Need veno advice :)

Trishane - Archosaur

hi um I've been pondering for awhile now on things I need to do. It's either to improve my gear or update my skills. ATM I'm g15+2(chest,pants,boots,sleeve) with flawless garnets/citrines and g16 cape hat (+4,3 respectively and only immac cit. shards on hat ) with a cloudstir,lunar ring, fc belt and g15 pataka. Could I ask for advice on which path to take?b:pleasedb:chuckle I just want to be able to do good in nw/tw and also not die easily in fw/bh/tt etc and also hit hard. Should I devote my current earnings on skills and just let g16 flow by, shard it with tempo shards and refine lightly or get my gear set with good shards (vit stones, gems, exclusives ) and be able to farm much better for skills? b:shocked I really don't know what to do and btw I'm not planning on soloing anything since I don't have a nix yet or a herc... TIA

Desdi - Sanctuary

The rule of thumb is that a dead DD deals no damage and a dead foxy purges nobody so I will strongly suggest to focus on your armor before you start thinking of skills (provided your skills are at least lvl10), strong weapons and big numbers.

The cheapest option for good effective gear is G16 Nirvana and since you're already G15, you're almost there. It's probably best to just try getting your molds & badges to make the gear.

DQ points seem to be working still, despite GMs announcing they will be removed from the site and moved to ARC with the new system. What does this mean? You could try botting for DQs and make some Demon/Sage cards for event gold to refine your gear. You could try going for a +5 on the gear, it's fairly easy. I would probably consider +5ing your current G15 too so that you can have more HP if needed when running Warsong/Lunar. Remember the G16 weapon costs 5 mirages per refine though so it might be trickier to refine.

Meanwhile you could try doing Weekly Abaddon/Seat of Torment to accumulate Crushed Emblems. Exchange 3 for an incomparable shard (Garnet or Citrine) for 1.5mil to shard your gear with. Morai shards are an option but they are slightly more expensive (mainly the Citrine ones at 3.6mil each).

This should place you in a pretty good position to allow you to start investing into your skills. I'm assuming you're talking about the lvl11 skills (Sage/Demon). You should already have the cheap ones (Fox Form, Venomous, Ironwood etc.) though. If you've reawakened, once you are lvl100 you can run Flowsilver with other people to get pages (OBP or PoFs) and use them to make some skill books. The skills that require Mystical Pages, however, will have to be made via tokens. When it comes to Chrono skills, you might want Fossilized Curse first (really effective against Archers, Assassins etc.) and leave Arcane Antinomy second.

You can also farm Cube for a necklace; 15 days if you do it on a single character. Use Luminance order for free COFs at 5k Prestige. Belt can be a Warsong one. Currently Warsong is has some bugs that prevent you from reaching the last boss so you may want to wait. In general, you'll want a Cube necklace and a Warsong belt. They can be bought too but it might be more expensive.

Once that's done, proceed to further improve your gear. You could attempt +7 with refine aids (this can be attempted earlier too as long as you keep accumulating DQs for event gold cards) and use Orbs afterwards while you work on getting more expensive shards.

This is taking into consideration an average budget and average money making.

Trishane - Archosaur

Desdi - Sanctuary wrote: »

The rule of thumb is that a dead DD deals no damage and a dead foxy purges nobody so I will strongly suggest to focus on your armor before you start thinking of skills (provided your skills are at least lvl10), strong weapons and big numbers.

The cheapest option for good effective gear is G16 Nirvana and since you're already G15, you're almost there. It's probably best to just try getting your molds & badges to make the gear.

DQ points seem to be working still, despite GMs announcing they will be removed from the site and moved to ARC with the new system. What does this mean? You could try botting for DQs and make some Demon/Sage cards for event gold to refine your gear. You could try going for a +5 on the gear, it's fairly easy. I would probably consider +5ing your current G15 too so that you can have more HP if needed when running Warsong/Lunar. Remember the G16 weapon costs 5 mirages per refine though so it might be trickier to refine.

