Pure PvP HA veno.... demon or sage, your opinons please...

Sage for pure melee attacks in fox form. Or for a mixture of magic and melee. Why? Obvious reasons. AOE purge is GREAT for when your getting ganked. Same goes for your fox form bonuses. Summer sprint is virtually your own purify. Your not hitting that much, so melee mastery and wood mastery are great. Plus, you have an archer's sharpened tooth arrow, just up close. Crush Vigor steals chi, and most stuns use chi. Leech lets you steal six-hundred HP all the time. Crush burns 1.4K mana in three seconds. 40% physical defense reduced for twenty seconds. Lucky's stun duration increased by one second, long enough to cast another skill. Both your HP/MP raisers go to 60% instead of 50%.
Also, don't look at demon's armor break. You have two other skills for that.

Directly copy-pasted from my Veno PvP Guide (work in progress):

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1.0 Build/Equipment
There are really only three acceptable veno builds in end-game PvP: vit-arcane, mag-arcane or heavy.

1.1 Vit-arcane:
This is the arcane tank build. The purpose of this build is to have high defence and high HP. This is a PvP-oriented build with the philosophy that as long as they can't kill you, you can purge+amp them and kill them. For venomancers, each point of vit adds 12 HP and a small amount of pdef and mdef. While you may ask why put in so many points into vit when its only 12 HP per vit, don't forget the purpose behind the build: maximizing your defences. Up to mid 90s, a nix's bleed damage is strong enough that you only need to purge+amp and throw in a few attacks to kill most players your lvl. At the higher lvls where a nix bleed is laughable, staying pure vit build would mean sacrificing your ability to deal damage efficiently. While you will have troubles killing people in solo PvP situations, you still will have quite a number of tricks up your sleeves to deal enough damage within the 10s charm tick margin.

For this build, stat just enough points into str to wear your gear, add in just enough to wear your weapon, then dump the rest into vit. All shards should be garnets for the pdef and use a pdef belt and neck. Sometimes its better to use gear that gives high pdef instead of the normal HH gear (e.g. HH90 AA pants > HH99 AA pants). You want to maximize your HP through stating vit but you also want to have high pdef as you will usually be targetted by physical attackers in PvP. Ideally, aim for the same amount of pdef in unbuffed fox form as you have mdef (e.g. at least 6k pdef and 6k mdef in fox form).

Example 90 build: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=2ad7406b36c34958 - 6.0k HP, 3.3k pdef, 6.5k mdef, 4.4-5.0k matk
Example 96 build: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=2a6519c2cc86c5d0 - 7.6k HP, 5.8k pdef, 7.9k mdef, 5.6-6.3k matk

1.2 Mag-arcane:
This is the nuke build. The purpose of this build is to act as a mini-wizard for DDing. As you approach end, end-game where everyone will have fully pimped out Nirvana gear and thus very high physical defences, the damage done by your pets will become more and more insignificant. As a result, the majority of your damage will resultingly come from your magic attacks with your pet playing the support role (stun, debuff, etc.). Unlike a wizard, veno's have few nukes and they are much weaker than wizards in terms of pure spell damage. As well, venos do not rely on spike damage or crits, but instead cummulative damage. On the other hand, venos magic skills are relatively fast casting, spammable, and veno's have the all-powerful purge+amp, allowing for the fast cummulative damage. You have still have fox form and bramble hood for defensive purposes but you will still be squishy nevertheless. Keep in mind though that pure mag is also ideal for PvE if at this point you still engage in PvE gameplay.

For this build, stat just enough points into str and dump the rest into mag. All sharding and gear should be exactly the same as the vit-arcane build described above, just with extra points put into mag instead of vit, but try to maintain at least 3k pdef and 4k HP. Note, however, that you will probably be backbenched for group PvP activities such as TW as you can easily be replaced by a similarly-geared wizard, cleric, or archer.

