Another iffy-to-bad empoweree. Thought I had a decent role, but unless people somehow knew it was me and were going with my "wait for someone who likes long roles" thing (which seems unlikely) then I really screwed the pooch on this one. I sort of got into the role, but it wasn't really all that compelling and I'm pretty sure nobody got much of a distinctive impression out of me.

My empowerment interview with Thror was funny, but I really wanted to try to actually learn about his religion and go for something with a bit of depth, which is not at all how it went. And that's fine, it was still fun and might've developed further if I had more hours in common with Thror. Or maybe I just had a totally wrong-headed approach, who knows.

PK-wise I really had high hopes for this one, and was confident I'd do well. Heavy dam redux on a stick, drawn-out combat style I enjoy and other things that seemed to play to my strengths, but I was just completely worthless. My sups almost never seemed to land, and I'd be lucky to get two or three sups on someone before I had to run. And half the people I fought would routinely rip through me in 4-5 rounds through sanc without me landing a single sup. If 56 hours as a lowbie shaman without a single kill isn't the definition of completely pathetic worthlessness (CF PK-wise, anyhow) then I don't know what is. At the very least I should never talk about any game mechanics ever again because I obviously have no idea how this game works.

The final straw was losing to someone in basically the perfect context for me to land a kill. Low-str, weapon dependant warrior far from a healer, cursed area, making mistakes even I could see, but by the time I landed a blind and a plague I was at 50%, so I ran a bit to mend up but I just couldn't stay ahead so died shortly after. I fought him again to verify that I really do suck this much, and sure enough, he dropped me through physical resist (half-relevant), sanc, protection and stone skin while I only landed 3 somewhat poorly chosen sups (weaken, plague, blindness, the last one was just in the hope of being able to mend a bit, but I died from 41% with one command wasted trying to pick up a disarmed weapon).

Even with the light warpriest focus, I just couldn't land sups fast enough to have any success. Not that I had any idea if my light warpriest focus was working with my gear or not, but whatever.

Right now I'm just disgusted with my RP and PK performance, and I'm not even sure if CF is the game for me still or not. After 15 years or whatever, it just seems like my RP isn't much good anymore, and if this character is any indication I just get worse at PK, not better.

1. Minotaur shaman is not the best, to be honest. Better than fire giant, but arial or human is a lot better if you want to actually seal kills, just because of the pk range. Also, you make it sound like you are treating shamans as a warrior, where you can tank. Treat them like dagger specs. Land one or two supps, like blind/plague/curse, then gtfo and com mend !;!;!. Rinse repeat till dead. If you try again with a smarter and lower exp penatly race, you'll be much more successful.

2. RPing as a minotaur is horrible. You can't really go indepth a lot of times or go into specifics, since well...no one understands you. :P

My advice? Try playing a different combo, and you'll get a lot better results.

>The final straw was losing to someone in basically the perfect
>context for me to land a kill. Low-str, weapon dependant
>warrior far from a healer, cursed area, making mistakes even I
>could see

Why you gotta be so harsh? I will say this, I think I had to take off something like 4 items before I could wear a demon headed pendant to drop the spear I was using (which makes it really hard to switch weapons by the way). So: Yes, I am terrible, but come on!? Give a guy a break!?

Oh yeah, and I think I had something like 8 levels on you. That plays a part in saves too doesn't it?

It wasn't my intention to make you delete, sorry dude.

From the Log:

Zhaldurek tells you 'Annd iv I amm doooo weak doo vighd yoou, denn I doo nnood detherhe doo lihe.'

Missed that while I was walking. Probably would have tried to talk you off the ledge had I seen that.

>Why you gotta be so harsh?

I'm not saying you're terrible, at all. You made a couple mistakes, I was just pointing out that it's not like I had a guy in a perfect set up, but he turned out to be marcus. You chased well, got the kill, etc. I wasn't trying to put you down.

>It wasn't my intention to make you delete, sorry dude.

Course it wasn't, but it wasn't just you. It was the basic frustration with doing so very poorly with a class I've always perceived as being very tough in the low levels.

>Heavy dam redux on a stick, drawn-out combat style...

My experience with a shaman is that some people really do just beat your ass down. Most warriors, for example, unless you're souped up with non-inherent protections.

Otoh, at hero, you can pump out some decent damage just spamming demonfire. Especially against people w/o great saves. Also, wither will take some people completely out of the game. (Which may not be a good thing as far as "killing them" goes, but it at least lets you make them run away.)

>My sups almost never seemed to land...

Were you fighting people higher level than you? Or classes like bards and paladins, that usually walk around w/ tons of saves?

