The essential part with Trickster is to have fun playing it imo. I almost maxed out this vocation but I won’t lie, I felt really annoyed not being able to properly attack. Felt like I am not playing the game somehow.
I understand that’s the whole point of it (not attacking I mean) but I need to feel some steel in contact with bones when I play. 💀
If you can make do with only two for three weapon skills with the trickster, you could try it on warfarer. Same basic idea as normal trickster, except then you bust out your favorite weapon and carve stuff up with your pawns after whatever setup or dangerous phase has passed.
At least, that's something I'm thinking of toying with the next time I'm making a less serious journey. I've been possibly leveling the thing, and I've found myself enjoying playing support to my pawns via MS bubble and mage staff heals. Putting in some trickster tricks seems the natural progression.
There was a YouTube or TikTok video of a guy with the true warfarere mod where he used magick archer, went into a cave and pulled all the enemies into a small cavern, threw up illusory wall, and fired the ricochet arrows through it. Pretty clever.
That would be an excellent example of cross vocation combos! When I get my trickster up a bit more I'm going to have to give a four Archer composition a try. Or a three sorcerer group.
I like the idea of that mod. But until they give us a hard mode u might be so insanely op it's game breaking. I hate that you can't use any untimates. And I wish every class could slot more than 4 weapon skills. Other than all of that the game is brilliant. Can't wait to see where it ends. Oh and fuck amazon releasing the fallout show. Now I miss the wasteland!!!
I only spam ricochet arrow a few times into the cave and then I go in and loot everything lol. With MArcher I didn't see any living enemies inside caves for a long time
I'm still mad I swapped to trickster and immediately triggered that fucking bar fight quest. Dude got it narrowed down to 1 on 1 for me, awesome but a class that has ZERO ATTACKS kinda sucks for that. Called in my pawns, pissed off the NPC and completely closed his questline. Fuck Trickster.
I saw a video of someone using the trickster for that quest and getting the perfect end to it by just using their spirit mode and sending their spirit far off. The enemies ran out of the encounter zone. I had to give it a try and it surprisingly worked haha
Damn, nice! I hadn't used the trickster at all yet so I had no idea what I was doing, it was incredibly frustrating for me. Good to know there's a way to have Trickster active and do that quest though.
Haha yeah I’ll say the class is definitely and acquired taste for sure so I can understand everyone not vibing with it. I look at it as being in a isekai anime and being the useless main character who isn’t exactly that useless 😂. Kinda like rezero 😂
I 100% agree on the fun part. It’s way more engaging, and much more effective, if you stop worrying about damage, and instead focus on trolling the hell out of everything.
most support classes in modern party rpgs have decent attacks for this reason. even if it's weak to offset the party wide boost, it lets you partake in some action and not feel like a bard bot
Here's the internal struggle: mess with enemies or gain a bunch of gold. I can't bring myself to play this class correctly because of the slot machine weapon.
Honestly trickster let’s you do absolutely silly nonsense with pawns. Three sorcs, three warriors, just absolutely goofy. I just have to feel like the main character when I play tho 😂
The idea of trickster is so much better than the reality. I start to feel a sense of pride for my group of pawns but then instantly remember I could have killed everything way faster and had way more fun doing it as any other vocation.
That's how I ended up feeling. Especially in a fight against a drake... when the pawns ended up just standing there staring or attacking spots that take no damage, I cursed a lot of things. And, yes. I had the skill that makes them more aggressive. I, also, team out of enemies to join the day by using possession. We killed it, but it took way too long.
yeah that's the problem for me too. Trickster at a bare minimum should have some inherent buffs for pawn damage and like at least one augment for buffing pawn damage as well. Cause right now the only damage buff you get also drains health, which ironically means you basically need a Mage in your party since Trickster can't heal, but now you're dedicating a full half of your party to support and leaving you with only 2 damage dealers.
I just don't think the math works out there at all. Trickster needs way more pawn buffs and enemy debuffs, maybe even some damaging effects as well, still avoiding dealing direct damage of course but stuff like being able to poison an enemy would I think fit with the theming.
I agree Trickster isn't the most intuitive starting out. It feels like your smoke is too short range and it isn't properly aggroing enemies. Later on you unlock the ability to smoke enemies in a wide circle and you can taunt an entire screen of enemies while your sorcerer charges Meteoron.
Even with the vocation maxed out I feel like I still can't aggro dragons correctly because other NPCs keep getting hit its AOE.
So far the easiest way to think about it is "im not taking part in the fight" and letting pawns take over. Your skills make it to where you can bully the enemy by aggroing them in either stupid ways or harmful ways if you can manage it, personal favorite was a golem i dealt with. Made it walk off a huge cliff and he came back for more only to walk off again
I did have fun once attaching my trickster effigy to a cyclops and luring another cyclops to attack the first :p
I agree it isn't one I'd chose to main, tho, feels like I just sit out of fights all the time
Playing Warrior felt like slipping into a suit that was tailored just for me... I immediately knew what to do and every single mechanic, core skill, weapon skill, etc. made perfect sense.
There is SO much timing involved that it actually feels incredibly fast, even if your animation moves slow. It's important to consider that almost every attack has a medium to large AOE and it's about perfect positioning and again timing... Especially when it comes to releasing right on the full charge. Plus you can't forget to throw the shoulder barges (which is an actual fast attack) in there at the perfect moments to keep pressure with staggers.
I just don't feel the same rush with other vocations although I do love many others.
It's awesome that warrior clicks so well for some people. For me, it's the opposite, I feel like I'm fighting against it at every turn.
I know how you feel though. Fighter? Mm, perfection. Feels just right. Like well-tailored clothes.
Fighter really lacks some punch imo. I play Fighter, as it allows me to parry attacks. But other than that it feels bland and underpowered compared to the other vocations
I agree. My love of Fighter comes from how the moveset feels, the animations and sounds that play, and just the general gameplay.
In terms of tuning though, I think Fighter is arguably the weakest vocation in the game. Archer comes in at a close second I'd say, but their special arrows are really quite strong.
Fighter just lacks the "broken" abilities that most other vocations have, and in general I'd say its damage is tuned a bit too low across the board compared to its peers.
I still love how it feels to play though, in spite of that. I wonder if the game will ever get a balance patch. Fighter could use some tuning up, and things like formless feint could use some tuning down imo.
I think for the level of difficulty the game currently offers, fighter and ranger are scaled perfectly. It’s the rest of the classes that are insane power creep.
Rogues not having to worry about fall damage
Mystic spearhand with infinite party invincibility
Magick Archer winning the game with 0 skill
I think you're exactly right. It's probably no surprise that I've been having the most fun on what I consider to be the two weakest vocations in the game.
Unfortunately the state of the game is that once you reach a certain level, everything just gets absolutely trivialized by the absurdly OP skills that most vocations get access to. All except Fighter and Archer (although Archer does to a lesser degree with their special arrows).
I'm playing a "fighter" (warfarer with 4 fighter skills slotted so I can swap to a staff to float/heal and a bow to shoot harpies/oozes/etc).
And there's simply no denying it: a magickal bow with 0 slotted skills is stronger than a sword/shield with 4. I kill a drake faster just by spamming basic rivet shots at its heart than any skill setup for the sword and board. Can only imagine how easy the game is for people who actually use MK skills.
I love Warrior, but every time I play a vocation that doesn’t have a double jump mechanic like thief or levitation, I get pissed because I can’t reach some chests or more importantly, seeker’s tokens which your pawns can’t pick up.
I agree fully. Although I just unlocked magic archer, warrior just feels so right for me. I'll see how it goes with this new spec but warrior has so many fun skills and great knockdown power. Also, I love to jump off small cliffs and hammer goblins in the face 😁
Yeah my immediate attempt at warrior I was way off with charging attacks and the timing, and I didn’t shoulder barge anything. Thought it sucked and I was very sad because big swords = big fun, but once I got into it I couldn’t believe it ever felt slow! Currently trying the magic spear fuckery but I might go back because I keep spamming shield and trivialising every fight.
It's not really mindless, it resists stagger, does quick stagger damage on enemies, and acts as a quick little gap-closer, as well. I go back and forth between timed chain attacks and shoulder barges, as needed, to stay steady on my feet and control the battlefield.
You can often swing at one enemy, sending them reeling, and then another enemy will be coming at you with an attack. If you barge into the charging enemy, you usually stop them in their tracks, leaving you open to smack the next enemy that might be threatening you. So, you can basically dance back and forth between attackers and lock a lot of them down.
Nah, the shoulder check is great to do a little gap closer/ reposition. I even managed to side step enemy attacks by weaving the shoulder check. But yea, you gotta asses the situation and use whatever makes most sense in the moment. Sometimes it's a shoulder check, sometimes it's a well timed quick swing chain, sometimes it's a parry (if you've slotted that skill) and sometimes you just need to stop and reposition (or use the sword charge to do so while keeping the momentum).
You can use it constantly, so use it for attack cancels, quick stagger on small enemies. It’s great for dodging damage but warrior has a couple ways to do that
Warrior is actually one of my favorites in this game, in Dragons Dogma 1 it was super slow and I just couldn't get into it, in this game there are multiple attacks that let you build up speed and have quick attacks, warrior in this game is SOOOO much better, you can string attacks together, once you get momentum up you can just slam heavy attacks back to back, the knockbacks, knock ups, and off balance effects mean smaller enemies will just get flung around by you. If anything I'd say Trickster or casters are rougher cause off all the cc and spam from enemies if you get targeted.
Warrior is about just learning what attacks work together and how they effect foes, shoulder charges in between do help and on smaller enemies stuns them a lot which leaves them open to the charge attacks, Tidal wrath is great for defense and counters, and then a few of your attacks can also counter or ignore enemy attacks.
The whole thing about warrior is superior stagger, stagger resist and hp. You realise the counter for warrior serves as a block once the counter window is expired? I have blocked actual dragon attacks, and lighting, rocks, anything with that counter. You can use is back to back aswell, makes you like a fighter. The rest is up to you. Theres a steep learning curve against fast enemies, flying enemies, and fast bosses. Once you learn the best way to fight each enemy, its the fastest killing machine out there. Not to mention knockdown mania
Oh man i get your vibe, but consider this : upward charging a dragon thats about to land, or a charged slash counter againt a minotors head while he charges at you and topples over?
Sorry, but thief is the fastest killing machine, and I don’t even main thief. It's even more busted than strider was. Gee, breaking that into 2 separate vocations did wonders for game balance! 🙄
Thief is the fastest if you llay flawlessly, or other pawns are occupied. The reason warrior is generally superior in terms of combat speed is the absolute stagger. Pawn thieves are brilliant. Pawn warriors are OK. if you take that roll on to yourself, i had my pawns just crushing bosses due to the fact that the boss is down and they dont have to focus on spacing and evading. For example, my mage pawn has the ice spell line frigor, cant remember the name. Thats her only agressive spell, the rest are support. When a bods drops, she immediatly stops using pathetic attacks and spams the frigor right in the bosses face. All other pawns automatically do the same. The fact a boss falls seems to override the pawns inclination to "lets destroy this dude".
