Heaven (Sage) vs Hell (Demon)

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Why would I want to ask an idiotic powerleveling kid anything? Except maybe "do you seriously wake up every morning and think you're cool?"

But let me ask you something - how long have you really played this game? You said you were in MY, yet the char you're posting with has a join date of last month. And your sig mentions you have a BM which I would assume is your main. Why not post on your main? Has your main played this game for awhile? Or did you just get back into this game after having played MY and left? Reason I ask is because, if you took ten minutes and looked around, you WILL see people who actually still visit the questing zones. Maybe it's different on HL, but on HT and Archosaur I still see a fair crop of newbies who, for whatever reason, still find the real game interesting. And those people are gonna want to know the facts, and an objective set of opinions, not "if you haven't bought r8 yet you fail as an archer gtfo."

But really, this line told me all I needed to know:

You know what? If that's your idea of a good time? Go for it. Some of us don't feel the same. Some of us don't see the appeal of a never-ending pissing contest. But you don't see me telling you to gtfo. Because for whatever perplexing reason, you and some others still like to play the e-peen game. Well, I'm not gonna judge. But I'd like the same courtesy in return, thank you.

*sigh* Anyone else I can talk to? >_>

EDIT:

I just posted this morning about my skill breakdown, the first time I've posted in this thread in months. I never talked about mana drain vs. seekers. That was Fleuri.

In fact, what I actually said was:


You could try reading the thread first.

Ruvil - Sanctuary wrote: »

Why do people think that long lists of skills and stating WIN for demon or sage is a good way of comparing the two? As if the side with more Win (on fail skills) is actually somehow better?

I wrote an entire essay about why Demon quickshot crits sage to death but then I realized that if I truly wanted to attempt to save my fellow archers from eternal faildom I should make simpler arguements.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANY KICK *** SAGE ARCHERS W/O A GEAR ADVANTAGE BIGGER THEN QUILUES IDEAL BREAST SIZE?!

Without having a massive gear advantage you will not be able to kill anything as sage, or at the very least you could kill alot more as demon.

Why should "ability to kill" be the measure of an archers effectiveness?

Because archers are a DD class... incase you haven't figured that out. We dont make crowd control vit based TW archers to run in and Roar I mean stunning arrow... We dont make mag weapon archers to heal squad members...

God damnit if you're an archer roll demon, go kill ****, and die in a blaze of glory!
or roll sage possible survive due to 3 spark, and live in eternal shame as you cannot accomplish anything.

Ruvil - Sanctuary wrote: »

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN ANY KICK *** SAGE ARCHERS W/O A GEAR ADVANTAGE BIGGER THEN QUILUES IDEAL BREAST SIZE?!

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

So wait, does the manaleak stack? Because if so that's hilarious.

Kiyoshi - Heavens Tear wrote: »

We have r9 archers with thousands of kills saying that mana drain is USELESS.

And then we have dumb and dumber here talking about the USES of mana drain.

Ruvil - Sanctuary wrote: »

I'm assuming that if a player dies to mana drain that there was a ninja veno harem hiding nearby that used chaotic spirit! (also said player sucks or just wanted to meet the venos o.o)

and ino you have a mushystash!

_blood_rain - Sanctuary wrote: »

Please teach the baby archers. there is a trend leaning to sage, save them from this grave mistake b:sad

_blood_rain - Sanctuary wrote: »

You asked for people to challenge, and so I shall.
And here's my rebuttal to this guide: sage<demon and frankly all your arguments show a lack of appreciation for burst damage/crits and consequently a lack of basic knowledge of how the archer class works. These things all sound good on paper to someone who hasn't really played an archer, but do you know how nice it is to stack crits? How vital it is? Moreover , even from a pve bias, you fail to give shell due credit, HERECY! I wont tell you about how efficient and cost free it made grinding for me, if you have ever spent a few hours grinding and actively learning your archer, you should have realized. Shame about it's diminishing usefulness tho, with weapons getting crazy strong. It should be made into a % reduction rather than a set value imo. Anyway, back to the guide, you even mentioned deadly, eagleon, vicious, etc. and everyone inherently knows those skills suck ***. You shouldn't even be getting them past level 1. I myself only recently got level 1 of eagleon and that was because i was bored and wanted to see mobs run in place for myself. To sum it up, if I eagleoned another archer and created offspring, I wouldn't let said offspring near this guide. Honest. and not even trying to be mean(well only a little).

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Please, if that's your idea of "mean," it's kind of Easy Mode. :P But moreover, I appreciate you staying on topic better than Protocol did.

A guide is supposed to contain an objective compilation. "This sucks, don't get past lv1 of it or you fail" is not an objective opinion. And it's a little bit irritating when I get labeled as "noob who actually uses vicious/serrated/deadly/stormrage/etc. in practice" just for not condemning them to the ninth circle of hell like everyone else. You would not catch any competent archer using Vicious in any serious situation, and I'm no exception to that. You might catch me using it when I'm bored and feel like throwing something else at a boss that I've killed a million times already, but that's about it. At the very least any guide needs to at least mention them, as a precaution against people wasting their coin/spirit on them at the expense of more important skills (which any guide I write would certainly do).

For the record, I am something of a completionist and I do plan to get lv11 of every skill eventually, if only to say that I did. I do know Sage Vicious, but only because I got it for a very cheap price (and I will soon learn Sage Serrated, once I can afford to after more important skills are learned). But you can rest assured that I won't be teaching the newbies that Vicious is as important as anything else. Does that make you feel any better? :P

As for burst/crit damage, I completely understand it. I just don't take it as a given that it's the end-all-be-all of holy archerdom. Look at it statistically - if your base crit is 1%, adding 1% effectively doubles your crit rate from 1/100 to 1/50. But if your base crit is 30%, adding 1% gives you much less of a realistic benefit. If anything, both cultis seem about even with regards to bow mastery.