Meanwhile you could try doing Weekly Abaddon/Seat of Torment to accumulate Crushed Emblems. Exchange 3 for an incomparable shard (Garnet or Citrine) for 1.5mil to shard your gear with. Morai shards are an option but they are slightly more expensive (mainly the Citrine ones at 3.6mil each).

This should place you in a pretty good position to allow you to start investing into your skills. I'm assuming you're talking about the lvl11 skills (Sage/Demon). You should already have the cheap ones (Fox Form, Venomous, Ironwood etc.) though. If you've reawakened, once you are lvl100 you can run Flowsilver with other people to get pages (OBP or PoFs) and use them to make some skill books. The skills that require Mystical Pages, however, will have to be made via tokens. When it comes to Chrono skills, you might want Fossilized Curse first (really effective against Archers, Assassins etc.) and leave Arcane Antinomy second.

You can also farm Cube for a necklace; 15 days if you do it on a single character. Use Luminance order for free COFs at 5k Prestige. Belt can be a Warsong one. Currently Warsong is has some bugs that prevent you from reaching the last boss so you may want to wait. In general, you'll want a Cube necklace and a Warsong belt. They can be bought too but it might be more expensive.

Once that's done, proceed to further improve your gear. You could attempt +7 with refine aids (this can be attempted earlier too as long as you keep accumulating DQs for event gold cards) and use Orbs afterwards while you work on getting more expensive shards.

This is taking into consideration an average budget and average money making.

Thanks desdi for the awesome advice. And sorry I forgot to tell you I do have a cube neck alreadyb:chuckle and since g16 is a long wait i might go for the +5 on my current g15s. Havent done any 100 bhs yet since I rebirthed and still on 98 lol. I could try botting dqs yes I just hope i wont dc that much. Thanks again

Jadsia - Lost City

Trishane - Archosaur wrote: »

hi um I've been pondering for awhile now on things I need to do. It's either to improve my gear or update my skills. ATM I'm g15+2(chest,pants,boots,sleeve) with flawless garnets/citrines and g16 cape hat (+4,3 respectively and only immac cit. shards on hat ) with a cloudstir,lunar ring, fc belt and g15 pataka. Could I ask for advice on which path to take?b:pleasedb:chuckle I just want to be able to do good in nw/tw and also not die easily in fw/bh/tt etc and also hit hard. Should I devote my current earnings on skills and just let g16 flow by, shard it with tempo shards and refine lightly or get my gear set with good shards (vit stones, gems, exclusives ) and be able to farm much better for skills? b:shocked I really don't know what to do and btw I'm not planning on soloing anything since I don't have a nix yet or a herc... TIA

I actually did the opposite of what Desdi said. I think it really depends on how you like to play. I prefer PvE so I focused on getting skills and keeping them updated. I'm old school though. It took me 2.5 years to get to 100 so I gave myself plenty of time to work on the skills. Most people these days rush to endgame which really makes it difficult to keep up with skills and cultis. I'd be in groups or NW or somewhere firing off many of my skills and you'd be surprised to see how many venos and other classes ask me what the hell kind of skills were I using. Some like Chi Burn, fossilized curse and arcane antimony are not common but fun to use.

A lot of people don't realize that a sage veno with sage soul degen can take 20% HP off most mobs and bosses without getting aggro. That's a 1 mil HP hit off a 5 mil HP boss. A lightly geared veno can do that. Sage Amp + a BM with Demon dragons is a real killer combo on bosses. A 4 mil HP boss will drop in seconds with a decent party with that. Then there are skills that will break armor. What I'm saying is that since you aren't comfortable about going solo yet because you don't have a pet that can tank decently then you need skills that will make you the most beneficial to a party. In this case your gear is not as important for this role. The processes for Sage Amp and Sage Soul Degen and the armor breaking skills are not dependent on gear.

