Is -20 str drop supposed to be something a player can cover at early 20's?

I like to think of myself as someone who knows gear but I haven't seen any way to cover that type of STR loss at that level.

catch them with flying down and spamming a direction along eastern or whatever - trip them to death. Easy as pie. Killed a ton of necros like this.

Alternately, work with someone who has detect invis.

Alternately, don't get slept and he can't do #### to you.

Seriously, village app versus necro under level 40, village app wins almost every time as long as he doesn't get slept.

And loot to the pies. To the pies I said!

It can be hard to get, but that shouldn't be because they kick your ass. It should be because you can't see them (or, if you're a svirf because they run like Tiamat is tracking them when they see you.)

At around level 20 you should have no problem with 95% of necros. If you draw the short straw and try to pick on one of Twist's morts, well, you're out of luck.

There's a good chance you know what I'm about to say, but I'm going to say it anyway: Know where people rank between 11-25. Know your way around these places. When you stick your head into Arendryl or Darsylon and hit "where" you should know whether they're close enough to run at now or if you need to back off and wait until they get closer to the entrance. You should know which entrance to the area you need to go to. A ranking mage is unlikely to be enlarged or flying, but they'll have groupmates, so run in, bash or trip and gtfo once they're dead.

Or, if you want Village app on easy mode, go Thug Thief. I think I had ten mage kills before I got inducted and I suck.

I ran a lowbie assassin villager who got 10 kills then autoed out of boredom. It was so, so easy. And I am probably the worst at PK among all those you can call a vet. Mages are pathetically weak at low levels. Doubley so if you surprise them.

You realistically can't. In theory the necromancer should run out of HP before they manage to stack that much -STR on you.

Heh.

No problem. Don't get slept.

Everyone knows that. Palmer made a living in mid 20s picking on chars that just ranked up to around level 20.

Invis has been a game changer since economy stuff went in some years ago. I'm fine with it meaning something.

To the app - if you're a warrior village applicant without a mage kill, get the mage kill asap and hit 25. If you've ranked up past that without a mage kill, sorry, your character is probably wasted at this point.

> If you've ranked up past that without a mage kill, sorry, your
> character is probably wasted at this point.

No way. From 11 to 51, a warrior kills a surprised mage in an eyeblink.
A low level warrior can kill a mage in two rounds wearing a basic regear set. More typical is 4-6 rounds, but all it takes is a bash or two. I've done it, it's happened to me and I've seen it happen to countless groupmates. A village app can run up to a ranking group, kill the mage and be gone before anyone notices he's coming. More typical is 4-6 rounds. At those levels half the mages are wearing academy leather.

So my advice to villager app guy is: just keep trying. If that necro fails his sleep he's probably dead unless he's prepping hard. So get yourself an enlarge prep and flee/enlarge/return/bash. Eventually he'll fail and you'll kill him. But really you should just focus on railing ranking mages. It seems dangerous, but honestly you'll be able to get a kill pretty easily if you just try a few times, even if it means dying to a group sometimes.

"So my advice to villager app guy is: just keep trying. If that necro fails his sleep he's probably dead unless he's prepping hard. So get yourself an enlarge prep and flee/enlarge/return/bash. "


Key phrases there: Villager App Guy, Enlarge Prep.

>Key phrases there: Villager App Guy, Enlarge Prep.

That's what I get for sleep-deprived posting (8 month old). Ok, so if the necro is coming at you prepped and geared then you may be sol. The rest probably still applies.

nt

sleep is a rank 10 spell. So many necro's perfect the spell before they hit pk range it's ugly.

Any moderately decent amount of saves eq (even stuff you can get at low levels) will help you turn that sleep that is cast at 100% into 2-3 free attacks against the necro when you save against it. And if they flee and try again it might just kill them (if the first one doesn't).

Most necros worth their salt take nightmares chilling call to avoid that very thing.

...so your point is valid, but doesn't make the fact that they have sleep perfected have any more bearing on whether they can fail to put you to sleep and die doing so.

It is disheartening considering low ranks warriors should be owning mages.

I'm not even getting a command in against this guy.

>It is disheartening considering low ranks warriors should be
>owning mages.

Why should low rank warriors be owning mages again? It's not like hero mages are owning warriors. The best of the best mages are probably tougher than the best of the best warriors, at hero, but I'm pretty confident in saying that on average (across player skill levels and character rank), warriors have it better than mages.

