Fri May 6 19:18:13 2005

At 5 o'clock PM, Day of Thunder, 31st of the Month of the Battle
on the Theran calendar Ghrun perished, never to return.

~

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But go ahead and play one to hero Nepenthe. Im waiting patiently.

It's on a very long list.

An orc is low penalty and will always have a favorable range in terms of level vs. level, though. That's not saying very much.

Enbuergo would whoop people no matter what. Honestly though, personally, I cannot pick a reason I'd take an orc over a fire giant warrior. The unique assetts they gain in my opinion don't outweigh the suckiness that is orcs.

Orcs are engineered to be bash specs. If you wish to specialize in bashing instead of a weapon, orc is way to go.

They have boatloads of hp and lately there have been some new improvements with orcs, making them to heal faster and such. When you add elf blood to the equation...

Orcs are pretty neat, though don't seem to have much interesting things at high ranks, unless you are a chieftain.

You are an experienced player, so you probably have played one. But if you haven't, do try one. Orcs are fun. As a decent PK:er, you should be able to play your orc more effectively than I did with mine.

Orcs are different than fire warriors, so I can't tell which is better. If it's bash bash bash, then orcs rock. But if you want skills that are of 'I hit him now and do a lot of damage now with this special move' type, then warrior is better.

I'd like to see orcs get some extra loving at hero range, though. However, I deleted my orc with about same hours as Enbuergo did, so I don't really know how orcs have it in Hero range..

Bash bash bash won't work on mages past lvl 38 or so. And once past that level, it's also not going to work on the vast majority of warriors that will be out-hitting/damaging you, especially smart ones that will make themselves hard to bash. The last time I was going about trying to regear, I was thinking about ranking from 39 to 50 with no skill other than dash as incentive. If orcs get a seriously revamp in the form of high level skills that will make them competitive (and I mean competitive in the form of actually being able to fight, rather than hiding in a cave until you know someone is convulsing on the ground and swooping a kill), I would consider playing another. Until they do, no thanks.

My thoughts with orcs were pretty much the same and I deleted my orc a few levels lower, for more or less the same reasons. My orc lost his fights if bash didn't work. Your PK skills are better, but I am not surprised to hear the same things I encountered from you. And what comes to ranking to hero with only dash as incentive, I felt pretty much the same and it was a major factor in the deletion of my orc. I'm not sure if I remember if I tried, but did holding banner and weapon in hand prevent headbutt? If not, that might be a viable tactics against magi, though I remember my orc getting his ass handed to him by a lvl 40 transmuter who seemed to outdamaged me, neuroed me etc. I think the lack of high level orcs is due to the reason that orc players do not want to rank to those levels as they do not feel it is worth it.

I say damn near, and by that I mean....It is.

It won't work if you have anything in your hands.

I would like to see warbanners take up the robe slot, similar to the Banners worn on Roadwarrior/Beyond the thunderdome etc.

You can definitely headbutt whilst using a single weapon, and I seem to recall that I could headbutt whilst using weapon + shield.

Not positive about the latter, but one free hand definitely allowed headbutting.

Headbutt was extremely useful for me in the midranks against shaman. All the orcs that didn't headbutt died to the shamen. I didn't, and the only difference was that I used headbutt and they didn't have a way to lag them.

Considering orcs don't get shield block, that had better be one damn good shield.

You can use headbutt while holding a warbanner, which makes it useful, although not reliable. I loved warbanners, and they make ranking a blast, but the fact that it's race-specific, crumbles after a while, and you have to use pc-corpses makes it much more difficult to use it for this purpose.

I have the feeling that warbanners are one of those things that come into their own when (if!!!) you have more orcs, because of the ability for a banner to affect all orcs in the group.

That would mean that you could have banners for several races in effect at once.

Also, any idea if banners are stackable when a group of orcs has several of the same race?

I believe that there are two effects when holding a warbanner, one being that you hit the race the banner was made from harder, the second being that other skills work slightly better. I would guess that if you had two orcs, each wearing a warbanner of a different race, you would get the damage bonus once for each of the two races you fight, but the 'skills work better' bonus only happens once.

Another problem with orcs is that they were designed to be a 'horde,' and obviously aren't.

Every class should have its niche. Something that sets it appart from other classes. Assassins have assassinate, unblockable one-shot killing capability. Thieves have steal, ability to get people's items without even having to do battle with them. Necros have tons of maledictions. Shamans maledict and also can tank well. Druids are all around good and lethal in PK while still having a lot of stealth. In fact, druids are probably the closest thing to an orc, except far better at their jobs. They lose bash + savage feeding and gain the hunt, I'd say that's a pretty damn fair trade. The orc doesn't have its niche. There are many things that are just better at *EVERYTHING* the orc can do. The only niche orcs have is an easy pk tool for pre-35 living.

Lets say I make something like a fire giant outlander, axe and hand to hand.

