the mastery in the skills. Skill points settings are done by following rule, top priority to low priority:

1: If a skill is needed to unlock another skill then put points in it till its unlocked.

2: if fire skin is not fully modified yet put points in inferno focus

3: If a skill is not at its mastery yet and there is no unmastered skill with a lower number you can still put points in, then put points in this skill.

 

I used this system to explain what to do at level-ups to my daughter and it worked nicely. And she was only 13.

 

Modifications of Combat arts

First modify the regeneration buff for fire tree and life regeneration.

Then modify magic coup for damage, life leech and stray damage.

Modify fire skin to block arrows, reflect melee and give more fire damage.

 

You can leave the other modifiers untouched till you get a feeling for this character.

Personally I modified expulse magic for defensive and debuff power.

For teleport I wanted a quicker teleport regeneration.

Cobalt strike: I modified it to damage, electrify and critical. It allows me to weaken a big enemy or to hit a single enemy from a distance and have only it alone running to me.

Weakened enemies are easier to hit and are themself worser in hitting me.

 

 

Play experience

 

The start:

If you have another character already, sell some items from the shared chest and buy a bow. Bows are best in early game for an elf, because they shoot fast and you kill from a distance. Try to get GI and magic coup runes. Modify GI to fire and life regeneration. Next modify magic coup for damage, life leech and stray damage.

As soon as you have concentration try to get unmodified crystal skin as second buff. Use a sword now and do magic coup whenever it has recharged. Modify fireskin to block arrows, reflect melee and more fire damage. If you notice that your hit chance is too low buy jewels with '-enemy chance to evade'.

When you get shield lore change crystalskin for fireskin.

At level 34 get a shield which has its defense value or block-chance for melee in red and if possible some sockets. When taking shield lore at level 35 use this shield, if it had block-chance in red then it will have a block-chance around 25% now (the higher shield lore, the higher the block chance).

At level 50 you are able to use trophies with alchemy. Especially troll-teeth trophies are nice because they boost your attack value for a big amount at high alchemy. Get used to the trophies and where you can get them. If you hunt for a while in orc area you can try different weapons with the boosted hit chance from the trophies. Later you will use trollteeth to hit bosses. If a boss has no reflection a good way to kill him is to use shurikens with +% life leech(look at shops for them). If you notice that you can do left click attacks at boss fights before magic coup is recharged drink concentration potions.

 

Try to keep magic coup around 0.5 seconds regeneration time and its damage at 40% of your hitpoints. You will have life leech from magic coup, boosted regeneration from GI buff, better block from shields and fire skin.... You will get hit less and less and heal faster and faster. And you have a nice amount of hitpoints, but: ....

 

CAUTION:

Some enemies reflect your melee damage back to you. Use expulse magic to remove the reflecting aura from them. For expulse magic: If you can remove the reflection aura from blue turtle champions it is high enough. If not read some runes in expulse magic. If you fight against mages, do it in an expulse magic circle to block most of the enemy spells. You can survive 2 reflected magic coups. Don't panic if you see that your coup is reflected. In panic you won't release the mouse buttons and your reflected magic coups will do more damage towards you than the enemy. You have 1 second to release the buttons, use it.

 

Variants

Robust Melee Elf

If you are knowing all the enemies with reflection and how to avoid them, change enhanced perception for sword lore. Leveling will be way faster in areas with no reflectors if you take a sword with doublehits (doublehits from weapon mastery seem not to work with magic coup in 2.43 PC), but be careful in hardcore: an overlooked turtle, double-hit from sword mastery and all reflected and FECAL MATTER! happens.....

If you play on a console: Sadly alchemy is hard to use on consoles. I would change alchemy and perception for sword lore and speed lore/storm focus.

 

Alchemy

 

Probably most players asked themself which use alchemy may have. If I need better hit chance or defense I could take speed lore without putting thoughts into trophies, if I have enough, how long they will still last in a fight.... I would probably never have considered alchemy if it wasn't for a challenge.

The numbers below are for level 120, 297 alchemy, Niob (influences some trophies). At this level the trophies are more than 48 seconds up for me. You can only use one of each type the same moment, but several different types.