Example 90 build: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=19ccf1eac62140e5 - 3.7k HP, 2.9k pdef, 6.8k mdef, 6.3-8.2k matk
Example 96 build: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=ef16b2d91c4b28fd - 5.0k HP, 4.7k pdef, 8.2k mdef, 9.1-9.2k matk

1.3 Heavy:
This is the end-game tank build. Like the vit-arcane build, the purpose of this build is to have high defence and very high HP. Unlike vit-mag, howver, your HP and defences come purely from your gear and its high refines. In other words, this is a specialized build ONLY for those who can afford to refine their end-game gear past +6. The philosophy of the heavy armour build is exactly the same as vit-arcane but even more radical as you may have to sacrifice your ability to kill others in one-on-one situations due to lack of damage and often having to wear a subpar weapon due to lack of stat points. As a result, going heavy tank build means going pure support with the sole purpose of purge-amping targets so that your team mates can kill them. You may decide to try half-half (part heavy, part arcane) but you'll be sacrificing the reason you went heavy originally (more HP from refines) and, stats-wise, pure vit arcane with pdef shards will almost always be better and more flexible.

Stating for heavy armour is very difficult and requires wearing ornaments that give lots of stat points in favour of optimal gear. Each stat point has to be allocated very carefully or you will find yourself unable to wear the magic weapon you may want to. First equip your tome, your cape, and all your ornaments. Next, stat in just enough str points to wear your helmet. After that, stat in enough str and dex to wear your armour piece with the lowest-stat-requirement. Proceed from there equipping the rest of your gear and addng in stat points as necessary. Dump what little remaining points you have into magic and see what is the best weapon you can equip. Alternatively, if you have a magic weapon that gives +str or +dex points, equip your weapon after equipping your tome/cape/ornaments before proceeding to your helmet and armour. I would highly recommend you use pwcalc (pwcalc.ru/pwi) to first test things out to make sure you indeed have enough stat points to wear everything you want. Because you will rely on heavily refining your magic ornaments for your mdef and your heavy armour for your pdef, sharding should be strictly HP.

Example 91 build: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=7344cc9c824c6104 - 6.5k HP, 6.2k pdef, 4.5k mdef
Example 99 build: http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=4c7f9be67ad7e1c7 - 9.9k HP, 7.4k pdef, 5.8k mdef
(note that these builds have higher refines and better gear as it is expected that only rich players can afford to properly choose this path)

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~Desiree

I'm not by any means rich, either, but I love the HA build also . I also feel that sage would be the best option for HA as the others have already said.


And also as Desiree said in her guide, pwcalc will be your friend for sure. I use it religiously. I'm sure you'll know that finding the right equipment will really affect your ability to go HA, and I'm always going through the auction house to find better ornaments with more stat points than what I already have, and I've calculated that by 99 I'll be able to use at-level gear as well as weapon. My only problem right now is finding the money to get the mats for my TT99 lol.. already have the weapon made. But that's beside the point.

Guess my point is always keep an eye out for the right equips. As for sage or demon I think it's pretty easy to guess by what Maddie said which would be the better route for the HA build, and it's pretty common that HA venos go this way.

I can't say much from a pvp point of view since I've only started TWing again with this char but, it definitely is an advantage, having the high physical defenses. That and people don't normally suspect a veno to be HA, and by the time they figure it out you've killed em lol.

But I don't fight purely in foxform, I use both magic and fox depending on what I'm up against. It's also good of course to have a set of arcane robes too for quick switching in the case you're up against a magic user.

I don't have all my sage skills for my veno yet, actually quite far from, but I'm really looking forward to seeing what more I can do once I have them all 11.

Good luck with your veno~!

kenlee wrote: »

sage for pure melee attack? no, thats demon, for "Obvious reasons" that you didnt provide it. the fact that sage spark gives 500% weapon atk while demon gives you 650% weapon attack (not even bm get that) should give you a reason to think.

Agreed that Demon has the (slight) advantage in theoretical DPS. But I thought sparking in PvP was a great big "stay away from me and stun/seal/sleep/kill me ASAP" sign? I could see a ranged attacker or a melee with long stuns (e.g. BM, assassin) managing to nail someone after sparking. But the veno stuns just don't last long enough for you to triple spark while holding the target. I suppose Stunning Blow (8 sec) or Frost (9 sec) might work, but they'll only freeze by the time you've sparked. The target is still able to fight back and use skills/genies/apoth items.

he has full interval with claws (you dont even need to break claws to equip it, takes 1-2min for me) so he can build sparks in like 19 seconds. i think this will top sage dps even with magic sword. you dont need the extra pdef from sage fox if you are already heavy.

