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Night Warrior and my concept
zapstriker
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Hopefully someone can help me out here.
I am so far level 28 with my Ninja themed character. So as a heads up, I'm not asking about changing my setup (or at least just yet). However, I am kinda concerned about the damage potential, attack potential, etc for the change I want to consider.
Now that the powers are out, I was looking forward to an attack. Shadow Strike. But now it says that I need Night Warrior purchased and its automatically awarded.
3 Things about this...
I am so far level 28 with my Ninja themed character. So as a heads up, I'm not asking about changing my setup (or at least just yet). However, I am kinda concerned about the damage potential, attack potential, etc for the change I want to consider.
Now that the powers are out, I was looking forward to an attack. Shadow Strike. But now it says that I need Night Warrior purchased and its automatically awarded.
3 Things about this...
- I use Way of the Warrior as it stands. It is Rank 3 so its harder for me to judge when I'm looking at Rank 1 unpurchased for numbers. Therefor, I would like to know some of this before hand. I know they at least scale with super stats. Mine is Dex, Str, Rec.
- Assuming I purchase it, does this mean I HAVE to equip it to make use of Shadow Strike?
- If I have to equip it to my slotted passive, would it be better, worse, or about the same due to the fact that I'm ignoring some of the resistance?
Post edited by Unknown User on
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1.) The scaling isn't specified. I think it just scales with superstats, with the stealth power still being affected by dex.
2.) Yes, you need night warrior to use shadow strike, because you need night warrior to be able to stealth, and shadow strike damage sucks unless using it in stealth.
3.) It's worse for sustained damage. If you're on your own, you'll need to pop advantaged elusive maneuvers or smoke bomb or something so that the 4 seconds go by and night warrior restealths. There's the possibility the thing you're fighting will just reset and heal up. And if you're in a group, you have to stop for 4 seconds and wait to stealth up again and drop the shadowstrike.
If you're just wailing away, that shadowstrike is just an alpha strike power, and then afterwards, I'm pretty sure the bonuses from night warrior are significantly worse than way of the warrior.
So, really, you'd use it for theme, or I suppose if you're building a stealth pvp guy. On the other hand, the shadowstrike damage out of stealth seems to be enormous. At level 9, without focus stacks and with just basic green equipment, I'm landing 3k-4.5k damage with shadowstrike. Elite Wayland Talos basically takes the shadowstrike and it's over. I don't know what the damage scales like at 40 and whether it's big enough so that against an alert boss, it's worth it to do nothing for 4 seconds and then take a second to fire off shadowstrike.
What about build switch in combat? Example:
If I take it and assign build 2 to be pretty much build 1 with Night Warrior and the 2 powers as my build 2 setup, do the alpha strike, then switch to build 1 with Way of the Warrior?
In theory though, that charge reduction sounds like it would be great for quite a few powers, but without making full use of bleed, it almost sounds like the end doesn't justify the means unless I was going pure damage and overall switch the theme I was going for.
RIP Caine
As for the passive, it's biggest draw besides it's ability to do massive spikes, is that it ignores damage types and is simply all damage boost or single target boosts. Meaning you can just as easily make a Sniper, or another option for range / melee hybrids or if you have a variety of damage types.
As for stats, it's superstats but practically you want Dex as one and Rank 3 so you have the best chance at actually sneaking up. Smoke Grenade helps alot here.
And for general use, I highly recommend Smoke Bomb / Evasive Maneuvers w/adv as both will put you back in stealth letting you get another massive spike, just be careful not to get hit while mid combat.
yes, I do have Smoke Bomb as that is my goto usually for when too much threat is drawn to me. For the ones that can get knocked back, I add the knockback effect to ensure I don't take damage when I go into it (Though sometimes it fails), but I kinda think this is where ninja vanish as an alternate power is going to help when I hit level 35 since I tested the day of unless its changed that it lets me use it while in that travel power. The Theory would be: Ninja Vanish (The Start) + Smoke Bomb should force a guarenteed stealth and the damage delay that sometimes happens from lag should no longer be an issue. I might have to rework some things to make it work.
Though you did say that it ignores damage types... I suppose with my shuriken barrage it makes it very effective on the non-elites and then my single target stuff should be nice. I am not clear about Bleed though, would it work well with that and the bleed blow up? Can it even get damage reduction?
I suppose the other issue about this is that one can't simply get the energy gain for the opponent dodging an attack which i guess means having to rely purely on my toggle power despite the time I have between of gaining energy from it.
So Considering I'm using the Rank 3 version of the Way of the Warrior, I went to test with the dummies there. I found a nice little Level 30 to try it out with my lvl 29.