>I'm not even getting a command in against this guy.

Boo-hoo. That's what it's like being a mage most of the time at those ranks.

Asshattery only goes so far, role-play is a requirement here. Maybe he'll step up, maybe he won't. *shrug*

Pretty sure he's talking about me, but I could be mistaken. I was not in the rotd, you're talking about a different necro than he is I think.

>Any moderately decent amount of saves eq (even stuff you can
>get at low levels) will help you turn that sleep that is cast
>at 100% into 2-3 free attacks against the necro when you save
>against it. And if they flee and try again it might just kill
>them (if the first one doesn't).

Sadly i find it difficult to gear for saves, stats AND dam roll at the low ranks. 12 dam roll doesn't scare a necro.

Once you've done even a half-assed attempt to look into non-limited regear, you begin to realize it is impossible to have decent stats across the board and still do any appreciable damage even as a mage.

I usually try to gear for -20 svs spell or so (along with +5ish str/dex and roughly 20-25 damroll when wielding 1-2 weapons and very often leave hitroll at 10-15 as a result), but just the 3-4 gear slots it takes to do that hampers you so much in the stats or dam department that you start to reconsider it when there's no lowbie AP or mages trying to get free kills using chameleon and vulns. It ultimately weakens you against the actual melee characters you should be worried about. Add in svs para specifically to deal with transmuters and it gets even more complicated, as the ONLY decent svs para pieces that still let you cover other stats such as HP, are limited and everyone and their mom collects them now relative to as recently as a couple years ago. Your other options mean you are using just svs para which means you need to be able to throw those pieces on, hunt down, and successfully kill the transmuter in question in under the space of an RL hour, often an impossible task if the muter is using duo and you have no information about hometowns. And I am talking specifically about mobs you walk up and kill without losing more than 40% of your HP from 20 onward.

To a certain degree, gearing defensively comes with tradeoffs, and the only way to overcome those tradeoffs is the limited gear. This is by design, but you really start to feel the pain when you have to deal with magic damage or massive stat loss at an earlier level than you ordinarily should have to. Another example is even if an assassin doesn't get the enhanced kot/kans, the stat loss from those skills cannot be covered, and generally you lose the fight once both land if you aren't wearing some pimp limited +str gear in particular and hopefully +dex. As a lowbie you are looking at being at 15 or worse in one or both stats once both land, so at that point it's a matter of if you can flee and who has the better connection speed pre-40.

"If they flee and try again it might just kill them."

Implying, of course, that the first attempt is risk free if they take minimal steps.

This be correct

Here is my two cents on this discussion. If you are actively hunting for people to kill, you generally have the advantage, whether you are the village applicant or the lowbie mage hunting. If you let the lowbie mage or the village applicant initiate the fight, you are in trouble, because they will have prepared for you and you will not be prepared for them.

If you don't want to be the hunted, be the hunter. I recognize that the detect invisible issue does exist, but the vast majority of lowbie mages don't hunt villager applicants or anybody for that matter, nor do they hang out invisible for the most part. So get out and hunt.

Part of the reason I rolled Palmer was that grouping and levelling uninterrupted was starting to feel like an entitlement to some of the playerbase. When I first started, you would bring a lowbie mage in your group with two warriors just so he would have detect invisible up and be watching for people coming to destroy the group. That had changed when Palmer was there and I wanted the newbies of that age to realize that someone jumping a ranking group was something you always had to be concerned about.

To make it easier for mages to find a group, move the svirfneblin inherent detect invis to level 20-25, and do something similar with assassins.

nt

So mad at you now, just NOW finding out that I got to run around with Thrakburzug (I think w/ Valryn?). Still one of my favorites from the CF world. Hopefully everything's good in your pursuits!

For the record, I've totally stolen you're "Mornin'" greeting, no matter what time of day it is. Ask anyone I know on AIM, heh.

I think I can honestly say that you were the only guy that I've seen pull off a betrayal without it seeming like some cheap ooc tactic.

You tried to pwk my orc once, but you rp'd well and I was convinced it wasn't the normal "player desperate for pk's by any means" thing. The fact you chose pwk pretty much showed you weren't after the pk, since you could have just run me out of moves or taken me underwater etc.