Does STSF go off of a forms INT or the shapeshifter's INT?

I'm asking because I recently fought a warrior with STSF and about 10 rounds into our first encounter, I couldn't flee. This is *after* taking the unpredictable edge.

Are those charges supposed to build that fast? Hard to imagine fighting a STSF without the edge (assuming there's a difference). And I imagine the net result for most would be to avoid that person for the rest of your login.

Lastly, to anyone playing STSF warriors, it seems pretty childish to taunt someone for not fighting you a second or third time. No one owes you another battle especially when they cannot flee/dodge/parry/hit you. If you want more action, don't pick STSF next time.

I bug boarded not being able to take unpredictable edge and had been trying to figure out the hidden thing keeping me from it (lack of observation exp, I think?), but seeing this I'm now glad I was unable to.

Guess I'll find my points better spent elsewhere and just run from STSF if I don't kill them in 3-4 rounds.

Burst Damage, very high Burst Damage. Especially as low Int characters. Otherwise their going to start defending better, hitting better, and stop you from fleeing.

It wouldn't be nearly as bad if they put a cap on how much damredux a warrior can get without assistance (healer/muter/invoker). An STSF warrior packing aura/shield/desensitize/stoneskin is just going to hurt so many people without much effort in the actual fight itself (granted that's lots of effort before the fight, but meh.)

>Burst Damage, very high Burst Damage. Especially as low Int
>characters. Otherwise their going to start defending better,
>hitting better, and stop you from fleeing.
>
>It wouldn't be nearly as bad if they put a cap on how much
>damredux a warrior can get without assistance
>(healer/muter/invoker). An STSF warrior packing
>aura/shield/desensitize/stoneskin is just going to hurt so
>many people without much effort in the actual fight itself
>(granted that's lots of effort before the fight, but meh.)

For what it's worth, any mage typically has the upper hand against a warrior when it comes to who can burn more DR preps without necessarily feeling it.

That may not always help when the prepped-up warrior comes for their item back and you can't effectively run them off or distract them, but in many fights the mage simply has to work the warrior into a scenario where his potions are going to fail long before their wands are, for example.

Similarly, a warrior is both much more limited in the total # of ticks worth of certain preps he can carry as well as where he can get those preps from, the latter also giving his opponents the advantage of knowing where he's likely going to go to resupply.

You know, those of us who have the potential to beat these power combos (My last invoker), but make stupid decisions, and are just too lazy/not fast enough to catch them as they recollect their preps, despite knowing where they are.

I would consider STSF the bane of shapeshifters, as I always have.

Some builds are really good against certain specs, and STSF is really good against shapeshifters.

Shapeshifters are a little limited in their choices in edges, but personally I'd avoid a STSF warrior at all costs. I've fought them with shifters, and sometimes got lucky, but not without help.

Shifters are good for some things, but not a lot of other things.

In my personal opinion, note opinion, STSF is one of the lamest overly used legacies. I personally think it retarded the amount of ability that it gives a warrior over so many other legacies, that and the fact it's fairly similar to martial trance. Which again is stupid and the large advantage it gives the warrior over certain classes, with almost no repercussions against a warrior.

I personally think that charges should

A. Accumulate at a FAR slower rate as the helpful suggests it is for multiple combat with foes, not 8-10 round I win.

B. Lower the variety of abilities. Giving a warrior cut off seems redundant with the amount of lagging ability.

C. Be removed entirely. Can argue all night long about this one, but the game would be better off if the legacy was scrapped.
Note I also mean one or the other, not all of these.

>A. Accumulate at a FAR slower rate as the helpful suggests it
>is for multiple combat with foes, not 8-10 round I win.

If that happened I think we would need more legacies aimed at elves. Which I'm totally okay with...and you would probably still complain about. Honestly, elves really suck until about 40+. The low HP is horrible at low levels, you know plus vuln iron or mithril. With the right gear, it is okay but still.

>B. Lower the variety of abilities. Giving a warrior cut off
>seems redundant with the amount of lagging ability.

I think the cut off ability gives you the advantage of using a spec that doesnt have any lagging ability, such as sword or dagger. Most characters can fly or have enlarge/reduce to avoid their other lag options. I dont have access to stats, but I'd assume most elves are sword or dagger. There are exceptions. With low str some of the heavier options are out such as polearm and most axes.

>C. Be removed entirely. Can argue all night long about this
>one, but the game would be better off if the legacy was
>scrapped.
>Note I also mean one or the other, not all of these.

Really your only direct counter is to kill them quickly or use an edge that I have no idea how effective it is. Maybe it does need slight balancing. But I'd rather see more interesting options than see it taken away entirely.

I can see both sides to this. STSF shines in certain scenarios, and is pretty useless in other scenarios. When it shines it seems broken.

If you *did* want to tone it down, which I'm not sure I agree is actually necessary (but also wouldn't whine about if it happened), I can think of three ways:

1. Make it charge more slowly,
2. Remove the "cutoff" effect but leave everything else the same,
3. Keep the charge rate the same, but make the non-cutoff benefits less powerful when fully charged.

I agree elves/drow need *something* that caters to them, because otherwise why wouldn't you play an arial instead?

That said, STSF in its current form might actually tilt that pendulum too far in the other direction. Why play an arial when I could be a STSF elf/drow?

Hoysepis stomped my decked STSF sword War Master Altariel with impunity more or less. I'm going to tell you how he did it.

Locate STSF (helps if you have air form). Attack using offence form. Is STSF packing more than 20% dam reduction (0% if they're decked and you have less than 1000 hp)? If yes, flee and do not fight them for 12 hours. If no, beat the crap out of them with rake/smash etc.