First:
I now understand about the comment earlier where you need the Night Warrior to be on to use shadow strike as it basically disables Sneak and Shadow Strike until Night Warrior is slotted (in case anyone runs by this and isn't sure).
Second:
I question if the dummies have any resistances because what I found is that with my attacks after the initial Alpha Strike test of Shadow Strike, it seemed my damage was the same with the level 30 dummy for both Night Warrior and Way of the Warrior.
When I tried against the Level 40 dummy, it seemed it did relatively decent damage for Shadow Strike (Reminded me of when someone showed me their dual blades build on the potential damage with a crit on their best attack, yet this damage was on a normal hit) with my damage being relatively close to each other on Night Warrior and Way of the Warrior. The only thing was the bleed damage burst went from 1400-1700 from what I saw against the lvl 40 dummy on normal with the Night Warrior compared to Way of the Warrior's 1500-1900. So it seems to me if I did the total switch, I might lose some damage, but it might not be that bad of a damage loss. Though I suppose it would all add up. However, this isn't including if I had Rank 3 in Night Warrior so it is possible that I could be doing more.
If anyone can help confirm this, it would be nice since I could probably better off having only 1 slotted power instead of 2 where I'd also have to juggle with advantage points that could be better spent elsewhere.
I'm now thinking about making a ranged Night warrior that uses archery and munitions. evasive maneuvers and smoke grenade with the advantages to restealth, using torrent of arrows, explosive arrow and sniper rifle/focused shot...
If you are stacking much in the way of additive damage buffs (Toggle Form, +Offense, High SS, Ego for ranged, Str for melee) in addition to your passive, then Diminishing Returns will eat most of the higher additive damage buff of Way of the Warrior compared to Night Warrior.
I am not saying that WotW is not a fine choice, but dont make your decision purely based on the % damage buff. Look at the other aspects of the two passives for your decision.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
PowerHouse (Link to this build)
Name:
Archetype: Freeform
Super Stats:
Level 6: Dexterity (Primary)
Level 10: Strength (Secondary)
Level 15: Recovery (Secondary)
Talents:
Level 1: The Blade
Level 6: Martial Focus
Level 9: Mighty
Level 12: Relentless
Level 15: Jack of All Trades
Level 18: Impresario
Level 21: Martial Training
Powers:
Level 1: Reaper's Touch
Level 1: Reaper's Caress
Level 6: Scything Blade (Swallowtail Cut)
Level 8: Smoke Bomb (Concussive Escape)
Level 11: Way of the Warrior (Rank 2, Rank 3)
Level 14: Reaper's Embrace (No Mercy)
Level 17: Shuriken Storm (Rank 2, Floating Butterfly, Strong Arm)
Level 20: Intensity (Rank 2)
Level 23: Form of the Tempest (Rank 2)
Level 26: Bountiful Chi Resurgence (Resurgent Reiki)
Level 29:
Level 32:
Level 35:
Level 38:
Travel Powers:
Level 6: Acrobatics (Rank 2)
Level 35:
Specializations:
Dexterity: Combat Training (1/3)
Dexterity: Gear Utilization (3/3)
Dexterity: Brush It Off (1/2)
Dexterity: Evasion (1/2)
Dexterity: Deadly Aim (1/3)
Dexterity: Quick Reflexes (3/3)
Warden: Fortified Gear (3/3)
Warden: Slaughter (1/3)
Warden: Ruthless (1/2)
Warden: Tenacious (1/2)
Warden: Upper Hand (1/3)
Warden: The Best Defense (3/3)
I've read enough on Diminishing returns and been trying to make sure not to put into too much of the wrong places. I've been trying to keep an eye on making sure I always have 30%/15%/15% for the base damage (which to me is surprisingly difficult if I don't have the gear as I right now have 28%/14%/15%), an offense of 26%, Critical chance of 22.5% and Critical Severity of 61.7%.
I've checked out the damage difference on the powers while I was at it. Since I only have points to rank 2 Night Warrior, my bleeding DoT falls by 143 so I'd guesstimate that rank 3 would possibly only fall to ~115-120 difference which might not be too bad, though I don't think the ignore 10% damage resistance works with Bleed's DoT.
Sounds like it kinda comes down to preference if I was to only pick 1 toggle or as I said to avoid the damage drop, do as I said with the build switch despite the marginal gain unless I get other things to go with it more. At the very least though, for my minion sweeping... if I rank 3 Night Warrior and get rid of WotW, I'd get more damage with my shuriken storm.
Also for the last post, I want to make sure that not only do I go for my theme with the character it is kinda based off of, I wanted to be sure that I was also effective when doing things like alerts and possibly PvP without going for min-maxing.