>And half the people I fought would routinely rip through me in 4-5 rounds through sanc without me landing a single sup.

That sounds kind of extreme for "half the people you fought", unless you were just up against an unusually tough batch of characters. Given you were evil, that's maybe even more surprising.

What were your parry and shield block skills? Were all these guys who tore you up wielding weapons shamans don't learn?

One random thought on the last encounter you mentioned: it's not always a good idea to "sell out" for the blind, since the guy you're fighting may have the means to cure it. If he does, then you potentially just wasted a lot of time.

If he didn't have items with which to heal himself, which you should be able to figure out using locate object, then you might could have gone for straight up damage. Dispel, throw some damage, flee and heal, repeat. Even better if you can heal at a faster-than-mend-wounds rate via consumables.

>Were you fighting people higher level than you? Or classes
>like bards and paladins, that usually walk around w/ tons of
>saves?

Yeah, mostly higher level people. Those are the people that attacked me, and mostly if I initiated, then the people just ran. I consider this a pretty normal setup for an exp-penalty character.

>That sounds kind of extreme for "half the people you fought",
>unless you were just up against an unusually tough batch of
>characters. Given you were evil, that's maybe even more
>surprising.

Could be some hyperbole there, but most of my fights were with people also out hunting.

>What were your parry and shield block skills? Were all these
>guys who tore you up wielding weapons shamans don't learn?

100% or close to it. The people tearing me up included assassin, invoker, paladin and finally, warrior.

>One random thought on the last encounter you mentioned: it's
>not always a good idea to "sell out" for the blind, since the

Yeah, and it did turn out that way. But if I don't blind, then I can't really hit and run.

Man, you didn't spell your own character's name right. :)

I'm trying to help you out below, so please take that in the spirit it's offered.

>Another iffy-to-bad empoweree. Thought I had a decent role,
>but unless people somehow knew it was me and were going with
>my "wait for someone who likes long roles" thing (which seems
>unlikely)

I had no idea who you were, FWIW.

You have to do a lot more than mostly-politely disagree on the forums to earn a grudge in this crowd.

>PK-wise I really had high hopes for this one, and was
>confident I'd do well. Heavy dam redux on a stick, drawn-out
>combat style I enjoy and other things that seemed to play to
>my strengths, but I was just completely worthless.

Based on just what you're writing here, I'd suggest, broadly:

1) You consider the strengths of a character, but fail to factor in equally its weaknesses. For example, a minotaur's lack of a wimpy means you need to think ahead a little differently in the way you pick and pace fights. You may fail to appreciate how often wimpy saves you from a terrible situation or a particularly stupid move on your part (and we all make them) if you haven't played one before.

2) You fail to give enough weight to the shifting strengths and weaknesses of your opponents as well. For example, I would say it's dramatically easier to get a kill with a shaman at level 15 than at level 25, even though the shaman class gains, in a sense that ignores relative strength or PK ranges, a ton of power in those ten levels. (And it's not because everyone at level 15 are first-time super-green newbies and everyone at level 25 are seasoned vets, though I'm sure at least one person's thinking that.)

> My sups
>almost never seemed to land, and I'd be lucky to get two or
>three sups on someone before I had to run.

This isn't much different from my experience playing a shaman. The difference is, on a good day I'm still going to kill that someone.

>And half the people
>I fought would routinely rip through me in 4-5 rounds through
>sanc without me landing a single sup.

Sometimes that does happen. As long as it doesn't happen every time and you're not dying when it does, time is on your side.

>If 56 hours as a lowbie
>shaman without a single kill isn't the definition of
>completely pathetic worthlessness (CF PK-wise, anyhow) then I
>don't know what is. At the very least I should never talk
>about any game mechanics ever again because I obviously have
>no idea how this game works.

Possibly that last thing. :)

You did get one kill, though it wasn't a solo kill.

>The final straw was losing to someone in basically the perfect
>context for me to land a kill. Low-str, weapon dependant
>warrior far from a healer, cursed area, making mistakes even I
>could see, but by the time I landed a blind and a plague I was
>at 50%, so I ran a bit to mend up but I just couldn't stay
>ahead so died shortly after.

This kind of goes back to what I was talking about earlier about gauging your opponents. Without having seen the fight, let me point out:

1) Low str, but also doesn't need much str. If my strategy is to throw -str in the 20s, I'd rather fight a fire giant with two heavy swords than a lower strength character who can lose 10 str and still be wielding his weapon.

2) That weapon's also a weapon you don't learn. You'll deal with that a lot as a shaman, but, again, you have to expect to get hit a lot and to not hit a lot (physically) in return.

3) It sounds like you didn't take a look at your opponent.

