So the Dex-dagger STSF experiment comes to a conclusion, 800 hours over Viya and Zaol is enough!

I basically was looking for a reason to delete the moment I did not get Emperor, which is probably easy to imagine. I want to avoid saying too much about active chars so the small amount I will say is widely known anyway. I had the other three of the council give strong commitment to voting for me, after all I was 300 hours and had good support from most of the cabal and two of the other three were new chars that just levelled up. I spent the vote-week thinking I would get to play the Emperor role, came up with a set of rules or practices. I was planning on being the Emperor with an always full council and always liked, never hated. I was going to keep the council in line with endless supply of orb of travels (zaol was lucky) and gold handouts (zaol was rich).

I enjoy player driven content so I am not going to call foul that I lost the vote. That’s part of the game, people can choose how they want to vote. But it left me with big disappointment OOC. IC I was a sphere truth with roleplay around legitimacy of position. This meant it would be difficult for Zaol to conspire against his emperor, not to mention lie to him. Zaol was not subtle about his lack of accepting the new Emperor so I am sure anathema would have eventually found him anyway. Also being in Australia I can only get on prime time on weekends. Though if I got Emperor I would have tried to make sure I got as many weekend hours as possible. I had 5 days left of my holiday when voted ended so I was expecting to pull some long shifts for those days

I enjoyed some interesting dynamics on this char. War was imminent with the Spire due to the power crazed mummy. Oniflond and I managed to keep the peace (yeah I know some of you wanted to see the war). Oniflond was poor, I was able to keep the peace with mere 500 gold. So I thought that was cool.
During the Empire Lull, when Fortress had masses I managed to get an unofficial alliance with battle, we had no blacks so it’s really up to Empire to attack battle. That was an interesting time when I had to keep sneaking away to use magic. Imperial law states that the head belongs at the throne, but I am sure the codex being there trumps that, so sometimes you have to do these things. I like playing characters where your enemies are not well defined. I sure loved when it flipped and war with village was back on though

Awhile back things started to get a bit old after a while and my playing time dropped off a bit and I lost WM. This made it drop a bit more so I just waited for Okeoj to finish and so I could get it back again. While Okoej is fairly new, I really liked him and did not want to try over throw him.
Okoej, sorry I kind of abandoned you a bit there, I kind of got a bit interested in some non-cf stuff at the time. I hope you enjoyed your stint at WM.
Sylvari, I liked you, though IC Zaol was wary of other drow. You give it a shot and are not one of these never die, no risk, eq hoarding divines. .
Talevar/Jehir, you guys are so similar, highly skilled, highly reliable and great fun to pk with.
Terpilans, probably one of the most skilled guy I grouped with in a long time. I love how when you had a better strategy than I was using, you found a way to respectfully suggest it, following the chain of command, even though you had the best idea. You deleted way too early though. You also got unlucky with the vote as I did, once I got Emperor you were going to be WM 1 minute later. The rest of the Cabal was going to find out at that point that the new WM was in command of all the Emperor’s assaults against our enemies, which would have perfectly suited your style of play. Terpilans with tactics and Zaol with PG and Sigil we would have been such a brutal duo.
Ysforgul, you’re the empire I liked the most out of the entire chars life. What can I say, your tough, knowledgeable, competent and very selfless player, helping out others all the time. If the whole player base were people like you, this game would be great. If I ever meet you in the future as an enemy, it would be really really hard to loot you.

Enemies, I am not going to name drop. It’s always a mixed bag. For those that avoided fights, shame on you, you should always give it a go. Like I said my character is not especially lethal, show up to defend! One time I logged in and 1 strong fortress was on carrying the codex in his hands. Just me and him on. He dropped the codex at the maran and then quit out before I could get there. I mean really? You know who you are.

Gaspere, I am not sure I can make sense of your 230 hour comment. Zaol was aggressive, the whole build was based around giving me the power to take on any character, and often more than 1. If I sat in cabal/guild was because I had no pks or I could not find them. I suspect that comment is mostly around our times not lining up and assumptions about eq + lack of pk losses.

The class combo:

I think it’s accurate to say the elf/drow dagger warrior is quite weak for a new player but stronger for a more experienced player.
Daggers are great weapon spec from point of the debuffs, bleeds and conceals. Once you appreciate this power, you can accept the trade-off of missing arteries and stabs and taking damage. I’d actually take more damage from missed hits compared to regular hits from mobs.
Zaol was fortunate to have haste for most of his life. That gave me the tanking of a sword spec at least, combined with imperial defence, 100% in all weapon skills made zaol an amazing tank.
For most of the time I had +25 str and +22 dex from gear meaning I could take a bunch of stuff and not lose str/dex and so that tanking was not impeded at all. The stat bonus meant I ran with only 40damroll or so making my char more of a winner, rather than a killer. Don’t make an STSF dex-dagger if your goal is to amass very high PK wins, the combo can make you the strongest warrior in the game, but nowhere near the most lethal.
People ask why both Viya and Zaol went h2h second and the answer is weight of not carrying extra weapons. To stay light and not lose dodge % (dodge = conceals). I am nuts about preps, my girdle weighs as much as all my armor. So something had to give. H2H is also great for ganks when you want to try lag people.
Parting block through STSF is pretty good and I noticed a difference, elf + 1 int gets more. Shadowstrike is fairly neat to and felt its absence on Zaol.
Flow/evade gets pretty frustrating for your opponents when they get missed entwines and flurries. I think people hated fighting these chars for that reason. A giant warrior takes hits from me, takes conceals from me and then I evade or flow their pincer, it gets very demoralising for them.
Entwine is the nemesis of this combo though. Sekpak really had Viya’s number. And Zaol almost died to Ruht once. All that effort I did to keep dodge working is instantly lost with that skill.