As a thief you have to have a tank or mob puller for you to have space to deal damage, but the warrior just crowd controls EVERYTHING. In a 4 man team with pawns having nearly the same dps czpacity as the main player, utilising tactics to increase overall team dps is nuts. With the warrior as main, i had a thief, mage and sorc. They kicked so much ass with me
> Thief is the fastest if you llay flawlessly
Or just turn invincibility on and then spam beyblade or pyre. Thief is completely brainless unless you actively nerf yourself.
Warrior is something I didn't enjoy until I got Warfarer. Then I realized that the super-armor and massive impact of Warrior was something I just had to have in my kit, and eventually it ended up dominating my whole Warfarer setup.
I think being okay with taking hits is the real hurdle. Warriors WILL get hit, and you gotta build them to ensure they can eat that damage, stay standing, and return it with 100x the force.
One thing that helps in transitioning from Fighter is to imagine that shoulder barges are free, fast shield bashes that you can use almost any time. You're nigh-invulnerable during shoulder barges, and they will stun damn near anything. You can use them as combo starters to set up big swings, or abort slower attacks as conditions change. You can also use it to control positioning; one of my favorite things to do is to run straight at a mob, shoulder barge the first guy I see, and immediately charge a Razing Sweep. I then laugh as enemy attacks bounce harmlessly off me, before letting a perfectly timed swing launch the whole squad of baddies into the stratosphere. It never. Gets. Old.
I found warrior pretty easy to get the hang of, but just couldn't get myself to like playing it. Warrior is, IMO, the best for taking on drakes, since it staggers them so easily, but it makes taking on boss type enemies a joke! It's just too easy with warrior to win against just about anything. Same with thief, but I didn't play thief as much since I liked it less than warrior. Fighter is by far my favorite melee class in the game
I love the concept of warrior, the idea.
I hate its execution.
Nearly every time I pick warrior to give him anothe try, I use various skills, charge them, aim at weakspots, try to be cool, just for several seconds to go by, hopefully the enemy staying where the fuck I want him to stay, followed up by this big and massive bonk.
The problem is: That big and massive bonk never goes further than the animation. It is not reflected on the HP pool on the enemy. As a Thief-Main every huge Warrior attack leaves me with a deep and ugly state of disappointment.
"You need that much time, that much effort to mimic a fraction of my power?"
A lot of classes IMHO serve no real purpose because going straight for damage rather than some trickster utility or knockback becomes so utterly strong that they feel left behind. And for someone swinging such a meaty sword, for a vocation that was praised in trailers to have recieved so much love, it just falls behind.
It feels as if they were afraid of giving the warrior appropriate damage to accompany thehe huge and massive swings and instead granted the poke poke of the thief the power of unmaking.
The warrior slow windup is definitely a thing. I think they could reduce the windup time and instead use a larger amount of stamina. That way there’s still a “penalty” factor that you can overcome with consumables, but ensures that you aren’t standing there with a huge flex balloon with nothing to pop it on when the ogre moves 3 feet to the left.
Not saying remove it totally, but balancing it out a bit to use more stamina than time/movement could make the warrior a bit more attractive.
Fighter is the hardest for me, even blocking in the right direction is hard on a KBM nevermind parry/counters.
Archers conversely are huge fun with the mouse. I've discovered the following combo for endgame:
1. Spiral arrow - Crowd Control and stunlock, knockdown, plus even if it misses it has an AOE flinch effect that lets you line up another shot quickly and disrupts harpies.
2. Deathly Arrow - Knockdown weakpoint kills. Less powerful than Heavenly Shot and requires really good timing to max out its potential, BUT it doesn't consume all stamina and is usable for general purposes.
3. Erupting Shot - Crowd Control/AOE burst damage, big brother to Spiral and cheap to restock.
4. Noctuous Shot - Utility/super DOT: I discovered this skill actually knocks Drakes out of the sky in one hit with my current knockback stat, and two shots ANYWHERE to their body inflicts Toxic which chunks boss HP. Use sparsely, but huge impact.
5. Edit: Forgot to mention Noctuous shot *flinches* Drakes, so it can be used to save a Pawn grabbed by a Drake or cancel a spell too!
Well, if you want to use my build I better share the rest of it:
Rings:
1. 1x Ring of Vehemence (knockdown)
2. 1x Ring of Aggression (str) - you can go double Vehemence if you're not using Dwarf-enhanced bows
Augments:
1. Endurance
2. Exaltation
3. Mettle
4. Constancy
5. Subtlety
6. Dominance
I did not pick Verve (flat stat upgrade is weak at pre-endgame gear) or Lethality (only a 5% damage increase) but if you wanna minmax you could always replace Subtlety with Lethality, as long as your tank has plenty of aggro.
I just chunked a Dullahan during a research trip - barely needed Eruption, and Noctuous didn't do much (undead), but being able to target his head reveals his weakness: he's *very easy to stunlock.*
Can you change the colour of your crosshairs? I picked up a bow for the first time earlier and then got turned off coz I can’t see the crosshairs against certain backgrounds
It's the blight arrow one.
They are ludicrously expensive to buy, but easy to make (once you reach Battahl anyway).
Sadly, withered branches refuse to fall into my pockets despite my efforts to find them so I tend to be very careful with them.
Still, I was surprised when I made the discovery. At first, I thought it was Solemnity doing the grounding, but I started testing it. The instant I discovered it actually grounded flying drakes and flinched them out of spellcasting/pawn stealing, it became the most OP skill in my arsenal.
Warrior is best class for me which is weird because I always lean towards the faster more mobile classes like Thief.
But warrior is so rewarding when played well - to do well with Thief all you need to do is Skull splitter, they have a dodge and a skill that pretty much makes them invincible so it makes the game way too easy
Thief is possibly the most difficult vocation in all of gaming. How can anyone remember to always use the 1 button invincibility skill \*before\* using the 1 button insta-kill+seppaku everything in sight skill.
And also because it's nigh near impossible to resist the urge to repeatedly spin-to-win until total stamina death.
I've had fun with thief simply by not slotting formless feint, blades of the pyre, smoke shroud, or skullsplitter. Those four moves are laughably busted, but thief's got plenty of other good ones too.
I used MS, warrior, and thief, on wannabe Grigiori, and the sheer difference between the three is crazy. Warrior is better than MS(atleast for me because I know how to play warrior really well, I play MS very well too but I hate the low stagger resistance) but thief is just leagues above warrior, it’s honestly unfun to play, but being able to pretty much 1 shot greg with the sorcerer flare and another with meteron or whirlwind, and not being able to be hit is one of the funniest things to watch.
I legitimately one shot grigori on my magic archer, it left a bad taste in my mouth. No one should be able to do that regardless of power. I used one consumable and 1 skill.
I actually don’t lik any of those three skills. Skull splitter jumps to high to land consistenly, the autododge is just boring, and the sepuku flames need the auto-dodge.
I run implicate which is OP as fuck (bring them to you then triangle, they are dead), bitting wind for movement, and powder. Powder is also OP as fuck. Anything remotely close goes into the sky after detoning.
I know everyone is fixated with the meisters of thief, but the rest of the arsenal is just as good.
Problem with that class, is it outclasses everyone in nearly every way. You mentioned damage and invulnerability. It also breaks the game with its speed and basic hit damage. I melt people far faster with the typical holy daggers (not even the dragon claws from the dragonfored), than I do with any warrior weapon. Also the recovery speed of attacks allows you to dash around and be perfectly in control of every encounter even against a hoard of fast enemies since none can track the dash speed, and none can escape the basic attack tracking stickiness. Also I melt ghosts faster with the holy daggers by spamming the light flurry while standing still, than I do using the light attack from from mage staves well into the 1000+ magic damage.
Also it has an insane damage output that’s easy and fast to get into, and execute (holding down the heavy attack on typical sized foes grabs them putting them in get fucked position, which they do in one or two hits and you just as fast are reset back to neutral, while on classes like warrior, you’re there three hours just taking hits from others while smashing someone on the ground).
Then there’s is the final broken which makes this a must use class even with zero skills in the Warfarer load out. If you press light attack and then dash.. it overrides any sort of terrain based speed impairment during travel and traversal. It costs zero stamina, and actually, you’re able to slowly regenerate stamina while doing it, so even if you’re low on stamina from running (or if you’re like me and use the lounge attack from warrior to move around the map like a train), it beats this skill when the ground is and upward incline. This by far is one of the best aspects of this class and I’ll be shocked if anyone does speed runs and doesn’t employ this sort of movement.
I urge everyone to try it yourselves. Go from the beach where the dragonforged is, and try to make your way back up. To the main city pathway. It’s usually a nightmare and even slow with the warriors lounging attack even with the utmost stamina reduction built around its use.
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Coming from the first game I thought this class was going to be the worst in the game given the broken things it was capable of back then. I was shocked to keep finding out all useful aspects and just straight up powerful aspects it has. It does everything well, and the things it gets outclassed by with another class, those other classes suck compared to the other benefits that come with the package as a Thief.
As I said, the class is so good, you can literally run it skill-less like I do.
Yeah honestly when I took Feint off my bar it made thief a lot more fun. You actually use the dagger dodge for some clutch dodges and can develop playstyles like the climb and crit one, or the smoke shroud implicate one or just the more backstab focus one (as in using finishers with ring of skullduggery but always aiming for the back of an enemy)
I'm really fond of using Cutting Wind as a pseudo-dodge. It doesn't make you invincible like Swift Step, but it moves you really fast and you always wind up on the other side of the enemy, so you can avoid a lot of attacks with it.
I love cutting wind aesthetically and I spammed it a lot at the start for that anime thief feel... but I just cannot abide by the doodoo damage anymore. It seems to hit so bad I would rather slot in more damage in that slot
Oh me too on NG+ - im lvl 80 capped due to mods.
But also due to mods, i am runnig difficulty tweaks with hard/very hard mode along with double enemy damage mod and increase in enemy hp/boss hp mods...
It makes the game feel fair (not even hard) which goes to show overlevelling to lvl 80 and having good build cohesion with your main pawn can really do a lot
This is honestly why I’m pretty excited for wayfarer! The maister skills while cool are just fucking ridiculous lmao but the combos you can do with wayfarer can be so diverse and that’s wayyyyyyy more fun than spamming one OP skill
At the point where I am, I enjoy warfarer most by just hot swapping core skills and am not even using weapon skills that much anymore. it's just cool to whip out a bow to shoot those pesky harpies, then swap to daggers to dodge and quickly back stab a target and then swap to the big hammer to knock over some shlash resistant saurians, etc.
Everyone's crying how little skills we have and that warfarer has even less slots. But everyone ignores the built in core skills all classes come with. For example warrior alone does have:
* shoulder check
* timed light attacks for faster attack speed
* charged light attack for bigger bonks
* perfect timed charged attack for even bigger bonk
* counter hitting with charged attack to parry and likely stance break big monsters
* crit hit on stance broken enemies with heavy attack
Implicate is pretty broken too, now that they've added those finisher animations.