I don't know if you've noticed this but bash isn't very useful near hero on mage/priesty types. So while my methods for lagging as an orc are trip, bash, cheapshot (off trip and bash) and headbutt, as the fire giant above I have bash, trip, crushing, occassionally pummel, lash and pincer. Lash for a fire warrior is not very usable, but crushing is as far as I know an unblockable means of lagging people for two rounds. Similar to headbutt, but much more damage and lands more often. They also get pincer (much more damage). If I'm flying and have bash protection, all I have to worry about is crushing assault for savage feeding and headbutt for lag. Not the same case against the fire warrior.

Orcs can hide in some situations...fire giant outlanders can camo in most wilderness spots.

Axe spec outdamages orc, h2h spec outtanks orc. They also have resist physical which orcs do not and shieldblock and iron hands, which orcs don't have. Toss on legacies, along with that, and not much less hit points. My fire giant warrior in this scenario can also join a cabal, which allows him to have a miriad of useful allies like healers and druids which I have ready access to. Granted, orcs can get allies as well, but they don't have the same deal as cabals do. Fire giants also only have one 'natural' enemy and that is Marans/Goodies. Orcs have those, plus several others.

Stun is also much more reliable than spinebreak, at the caveat that it doesn't halt all combat, and orcs get trample which is a useful way to open up combat.

Lets go into the skills my fire giant gets :

Weaponbreak
Pincer (mentioned above)
Whirl (yay, malediction)
Overhead
Disembowel
Crushing Blow
Stun
Pummel (big dam)
Iron hands
Evasion
Earlier disarm and offhand disarm.
Fourth attack.
Retreat
etc etc etc

and of course:
Legacies

My orc on the other hand has warbanners, exsanguinate, hide, ingest, etc.

Give me some goals...maybe, kill a lot of people. Survive a lot of pks. Hrm, fight well against mobs. Useful ranking partner.

In every one of those goals, I can't see the fire giant being worse than the orc. Every single one. The healing is nice but lack of tanking more than makes up for it. Warbanners are cool but they are not weaponbreak, disembowel and pummel.

In any scenario, I'd rather be the fire giant outlander than the orc. I dig the whole horde concept but the problem with that is that if you want people to play things they have to be good alone, otherwise people won't play them. On the other hand, you can't design things to gang that are great alone, otherwise they're overpowered. Its just one of those concepts that doesn't work well, if a class is underpowered by itself people won't play them enough to have 'roaming hordes' of orcs.

However, the reason to choose orc over warrior does not lie in the ability to PK. Mainly, it is RP related and the liking for some perks orcs get, such as butcher and exaguinate.

I think orcs work well in PK until their prey can protect themselves from bash. Orcs work well in bashing down that elf paladin or storm shaman five or ten ranks below them at level 32 when they have savage feeding.

However, when the opponents that can control their translucence, orc loses the main edge of his combat tactics and has to rely on tactics that are less than optimal from the orcs point of view(sacrifice offhand weapon damage for headbutt, though banner helps if you have one). Headbutt needs to trigger savage feeding, IMHO(I don't recall it doing so. Correct me if I am wrong. It would be logical for it to do so RP-wise).

And what comes to the incentive to rank orc to hero. I'll make an easy comparison to approximate the situation. Let's remove legacies and enhanced reactions from warriors and move dash to 48. How inclined are you to rank a warrior like that past 40? Well, granted, orcs have overrun, the usefulness of which I do not fully comprehend. But still, I see that the incentive to rank an orc to hero is not more than the incentive of ranking that example warrior to hero.

I more or less posted to give orcs the heads up, but your points are valid. The orcs have a goal. Becoming a chieftain, the strongest orc of all Thera, but is it worth to rank to levels where ultimately, you are considerably weaker than before? I admit that I haven't tried the improved orc, but I cannot say that the same things would not apply to it.

Just to solidify my whole argument, while orcs aren't horribly underpowered I genuinely and authentically think I could accomplish the same things with other classes with far less effort. If I wanted a 'bash spec', or rather someone who lands a bunch of cheesy kills, I'd play a necro. They have that ability plus there are far less things that they're vulnerable to. If you view orcs as a jack of all trades you should play a druid. The difference is with the druid you'll have much better tools at your disposal and be less of a pushover at hero.

But after you lose that shiney set, and realize that you can't kill mobs for decent stuff to get you going, it becomes annoying.

Even after all this time, I'm still not immune to rage deletion, if I can't at least get a decent starter set going myself. I think it came down to being smooshed by Goliath trying to get his axe after Emmonev was kind enough to relieve me of everything. I didn't parry or dodge one hit. Not one. That immspiracy orc negative parry/dodge modifier is a bitch.

The real end of story is I would not recommend ranking an orc past 23. With each level past that benchmark, it became harder and harder to kill people. I wanted to say 'hey I played an orc and made it work so bite me u haterz!,' but in the end, there was pretty much no time where I would have rather had orc skills than a warriors. I think I went 35-0, but I think that stat is misleading at best, as I had to play so cautiously once I got into the 30s that most of my wins were cherrypicks.

n/t