Or to put it another way: Yes, I've seen stacked crits. Several in a row, easily, and my crit rate is only 24% (currently). I do not believe that increasing that rate to 25% will show me a measurable difference.

As for Winged Shell, ahh. I must admit, you reminded me of a time long ago, when I was in the 70s, I saw another archer use that skill in much the same way you describe. I sat on the roof of a hut and watched this archer fight Soris for several minutes. By that time I wasn't doing KQs often enough to really cement that tactic into my mind anymore. But it was definitely a respectable sight. So I'll keep that in mind.

Fleuri - Sanctuary wrote: »

I think I need to say something serious here, just for a moment.

*deep breath*

"Something serious."

b:shocked

So, ok, anyways... dps is a good first approximation but it's not the be-all nor end-all for combat analysis. If you want really accurate, you probably should be getting into cumulative distribution functions.

So... CDF 101: If you shoot a single arrow, you could represent a CDF using a graph. Your "x-axis" would be damage and your "y-axis" would be the probability of doing less than that much damage. For a single arrow you would have a horizontal line representing the chance that you miss and then a diagonal line representing your damage range, and another diagonal line representing your crit damage. This diagonal line would slope downhill so your far right corner would have a 100% chance of inflicting less than one point more than your maximum critical hit damage for that shot.

And when you shoot multiple arrows, those lines start becoming curves. By the time you shoot four arrows your CDF starts looking a lot like a normal distribution (with a few artifacts down on the lower left, from your miss chances).

Put differently, the x-axis for the cdf shows your opponent's chance of surviving (put them on the x axis for how much damage they can soak up in that amount of time -- and this is not a constant because of healing and stuff). But CDFs are hard to make, in part because we do not know how evasion really works, and also because they are still not a complete picture and so it's hard to get accurate numbers when the underlying assumption is flawed.

What I really want to do, for determining battle outcomes, is represent the battle as a markov chain. Basically, at each step of battle I could have "and if this happens do this" with some kind of estimate for reaction time and error -- if I had that, I could fairly reliably predict a battle outcome for someone fighting in a specific fashion. It's still not great, because people do crazy stuff, but it's way better than "you suck" for battle analysis.

But I'm not there yet.

So, anyways, I did work through some numbers for quickshot, and it looks to me like demon quickshot is amazing for demons and in some situations it lets them outdps sages (which is how things are supposed to work), but it also looks like demons think sages base performance is just like theirs which... is silly.

But, hey, I can be silly too!

Have I told you about the wonders of vicious arrow recently?

Oh, and about crits? Crits have a significant effect on those CDF curves...

Fleuri - Sanctuary wrote: »

I am begining to get the idea that you think that a broken testing scenario, where you broke the protocol (which was not well designed to start out with), represents my knowledge of 1v1 pvp.

But, yes, lag issues and so on are important also.

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Even so, you're not going to want to write it like that in a guide. Even if your opinion does match up with the objective fact, its presentation is important.

Ok then let me rephrase. The following skills, vicious arrow, serrated arrow, deadly shot, knockback arrow, and stormrage eagleon carry no practical or general use; and as such I would advise no archer to use these skills at all, let alone as a deciding factor in choosing culti. There , I used a lot of unnessecary space and too many words just to present something better described by the word "suck"

Different strokes, then. :P The important thing is that I knew what I was doing, and I did. I had a morbid curiosity to see how well it would improve from lv10->lv11. And I would encourage any archer to experiment, just as long as they're aware of what they're doing. And the point of a guide is to instill such awareness.

Now you reveal the reading problem is worse than I had thought. If you wanted to know what menial, laughable "improvements" these skills made from level 10 to 11, you could have simply read the skill descriptions on ecatomb. It takes only a few seconds to read the descriptions, decide they still suck, then go on with your life. Instilling awareness is one thing. But this is a well known archer fact, don't advise new archers to waste money and sp on a skill that is terrible for the sake of curiosity. That is mean.

Ah, but we weren't talking about Stun & STA, were we. We were talking about Bow Mastery.

But sure, let's talk about Stun & STA now. In my writeup back there I mentioned "game mode bias" - meaning it's up to the player to choose based on what their playstyle is, and that if they're PVP-oriented Demon is likely going to be much better for them (a notion which I have never disputed, btw... I'll leave that one to the mathletes). A longer stun and a more potent HP debuff do have objective benefits in PVE, though. The trap most archers fall into here is assuming that if it doesn't assist in maximum DPS, then it's not worth getting.

Now before you burn me at the stake for insulting the god of DPS, let me remind you that, again, I have never disputed that as requisite for endgame PVP. If you're an archer in PVP, your job is to drop people, and drop them fast. I get that. In PVE, though, I don't put too much stock in max-DPS. My DPS probably qualifies as "****" by most standards here, and even I can steal aggro from pretty much any classic tank. And by that I mean, I can steal from barbs, I can steal from hercs (very easily, even), and I can steal from non-aps-abusing BMs. Given all that, wth am I going to do with more DPS? Wait longer before attacking a boss? :P

Wasn't specified stun/sta/passives from the beginning. but anyway even for pve crits are still better. What good is a second longer to keep hitting and not crit... next to regular duration stun except with higher chance to kill off whatever you are shooting much faster. Sta, I'll give you for pve, kind of, because the crit is still damn useful even when head to head with inc debuff. Also, with high DPS and defenses to match...you may very well end up tanking the boss, or you can practice better aggro control.