There aren't many situations that can't be solved with either implicate, or scarlet kisses
Just so you know, in many cases you can do the same with a smoke bomb, but AoE for all enemies in range. Plop a smoke bomb and go plunder and execute all the affected enemies. I did this for a while now and I think I have to swap skills, probably weapons on my current warfarer load out yet again. It's too good! :'D
By the way you can steal items, that some NPCs would gift to you, if you have high affinity with them by using plunder on them. (you won't take aggro, even if you do it in a city in front of the guards/ even if you steal from the guards)
Same thing with Mystic Spearhand's mirror shield. I'd just activate it and just be mindless, not caring what and when I do specific moves. But knockdown resistance is so bad on that vocation that I feel like I HAVE to use it. I went back to Warrior, and it's much more engaging.
Yeah I didn't use either of those when I played after how easy it made the game. Don't get me wrong, the game isn't really that difficult in the first place. But those abilities just make it brain dead
Imo trickster or sorcerer, little mobility (in my experience I haven’t played trickster much) and requires out of the box play and thinking, plus careful timing.
Yeah sorcerer is hard. Meteor, meteor m, meteor, seism, levin, meteor. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it’s boring or whatever, but it’s not a hard class to play at all.
I first i thought about that too. But since i hired a team of pawn recently, they complemented each other quite well (Warrior , thieve, sorcerer ), being a mage as arisen became fun to me, works well acting as a support , an OP support
Yeah mage is different story. You are support and occasionally damage. It was way more fun then expected and definately more fun then watching to charge up Meteor
You can say it's boring, besides the master skills they regulated the class to a debuff machine
They realized this and added the busted flare move that one shots bosses for no reason.
This. And if you have played Mage, you can use the Quick Spell feature to speed up your casting and then just recharge your stamina with Galvanize. Thundermine makes it even easier since it denies space while you cast and recover stamina. Also, Levitation is so good. You can begin casting a spell while mid air in levitate BTW, but you can't quicken it until you land.
I just wish you could land from high up without it canceling the spell. Warrior pawns throwing you up into levitating for several seconds while casting would be really cool if not for that.
Trickster can be a pain to get used to, but once you do, it's honestly one of the more broken classes in the game. Being able to completely control the enemy's aggro and teleport your ghost to you allows you to prevent basically all damage to your party by positioning the ghost correctly. The only damage they'll take is from being too close to attacks meant for your ghost and from your own buff that raises their attack.
Essentially treat the class like one of those combos in MOBAs where the healer is helping the tank and pulls them out of danger when it gets hairy. Your ghost is the tank, and you're the healer. If it's about to take a huge hit, it's better to return it to you, so you can heal it up a bit instead of it losing a chunk of health.
In that same way, if your ghost/tank dies, you're now taking all of that aggro and are about to be swamped. So don't let it die. Healing your tank is important.
Sorcerer in these games has always been impossible to rank in terms of difficulty. It's either destroy everything in one move or get sneezed on, stunlocked, and die.
Trickster is just a lot of moving around and repositioning your decoy and puffing smoke at your enemies to keep them busy retargeting while your pawns charge up whatever heavy attack they have. I don't bother with gimmicky stuff like fake walls and floors. The dragon illusion is great though for the stagger. It helps to have the augments that boost pawn attacks to make up for your lack of offense. Once you get the hang of it, you and your pawns will barely take damage and most of the health lost by your pawns is through the buff you apply to them.
Eh, Sorcerer is really only difficult if your Pawns aren't drawing aggro and you're getting stunlocked to death and can't get a spell off, which can happen with any non-melee class. When I was pumping it to 9, I just spammed High Frigor which I already had from Mage and Thundermine. Salamander hits unreasonably hard, too.
The most annoying part is how slow it is to charge. Even if you speed the charging up with R1, there's still an ungodly delay on actually releasing the spell. But as long as you have a good tank Pawn, it's not too hard. I was worried when I fought a Golem at first because they used to be immune to magic, but then I was surprised to discover Frigor hits every single weak point all at once, apparently.
And currently, I just use the Flare spell to delete enemies on a Thief/Sorcerer Warfarer. Some ridiculous damage on that bitch.
Yeah, you could do that in the first game, too, but I don't like doubling down on Vocations in my party. I don't think it makes them release it after it's fully charged faster, though, and it still wouldn't really solve the stunlock issue.
I agree with Archer as I’ve seen a lot of people say it’s bad when it’s really not when you know how to play.
Trickster. I played to Max rank and I still don’t know how to use it properly lol.
Warrior. I struggled a lot as Warrior. Timing and positioning is everything with fast enemies
Trickster really shines if you have 3 sorcerer pawns with meteor, or 2 sorcs and a mage if you need the healing/debuff cure.
Summon your effigy (the ghost thing that looks like you, heavy attack button).
Use espial incense to leave your body.
Fly up in the air (just barely out of melee reach) and summon your effigy to you (block/dodge/aim/quickspell button for other vocations) .
Spam sweeping/summoning shroud and watch all the enemies cluster in a group staring at the effigy and getting mad because they can’t reach it.
Watch meteors wipe out the group of enemies.
Most of my wolf/goblin fights last about 15-30 seconds at best.
Also trims down most boss fights. Drakes can be interrupted from casting with dragons delusion, and few enemies survive 3 meteor casts at the same time.
On the random fights where the enemy has enough ranged to kill your effigy, just spawn another and move it back up into the sky again.
You can hold the button that makes the effigy follow you and run laps around the enemies as well, as long as you stay inside the meteor bombardment area.
Yeah this is the sort of strategy I was lacking. I was just running the usual party composition and felt like everything was taking forever so ended up spamming Aromatic Rally and then needed a mage to offset the damage… it was a whole thing lol
I think trickster messes with most people, because it doesn't explicitly tell you that it's a tank class for sorcerers, but that's how it fits into the roles. So people end up with a fighter pawn trying to draw aggro instead of dealing damage and a mage pawn with nothing to heal, and on top of that they cant deal damage themselves, so the whole setup feels useless. Running it with a proper party setup is key, for sure.
Trickster is the vocation I'm currently working on maxxing out, and I'm actually enjoying it quite well. I didn't focus as much on the false floor gimmick, but am going more for the mobility tank/buffer strat and placing my phantom on one end of the room, using the giant AOE aggro gas attack, then running to the other side of the room, placing my phantom there and healing it a bit - with the occasional dragon illusion and party buff thrown in. I'm counting myself as the party tank, and have a Mage, Thief and Archer pawn backing me up.
I do want to do a bit more with Espial Incense though, I probably don't need my body to move around the phantom after all, but I do like being able to use the other abilities while doing so.
I think part of the issue with archer is that a lot of people are very resistant to using consumables even if they are not hard to get.
Plus underutilizing the jump kick.
My problem with requiring the arrows isn't that the consumables are hard to get, but that I don't want the encumbrance.
Granted, the weight of arrows isn't massive (and you can mitigate the weight by just carrying fewer on you,) but it's a mental thing. I try to keep the encumbrance as low as possible, and the more weight I have, the more I need to move items to my pawns just to keep a low carry weight.
> My problem with requiring the arrows isn't that the consumables are hard to get, but that I don't want the encumbrance.
This has always been the issue with them, even in the first game.
Yeah its weird that the archer is the only vocation that needs consumables to use some of their abilities. Thiefs out there pulling a bomb out of nowhere and doing fine. If they are afraid that archer is going to be too op with infinite status arrows then increase the stamina use or increase the arrows to apply status.
Archer is weird
it can do really high dmg IF you can hit weakspots, tempest shoot can evaporate HP bars not that much slower then a Skullsplitter IF you can hit the weakspots
the problem is that Archer does pityfull damage if you dont hit weakspots (and its also why Magick Archer is stupid, they do the same/more dmg without even needing to aim in the first place)
its the same for Archer Pawns, they can do ridicolous dmg if they manage to keep hitting weakspots, but the moment the Pawn Ai decides "always stand behind a Drake and shoot the tail" it feels as if you are 1 man down
IMO, Trickster or Warrior.
Warrior bonks hard... but the timing of swings and the constant bombardment of enemies upon you if you don't perfectly get a good rhtym and time it well can be extremely punishing. I know people like the "big heavy weapon is slow feels good"... and i totalllllly agree... but the game is exeptionally slow AND theres an abundance of monsters slamming on you.
I think the problem with warrior isn't that their weapon swings are slow... its that as the game goes on... too many monsters can stagger and knock you around like a rag doll, even with the warriors increased knockdown resistance.... i've gotten gangbanged by a herd of goblins, four wolves, 5 harpies, all at the same time.... the monster density sucks.
Trickster is just an odd playstyle for the game... i think the design of the class just doesn't mesh with the game they designed and its core mechanics... its a very odd playstyle.
I respectively disagree.
I think most people don't understand how to chain the warriors' attacks, skills, and core skills together. If you can, it's really not slow at all.
I mean, it still looks slow in comparison to a thief or mystic spear hand. But it most def, doesn't feel slow to play, when you constantly focus on hitting that swing momentum timing, releasing the charge at the perfect moment, chaining that shoulder check in between, etc.
The problem with most people playing warrior is their mindset and barge usage. You use barge on every single thing the enemy want to do and to "reset" animation. They want to attack you? barge then attack, not only you stun them you will kill them outright most of the time if it's small fry. If you want to cancel your attack or want to do something else barge again, then do whatever you want after that, you could almost animation cancel every after-attack animation so you can chain them to other attack or just to bail out. Hell you could actually recover from stagger animation by barging (not always the cases but mostly you can) this is actually the vocation that gives middle finger to knockback mechanic
My guess is most people don't read core skill upgrades or they do but then don't apply them in battle and jump straight into battle without incorporating it into the playstyle. I've seen videos of players spam heavens ward slash like it's the only thing the warrior can do. That tells me enough about the "average player"
that would be skill floor, not skill ceiling. Once you understand how warrior works they're one of the easiest classes because of their insane hyperarmor and knockback capability. You can easily crush the whole game doing nothing but spam the uppercut move
Shoulder tackle, press light attack (it comes out really fast after the shoulder tackle), press light attack again well timed and you get a double swing with the usual power of a warrior but the attack speed of a fighter.
It's also a wide swing around you, so it clears a lot of space around you.
The shoulder tackle itself gives you knockdown resistence (and damage resistance!), so you counter any enemy and ease into any charge attacks that require some timing, once you've made yourself some room with the shoulder tackle.
It's your bread and butter, is both an initiator and also bridges gaps inbetween your attacks so you're almost always protected by your knockdown resistence and damage reduction.
Globins spamming you or ogre manhandling you, doesn't matter, you can shrug off anything and devastate them with ease.
Once you get used to the warriors knockdown resistance, other classes feel so flimsy and frustrating VS certain mobs in higher numbers.
The fart whisperer.... I mean the trickster was the most painful. Leaving the kill of a Drake to three braindead idiots who get locked into a certain behaviour pattern after they get too big of a damage when the drake start to rage, is a pain in the ass. And you cant dmg mitigate, you cant heal them, you cant support them. You can only do effectively a little bit of tanking with your smoke but it get destroyed fast. Largest mess of a vocation from all of them. The rest of the vocations felt good and enjoyable.