I can look at that character and immediately say, yeah that's about +10 str from gear, and that's a light weapon -- I need to throw probably -20 str to get him to drop it and, barring extenuating circumstances, that probably is not happening before I'm dead.

Note: that particular gearing strategy to that magnitude is rare in the midlevels, but not completely unheard of. As an experiment I once stacked +15 str and +10 dex overmax on a midlevel assassin and a lot of people did exactly what you did -- tried to drop my stats and ran out of HP a long time before they got there, even though I was packing very little damroll.

As a shaman, no matter how your opponent is geared, there is some kind of opening for you, but you can't always get away with ignoring it.

4) Don't forget that your opponent also had always-on inherent DR against what you were throwing, too, something I assume you didn't try to counter (and honestly, I'm not sure that I would have.)

5) Granted, there's always the strategy of wearing someone down through attrition, but even if you did get the weapon out, what then? In this case, what does that get you? Something, yes, but my gut feeling is, it doesn't get you as far as you're hoping.

>I fought him again to verify that
>I really do suck this much, and sure enough, he dropped me
>through physical resist (half-relevant), sanc, protection and
>stone skin while I only landed 3 somewhat poorly chosen sups
>(weaken, plague, blindness, the last one was just in the hope
>of being able to mend a bit, but I died from 41% with one
>command wasted trying to pick up a disarmed weapon).
>
>Even with the light warpriest focus, I just couldn't land sups
>fast enough to have any success. Not that I had any idea if my
>light warpriest focus was working with my gear or not, but
>whatever.
>
>Right now I'm just disgusted with my RP and PK performance,
>and I'm not even sure if CF is the game for me still or not.
>After 15 years or whatever, it just seems like my RP isn't
>much good anymore, and if this character is any indication I
>just get worse at PK, not better.

I didn't interact with this character and can't say anything either way about your RP.

>Man, you didn't spell your own character's name right. :)

If you can check number of failed logins you'll probably see this reflected there too.

>You have to do a lot more than mostly-politely disagree on the
>forums to earn a grudge in this crowd.

Oh, of course. I entirely meant that in a positive way. It wouldn't have been a grudge, it would've been favoritism, which is also something that doesn't happen except once in a blue moon. That's why I called it unlikely.

>This isn't much different from my experience playing a shaman.
> The difference is, on a good day I'm still going to kill that
>someone.

I've gone over my fights a bit, trying to figure out what sups I could've thrown instead. There definitely was room for improvement, but I didn't really see a case where I could've won it in 3 sups.

>You did get one kill, though it wasn't a solo kill.

That wasn't a kill it was euthanasia. The guy dropped in one melee hit. If I had known he was that close to dead I would've just let the original dude finish it.

>1) If my strategy is to throw -str in the 20s, I'd rather fight a
fire giant
>with two heavy swords than a lower strength character who can

Well the question is what I could've done instead. I could've gone for straight move drain, and hit and run a lot. But that wasn't going to happen in 3 sups either. I didn't have the luxury of running off to mend. In fact, I tried that and he just easily chased me down before I could get off more than one mend.

>3) It sounds like you didn't take a look at your opponent.

This is true. But I wouldn't have recognized his +str numbers anyway. I have a plan for fixing this.

>4) Don't forget that your opponent also had always-on
>inherent DR against what you were throwing, too, something I
>assume you didn't try to counter (and honestly, I'm not sure
>that I would have.)

In which fight the first or second? In the second I was basically going for whatever parrying edge I could manage, in the first I was throwing lightning.

>5) Granted, there's always the strategy of wearing someone
>down through attrition, but even if you did get the weapon
>out, what then? In this case, what does that get you?

Well with the weapon out, he can't lag me, he's not doing as much damage, and my parrying is much better. That gives me the ability to outdamage him. Three damage sups wouldn't have won me the fight either.

Is that sometimes you simply cant wint against certain opponent. Decked felar/giant warrior with curing blindness potions, for example.

Thats for lowbie PK, not sure who it would be in hero range.

Is that plague is a filthy, nasty, mean one round commune, especially at low ranks, that saves differently than other communes.

You're level 15 in the Past. Is there anything worse than being plagued a few times? Is there anything more seemingly innocuous than hammering the Hell out of a shaman when he's just scratching you a couple times with plagues and you're still strong enough to hold your weapons? I loves me some plague. When it's not me getting plagued. Of course.

Especially when it fails 2 times and then you see your health is at 30%. Thats what I talk about. And decked warrior with curing blindness potion will always carry return potion as well.

Yes, plague is good and I often began with it in the Past, hoping they dont have recall potions (and many times I was right). But against mentioned opponents it will do nothing really.

