Tuesday, April 1, 2008

WTF, my build sucks!!

Hello, my friends. I made this topic after poking around and noticing a common mistake the new players are doing.
Wandering around I've seen many players complaining about their char's lack of power and not knowing why they are having so much trouble at xping.And it's something easy to see. Most of the new players like to spread their points on their abilities. They don't make the most important decision a builder must do when they are making a new char: "Is it going to be str or dex based?"
That's the basic question you need to ask yourself. You see, spreading your ability points and ability raising feats may sound cool in theory but when you have to go out and bash all those creatures you may find out that it's going to be harder than you thought..
Using the classic gith monk as an example.. make it with str8 and dex22.. weapon finesse and lvl 40, ok? I'd have 10 stat points to spend, right? Consider I didn't take any Great Dexterity or any other related feat. Build 1: Str 14, Dex 26. Build 2 Str 8, Dex 32.
Build 1, as you can see I've spread my ability points, +6 on str and +4 on dex. Build 2, on the other hand, got all points on dex.
Does that really make any difference at all?Well, with upgrades it would be like this:Build 1: Str 26(+8), Dex 38(+14)Build 2: Str 20(+5), Dex 44(+17)
What you got to ask yourself, is it really worth losing AB and AC to raise your str? Well, build 1 can carry 613lb, almost twice what the build2 can carry. And of course, more damage too.
This is just a simple example about how spreading your ability points can compromise your build's effectiveness. Most of the builds around have even wider ability discrepancies.. like points spent on not so useful abilities or almost making your 2 attack related abilities half/half.. Ex: Gith monk with weapon finesse and str 32, dex 36, he sure was struggling to lvl his char at sheelo. Maybe he wanted to get dev crit, oh well.. Or even a deep orc rdd, of course str based, with an unusual high dex..
Thing is, unless you aim to try making something "exotic", please don't weaken your char by spreading your stat points.DMs and the other players will be grateful. Some are stress out already by our regular annoying/whining players.. Less weak chars around = less whining = Happy players :D

1 comment:

Deurack said...

AMEN! Wow, I wish I had thought to post a message like this earlier, since we talk about it fairly frequently. I agree with Deimonos that not specializing in either Str or Dex is definitely one of the biggest mistakes we see new melee players making. Distributing your ability points among many different stats might work on other servers where the monsters are not so powerful, but here you MUST specialize if you're going to be effective.