I was wondering if anybody has any experience with polearms with the trapping legacy. Would this weapon perform very well with a low dex race or would I be better off with a different weapon set? When I used polearms practicing I found I struggled to land more then my second attack. Granted I was not specialized, but I was curious if this legacy would perform better with a heavy halberd? Also with dual wield weapons is dual wielding a issue with having to take a such a heavy weapon for this legacy to work? Are you driven to fist as a second legacy to get a very good experience with this legacy due to maldicts making it easy to nullify?

I had relative success with it in the past using Axes and swords. It goes well with the Fist legacy. Mostly due to the lowered chance of disarm but also due to the additional wield weight. Note I said lowered chance of disarm. It is not spiderhands.

The disadvantage is that you're putting all your eggs into one basket. Someone breaks your heavy weapon or disarms it and the legacy does almost nothing for you with a lighter weapon. There are some really heavy weapons out there but only a few that have a really high average that work well with the legacy.

It was fun playing with the legacy but I had multiple better options that I could have chosen that would have helped me more often.

Had it on a cloud rager scout.

Harder to cover against stat loss with this build so I wouldn't recommend it.

As a fire imperial? As a rager zerker? Sure.

I took fist not so much for the weight benefit as for the disarm resistance. I would recommend riddle over fist with the builds I had. As a fire giant imperial I would also take riddle over fist.

Check his PBF

Basically the heavier the weapon the harder you hit, it does not factor into the amount of hits to my knowledge.

Hope link below helps a bit.

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=73&topic_id=76

So it would basically only make you strike harder? Thought it was supposed to make you crush through defenses. That's a bummer if that's the case though. I might want to just think about a new legacy.

While there are ways to make this legacy shine, most of them basically involve a very limited number of items that are (generally) highly coveted. It also means you've essentially made bad gearing choices since you will do more damage exploiting a vuln than you can with trapping anyway, and that doesn't require you to lug around 50 lb. weapons that you'll drop with a single point of str loss.

If you can carry 5 10lbs weapons that exploit all the vulns, you'd end up doing the more damage than you ever will with trapping. It could help you against, say, no-vuln humans, but you'd probably still want a lower weight weapon anyway.

I don't know how dodge vs. weapon weight interacts today, but I highly suspect that heavies weapons are easier to dodge, at least to some degree. This means that taking trapping not only locks you into a small selection of weapons which probably don't hit vulns (more on that later) but also makes it less likely to hit with your regular attacks in today's dex heavy CF.

The vuln changes mean it is harder today than every to cover a vuln. Even if you have 1 item, you still take a small amount of extra damage from your vulnerability, and if you have a material vuln, or non-elemental (i.e. holy/light/etc.) you probably can't cover it at all.

Since vuln damage (extra 33%) is applied on the total amount, you are going to see a big jump, and double vuln (silver + holy for example) gives you a whopping 75% extra damage due to the multiplicative way in which they stack.

In an ideal scenario, you are trapping *and* exploiting a vuln, with a max weight (50lb) weapon, but outside of Armageddon, most of the really heavy weapons don't hit a vuln at all (steel+slash for lochabar axe for example), or hit one that isn't all that great i.e. blunt since it is useful against gnomes/svirfs, but goes into a resistance against giants/minos. Armageddon with it's wrath + iron (I think) is basically as good as it gets, and is a unique(?) item you've now spent a legacy choice on, but have no guarantee of getting.

In a realistic scenario, you can always *have* a heavy weapon, but in a vast majority of scenarios you'd be better off using that carry weight to have other weapons which would allow you to hit a vuln or use a weapon your opponent doesn't know or have something cursed/nodisarm or some combination thereof.

Compare to say, chilling, which is just +8 damage all the time. It will never be the bonus to damage that trapping can be, but even if you have 3 str, you are still hitting for 8 more hp worth of damage every time, and you haven't limited weapon selection in anyway.

With the additional change of being over carry weight making it hard to flee, you've also (potentially) nuked your ability to run away in the even of str loss.