 

The trophies:

• branch trophy: +90,9% blockchance root effects, from plants - Nice in PvP vs Dryads or if you know that you have to pass an area with enemies who cast root effects
  
• demon tooth: regeneration per hit 4,5s, from demons - never used in my builds. RPH seems to be wrong by factor 10(?)
  
• harpy feather: blockchance projectiles 85%, from dryads - used in PvP mainly
  
• iron ore: 3000 physical armour, from stone creatures, minotaurs, griffons - makes 12000 with +300% armour value - whenever I fear to take strong physical hits
  
• leather hat: +100% attack speed, humanoid monsters
  
• roasted joint: 100% healing, animals - It seems to have less delay in its effects. And PvP if healing potions are against rules.
  
• skull: +30% critical hits, undeads - I have so many of them that I used them against everything which I knew to be not dead at one magic coup.
  
• talisman: 37.5% evade, humans - at hard hitting enemies
  
• troll tooth: +999.9% hitchance - being able to hit a boss or tough champion with any weapontype, which is for me life leech weapons. If I run into a melee reflector I use trolltooth and a projectile weapon.
  

The potions:

The biggest pink and blue potions last 187.7s. The green one does 50% of my hitpoints, the yellow one -60% regeneration time, and the healing potion is at 100%.

 

Before I would do speed lore I would do alchemy. The mentor potions are nearly permanent, you have more fun in using different weapons because of trolltooth and leatherhat, you can nearly ignore root effects,.....

 

 

Magic Immunes

 

Magic Coup is overwriting any damage modifier which is socketed. So a magic coup build runs into problems at enemies with magic immunity. If ancient magic will remove this immunity is not proved yet. In my builds I am not using ancient magic.

 

What possibilities does a melee elf have:

• Magic coup is a melee attack so ignore armour is an option.
  
• Life leech at silver modifier can do up to 30% of the magic coup damage. And life leech is extra damage without any resist against it.
  
• Life leech (for bosses best +x% life leech) can be found on some weapons. Some tests about x% life leech: http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.c...64&postcount=6
  
• You can optimize your magic coup for physical damage, by not socketing a damage modifier and using a weapon without any natural damage.
  
• You can do left click attacks, but this option is more for polearm elves who can use tactics lore to unlock polearms.
  

 

PvP

 

We planed cavalry builds for a weekend's night-watch at volunteer firefighters. But a nasty car crash ate up most of the time. So we did some

PvP in multiplayer LAN doing best of 5 rules. All characters were around level 115.

This character versus a Pyromancer Elf:

3:1 - My expulse magic was stronger because I had arcane lore too. His expulse magic was useless against my magic coup.

Tactic: cobalt strike modified to reduce stats(weakening), teleport , expulse magic to remove buffs, magic coup, teleport to stun, magic coup, teleport, ....

 

Versus a caster Dryad:

3:2 - Had to learn to use trophies to counter root effects.

 

Versus an Inquisitor:

3:0 - Blocked spells with expulse magic, and his attempt to do melee against a shield with scaled block chance, fire skins reflection and equip and trophies boosting evasion to 90% resulted in not a single hit.

 

Versus an Shadow Warrior:

I am curious how I will do against him. We had no time at weekend to test it. The super willpower will be a tough opponent for my expulse magic. And he will not take the fight easy, seeing that players who laughed at my character were loosing in PvP.

 

Is this a guide?

 

Yes and no. The post is mainly to show that you can play funny builds with good planning. If you plan a melee elf on the PC I would play the variant listed under variants.

You should know now that alchemy allows to kill a non reflecting boss with trollteeth and leatherhats trophies using a weapon with x% life leech.

For myself I was re-reading old builds about any class and whenever I read the build sucks later on when trying to fight bosses in niob, I asked myself could the problem be solved with alchemy?

Inquisitor which depends on souls for his chance to hit and has none at bosses, alchemy could be considered.

Dryad with nature and vodoo which wants to do bargaining, alchemy to unlock bargaining and get the possibility to kill bosses with life leech shurikens.

Shadow Warrior with astral lore and blacksmithing, add ranged boss killing with alchemy

You don't need to play this build, but if you stopped to say alchemy is useless then this post has done its job

 

Feedback

If you are playing a build with alchemy or now plan to play one, please give me some information. I plan to translate my german Alchemy guide into english and I need links to english builds with alchemy.