It's best to work on both gear and skills at the same time but work on skills that will make you the most beneficial to the party before you work on gear.

That's my take on it.

Trishane - Archosaur

Jadsia - Lost City wrote: »

I actually did the opposite of what Desdi said. I think it really depends on how you like to play. I prefer PvE so I focused on getting skills and keeping them updated. I'm old school though. It took me 2.5 years to get to 100 so I gave myself plenty of time to work on the skills. Most people these days rush to endgame which really makes it difficult to keep up with skills and cultis. I'd be in groups or NW or somewhere firing off many of my skills and you'd be surprised to see how many venos and other classes ask me what the hell kind of skills were I using. Some like Chi Burn, fossilized curse and arcane antimony are not common but fun to use.

A lot of people don't realize that a sage veno with sage soul degen can take 20% HP off most mobs and bosses without getting aggro. That's a 1 mil HP hit off a 5 mil HP boss. A lightly geared veno can do that. Sage Amp + a BM with Demon dragons is a real killer combo on bosses. A 4 mil HP boss will drop in seconds with a decent party with that. Then there are skills that will break armor. What I'm saying is that since you aren't comfortable about going solo yet because you don't have a pet that can tank decently then you need skills that will make you the most beneficial to a party. In this case your gear is not as important for this role. The processes for Sage Amp and Sage Soul Degen and the armor breaking skills are not dependent on gear.

It's best to work on both gear and skills at the same time but work on skills that will make you the most beneficial to the party before you work on gear.

That's my take on it.

Well I don't have that much problems pve wise but i just want to be not that squishy and hit hard too. Ive been doing poor in nw and my credits basically show that. I'll do some research on which skills I really need to at least do better in pvp and would benefit me and others in instances. Thanks for the advice ^^

MochiBean - Archosaur

Since it seems like you're mostly interested in nw/tw I would def work on upgrading your gear first. G16 should be pretty easy to get since you already have g15. Desdi gave great advice about refining and sharding. I will have to say that +5 on g16 doesn't really cut it anymore since most people have +10 weapons. So try to save and refine your armor as much as you can.

As far as skills go try searching AH and catshops everyday. You never know when someone will miss price something. I have gotten good skills for 500k-1.5 mil. Not to mention now that a lot of people are doing flow silver palace there should be a lot more books floating around. Make sure u get the skill books that drop in fb89 all of them are good. If you are sage useful pvp skills would be summer sprint, lucky, nova, lending hand, purge, amp and soul degen. These skills are also the most expensive to get. But if you have already reincarnated then you should be able to make a book a day.

Anyways I hope this helps and Good Luck.

oops I forgot to add the morai skills as well make sure you do your dailies and get those skills.

Desdi - Sanctuary

Ugh I actually took for granted they'd have skills like Amplify Damage already and considered they are talking about less common skills like Summer Sprint, Parasitic Nova and the like. My bad I guess.

Having played for years, I had almost every skill before I hit lvl100 and didn't experience the need to work on both gear and skills at the same time. Times have changed.

It's still my opinion though that gear has a priority because I have witnessed players dying and not being able to actually debuff and, additionally, it depends a lot on the squad itself when you run one. Average Warsong squads will typically not care about the Venomancer's skills on my server as long as there's "some amp" and "some physical defence debuff". When I first started farming Warsong for Nirvana gear (I was a r8/TT99 mix with +6 refines) nobody really cared if I had lvl11 Amplify or anything. They just wanted me to be able to live and defend a Pavilion and contribute to the squad in whatever way I could.

It is best to work on both at the same time but when budget is tight, sacrifices need to be made :c

Jadsia - Lost City

Having a great defense is nice but can only go so far without having an equal to or better offense. I'd work on both incrementally at the same time.