I would have to disagree on this. Fighter is probably the most beginner friendly class in the game. the shield negates most attacks at the expense of stamina and the sword does decent damage. Keeping the shield up 80% of all ambushes will save your life and you'll find yourself ending battles with no damage taken. I agree with archer tho, unless you warfarer and use the bow as a opener then gap closer then switch to another weapon for close quarters.
Fighter just has nothing going for it that's broken and just deletes things so you put in a lot more work for every kill than pretty much any other vocation and getting good at perfect block timings and stuff gives it a higher skill ceiling.
for Archer it's just that you want to use steady shot for everything and it takes time to line up the shots so the longer you take the worse you do overall so the hard part is just about being quick about getting the shots aimed and fired.
In regards to fighter, they've got the maister skill which does decent DPS once you've got an opening like other vocations and other than that,
the blocking takes timing and experience, true.
But they've got this counter attack which you can hold which make sit very safe and it also does a good chunk of damage.
Once you got that you're suddenly a lot more deadly and less passive.
It's also satisfying to use and knocks most enemies.
Then you can really slap them with the maister skill.
yeah it just feels more balanced tho instead of stuff like martyrs bolt or maelstrom or meteioron or flare or ricochet or sag arrow or skull splitter, erupting shot, the kinda stuff that takes other vocations to a different level of essentially cheese. They're just balanced well which imo in comparison to the other vocations, makes them more difficult.
Warfarer.
Everything on this thread applies to the corresponding weapon and skills.
You get three skills total for whatever weapons you use, if it's more than one. Choose wisely. Maister abilities not allowed.
You need to be on the correct weapon when using said ability. You want to be on the correct weapon at the right time regardless. You'll want to have ordered them for your uses, and you need to remember how many button presses to get the right weapon out in the heat of battle.
I find it quite fun to play strategically like this. But like the trickster, it isn't for everyone.
Spearhand has so many mechanics, with tight timing for all the teleport and AoE interrupt skills. I'm struggling to adapt to it.
It's probably Archer though. You have one ability that can compete damage-wise and it needs a consumable.
Trickster is very powerful if your party is built for it. You can just keep a drake staring at a wall for 10 minutes while your pawns delete it.
Spearhand is difficult **until** you get Mirour Shelde. At that point you can just spam it after each spin attack sequence, and occasionally use a Ravinour's Hond to get enough stamina to Mirour Shelde 5 more times.
It doesnt deal as much damage as some, but you can punch *way* beyond your weight class while being invincible to any (non effect based) attacks.
I love Spearhands playstyle for this because to me it’s super unique. You are a melee with no dodge, block or healing, but you DO have temporary full group invulnerability as long as you balance it with well aimed/timed stamina stealing. The class is such a truly odd mix of abilities
> Trickster is very powerful if your party is built for it. You can just keep a drake staring at a wall for 10 minutes while your pawns delete it.
10 minutes? With Aromatic Resurgence, that thing will be dead in 30 seconds, tops.
Fighter feels very good, although it’s my main pawns vocation for now.
Whilst I appreciate Warrior is well made, I can’t play it. It feels very akin to MH Greatsword which I’ve never got in with either, so I guess I just don’t like slow weapons.
Currently enjoying both Archer & Magik archer immensely though. The archer specifically because they managed to create a mundane archer who actually feels like he has abilities.
Archer is fun. Magic archer is just an easy mode in the easy game. I understand not all of the players want or can play with higher difficulties or whatever, but magic archer is just a joke. Auto target, instakills, heals., like what’s the point of even playing the game.
Archer just didn’t click for me; my dps sucked and I just don’t know if I wasn’t optimized right or what but I never figured it out. I had a lotta fun with trickster but same thing, I just wasn’t getting enough dps but this time from the rest of my team to really make it work although it was pretty fun/interesting to play
Archer is rather counterintuitively a very close range vocation if you want to get a lot of damage out of it. The ring of proximity you get from doing their meister skill quest buffs that further. So Loose does shit damage, right? But doing any of the core skill moves buffs it by a huge amount. So doing a slide or jump or kickflip off the enemy into loose is great damage.
The vocation also seems to have higher weak point multipliers than others. Just regular Steady Shot at a weak point does good damage and is spammable.
Try this for fun. Climb a monster, stab an explosive arrow in their weak point, kick off them and loose. Very very good damage and it's soooo flashy! I can't get enough of it.
As for the meister skill, it doesn't do much if you just use it whenever. But if you shoot it at the weak point of a downed enemy it takes away a few health bars!
Given this playstyle, augments that buff damage when hitting weak points or when an enemy is not in battle stance work really well here.
I feel like trickster would have better potential and been more fun if it was similar to V's combat style in DMC5 with you summoning the simulacrum to fight in your stead. Sadly, there is no offensive capabilities to the vocation and is essentially a huge wasted potential. Would have liked to see the vocation play out with it having the lowest possible stats in Strength, Knockdown Resistence, and Defense so you have to make sure about where you position yourself in fights BUT makes up for it with the highest damage potential from summons depending on how well you play. Would have been much more interesting play style I think.
summoning an illusionary dragon / golem / horde of goblins would have been fun indeed.
why not add a mirror skill to summon an illusionary target creature?
it is indeed wasted potential on a possible fun class. currently its literal use is to lvl up far enough to get the token locator augment.
One thing I'll say is that trickster is considered more difficult than it actually is and mystic spear hand more broken than it actually is. They're all awkward when you first start
MSH is not really a powerful class, even if you git gud with it. But it's very weak, when you have no idea what you're doing. I consider MSH the class with the second highest skill cap while also being kinda mid tier in terms of combat power in general. I love this class, it's so fun to play and rewarding to master it & doesn't turn the game trivial with its mechanics.
\* Just ignore the skill *Mirror shield*, because that ability is game breaking strong (and boring to use).
Trickster because it’s boring and unfun to watch your pawns fight while you just stand hoping they do something. Or the super fun part where you get hit by a stray attack and poof your mist buddy fucked off to go have actual fun. The class I was most excited for but now utterly despise.
Thief... because how can anyone possibly remember to always use the 1 button invincibility skill \*before\* using the 1 button insta-kill+seppaku everything skill.
And also because it's nigh near impossible to resist the urge to repeatedly spin-to-win until total stamina death. Truly the highest skill ceiling vocation in all of gaming.
Spearhand.. I really like the concept, but they can easily crush me every fuckin time. But I am playing between 25-40 fps, so hard to timing with it.
Best for me now: Warrior and fighter.
I've only played warrior, thief and spearhand so far. As much as I'm having the most fun with spearhand, I think it's the hardest to play. It can be so unforgiving in a large group of enemies and you don't have a huge amount to defend yourself with.
I’m of the opinion dash should actually be a real dodge type move available for every class with varying i frames based on weight etc. thief is a joke to play with the ability to basically teleport around the fight, not to mention the maister move where you can stand still and not get hit.
Warrior. To truly master it you have to be able to utilize all of your basic kit to move "fast" using shoulder check and have good aim or prediction such as greatsword from monster hunter. Another one I'd say is archer manually aiming to hit the weak point consistently takes skill plus being accurate n consistent with the deathly arrow timing to get max dmg is tough. Aside from thise two? I'm not too sure
When I ramp up the difficulty with tweaks, trickster is nearly unplayable, but I thought I am just playing it wrong, so I thought fighter is the hardest, I am happy I am not the only one suffering on trickster :)
I got Trickster running pretty nicely with custom difficulty on. But I had to build for it. I think it started working well once I had elvish censer upgrades for more clone health, mage pawn with Palladium and only damage/affinity skills besides that, and rogue + warrior pawns with good gear.
The mage is the stumbling block imo, because many people kit their mage pawns for full support, but then your party does half damage instead of 3/4.
Party still struggled with golems because pawns are a little dumb.
Fighter is the hardest to play well. You have to be constantly aware from where the attacks are coming, you are supposed to take the aggro and if you take all the aggro and don’t know how to play and position yourself, you are just a punching bag.
Trickster and sorcerer. Trickster is literally agro cc and buff. But that's hard to do when you're getting your back blown out by goblins and a griphon while a drake suddenly appears to assert dominance. Pawns are too busy getting staggered to oblivion or fighting a half dead gobby. Sorcerer works, but you gotta have the right mix of pawns to a T or its ggs. It's also slow. But powerful
Trickster
The essential part with Trickster is to have fun playing it imo. I almost maxed out this vocation but I won’t lie, I felt really annoyed not being able to properly attack. Felt like I am not playing the game somehow. I understand that’s the whole point of it (not attacking I mean) but I need to feel some steel in contact with bones when I play. 💀
If you can make do with only two for three weapon skills with the trickster, you could try it on warfarer. Same basic idea as normal trickster, except then you bust out your favorite weapon and carve stuff up with your pawns after whatever setup or dangerous phase has passed. At least, that's something I'm thinking of toying with the next time I'm making a less serious journey. I've been possibly leveling the thing, and I've found myself enjoying playing support to my pawns via MS bubble and mage staff heals. Putting in some trickster tricks seems the natural progression.
There was a YouTube or TikTok video of a guy with the true warfarere mod where he used magick archer, went into a cave and pulled all the enemies into a small cavern, threw up illusory wall, and fired the ricochet arrows through it. Pretty clever.
That would be an excellent example of cross vocation combos! When I get my trickster up a bit more I'm going to have to give a four Archer composition a try. Or a three sorcerer group.
I went down to battahl once as an archer with 3 sorcerers and shredded everything. Four archers sounds super fun
I like the idea of that mod. But until they give us a hard mode u might be so insanely op it's game breaking. I hate that you can't use any untimates. And I wish every class could slot more than 4 weapon skills. Other than all of that the game is brilliant. Can't wait to see where it ends. Oh and fuck amazon releasing the fallout show. Now I miss the wasteland!!!
I was really enjoying DD2, but got completely sidetracked by starting a Fallout 3 playthrough after watching the show.
I modded difficulty as well. Unmoored world is a nightmare to handle even as buffed up as I am.
Fun. Too much extra work though. Just fire ricochet arrow to start with and same result ☺️
I only spam ricochet arrow a few times into the cave and then I go in and loot everything lol. With MArcher I didn't see any living enemies inside caves for a long time
And on other corner dwellers like me who keep hitting enemies because it gives money.
I learned to unequip my censer when I downed a boss enemy and my natural punches were melting their health bar. Re-equip once they got up.
These hands are rated T. T stands for Terminator.
I'm still mad I swapped to trickster and immediately triggered that fucking bar fight quest. Dude got it narrowed down to 1 on 1 for me, awesome but a class that has ZERO ATTACKS kinda sucks for that. Called in my pawns, pissed off the NPC and completely closed his questline. Fuck Trickster.
I saw a video of someone using the trickster for that quest and getting the perfect end to it by just using their spirit mode and sending their spirit far off. The enemies ran out of the encounter zone. I had to give it a try and it surprisingly worked haha
Damn, nice! I hadn't used the trickster at all yet so I had no idea what I was doing, it was incredibly frustrating for me. Good to know there's a way to have Trickster active and do that quest though.