 

ToDo

I kinda forgot to continue work on this on: it was moved into the guide section in a time when you couln't edit the first article of a thread in the guide section. I added the link collection from my article in the SIF. I am not certain if I will update this guide for the AddOn. I think I will keep it as it is for the people without the AddOn and do an own article about melee elves in the AddOn.

Edited March 15, 2010 by chattius

[StiCk_eM 1]

I've been following your posts on the SIF closely because since Sacred 2 came out I was interested in a melee HE (which I've taken to level 60), but haven't gotten time to revisit it yet. Your idea to use alchemy is very cool and inventive. I'm glad people are still experimenting.

 

I'm sticking with the more traditional build using sword lore. Do you think spell resistance is a must even with expulse magic? And if I don't take spell resistance then I have two skill slots open...any recommendations besides going for alchemy (especially cause I don't want to take bargaining)?

 

I was curious about ancient magic but of course do not know how it works at mastery level. And I was thinking maybe combat discipline would be the way to go because I know it increases damage and will reduce timers.

 

Thoughts?

 

Thanks for your insightful post,

 

StiCk_eM

[chattius 2,674]

As I listed in the variants section, alchemy is not a must have. For me it added a lot of fun to experiment with trophies and different weapons.

For a melee elf my main problem playing hardcore was, that I did too much damage !

I suffered from an eye surgery so I often overlooked enemies with reflection in the stray damage distance of magic coup.

A weapon lore with double-hits made it hard to adjust my damage output in a way to survive 2 hits on reflectors with one coup. With a weapon lore and mastery I would want to survive 2 hits which can be doublkehits. So I would have to survive 4 times the damage of my magic coup.

So the decision was to get my hit chance with alchemy for every weapon type and stay away from doublehits. Luckily not everyone has these bad eyes. So if you are sure to see all reflectors and are able to avoid hitting them to quickly or always debuff them you can go a full damage build even in hardcore.

Just use a low damage weapon set whenever you walk in areas with reflectors.

Since you do enough damage you can sacrifice some of your damage sockets to socket stuff to increase you hit chance. If you add ancient magic you could even use cobalt strike on melee reflectors. Its all up to you. Do whatever gives the most fun for you. I like to experiment and I want a lot of possibilities in a build because I lack the time to play much.

[StiCk_eM 1]

So you just think tactics is totally useless?

 

And yes I realize your eye situation like I said I've been following your posts for sometime now so I think I've read it in almost every post you've written about this build

 

Thanks,

 

StiCk_eM

[chattius 2,674]

Tactic lore:

Magic coup can kill normal mobs even with its stray damage in niob. That makes reflected magic coups this dangerous in hard core. As long you are not planing to do left click attacks tactics is not needed in a magic coup build.

 

Spell resistance:

I use trophies when I run through areas which I know to hold enemies with rooting attacks. Without alchemy spell resistance to keep your mobility may be not the worst idea. Also I have a weapon slot filled with a shuriken, so at casters I can stay in my expulse circle and throw at the casters outside. Since I am not using a weapon lore my chance to hit is balanced with equipment to hit champions with every weapon at 90% and for the tougher fights I add trophies. I notice that most melee elves calculate their hit chance for their main weapon. So changing to a ranged significantly reduce their chance to hit.

 

You can 'buy' most skills with jewels in sockets. You can buy hit chance, evade, block, and so on. But you have only a limited number of sockets. The overall balance of a build has to fit.

If you don't go shield lore because you want to play a lancer then you need something other defensiv: storm focus with cascading shroud and ice storms for slowing, or speed lore for more defense..... You have to balance a character.

 

I played a lancer-elf with hit and run tactics and she was a lot of fun. I did her in 2008 when there was a lot of confusion about melee-elves. But I was without build related deaths with her. Our twins climbing on my knees and disturbing and stuff like this is not build related.