Pro's of trapping:
More DAMAGE = Moar Better

Con's of trapping:
Severly limited gear selection.
Hard to impossible to exploit vuln's.
Carry weight rapidly becomes an issue.
Eaiser to dodge your weapon, potentially meaning you aren't even getting more damage in the general case (unverified)


Suggestion for fixing:

Some or all of the following

1) Reduce all weapon weights by a factor of 10. Coupled with a corresponding decrease in wield weight vs. strength.
2) Reduce or eliminate dodge vs. weight.
3) Make every 50lb weapon hit material and a vuln (whitesteel, iron, mithril, non-metal as material options, basically any non-physical type + blunt for damage type)
4) Vastly increase number/variety of heavy weapons.
5) Vastly increase heavy weapon bonus to be *better* than hitting a vuln in basically every case.
6) Some other clear benefit to wielding super heavy weapons that counteracts the con's. I.e. heavy weapons are really big, and dodging/parrying them is very very hard as compared to a regular weapon.

PLZ PEOPLE ROLL FIRE GIANT AXE SPEC BESERKERS! They are fun! I swear

Heavy weapons are harder to parry in general, and especially hard to parry with a light weapon. Despite the increased difficulty in vuln exploiting by using trapping legacy to its maximum, you do have a vastly greater dmg output potential with it if you are wanting to give it a go.

Something else of note is that giants are played far less than they were a few years back so you will generally have less competition for said heavy weapons than in the past. More than anything though you should play what sounds fun. You might end up falling in love with trapping legacy even if no one else likes it.

>Heavy weapons are harder to parry in general, and especially
>hard to parry with a light weapon. Despite the increased
>difficulty in vuln exploiting by using trapping legacy to its
>maximum, you do have a vastly greater dmg output potential
>with it if you are wanting to give it a go.

Potential is not reality. Also you don't address dodge...

>Something else of note is that giants are played far less than
>they were a few years back so you will generally have less
>competition for said heavy weapons than in the past. More than
>anything though you should play what sounds fun. You might
>end up falling in love with trapping legacy even if no one
>else likes it.

Giants are less, which means dodge is more? I agree with the sounds fun, but playing something that is objectively bad like felar sword spec probably isn't going to be as much fun as something that isn't...

Have you guys considered lowering their xp cost and raising that of elves/drows? I can't see any reason why I'd play a giant over other (ie. dex) options at this point.

There has been a bunch of discussion but we have never managed to quite pin something down. The xp mod wouldn't really make an impact because giants are still more powerful at lower levels than elves, we moreso need to find an option that helps to up their awesome at high levels/hero.

You know.. help a giant out.

Change storm giant wield weight from 55 to 65, and change fire and cloud giants from 60 to 70. They can wield heavier weapons to get more out of their Pros? That would in a sense make trapping better.

It is really good to know you guys are even talking about the issue. Thank you for letting us know.

Changing their wield weights won't really help address the issue either, especially since everyone considers using "heavy weapons" a bad choice due to the potential of strength maledicts that exist.

Some of the recent-ish changes that came up to help try and give giants a little bit of an edge was the +dmg for 24/25 strength was increased. Heavy weapons were also made harder to parry, and said heavy weapons are even harder to parry if your opponent is using a lightweight weapon. Skill learning was improved to a higher baseline for races with a low int, defenses were made easier to learn at lower levels.

The thing is that there was no 1 single event or change that made giants worse over night. It was a long list of small adjustments that eventually got to this point. As newer areas kept getting added the ease of access to decent/quality non-physical weapons changed. Evade was something that put a small shift towards dex builds over str builds. Heavy use of dmg redux preps have become a more common practice than years ago so the lower hp of most giant races is also a non issue.

Honestly if it was up to me, I would just get rid of the Striking legacy. Doing that would probably put giants damn near even again in a lot of situations.

Remove int/wis requirement for Unpredictable edge. I was so bummed when I couldn't take it as Kaer.

There are no high str/low dex races that have high int, so we have giants who are STSF vulnerable both with inability to take Unpredictable edge and failing int check for STSF charges.

Valg's changes to make dex as (more) important as strength had a lot to do with it.