After 12 hours, locate STSF, repeat again.

You need: >1000 hp, and ABS.

Another concern: can STSF maledict? If yes, pack some +str/dex. Flee if str/dex gets nuked too badly and they're not almost dead with you at high hp.

They need a way of doing damage outside of melee in general terms. Not all forms have that. Jaguar, Tiger, Dire Wolf, Gator and the large majority of other forms do not have a big damage skill like rake or smash that will both lag the STSF but also land and cause any significant damage. I'm not saying STSF is unbeatable but it really shines against most shifters for this reason.

A lot of the shifter downgrades over the years have been because shifters had access to an extra large HP pool and lagging pet via Scion, in my opinion, they could do with an un-nerfing now that it's gone. But, having said that, the staff likely sees more bang for their buck devoting time to other resources.

If you're who I think you are, then it might bear noting that the STSF warrior you were fighting shows up in the CF twitter feed fairly regularly, and not because he's owning face.

I'm less concerned with a specific character than I am with the wasted edge points.

>Does STSF go off of a forms INT or the shapeshifter's INT?
>
>I'm asking because I recently fought a warrior with STSF and
>about 10 rounds into our first encounter, I couldn't flee.
>This is *after* taking the unpredictable edge.
>
>Are those charges supposed to build that fast? Hard to imagine
>fighting a STSF without the edge (assuming there's a
>difference). And I imagine the net result for most would be to
>avoid that person for the rest of your login.

The bonus against STSF that Predictable gives is based on wisdom so it suffers from the same disadvantage many forms do because of their intelligence. I wouldn't take it on a shapeshifter.

>Lastly, to anyone playing STSF warriors, it seems pretty
>childish to taunt someone for not fighting you a second or
>third time. No one owes you another battle especially when
>they cannot flee/dodge/parry/hit you. If you want more action,
>don't pick STSF next time.

Sometimes that's just the player being a douche, but more often than not it's not that they actually believe it but rather that it's good strategy to taunt you because you might let your emotions get the better of you and hand them a PK win. What are you, chicken?

That's the kind of info I hate learning after I choose an edge. I wouldn't choose it either in retrospect.

Thanks

It would be humane to make this edge unavailable to shifters as no one would choose it were they informed.

But I'll reiterate that I never felt STSF warriors were that bad to begin with. I took it because there were many STSF warriors around at the time, not because they were kicking my ass.

It did make it noticeably easier to roflstomp them (or escape from them in case they were village scouts and had critical hit).

Most high wis races are high int as well (save for centaur/minotaur). So that edge really does nothing of use for races who suffer from STSF (like giants, though I think they can't take it).

Conceptually, it seems kind of weird that the edge is tied to the WIS stat. I can imagine a character who isn't very wise still being fairly unpredictable.

On a serious note, we're not talking about dumb unpredictable, that's about unpredictability in combat, which isn't attainable w/o intelligence and wisdom about combat, that's for sure.

Reduce STSF rate against tipsy/drunk opponents! :)

nt

Does that make unpredictable sort of a waste for a shifter? I mean, the avg STSF probably has 23-25 int. Some top tier forms are 15 int. avg. is probably 17.

I can see physical attribs changing when you shift, but I don't know why being a different shape makes you dumb and foolish. Except that when forms were introduced (transmuters were split into 2 sub-classes) STSF wasn't a thing.

For me, the "worst" change is the extra movement lag + cost when above weight, especially since some forms can have strength of 16 or less (especially defensive forms) and you basically have to pretend you're a dex dodge warrior/melee and keep weight < 50%.

STSF has always been a nightmare for shifters though. I remember Quas's drow zerker used to straight own my Air/Offense shifters (one of like 20 I've played) face clean off. And that was in like 2010.

Edited to add: Why you gotta think about some outside-the-box tactics to kill those STSF warriors. Camel can blind (which is money for many reasons), you can always start off out of form with a wither/plague/crimson wand to try and make them drop their weapons (since STSF warriors usually need ~+12 in strength gear if they don't want to drop weapons in any sort of drawn out fight) if they aren't geared for tons of strength.

Of course, you can always die because you're an unshifted shifter (even with haste + partial shifts, regardless of what Kstats thinks) but yeah.

Only two things are a nightmare to shifters: village scouts and necromancers.

It definitely helps if the scout has STSF and Space because these make it more difficult for the shifter to escape. But it's critical hit that makes the shifter want to escape.

Granted, it may depend on your forms. I don't have experience with all of them obviously.

They have three spells and if they land any of them, you are finished. And in form, you have the int/wis of a storm giant of course.

Forget: I think their forget will outlast your mana in form and when you run out, you die. Last time I had forget on a shifter, it wasn't close. Granted it was from a mushroom.

Sleep: You'll then have forget cast on you in case you don't die to crimson scourge, etc. And you definitely won't outlast forget in this case.

PWK: of course.

I've seen many shapeshifters who will not fight a necro (much less a mummy/wight/lich) for any reason because of this.

...certain necros aren't as scary.

I mean, Scarab Leader Mummy is still a fight you generally want to avoid the #### out of, but yeah.

Lion + Gorilla + Orang + Rhino + any form with spell evasion has some chances against Joe Necro. Again, if you're trying to fight Lich Emperor Gaspare with a shifter, good luck (I tried...I died...but I made him flee TWICE!!!!!!!!!!!).

Spectres aren't too scary, especially if you're utility and they aren't Dread Lord.

They aren't all RoboCop.

You can't rope-a-dope them the way you can rope-a-dope other builds that are stronger than you.

To beat them, you need to press the advantage that all shapeshifters have: ability to outprep a warrior.

gr

.