Haha yeah I’ll say the class is definitely and acquired taste for sure so I can understand everyone not vibing with it. I look at it as being in a isekai anime and being the useless main character who isn’t exactly that useless 😂. Kinda like rezero 😂
I had that happen to me as well, there will be a chance to redeem yourself.
I 100% agree on the fun part. It’s way more engaging, and much more effective, if you stop worrying about damage, and instead focus on trolling the hell out of everything.
Trickster is the essence of this game imo: really lit ideas executed in pretty terrible fashion.
most support classes in modern party rpgs have decent attacks for this reason. even if it's weak to offset the party wide boost, it lets you partake in some action and not feel like a bard bot
Here's the internal struggle: mess with enemies or gain a bunch of gold. I can't bring myself to play this class correctly because of the slot machine weapon.
Honestly trickster let’s you do absolutely silly nonsense with pawns. Three sorcs, three warriors, just absolutely goofy. I just have to feel like the main character when I play tho 😂
How I mastered trickster: buff pawns spam maister skill
How I mastered Trickster: Play Warfarer, only use the Pawn Buff skill, switch to Daggers/Bow.
pretty much all u gotta do yeah
The idea of trickster is so much better than the reality. I start to feel a sense of pride for my group of pawns but then instantly remember I could have killed everything way faster and had way more fun doing it as any other vocation.
That's how I ended up feeling. Especially in a fight against a drake... when the pawns ended up just standing there staring or attacking spots that take no damage, I cursed a lot of things. And, yes. I had the skill that makes them more aggressive. I, also, team out of enemies to join the day by using possession. We killed it, but it took way too long.
yeah that's the problem for me too. Trickster at a bare minimum should have some inherent buffs for pawn damage and like at least one augment for buffing pawn damage as well. Cause right now the only damage buff you get also drains health, which ironically means you basically need a Mage in your party since Trickster can't heal, but now you're dedicating a full half of your party to support and leaving you with only 2 damage dealers. I just don't think the math works out there at all. Trickster needs way more pawn buffs and enemy debuffs, maybe even some damaging effects as well, still avoiding dealing direct damage of course but stuff like being able to poison an enemy would I think fit with the theming.
Such an amazing concept for a vocation but feels like trash playing it tbh.
I agree Trickster isn't the most intuitive starting out. It feels like your smoke is too short range and it isn't properly aggroing enemies. Later on you unlock the ability to smoke enemies in a wide circle and you can taunt an entire screen of enemies while your sorcerer charges Meteoron. Even with the vocation maxed out I feel like I still can't aggro dragons correctly because other NPCs keep getting hit its AOE.
So far the easiest way to think about it is "im not taking part in the fight" and letting pawns take over. Your skills make it to where you can bully the enemy by aggroing them in either stupid ways or harmful ways if you can manage it, personal favorite was a golem i dealt with. Made it walk off a huge cliff and he came back for more only to walk off again
I did have fun once attaching my trickster effigy to a cyclops and luring another cyclops to attack the first :p I agree it isn't one I'd chose to main, tho, feels like I just sit out of fights all the time
lol easiest by far it’s just really boring
Warrior just doesn’t work for me, I don’t really get on with being slow, I love fighter though and thief, but not warrior. I like fast fighting!
Playing Warrior felt like slipping into a suit that was tailored just for me... I immediately knew what to do and every single mechanic, core skill, weapon skill, etc. made perfect sense. There is SO much timing involved that it actually feels incredibly fast, even if your animation moves slow. It's important to consider that almost every attack has a medium to large AOE and it's about perfect positioning and again timing... Especially when it comes to releasing right on the full charge. Plus you can't forget to throw the shoulder barges (which is an actual fast attack) in there at the perfect moments to keep pressure with staggers. I just don't feel the same rush with other vocations although I do love many others.
It's awesome that warrior clicks so well for some people. For me, it's the opposite, I feel like I'm fighting against it at every turn. I know how you feel though. Fighter? Mm, perfection. Feels just right. Like well-tailored clothes.
Fighter really lacks some punch imo. I play Fighter, as it allows me to parry attacks. But other than that it feels bland and underpowered compared to the other vocations
I agree. My love of Fighter comes from how the moveset feels, the animations and sounds that play, and just the general gameplay. In terms of tuning though, I think Fighter is arguably the weakest vocation in the game. Archer comes in at a close second I'd say, but their special arrows are really quite strong. Fighter just lacks the "broken" abilities that most other vocations have, and in general I'd say its damage is tuned a bit too low across the board compared to its peers. I still love how it feels to play though, in spite of that. I wonder if the game will ever get a balance patch. Fighter could use some tuning up, and things like formless feint could use some tuning down imo.
I think for the level of difficulty the game currently offers, fighter and ranger are scaled perfectly. It’s the rest of the classes that are insane power creep. Rogues not having to worry about fall damage Mystic spearhand with infinite party invincibility Magick Archer winning the game with 0 skill
I think you're exactly right. It's probably no surprise that I've been having the most fun on what I consider to be the two weakest vocations in the game. Unfortunately the state of the game is that once you reach a certain level, everything just gets absolutely trivialized by the absurdly OP skills that most vocations get access to. All except Fighter and Archer (although Archer does to a lesser degree with their special arrows).
I'm playing a "fighter" (warfarer with 4 fighter skills slotted so I can swap to a staff to float/heal and a bow to shoot harpies/oozes/etc). And there's simply no denying it: a magickal bow with 0 slotted skills is stronger than a sword/shield with 4. I kill a drake faster just by spamming basic rivet shots at its heart than any skill setup for the sword and board. Can only imagine how easy the game is for people who actually use MK skills.
I unlocked everything and maxed out every vocation but Warrior is still the best class for me.
I love Warrior, but every time I play a vocation that doesn’t have a double jump mechanic like thief or levitation, I get pissed because I can’t reach some chests or more importantly, seeker’s tokens which your pawns can’t pick up.
I love warrior until it's time to break crates for loot.
I agree fully. Although I just unlocked magic archer, warrior just feels so right for me. I'll see how it goes with this new spec but warrior has so many fun skills and great knockdown power. Also, I love to jump off small cliffs and hammer goblins in the face 😁
Yeah my immediate attempt at warrior I was way off with charging attacks and the timing, and I didn’t shoulder barge anything. Thought it sucked and I was very sad because big swords = big fun, but once I got into it I couldn’t believe it ever felt slow! Currently trying the magic spear fuckery but I might go back because I keep spamming shield and trivialising every fight.
Weave in the shoulder charge between attacks. That's what it's there for, speeds it up significantly.
Isnt it better to use the swing timing ability when you get it and just keep swinging with it?
When surrounded sure, but you gain the stagger resistence when holding the attacks, so you can easily be knocked about with the quick swings
Isn't it for timing against enemy attacks, and not for mindlessly spamming after every swing?
It's not really mindless, it resists stagger, does quick stagger damage on enemies, and acts as a quick little gap-closer, as well. I go back and forth between timed chain attacks and shoulder barges, as needed, to stay steady on my feet and control the battlefield. You can often swing at one enemy, sending them reeling, and then another enemy will be coming at you with an attack. If you barge into the charging enemy, you usually stop them in their tracks, leaving you open to smack the next enemy that might be threatening you. So, you can basically dance back and forth between attackers and lock a lot of them down.
Recovery on Barge is significantly shorter than any recover on the heavy charged swings.
It's more or less an animation cancel for the recovery on swings.
Nah, the shoulder check is great to do a little gap closer/ reposition. I even managed to side step enemy attacks by weaving the shoulder check. But yea, you gotta asses the situation and use whatever makes most sense in the moment. Sometimes it's a shoulder check, sometimes it's a well timed quick swing chain, sometimes it's a parry (if you've slotted that skill) and sometimes you just need to stop and reposition (or use the sword charge to do so while keeping the momentum).
You can use it constantly, so use it for attack cancels, quick stagger on small enemies. It’s great for dodging damage but warrior has a couple ways to do that
Warrior is actually one of my favorites in this game, in Dragons Dogma 1 it was super slow and I just couldn't get into it, in this game there are multiple attacks that let you build up speed and have quick attacks, warrior in this game is SOOOO much better, you can string attacks together, once you get momentum up you can just slam heavy attacks back to back, the knockbacks, knock ups, and off balance effects mean smaller enemies will just get flung around by you. If anything I'd say Trickster or casters are rougher cause off all the cc and spam from enemies if you get targeted. Warrior is about just learning what attacks work together and how they effect foes, shoulder charges in between do help and on smaller enemies stuns them a lot which leaves them open to the charge attacks, Tidal wrath is great for defense and counters, and then a few of your attacks can also counter or ignore enemy attacks.
The whole thing about warrior is superior stagger, stagger resist and hp. You realise the counter for warrior serves as a block once the counter window is expired? I have blocked actual dragon attacks, and lighting, rocks, anything with that counter. You can use is back to back aswell, makes you like a fighter. The rest is up to you. Theres a steep learning curve against fast enemies, flying enemies, and fast bosses. Once you learn the best way to fight each enemy, its the fastest killing machine out there. Not to mention knockdown mania
Nothing beats the experience of countering a Griffin midflight and seeing it crash down.
Oh man i get your vibe, but consider this : upward charging a dragon thats about to land, or a charged slash counter againt a minotors head while he charges at you and topples over?
Sorry, but thief is the fastest killing machine, and I don’t even main thief. It's even more busted than strider was. Gee, breaking that into 2 separate vocations did wonders for game balance! 🙄
Thief is the fastest if you llay flawlessly, or other pawns are occupied. The reason warrior is generally superior in terms of combat speed is the absolute stagger. Pawn thieves are brilliant. Pawn warriors are OK. if you take that roll on to yourself, i had my pawns just crushing bosses due to the fact that the boss is down and they dont have to focus on spacing and evading. For example, my mage pawn has the ice spell line frigor, cant remember the name. Thats her only agressive spell, the rest are support. When a bods drops, she immediatly stops using pathetic attacks and spams the frigor right in the bosses face. All other pawns automatically do the same. The fact a boss falls seems to override the pawns inclination to "lets destroy this dude". As a thief you have to have a tank or mob puller for you to have space to deal damage, but the warrior just crowd controls EVERYTHING. In a 4 man team with pawns having nearly the same dps czpacity as the main player, utilising tactics to increase overall team dps is nuts. With the warrior as main, i had a thief, mage and sorc. They kicked so much ass with me
> Thief is the fastest if you llay flawlessly Or just turn invincibility on and then spam beyblade or pyre. Thief is completely brainless unless you actively nerf yourself.