Well, he has a full interval fist BM already. Any time he wants pure DPS, he can just play the BM. The only thing that's going to live long enough for you to build up a spark in 18 sec is a PvE boss.

Dude don`t listen to those s**ts b:laugh Just go sage it`s best for HA

Michael_dark - Lost City wrote: »

Thanks for the replies so far... I think I'm leaning towards demon still, just finished my culti and am at the point where I need to choose now, but I'm still on the fence. *sigh* This does seem to be one of the more difficult classes to make a culti choice.


A little more info: I went full heavy (cept 77 wrists) at 80. At 89 I'm finally able to weild a frost wand. I may go fists one day but yeah I do plan on being PvP caster. I do realize i'll probably need to be 98+ before I can wield a NP, so I probably won't refine till I can at least get first cast... Not even sure if I'll go that foar.

As for the other 100% armor breaks, those are from Myriad, right? Does anybody actually use myrad in PvP? I don't think I've ever seen it being used as it's quite unpredictable... at least ironwood does do damage and has the 20% chance to proc.

Hmm... And thinking about sage purge, yeah the 5m radius really doesn't mean so much now that I think about it.

Michael, I read a couple of posts in PW CN that the 5m radius of sage purge is actually 15m when the skill is cast. Since you're in a big faction, may I suggest the rank6 weapon? It's level90 and 270 magic requirement, has great magic damage,-10% channeling and guaranteed 2 sockets.

I've always preferred the guaranteed 40% armor decrease rather than gamble for armor break. What I do is cast ironwood, EP then tangling mire. Depends on if the nix is tearing enough damage while I'm casting whatever stun skills my veno has and if its not, I usually add a myriad to try for armor or mind break (only had it happen once when both activated.) You might want to add a couple pieces of arcane for when archers use their metal attacks. How many times have you fought venos on your BM and how many skills do they get to cast in the duration of that fight? Most fights are over within seconds making it impossible to keep recasting ironwood and hope for an armor break.

Sometimes and only rarely, I wished I had the crit rates demon light venos have because it would have helped taken out my opponents when their charms were on cool down.

Ultimately, it all comes down to your playing style and your preference. I've had friends who went demon and told me they should have chosen sage and there are those who chose sage and wanted demon. It's cognitive dissonance. How many times have you bought something and think to yourself 'wouldn't it be better if you had chosen the other color, model, etc'

Hmm this makes me think, as well lol. Before I chose sage I thought demon might have been better (because I have found I rather like casting more than fox at times). Buuut I dunno, my veno's not my main really lol. I just play her when I get bored with my cleric (or tired of re.tards I squad with sometimes >_>).

Luckily I could switch cultis if i wanted to and it wouldn't cost me that much since well, I only have like 3 sage skills atm on my veno lol.

I'm sorta on the fence with this myself now lol. hmm. I'd always read not just from guides here but on the malaysian forums that sage was better for HA and demon was silly, but I have to honestly say there aren't many sage skills I would really use religiously except amp and a few others. The summer sprint purify sounded great too since you don't always have triple sparks (and honestly not sure I'd wanna waste it if it were just a puny mob or something).

Oh well, I guess I'll look over the skills again. been a while since I reviewed them honestly >.>;

As for Maddie, I don't think it's right to say she wouldn't know what she's talking about. We don't even know what your character/level is, Kenlee lol. She could for all I know, have a high level veno on another server or have played the other servers in Malaysia. You never really know lol.. so don't be so quick to judge someone only based on level. "Can't judge a book by its cover"?

And honestly level doesn't mean much these days... been seeing lots of fail.. well, everything lately ever since hypers and BH came out. Being level 100 doesn't speak much for experience anymore (even though I leveled both my characters the hard way up to their mid 90s >_>).