 

2 tactic lore

3 armour

5 concentration

8 polearms

12 arcane lore

18 storm focus

25 arcane focus

35 speed lore

50 constitution

65 inferno focus

 

I used magic coup as a group killer with high regeneration times and my normal left clicks could do group damage too because the polearm had a chance to hit more enemies. At bosses most of the damage came from x% life leech of a special polearm so even the left clicks did a hell of damage on bosses. I used crystal skin and cascading shroud till begin of platin, then I noticed that physical resistence became less important and that inferno focus with a reflecting fire skin may have been better. So I decided to do it instead of spell resistance which I had planed. The elf made a lot of fun as long I could play her.

Of cause with my nowadays experience I would do the skills in another order, but the set of skills I did in 2008 are not unplayable even in 2.40.

 

A melee elf forgives a lot, as long you have life leech from magic coup and GI to life regeneration. And do vitalíty the first levels as a buffer.

Feel free to experiment...

Edited June 30, 2009 by chattius

[Viper007 1]

This sounds fun. I might have to try out the melee high elf. I always thought of her as the weakest defensive character in the game with no hope of surviving melee combat. Looks like I was wrong.

Edited June 30, 2009 by Viper007

[StiCk_eM 1]

I quickly found out when I started building my first melee HE when Sacred 2 first came out that she was incredibly powerful and all those glass cannon builds with the HE that were running around had no chance of standing against a solid melee HE. She could kill almost as fast, but take a beating unlike her counter parts! That's when I got excited about her.

 

Basically I think I will be taking Spell Resistance and my final choice is between a few skills:

1) Combat Discipline - will add damage across the board and reduce some timers, but will it be a big enough increase?

2) Ancient Magic - the hope that this skill would reduce monster resistances at level 75 for our coup to run even more freely makes this tempting, but I don't know if it is worth the risk to waste a skill slot.

3) Speed Lore - would add attack, defense, and speed to our build making her even more deadly. Moving from mob to mob more quickly while being hit less and hitting more often. Would it be worth it?

 

So those are basically what I'm going to have to decide between,

 

StiCk_eM

Edited June 30, 2009 by StiCk_eM

[chattius 2,674]

I would choose speed lore. Main reason for it would be its defense value which is multiplied with the shield lore per cents. Run speed is experience rate: you are quicker at the mobs. Run speed is defense: you can dictate where you want to fight and can avoid to get circled.

The extra hit chance from speed lore frees up a socket or 2.

 

Ancient magic:

For resistances there is life leech, which can't be resisted or with sword lore: choose a dagger with ignore armour.

 

Combat discipline:

I can one hit normal mobs in niob without double-hit from a weapon mastery or having combat discipline.

 

The problem of a melee elf is not to do enough damage, but to do enough damage to kill while still being able to survive a reflection. And at higher levels I had to reduce the damage of my magic coup more and more. Often I found myself throwing knives on the turtle island when I planed to visit the poison lord.

 

Reflections are hard for a melee elf. You can debuff an reflecting aura with expulse magic, but you have to know that there is a reflector.

You have just magic coup, so one of the few ways to fight reflectors is having a weapon in your slots which does a lot less damage whenever you fear that you can hit a reflector.

[StiCk_eM 1]

Yup I think I had convinced myself that I would pick Speed Lore already it just seems good and I like to run fast .

 

So does the mod "Chance to ignore armor" work with Magic Coup? Cause I was pretty sure that it didn't work with spells, but I know Magic Coup is a weapon based Combat Art so its kinda confusing, but I'll take your word for it whether it does or not.

 

Thanks again,

 

StiCk_eM

[chattius 2,674]

I am quite sure that it worked, but that was at my old melee elves. In new builds I am more on life leech. I will check again when I find the time- more a free game computer as long as my kids are not in bed.

The arcane set has ignore armour and I am quite sure that the developers had a magic coup build in mind when giving disregard armour as a set bonus.

[Epox 2]

yep the melee he can be quite powerfull if tweaked right, I know that because I had sword and board melee high elfs build is also posted in a thread, I think thier are many ways to go with here some stronger some weaker and its kinda up to the player to find out what suits better for the build that the person wanna make

[berks69 0]

Hi all

 

I am fairly new to Sacred 2 and have it on the PS3. First off, thanks for this thread, after making about 4 characters and playing them all to about level 35 only to discover they were gimped at higher lvls, it is really good to see some solid advice from guys who have actually made it to Niob with a char that is still kicking ass.