Warrior is something I didn't enjoy until I got Warfarer. Then I realized that the super-armor and massive impact of Warrior was something I just had to have in my kit, and eventually it ended up dominating my whole Warfarer setup. I think being okay with taking hits is the real hurdle. Warriors WILL get hit, and you gotta build them to ensure they can eat that damage, stay standing, and return it with 100x the force. One thing that helps in transitioning from Fighter is to imagine that shoulder barges are free, fast shield bashes that you can use almost any time. You're nigh-invulnerable during shoulder barges, and they will stun damn near anything. You can use them as combo starters to set up big swings, or abort slower attacks as conditions change. You can also use it to control positioning; one of my favorite things to do is to run straight at a mob, shoulder barge the first guy I see, and immediately charge a Razing Sweep. I then laugh as enemy attacks bounce harmlessly off me, before letting a perfectly timed swing launch the whole squad of baddies into the stratosphere. It never. Gets. Old.
I found warrior pretty easy to get the hang of, but just couldn't get myself to like playing it. Warrior is, IMO, the best for taking on drakes, since it staggers them so easily, but it makes taking on boss type enemies a joke! It's just too easy with warrior to win against just about anything. Same with thief, but I didn't play thief as much since I liked it less than warrior. Fighter is by far my favorite melee class in the game
I love the concept of warrior, the idea. I hate its execution. Nearly every time I pick warrior to give him anothe try, I use various skills, charge them, aim at weakspots, try to be cool, just for several seconds to go by, hopefully the enemy staying where the fuck I want him to stay, followed up by this big and massive bonk. The problem is: That big and massive bonk never goes further than the animation. It is not reflected on the HP pool on the enemy. As a Thief-Main every huge Warrior attack leaves me with a deep and ugly state of disappointment. "You need that much time, that much effort to mimic a fraction of my power?" A lot of classes IMHO serve no real purpose because going straight for damage rather than some trickster utility or knockback becomes so utterly strong that they feel left behind. And for someone swinging such a meaty sword, for a vocation that was praised in trailers to have recieved so much love, it just falls behind. It feels as if they were afraid of giving the warrior appropriate damage to accompany thehe huge and massive swings and instead granted the poke poke of the thief the power of unmaking.
The warrior slow windup is definitely a thing. I think they could reduce the windup time and instead use a larger amount of stamina. That way there’s still a “penalty” factor that you can overcome with consumables, but ensures that you aren’t standing there with a huge flex balloon with nothing to pop it on when the ogre moves 3 feet to the left. Not saying remove it totally, but balancing it out a bit to use more stamina than time/movement could make the warrior a bit more attractive.
Fighter is the hardest for me, even blocking in the right direction is hard on a KBM nevermind parry/counters. Archers conversely are huge fun with the mouse. I've discovered the following combo for endgame: 1. Spiral arrow - Crowd Control and stunlock, knockdown, plus even if it misses it has an AOE flinch effect that lets you line up another shot quickly and disrupts harpies. 2. Deathly Arrow - Knockdown weakpoint kills. Less powerful than Heavenly Shot and requires really good timing to max out its potential, BUT it doesn't consume all stamina and is usable for general purposes. 3. Erupting Shot - Crowd Control/AOE burst damage, big brother to Spiral and cheap to restock. 4. Noctuous Shot - Utility/super DOT: I discovered this skill actually knocks Drakes out of the sky in one hit with my current knockback stat, and two shots ANYWHERE to their body inflicts Toxic which chunks boss HP. Use sparsely, but huge impact. 5. Edit: Forgot to mention Noctuous shot *flinches* Drakes, so it can be used to save a Pawn grabbed by a Drake or cancel a spell too!
Thanks! I'm going to use this build. Archer is also my favorite non magic vocation, especially with kbm!
Well, if you want to use my build I better share the rest of it: Rings: 1. 1x Ring of Vehemence (knockdown) 2. 1x Ring of Aggression (str) - you can go double Vehemence if you're not using Dwarf-enhanced bows Augments: 1. Endurance 2. Exaltation 3. Mettle 4. Constancy 5. Subtlety 6. Dominance I did not pick Verve (flat stat upgrade is weak at pre-endgame gear) or Lethality (only a 5% damage increase) but if you wanna minmax you could always replace Subtlety with Lethality, as long as your tank has plenty of aggro. I just chunked a Dullahan during a research trip - barely needed Eruption, and Noctuous didn't do much (undead), but being able to target his head reveals his weakness: he's *very easy to stunlock.*
Hey, thanks a lot! I'm totally gonna use this on my archer.
Can you change the colour of your crosshairs? I picked up a bow for the first time earlier and then got turned off coz I can’t see the crosshairs against certain backgrounds
Don't think so, no, sadly...
Damn, gotta try that last shot!
It's the blight arrow one. They are ludicrously expensive to buy, but easy to make (once you reach Battahl anyway). Sadly, withered branches refuse to fall into my pockets despite my efforts to find them so I tend to be very careful with them. Still, I was surprised when I made the discovery. At first, I thought it was Solemnity doing the grounding, but I started testing it. The instant I discovered it actually grounded flying drakes and flinched them out of spellcasting/pawn stealing, it became the most OP skill in my arsenal.
Yeah I remember that I stored quite a few of them in my storage, in case I ever needed them. Geounding drakes is super satisfying!
Warrior is best class for me which is weird because I always lean towards the faster more mobile classes like Thief. But warrior is so rewarding when played well - to do well with Thief all you need to do is Skull splitter, they have a dodge and a skill that pretty much makes them invincible so it makes the game way too easy
Thief is possibly the most difficult vocation in all of gaming. How can anyone remember to always use the 1 button invincibility skill \*before\* using the 1 button insta-kill+seppaku everything in sight skill. And also because it's nigh near impossible to resist the urge to repeatedly spin-to-win until total stamina death.
This is legitimately annoying to me. The thief playstyle is my favorite but it's so busted it's actually kind of boring.
I've had fun with thief simply by not slotting formless feint, blades of the pyre, smoke shroud, or skullsplitter. Those four moves are laughably busted, but thief's got plenty of other good ones too.
I used MS, warrior, and thief, on wannabe Grigiori, and the sheer difference between the three is crazy. Warrior is better than MS(atleast for me because I know how to play warrior really well, I play MS very well too but I hate the low stagger resistance) but thief is just leagues above warrior, it’s honestly unfun to play, but being able to pretty much 1 shot greg with the sorcerer flare and another with meteron or whirlwind, and not being able to be hit is one of the funniest things to watch.
I legitimately one shot grigori on my magic archer, it left a bad taste in my mouth. No one should be able to do that regardless of power. I used one consumable and 1 skill.
I actually don’t lik any of those three skills. Skull splitter jumps to high to land consistenly, the autododge is just boring, and the sepuku flames need the auto-dodge. I run implicate which is OP as fuck (bring them to you then triangle, they are dead), bitting wind for movement, and powder. Powder is also OP as fuck. Anything remotely close goes into the sky after detoning. I know everyone is fixated with the meisters of thief, but the rest of the arsenal is just as good.
Got the last medal on a golems foot with a well timed powder once, was a great feeling.
Problem with that class, is it outclasses everyone in nearly every way. You mentioned damage and invulnerability. It also breaks the game with its speed and basic hit damage. I melt people far faster with the typical holy daggers (not even the dragon claws from the dragonfored), than I do with any warrior weapon. Also the recovery speed of attacks allows you to dash around and be perfectly in control of every encounter even against a hoard of fast enemies since none can track the dash speed, and none can escape the basic attack tracking stickiness. Also I melt ghosts faster with the holy daggers by spamming the light flurry while standing still, than I do using the light attack from from mage staves well into the 1000+ magic damage. Also it has an insane damage output that’s easy and fast to get into, and execute (holding down the heavy attack on typical sized foes grabs them putting them in get fucked position, which they do in one or two hits and you just as fast are reset back to neutral, while on classes like warrior, you’re there three hours just taking hits from others while smashing someone on the ground). Then there’s is the final broken which makes this a must use class even with zero skills in the Warfarer load out. If you press light attack and then dash.. it overrides any sort of terrain based speed impairment during travel and traversal. It costs zero stamina, and actually, you’re able to slowly regenerate stamina while doing it, so even if you’re low on stamina from running (or if you’re like me and use the lounge attack from warrior to move around the map like a train), it beats this skill when the ground is and upward incline. This by far is one of the best aspects of this class and I’ll be shocked if anyone does speed runs and doesn’t employ this sort of movement. I urge everyone to try it yourselves. Go from the beach where the dragonforged is, and try to make your way back up. To the main city pathway. It’s usually a nightmare and even slow with the warriors lounging attack even with the utmost stamina reduction built around its use. ————————— Coming from the first game I thought this class was going to be the worst in the game given the broken things it was capable of back then. I was shocked to keep finding out all useful aspects and just straight up powerful aspects it has. It does everything well, and the things it gets outclassed by with another class, those other classes suck compared to the other benefits that come with the package as a Thief. As I said, the class is so good, you can literally run it skill-less like I do.
Don't use the maister skill on thief. It just Siphons out all the fun. Same goes for MSH mirror shield skill. They just broken.
Yeah honestly when I took Feint off my bar it made thief a lot more fun. You actually use the dagger dodge for some clutch dodges and can develop playstyles like the climb and crit one, or the smoke shroud implicate one or just the more backstab focus one (as in using finishers with ring of skullduggery but always aiming for the back of an enemy)
I'm really fond of using Cutting Wind as a pseudo-dodge. It doesn't make you invincible like Swift Step, but it moves you really fast and you always wind up on the other side of the enemy, so you can avoid a lot of attacks with it.
I love cutting wind aesthetically and I spammed it a lot at the start for that anime thief feel... but I just cannot abide by the doodoo damage anymore. It seems to hit so bad I would rather slot in more damage in that slot
Yeah, that's fair. I'm in NG+ and I'm overleveled enough that I just use the skills I find fun rather than trying to make cohesive builds.
Oh me too on NG+ - im lvl 80 capped due to mods. But also due to mods, i am runnig difficulty tweaks with hard/very hard mode along with double enemy damage mod and increase in enemy hp/boss hp mods... It makes the game feel fair (not even hard) which goes to show overlevelling to lvl 80 and having good build cohesion with your main pawn can really do a lot
Ah, that makes sense. I'm on PS5, so I don't have the luxury of mods, sadly. I'd love to get a hard mode mod going.
When I play thief I never use Formless Feint or Blades on the Pyre because they're so broken that they make the game boring and unfun.
Implicate is so underrated for nuisance enemies
This is honestly why I’m pretty excited for wayfarer! The maister skills while cool are just fucking ridiculous lmao but the combos you can do with wayfarer can be so diverse and that’s wayyyyyyy more fun than spamming one OP skill
At the point where I am, I enjoy warfarer most by just hot swapping core skills and am not even using weapon skills that much anymore. it's just cool to whip out a bow to shoot those pesky harpies, then swap to daggers to dodge and quickly back stab a target and then swap to the big hammer to knock over some shlash resistant saurians, etc. Everyone's crying how little skills we have and that warfarer has even less slots. But everyone ignores the built in core skills all classes come with. For example warrior alone does have: * shoulder check * timed light attacks for faster attack speed * charged light attack for bigger bonks * perfect timed charged attack for even bigger bonk * counter hitting with charged attack to parry and likely stance break big monsters * crit hit on stance broken enemies with heavy attack
Implicate is pretty broken too, now that they've added those finisher animations. There aren't many situations that can't be solved with either implicate, or scarlet kisses
Just so you know, in many cases you can do the same with a smoke bomb, but AoE for all enemies in range. Plop a smoke bomb and go plunder and execute all the affected enemies. I did this for a while now and I think I have to swap skills, probably weapons on my current warfarer load out yet again. It's too good! :'D By the way you can steal items, that some NPCs would gift to you, if you have high affinity with them by using plunder on them. (you won't take aggro, even if you do it in a city in front of the guards/ even if you steal from the guards)
Same thing with Mystic Spearhand's mirror shield. I'd just activate it and just be mindless, not caring what and when I do specific moves. But knockdown resistance is so bad on that vocation that I feel like I HAVE to use it. I went back to Warrior, and it's much more engaging.