So did evade (as you mentioned).

So did edges, of which I can only think of maybe one that favors a giant race (Zealot of the One Law). PS I don't count Weighted Leverage.

STSF is also the devil So I'm with you on that. It does too many things IMHO. I'd be fine if it only did the "blocks someone's attempt to flee" instead of doing that + added damage + added attacks that bypass defenses + added defenses.

Flurry or high damage skills used to be a Giant's bread and butter, but with parry everything + evade, I've seen giants get 3 flurries in a row evaded/parried. That's kinda a kick in the ####.

#1 - Change the inherent for fire giants, and add one for cloud giants. Perhaps make them more useful. While Lavawalk is useful in niche situations it is no call lightning on tap. Having no inherent makes cloud giants sad.

#2 - Bump their wisdom/int up a little bit. They will still be "dumber" than most, but likely shouldn't be as dumb as an Orc.

#3 - You could consider adjusting skills like flourintine to take into account the sum of str/dex to put their parry ability on par with dexclass

#4 - You could always add a skill akin to evade that works on STR.

#5 - You could make STR add a multiplier to weapon damage beyond damroll. Arguably a 25 str guy hitting you should hit harder than 19str guy regardless of damroll. This would boost what giants are already "good" at (burst damage) much like evade/stsf/etc boost what dex classes are already good at.

I don't think that the changes overall will have to be this numerous/drastic to make giants more viable. I'd guess their is one of two ways, shore up their defenses/weaknesses or just push them more towards orc-dom pure damage.

In the end, I really like your idea for #5. A flat modifier that scales damage based on your current strength would be a 75% damage at 15 strength to 125% damage at 25 strength, with 20 strength being the current norm. This would not only make giants more viable but dex builds less viable, potentially balancing them against each other a bit.

Just food for thought.

1: being neutral and perma fly are two huge perks for a ton of reasons, especially for certain cabals.

2: no useful comment from me to further a discussion, i personally dislike the idea though

3: at one point, unless I am horribly misremembering, it was told me to me that 25 dex + flourintine is still worse at parry than size large and 25 str. The main reason you see the amped defenses on the high dex non large races with swords is dodge.

4: i suggested this to Daev years ago as an edge similar to the gnome one that allows evade to be triggered on wis. It never went anywhere.

5: this is an interesting idea, in particular if you make it a scale like Verathi mentioned in his reply to you.

Edits to fix spelling errors from phone

>Changing their wield weights won't really help address the
>issue either, especially since everyone considers using "heavy
>weapons" a bad choice due to the potential of strength
>maledicts that exist.

On a Maumlak orc, moreso than the wield weight and strength maledict is the opportunity cost of carrying more than one or two really heavy weapons. 100lb of weight for 2 weapons is 1/5 of your overall carry weight. That is a lot. Reducing wield weights and weapon weight across the board would IMHO be better than (or complementary to) increasing wield weight. If I could carry 4-5 really heavy weapons (max weight, 50lb now, 10lb if reduced) then I haven't put myself at max weight *and* made it so I have to keep max strength. Only the second.

This isn't as much of a benefit to trapping warriors though since you probably only have one or two spec weapons of that weight anyway.

p.s. Semi-related note, the nerve strike that reduces max carry needs to go. When it was originally created, it was an interesting mechanic but incredibly niche, now that being over max carry nukes movement it is a silly malediction. Even if I'm still overmax strength I can get hit with the movement penalty due to nerve dropping my max carry weight and there isn't anything I can do to cover it.

>p.s. Semi-related note, the nerve strike that reduces max
>carry needs to go. When it was originally created, it was an
>interesting mechanic but incredibly niche, now that being over
>max carry nukes movement it is a silly malediction. Even if
>I'm still overmax strength I can get hit with the movement
>penalty due to nerve dropping my max carry weight and there
>isn't anything I can do to cover it.

Worry not, noone takes exploit vitals anymore.

Have you though about something like a aim skill that is based on strength rather than hitroll? Just something of the like to help them hit a bit more and get dodge less?

Trapping is irrelevant to that, it works for everyone.