 

A couple of questions that I was hoping you could help out with:

- So this is what I was thinking based on this build in terms of skils (not too worried about the order, just the actual skills):

1) Delph focus (want GI high)

2) Delph lore (damage on MC)

3) concentration (GI and IS)

4) bargaining (haven't tried this out yet on my others toons but everyone on the forum raves about it so thought I would see what all the fuss is about)

5) enhanced perception (at higher lvls, a lot of the fun for me is just finding new funky items)

6) armour lore (I wanna live past level 2)

7) constitution (I wanna live past level 3)

 

Now, of the remaining 3 skills, I need one of them to be either pyro lore or pyro focus so that I can mod my skin. Which one of these should I go for and is it worth investing in the pyro aspect apart from the skin? I'm just a bit worried that I'll get bored just running around MCing everything with no other diversity to this toon?

 

As Chattius mentioned, Alchemy is difficult to use on a console so was wondering how crucial it is to a successful (long term Niob) HE build? The SacredWiki states that ancient magic and tactics don't stack with MC, so I'm not looking at them (unless I plan on using some fire skills in which case maybe ancient magic?). Speed lore and shield lore are also options, but again that means no fIREpower (parden the pun). Basically my question is what should my last 3 stats be?

 

With respect to attributes, how essential is it to put all points into Vitality? Although I haven't played HC (not sure you can on the console) my aim would be not to die once. Do you still do enough damage without pumping up your int / dex / str (depending on what weapon you plan on using).

 

So to summarise:

1) Great guide - thanks

2) what would you recommend my last 3 skills be?

3) will I still do enough damage (on the console, not sure if they changed anything) if I put all my extra attrib points into Vit?

 

Thanks

"Aspiring HE slice and dicer" (Just discovered emoticons, boy am I having fun now.....)

[chattius 2,674]

Fire focus, shield lore and ancient magic would be a possibility if the first 7 skills are already fixed. You want fire focus and not lore, because the level of fire skin gives it reflect chance and more fire damage in gold mod. The level of fire demon gives more fire damage.

I would modify fireskin first before level 50, then meteor for its stun at around level 80( without lore there won't be much damage but it stills stuns long enough for a magic coup) and last fire demon at level 120-130. With 75 points for fire mastery you can get 3 full modified spells.

You can use cobalt strike as a ranged attack. Because you will be a bit hybrid, I would modify magic coup to sure hit and not damage as first modifier. Also sure hit helps to get some hit chance since you won't have alchemy at tough opponents.

 

Modify GI to silver first: fire and life regeneration.

Magic coup next: hit, life leech and stray damage.

cobalt strike: in your case as an arcane mage: chain, chain/weaken-both are okay, explosion

teleport : faster regen

expulse magic : power and the other defensive stuff

 

I would go all vitality at least till level 75. Life leech and life regeneration need a base life pool to work with.

 

All what is changed in skills is alchemy for ancient magic, so the defense should be okay. Also console has more hotkeys so you can have a ranged cobalt strike and a meteor for stun (and a bit damage). Try to damage the opponents from a distance and if they are close use your weapon to have some extra heal with life leech.

 

You probably have to find your own balance with hit and damage jewelry. If you play this way please give some note if it is working or not, and if not where the problems are, so we can help others players to avoiid same mistakes.

[berks69 0]

Chattius

 

Thanks for the input, agree with what you suggested on the attrib points. Atm she is only level 6, so I think what I will do is see how she is going when it comes time to choose her last 2 skills (agree with your point on the fire focus so that one becomes the 8th skill for sure) I will update this post and let you (and whoever else may be interested) know how she is doing.

 

Thanks again

[chattius 2,674]

Added some stuff to make the guide fit for 2.43.

[chattius 2,674]

I played a weapon-skill-less melee-elf and my daughter did sword lore instead perception. She now reached sword mastery this weekend and so I asked her if she was seeing any doublehits, the result:

 

Doublehits from Mastery are not triggered by Magic Coup

 

I noted this in the variant section of my guide, since the original guide has no weapon skill at all. So a short write up what a weapon skill does for magic coup:

 

I gives some hit chance and it unlocks some modifiers.