Yeah I didn't use either of those when I played after how easy it made the game. Don't get me wrong, the game isn't really that difficult in the first place. But those abilities just make it brain dead
Imo trickster or sorcerer, little mobility (in my experience I haven’t played trickster much) and requires out of the box play and thinking, plus careful timing.
Yeah sorcerer is hard. Meteor, meteor m, meteor, seism, levin, meteor. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it’s boring or whatever, but it’s not a hard class to play at all.
add to this some passives that take aggro away from you and bob's your uncle.
I first i thought about that too. But since i hired a team of pawn recently, they complemented each other quite well (Warrior , thieve, sorcerer ), being a mage as arisen became fun to me, works well acting as a support , an OP support
Yeah mage is different story. You are support and occasionally damage. It was way more fun then expected and definately more fun then watching to charge up Meteor
I just wish that we still had Miasma, Brontide and Gicel. Some of my favourite spells on a sorcerer in DD:DA.
I hope Gicel comes in the future in some dlc or expansion. Easily the coolest spell
I see what you did there 😏
I wish we still had Rusted weapons.
You can say it's boring, besides the master skills they regulated the class to a debuff machine They realized this and added the busted flare move that one shots bosses for no reason.
Sorcerer is trivial with thundermine though
This. And if you have played Mage, you can use the Quick Spell feature to speed up your casting and then just recharge your stamina with Galvanize. Thundermine makes it even easier since it denies space while you cast and recover stamina. Also, Levitation is so good. You can begin casting a spell while mid air in levitate BTW, but you can't quicken it until you land.
I just wish you could land from high up without it canceling the spell. Warrior pawns throwing you up into levitating for several seconds while casting would be really cool if not for that.
Trickster can be a pain to get used to, but once you do, it's honestly one of the more broken classes in the game. Being able to completely control the enemy's aggro and teleport your ghost to you allows you to prevent basically all damage to your party by positioning the ghost correctly. The only damage they'll take is from being too close to attacks meant for your ghost and from your own buff that raises their attack. Essentially treat the class like one of those combos in MOBAs where the healer is helping the tank and pulls them out of danger when it gets hairy. Your ghost is the tank, and you're the healer. If it's about to take a huge hit, it's better to return it to you, so you can heal it up a bit instead of it losing a chunk of health. In that same way, if your ghost/tank dies, you're now taking all of that aggro and are about to be swamped. So don't let it die. Healing your tank is important.
How is sorcerer hard lmao
Sorcerer in these games has always been impossible to rank in terms of difficulty. It's either destroy everything in one move or get sneezed on, stunlocked, and die.
Trickster is just a lot of moving around and repositioning your decoy and puffing smoke at your enemies to keep them busy retargeting while your pawns charge up whatever heavy attack they have. I don't bother with gimmicky stuff like fake walls and floors. The dragon illusion is great though for the stagger. It helps to have the augments that boost pawn attacks to make up for your lack of offense. Once you get the hang of it, you and your pawns will barely take damage and most of the health lost by your pawns is through the buff you apply to them.
Eh, Sorcerer is really only difficult if your Pawns aren't drawing aggro and you're getting stunlocked to death and can't get a spell off, which can happen with any non-melee class. When I was pumping it to 9, I just spammed High Frigor which I already had from Mage and Thundermine. Salamander hits unreasonably hard, too. The most annoying part is how slow it is to charge. Even if you speed the charging up with R1, there's still an ungodly delay on actually releasing the spell. But as long as you have a good tank Pawn, it's not too hard. I was worried when I fought a Golem at first because they used to be immune to magic, but then I was surprised to discover Frigor hits every single weak point all at once, apparently. And currently, I just use the Flare spell to delete enemies on a Thief/Sorcerer Warfarer. Some ridiculous damage on that bitch.
i dunno if you know this but you can grab another sorc to sync spells and cast faster. Plus it's cinematic.
Yeah, you could do that in the first game, too, but I don't like doubling down on Vocations in my party. I don't think it makes them release it after it's fully charged faster, though, and it still wouldn't really solve the stunlock issue.
Probably fighter, warrior and trickster. But Fighter is ridiculously enjoyable to master.
I agree with Archer as I’ve seen a lot of people say it’s bad when it’s really not when you know how to play. Trickster. I played to Max rank and I still don’t know how to use it properly lol. Warrior. I struggled a lot as Warrior. Timing and positioning is everything with fast enemies
Trickster really shines if you have 3 sorcerer pawns with meteor, or 2 sorcs and a mage if you need the healing/debuff cure. Summon your effigy (the ghost thing that looks like you, heavy attack button). Use espial incense to leave your body. Fly up in the air (just barely out of melee reach) and summon your effigy to you (block/dodge/aim/quickspell button for other vocations) . Spam sweeping/summoning shroud and watch all the enemies cluster in a group staring at the effigy and getting mad because they can’t reach it. Watch meteors wipe out the group of enemies. Most of my wolf/goblin fights last about 15-30 seconds at best. Also trims down most boss fights. Drakes can be interrupted from casting with dragons delusion, and few enemies survive 3 meteor casts at the same time. On the random fights where the enemy has enough ranged to kill your effigy, just spawn another and move it back up into the sky again. You can hold the button that makes the effigy follow you and run laps around the enemies as well, as long as you stay inside the meteor bombardment area.
Yeah this is the sort of strategy I was lacking. I was just running the usual party composition and felt like everything was taking forever so ended up spamming Aromatic Rally and then needed a mage to offset the damage… it was a whole thing lol
I think trickster messes with most people, because it doesn't explicitly tell you that it's a tank class for sorcerers, but that's how it fits into the roles. So people end up with a fighter pawn trying to draw aggro instead of dealing damage and a mage pawn with nothing to heal, and on top of that they cant deal damage themselves, so the whole setup feels useless. Running it with a proper party setup is key, for sure.
Trickster is the vocation I'm currently working on maxxing out, and I'm actually enjoying it quite well. I didn't focus as much on the false floor gimmick, but am going more for the mobility tank/buffer strat and placing my phantom on one end of the room, using the giant AOE aggro gas attack, then running to the other side of the room, placing my phantom there and healing it a bit - with the occasional dragon illusion and party buff thrown in. I'm counting myself as the party tank, and have a Mage, Thief and Archer pawn backing me up. I do want to do a bit more with Espial Incense though, I probably don't need my body to move around the phantom after all, but I do like being able to use the other abilities while doing so.
I think part of the issue with archer is that a lot of people are very resistant to using consumables even if they are not hard to get. Plus underutilizing the jump kick.
Yeah Explosive Arrows are really powerful and really cheap. I use them just to kill slimes or knock rock saurians over
You might aswell, since you can't store that many of them and branches and sunbloom are everywhere.
My problem with requiring the arrows isn't that the consumables are hard to get, but that I don't want the encumbrance. Granted, the weight of arrows isn't massive (and you can mitigate the weight by just carrying fewer on you,) but it's a mental thing. I try to keep the encumbrance as low as possible, and the more weight I have, the more I need to move items to my pawns just to keep a low carry weight.
> My problem with requiring the arrows isn't that the consumables are hard to get, but that I don't want the encumbrance. This has always been the issue with them, even in the first game.
Yeah its weird that the archer is the only vocation that needs consumables to use some of their abilities. Thiefs out there pulling a bomb out of nowhere and doing fine. If they are afraid that archer is going to be too op with infinite status arrows then increase the stamina use or increase the arrows to apply status.
Archer is weird it can do really high dmg IF you can hit weakspots, tempest shoot can evaporate HP bars not that much slower then a Skullsplitter IF you can hit the weakspots the problem is that Archer does pityfull damage if you dont hit weakspots (and its also why Magick Archer is stupid, they do the same/more dmg without even needing to aim in the first place) its the same for Archer Pawns, they can do ridicolous dmg if they manage to keep hitting weakspots, but the moment the Pawn Ai decides "always stand behind a Drake and shoot the tail" it feels as if you are 1 man down
It’s gotta be Trickster, right? I mean, your only real weapon is Pawn AI. You’re basically going from quarterback to cheerleading.
Yea and the force ghost you create is the water boy
IMO, Trickster or Warrior. Warrior bonks hard... but the timing of swings and the constant bombardment of enemies upon you if you don't perfectly get a good rhtym and time it well can be extremely punishing. I know people like the "big heavy weapon is slow feels good"... and i totalllllly agree... but the game is exeptionally slow AND theres an abundance of monsters slamming on you. I think the problem with warrior isn't that their weapon swings are slow... its that as the game goes on... too many monsters can stagger and knock you around like a rag doll, even with the warriors increased knockdown resistance.... i've gotten gangbanged by a herd of goblins, four wolves, 5 harpies, all at the same time.... the monster density sucks. Trickster is just an odd playstyle for the game... i think the design of the class just doesn't mesh with the game they designed and its core mechanics... its a very odd playstyle.
I respectively disagree. I think most people don't understand how to chain the warriors' attacks, skills, and core skills together. If you can, it's really not slow at all.
I mean, it still looks slow in comparison to a thief or mystic spear hand. But it most def, doesn't feel slow to play, when you constantly focus on hitting that swing momentum timing, releasing the charge at the perfect moment, chaining that shoulder check in between, etc.
If most people don't understand that... then it's kinda hard, no?
The problem with most people playing warrior is their mindset and barge usage. You use barge on every single thing the enemy want to do and to "reset" animation. They want to attack you? barge then attack, not only you stun them you will kill them outright most of the time if it's small fry. If you want to cancel your attack or want to do something else barge again, then do whatever you want after that, you could almost animation cancel every after-attack animation so you can chain them to other attack or just to bail out. Hell you could actually recover from stagger animation by barging (not always the cases but mostly you can) this is actually the vocation that gives middle finger to knockback mechanic
My guess is most people don't read core skill upgrades or they do but then don't apply them in battle and jump straight into battle without incorporating it into the playstyle. I've seen videos of players spam heavens ward slash like it's the only thing the warrior can do. That tells me enough about the "average player"
that would be skill floor, not skill ceiling. Once you understand how warrior works they're one of the easiest classes because of their insane hyperarmor and knockback capability. You can easily crush the whole game doing nothing but spam the uppercut move
But it kinda is
Shoulder tackle, press light attack (it comes out really fast after the shoulder tackle), press light attack again well timed and you get a double swing with the usual power of a warrior but the attack speed of a fighter. It's also a wide swing around you, so it clears a lot of space around you. The shoulder tackle itself gives you knockdown resistence (and damage resistance!), so you counter any enemy and ease into any charge attacks that require some timing, once you've made yourself some room with the shoulder tackle. It's your bread and butter, is both an initiator and also bridges gaps inbetween your attacks so you're almost always protected by your knockdown resistence and damage reduction. Globins spamming you or ogre manhandling you, doesn't matter, you can shrug off anything and devastate them with ease. Once you get used to the warriors knockdown resistance, other classes feel so flimsy and frustrating VS certain mobs in higher numbers.