Desdi - Sanctuary

Offence is affected a lot by the weapon though, which is part of working on the gear. I don't disagree with you but one may have lvl11 Lucky Scarab however the person wielding a +8 G16 Nirvana weapon (with lvl10 Lucky) will hit harder than a G15 Nirvana +5 person with lvl11 Lucky Scarab.

Just to clarify, I don't consider debuffs and skills like Purge, Chi Burn etc. offensive but I place them in the category of support (or just "debuffs") in my mind. Skills like Summer Spring, Bramble etc. fall under defence for me and lastly, offence are just the nukes.

Already said people should work on both though, however if circumstances are unfavorable and one has to choose one on the other I would personally choose gear.

I actually used to value skills over gear for the longest time but my mind changed after various experiences. That is if one would have to choose, of course, but that's going into the realm of theory; pretty sure people can usually afford working on both bit by bit.

JanusZeal - Heavens Tear

Trishane - Archosaur wrote: »

Well I don't have that much problems pve wise but i just want to be not that squishy and hit hard too. Ive been doing poor in nw and my credits basically show that. I'll do some research on which skills I really need to at least do better in pvp and would benefit me and others in instances. Thanks for the advice ^^

Jadsia's advice is terrible for PVP, keep this in mind.

Gear/defenses are extremely important for support roles a veno plays in tw/nw. Weapon is, as mentioned by another smarter poster, a given as being refined along with armor, but not important for the things OP prioritized.

If you're a veno doing nw and have proper defenses too, and are demon, bonus points as you get to run the flag (capturing much faster) and take a beating, aiding in getting more tokens.

In TW, to get close enough to purge and debuff catas, a veno needs to rely on skills, charms, apoth, and especially defenses (that they get from good armor and refines/shards on armor) or else they get creamed by BMs and ranged classes before even reaching the close distance to be able to debuff (demon nova being the partial exception).

Jadsia - Lost City

JanusZeal - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Jadsia's advice is terrible for PVP, keep this in mind.

In TW, to get close enough to purge and debuff catas, a veno needs to rely on skills, charms, apoth, and especially defenses (that they get from good armor and refines/shards on armor) or else they get creamed by BMs and ranged classes before even reaching the close distance to be able to debuff (demon nova being the partial exception).

First thing I noted in my post was that it depended on how a person wanted to play the game and I preferred PvE so I chose to level skills first. I also noted that I leveled very slow and this allowed me to do both at the same time.

I chose to farm for my g16 gear and mats to sell for my refines. Working on my skills first helped me out tremendously in that aspect. That's why I chose PvE over PvP for the longest time. It took me over 3 months of farming HH 2.1 in solo mode during 2x with a glacial walker to farm enough mats to sell and buy myself a herc a little more than 3 years ago. It took me another month or so to farm HH in squad mode to farm enough mats to sell and buy a nix. That's just the way I decided to play. One step at a time.

Now, I'm certain many players out there cash shopped their gear and refines (rank gear) to get them PvP centric in a hurry but that really depends on those persons' style of playing. Doesn't it?

While I agree with you that if one playing a veno wants to start in-game life out being PvP centric then my advice is horrid. Gear comes first so what the issue would then be is how the player decides to obtain that gear.

I must have done over 1000 HH farming runs and 100s of WS and a several dozen Lunar runs to get what I have and I am greatful I chose to get my skills first because they were essential in helping me get my herc, my nix, g16 gear and refines (before they did away with fairy boxesb:angry).

I once forgot to have pots for a full WS run and thank god for sage Leech and sage Consume spirit and the new fox form for chi. The 3 spark mana gain was a blessing that time too.

There's really no need to be so condescending towards my advice. Everyone's style is different and bits and pieces of everyone advice may help the OP

*Edit* As far as PvP in NW and TW is concerned I think it's just as important if not more to be a part of a well rounded squad to support each other. Good coordination, team play is essential. I've seen well poorly geared but well practiced and well coordinated team players wipe the **** out of dumb frost baby heavily geared but skill lacking groups in TW. That was hysterically amusing.