 

Nothing else because attack speed for magic coup comes from arcane lore, and thats why a too high weapon level has no effect on magic coup.

Magic lore has a hidden attack chance in addition to its first modifier. So even last kill shows only 50%, these 50% are only for the left click. Magic coup may hit to 90%, but it is not shown. A developer confirmed the hidden chance in german forum. So even without a weapon skill but high magic coup levels you will be able to hit normal= non-bosses beasts with a high enough hitchance. I was kinda puzzled that my level 90 magic coup seemed to hit 100% except a few bosses, without moifying it for sure hit, without using alchemy trophies and without a weapon skill or speed lore and without putting points in strength or dexterity. So now I know that magic coup and some more weapon combat arts have a hidden hit chance.

 

Weapon mastery may be needed in high levels to unlock weapon modifiers, but there is no need to reach mastery before these weapons occure. So doing inferno mastery before weapon mastery may be wise.

[chattius 2,674]

I bought the AddOn. This is a one way street: all my 2.43 savefiles are now 2.64. So I can't do any testing with the 2.43 version anymore.

 

The Character survived both new areas in the AddOn in Niob only because of high Hitpoints, and carefully placed expulse magic.

 

Damage over time is now less dampened by resistances or mitigation, if at all. Some monsters have high life leech Combat Arts and if they appear in a group and decide to do a synchronized attack you are in deep trouble. Runes are capped at 200.

 

You now really need:

Reduction of DoT, CA-block/reflect.So its best to modify in this way. I have no time to start again, but if I would do a new melee elf for the AddOn:

 

02 bargaining

03 arcane lore

05 arcane focus

08 armour lore

12 constitution

18 concentration

25 storm focus

35 shield lore

50 inferno focus

65 alchemy

 

Storm focus will bring an alternative skin with CA-reflect, cascading shroud and raging nimbus modified.

[chattius 2,674]

Gogo asked me to bring my article from SIF here to darkmatters. I started this with this thread but then 2 things happened:

Gogo moved the article from normal forum to guide section at a time when it was not possible to edit the main article in a guide

I bought the AddOn and it brought a lot of changes.

So I moved some links which are for 2.43 into the main guide now, I added some warnings about changes which happened after the guide was written.

 

But I will not do a rewrite for the AddOn. I will freeze this guide in the 2.43 version for the people who don't have the AddOn.

 

I will start a new article how I would design a melee elf for the AddOn. There are several ways to do it:

 

A FAQ: I will answer the most frequent questions about melee elves, but it is up to the reader to design his own elf.

or

A Guide: I will write down what I think is the best melee elf for the AddOn

[dwyrin 0]

I was wondering if you had written up a guide for the addon version of this guide or do you still recommend your post as of Posted Sep 7 2009, 09:31 AM ?

[chattius 2,674]

The main differences in the AddOn for this character are:

 

Regeneration per hit- you can now have way higher Combat Art-levels. Which is positive for this character.

 

Rune Cap: you can only read 200 runes. So it is mainly less hp regeneration since Combat Art regeneration can be countered with reg püer hit.

 

Reflection is not as dangerous as it was before. Positive too.

 

The biggest problem in the AddOn are enemies with Damage over Time and x% life leech. DoT can be countered with socketing. x% life leech is based on maximal hitpoints. So constitution and vitality won't help. Expulse magic is the only protection against this type of attack in the above build.

In the AddOn x% life leech could be 35% leech. So you can't allow to be hit for more than 2 leeches. I planed to do a new write up covering this aspect too.

 

I do not have the time to play that much anymore. I recovered from my surgeries and I am back at work and we have 5 kids. So I did no testing.

 

I would stay away from enhanced perception and take storm focus for the crystal skin and its spell reclect. This will be hopefully enough to prevent that you are hit too quickly with this x% leech if you use expulse magic with its spell block too. Crystal skin would then be used mainly at areas wit hnasty spells, while fireskin is at melee places.

Alchemy will do 100% heals and not only 50-75% heals in niob. So you should be able to heal up between the leeches. But as I said: I had no time to test it.