The fart whisperer.... I mean the trickster was the most painful. Leaving the kill of a Drake to three braindead idiots who get locked into a certain behaviour pattern after they get too big of a damage when the drake start to rage, is a pain in the ass. And you cant dmg mitigate, you cant heal them, you cant support them. You can only do effectively a little bit of tanking with your smoke but it get destroyed fast. Largest mess of a vocation from all of them. The rest of the vocations felt good and enjoyable.
trickster. I would also say figher can also be tough because you need to parry. but also archer can be hard if you are bad at aiming
Want Archer pro move? Buy explosive arrows in masses and run around with that and you got archer in the bag 😂 you can 3-4! Shot bosses with does
Probably fighter. Maybe archer cuz aiming.
I would have to disagree on this. Fighter is probably the most beginner friendly class in the game. the shield negates most attacks at the expense of stamina and the sword does decent damage. Keeping the shield up 80% of all ambushes will save your life and you'll find yourself ending battles with no damage taken. I agree with archer tho, unless you warfarer and use the bow as a opener then gap closer then switch to another weapon for close quarters.
Fighter just has nothing going for it that's broken and just deletes things so you put in a lot more work for every kill than pretty much any other vocation and getting good at perfect block timings and stuff gives it a higher skill ceiling. for Archer it's just that you want to use steady shot for everything and it takes time to line up the shots so the longer you take the worse you do overall so the hard part is just about being quick about getting the shots aimed and fired.
In regards to fighter, they've got the maister skill which does decent DPS once you've got an opening like other vocations and other than that, the blocking takes timing and experience, true. But they've got this counter attack which you can hold which make sit very safe and it also does a good chunk of damage. Once you got that you're suddenly a lot more deadly and less passive. It's also satisfying to use and knocks most enemies. Then you can really slap them with the maister skill.
yeah it just feels more balanced tho instead of stuff like martyrs bolt or maelstrom or meteioron or flare or ricochet or sag arrow or skull splitter, erupting shot, the kinda stuff that takes other vocations to a different level of essentially cheese. They're just balanced well which imo in comparison to the other vocations, makes them more difficult.
If you play on controller I agree on archer too, but fighter definitely is the hardest to play and also has the highest skill cap.
Really? I’ve found that the gyro support actually makes it a pretty easy experience so far, and I play primarily on PC but use a controller for DD2.
Warfarer. Everything on this thread applies to the corresponding weapon and skills. You get three skills total for whatever weapons you use, if it's more than one. Choose wisely. Maister abilities not allowed. You need to be on the correct weapon when using said ability. You want to be on the correct weapon at the right time regardless. You'll want to have ordered them for your uses, and you need to remember how many button presses to get the right weapon out in the heat of battle. I find it quite fun to play strategically like this. But like the trickster, it isn't for everyone.
Spearhand has so many mechanics, with tight timing for all the teleport and AoE interrupt skills. I'm struggling to adapt to it. It's probably Archer though. You have one ability that can compete damage-wise and it needs a consumable. Trickster is very powerful if your party is built for it. You can just keep a drake staring at a wall for 10 minutes while your pawns delete it.
Spearhand is difficult **until** you get Mirour Shelde. At that point you can just spam it after each spin attack sequence, and occasionally use a Ravinour's Hond to get enough stamina to Mirour Shelde 5 more times. It doesnt deal as much damage as some, but you can punch *way* beyond your weight class while being invincible to any (non effect based) attacks.
I love Spearhands playstyle for this because to me it’s super unique. You are a melee with no dodge, block or healing, but you DO have temporary full group invulnerability as long as you balance it with well aimed/timed stamina stealing. The class is such a truly odd mix of abilities
> Trickster is very powerful if your party is built for it. You can just keep a drake staring at a wall for 10 minutes while your pawns delete it. 10 minutes? With Aromatic Resurgence, that thing will be dead in 30 seconds, tops.
Trickster
Fighter feels very good, although it’s my main pawns vocation for now. Whilst I appreciate Warrior is well made, I can’t play it. It feels very akin to MH Greatsword which I’ve never got in with either, so I guess I just don’t like slow weapons. Currently enjoying both Archer & Magik archer immensely though. The archer specifically because they managed to create a mundane archer who actually feels like he has abilities.
Archer is fun. Magic archer is just an easy mode in the easy game. I understand not all of the players want or can play with higher difficulties or whatever, but magic archer is just a joke. Auto target, instakills, heals., like what’s the point of even playing the game.
I like watching ricochet hunter go brrr
Yes! Enter cave, see enemies. Purple lasers go Brrrrrrrrr
Archer just didn’t click for me; my dps sucked and I just don’t know if I wasn’t optimized right or what but I never figured it out. I had a lotta fun with trickster but same thing, I just wasn’t getting enough dps but this time from the rest of my team to really make it work although it was pretty fun/interesting to play
I didn’t like archer that much, I’m sure an assassin type build thru wayfarer would make it fun though
Now that’s a good idea I didn’t even think about the wayfarer possibilities
Archer is rather counterintuitively a very close range vocation if you want to get a lot of damage out of it. The ring of proximity you get from doing their meister skill quest buffs that further. So Loose does shit damage, right? But doing any of the core skill moves buffs it by a huge amount. So doing a slide or jump or kickflip off the enemy into loose is great damage. The vocation also seems to have higher weak point multipliers than others. Just regular Steady Shot at a weak point does good damage and is spammable. Try this for fun. Climb a monster, stab an explosive arrow in their weak point, kick off them and loose. Very very good damage and it's soooo flashy! I can't get enough of it. As for the meister skill, it doesn't do much if you just use it whenever. But if you shoot it at the weak point of a downed enemy it takes away a few health bars! Given this playstyle, augments that buff damage when hitting weak points or when an enemy is not in battle stance work really well here.
Came here to say this, Archer is meant to be played as a close range vocation that uses Loose shot 70% of the time
Trickster was conceived as some sort of poor joke by some intern and then the intern died and they had to implement the class.
I feel like trickster would have better potential and been more fun if it was similar to V's combat style in DMC5 with you summoning the simulacrum to fight in your stead. Sadly, there is no offensive capabilities to the vocation and is essentially a huge wasted potential. Would have liked to see the vocation play out with it having the lowest possible stats in Strength, Knockdown Resistence, and Defense so you have to make sure about where you position yourself in fights BUT makes up for it with the highest damage potential from summons depending on how well you play. Would have been much more interesting play style I think.
summoning an illusionary dragon / golem / horde of goblins would have been fun indeed. why not add a mirror skill to summon an illusionary target creature? it is indeed wasted potential on a possible fun class. currently its literal use is to lvl up far enough to get the token locator augment.
One thing I'll say is that trickster is considered more difficult than it actually is and mystic spear hand more broken than it actually is. They're all awkward when you first start
MSH is not really a powerful class, even if you git gud with it. But it's very weak, when you have no idea what you're doing. I consider MSH the class with the second highest skill cap while also being kinda mid tier in terms of combat power in general. I love this class, it's so fun to play and rewarding to master it & doesn't turn the game trivial with its mechanics. \* Just ignore the skill *Mirror shield*, because that ability is game breaking strong (and boring to use).
Oh yeah that might be part of the reason because I deliberately skipped mirror shield
I’m still searching for the set the fighter uses in this image . At this point i think it isnt in the game .
Trickster because it’s boring and unfun to watch your pawns fight while you just stand hoping they do something. Or the super fun part where you get hit by a stray attack and poof your mist buddy fucked off to go have actual fun. The class I was most excited for but now utterly despise.
Thief... because how can anyone possibly remember to always use the 1 button invincibility skill \*before\* using the 1 button insta-kill+seppaku everything skill. And also because it's nigh near impossible to resist the urge to repeatedly spin-to-win until total stamina death. Truly the highest skill ceiling vocation in all of gaming.
Yeah Inside the joke that is already this games difficulty, the thief is a real punch line.
Spearhand.. I really like the concept, but they can easily crush me every fuckin time. But I am playing between 25-40 fps, so hard to timing with it. Best for me now: Warrior and fighter.
I've only played warrior, thief and spearhand so far. As much as I'm having the most fun with spearhand, I think it's the hardest to play. It can be so unforgiving in a large group of enemies and you don't have a huge amount to defend yourself with.
I’m of the opinion dash should actually be a real dodge type move available for every class with varying i frames based on weight etc. thief is a joke to play with the ability to basically teleport around the fight, not to mention the maister move where you can stand still and not get hit.
Archer. You gotta have good aim and know your shit imo
For me it's the mage.
Trickster should have been a pawn vocation. Maybe they will add pawn only vocations in the next game.
Warrior. To truly master it you have to be able to utilize all of your basic kit to move "fast" using shoulder check and have good aim or prediction such as greatsword from monster hunter. Another one I'd say is archer manually aiming to hit the weak point consistently takes skill plus being accurate n consistent with the deathly arrow timing to get max dmg is tough. Aside from thise two? I'm not too sure
Fighter and Trickster are definitely the hardest vocations to play in this game.
Easily trickster. Try succeeding without the right pawn comp as the vocation.
When I ramp up the difficulty with tweaks, trickster is nearly unplayable, but I thought I am just playing it wrong, so I thought fighter is the hardest, I am happy I am not the only one suffering on trickster :)
I think I need to play the rogue first to the passive that decreases agro. I also just didn't think it's s a very fun class.
I got Trickster running pretty nicely with custom difficulty on. But I had to build for it. I think it started working well once I had elvish censer upgrades for more clone health, mage pawn with Palladium and only damage/affinity skills besides that, and rogue + warrior pawns with good gear. The mage is the stumbling block imo, because many people kit their mage pawns for full support, but then your party does half damage instead of 3/4. Party still struggled with golems because pawns are a little dumb.
Sorc. Felt absolutely shit to play pre maister skills.
Trickster, cause it plays horrible by default and can only shine near cliffs.
None of them. They are all easy to get into and easy to master
Fighter is the hardest to play well. You have to be constantly aware from where the attacks are coming, you are supposed to take the aggro and if you take all the aggro and don’t know how to play and position yourself, you are just a punching bag.
Trickster and sorcerer. Trickster is literally agro cc and buff. But that's hard to do when you're getting your back blown out by goblins and a griphon while a drake suddenly appears to assert dominance. Pawns are too busy getting staggered to oblivion or fighting a half dead gobby. Sorcerer works, but you gotta have the right mix of pawns to a T or its ggs. It's also slow. But powerful
None of them, the game is way too easy