This is why locate object is useful for shamans. Yes, I realize you don't get it until much later. It lets you know what potions your opponent is carrying. (Assuming you know the keywords to locate all the common ones.)

At level 15, if you land a plague on this hypothetical "decked" beast and he burns a costly/precious return potion, and then burns more copper at a healer, who is winning the "shaman war of attrition"?

And at level 15, if you failed all your supps for whatever reason and have to withdraw to heal up until you can try again, have you lost any ground in the "shaman war of attrition"?

No.

I land a plague, he dishes out some neat damage. I flee and recall/teleport (because I always prefer this instead of fleeing by legs - as Log Board proves, too many have died trying to run away). He recalls too or walks safely if a city is near.

Maybe he will spend 1 gold coin more, but since I fled and he is alive it is "I cant win" situation as for me. Thats what I described. Knowing someone spent couple gold coins after fight with me gives me no real pleasure. His corpse does.

that is not teleporting/wording instantly. There are a lot of tactics that work in running battles that don't work in toe to toe battles.

along these lines the changes to air shifters make them laughable in terms of kill sealing against people who know how to run.

>that is not teleporting/wording instantly.
As I said, there is a chance to die if you try to run:
Your link is much slower (mine is not good btw)
You occasionaly make a step back after you fled
The enemy is quick and he follows you in that second while you read room desc to realize where did you flee

Log Board proves my words by many deaths. It is enough for me.

>There are a lot of tactics that work in running battles that don't work in toe to toe battles.

You surely have some logs to demonstrate? Shaman against some enemy who can eat you alive in 3 rounds and have potions against blindness. I'd enjoy to read them.

what i am talking about goes a little bit beyond which skills to use. Everything is in timing, in forecasting your opponents moves and your own and gently guiding the direction of the fight in an non overt manner. If you do it in an overt manner they will just teleport/word.


Here is just one for instance even though it is not directly shaman related. As a village berserker against a well geared fully prepped lion/vulture chances are you are not going to beat the lion toe to toe. Chances are you can beat the vulture toe to toe. In order to get that fight with the vulture you need to run away from the lion fast enough that they switch to vulture to flyto you. then you need to fight back against the vulture. as soon as they switch lion you got to start running again. rinse repeat and try to catch them overcommiting.

This is talk about shamans. I am not ready to argue about other classes and so on. Sometimes it may work, but my point was about lowbie shamans like Chisaw or Zhaldurek.

About 4 times in my life I was badly beaten in 2-3 rounds. By four different chars.
I will speak about 1st one. I failed to land plague, fled and recalled. I could stay more, but if I attack him again, I'd be dead. If I heal myself, I could try again. Maybe I'd land a plague, then again I'd be forced to flee and hope fleeing wont fail. Healing again...BAM, no mana.

And 25 lvl minotaur does not have much more mana than 17 arial.

civilized <100%hp 59%m 68%mv 2292tnl (67.26%)> co summ toth
Toth arrives suddenly.

civilized <100%hp 50%m 68%mv 2292tnl (67.26%)> co plague tot
Toth yells 'Die, Chisaw, you sorcerous dog!'
You narrow your eyes and glare in Toth's direction.
You lost your concentration.
Toth MUTILATES you!
Toth EVISCERATES you!
Toth is covered with bleeding wounds.

civilized <77%hp 47%m 68%mv 2292tnl (67.26%)>
Toth's slice MUTILATES you!
Toth's chaotic blast DISMEMBERS you!
Toth's chaotic blast EVISCERATES you!
Toth parries your acidic bite.
Toth is covered with bleeding wounds.

civilized <38%hp 47%m 68%mv 2292tnl (67.26%)>
Toth's bash slides off your protective shield.
Toth is covered with bleeding wounds.

When I am fighting a melee class I never start off with a supp that will cause me to take damage on first cast. Especially if it has a high chance of failing. I often start with a damage supp. Something like earthquake that wont give him a free round if you fail. You can sub in level appropriate damage spell.

what i am talking about goes a little bit beyond which skills to use. Everything is in timing, in forecasting your opponents moves and your own and gently guiding the direction of the fight in an non overt manner. If you do it in an overt manner they will just teleport/word.


Here is just one for instance even though it is not directly shaman related. As a village berserker against a well geared fully prepped lion/vulture chances are you are not going to beat the lion toe to toe. Chances are you can beat the vulture toe to toe. In order to get that fight with the vulture you need to run away from the lion fast enough that they switch to vulture to flyto you. then you need to fight back against the vulture. as soon as they switch lion you got to start running again. rinse repeat and try to catch them overcommiting.