I want whatever he has

[__________________si]

I just fought a yellow mission human mob who had a refelct shield. Now this guy took me [expletive] ages to kill. In the end I:
had to zone more than 15 times
used 30 health packs (244hp)
35 Nano packs (fills me up a quarter of my pool)
and used Dimach on him twice. This alone should give you some idea of how much of an effort it was.

The only way I could kill him was doing as much damage as poss, zone just before I died, only filling 50%HP and Nano (otherwise he would be back to almost 100% health), go straight back in and his health would be about 5% less than when I started on him the time before. rinse Repeat as they say.

He was hitting me for 53, 54 or 117 all the time + 11 reflective dmg. I was hitting him for low 20's to the odd 50 if I was lucky..I normally hit for 150 against greens Not much maybe but I get by ok.

I put my shield on halfway through to try and get any advantage I could, he was hitting me for exactly the same. His shield eventually timed out which was when I started hitting around the 100 mark reguarly and this is the only reason I managed to kill him.

So after this War and Peace ramble my point is if his shield made such a major difference why the hell did mine make no difference whatsoever (apart from the pathetic reflective hits)?

[Brad, STL/MO]

You didn't give me enough information to comment for sure ... but let me make a few educated guesses.

You are a martial artist. You are at least 30th level, probably low 40s. I say this, because I made exactly this same point over on the Martial Artist forum.

The mob in question was an adventurer of similar level, maybe even yellowish-green to you.

It is apparently possible for adventurers who know what they're doing to layer their damage shields, possibly even to layer two damage shields and a regular shield nano, plus whatever they're wearing for armor.

You are at the level where you have discovered that you are a Minimum-damage Artist. When a target has that much armor, it becomes basically impossible for the hand-to-hand basic attack to do more than minimum damage, and that minimum damage ain't great.

Hopefully, you have done everything you can to raise Martial Arts skill, including buffs, implants, and IP spent not only there but also in the attributes that affect it. Hopefully you're also using the highest level damage buff you can get your hands on. That's all you can do to raise your minimum damage on basic hand-to-hand.

You're going to spend the rest of your career (unless Funcom makes some major changes) doing minimum damage about 2/3 of the time to about a third of the mobs you tackle, including player characters should it come to that.

The best way to survive that is to absolutely max out your brawling skill and using the Brawl special attack every 20 seconds. You should also max out whatever martial arts special attack offers you the best minimum damage. At your level, you should be using Bird of Prey; approximately 30 second recycle time, minimum damage in the 80s to low hundreds. If you make it that far, you'll want Blessed with Thunder.

You also need to overequip the best armor you can get your hands on. This won't help with the damage shields, but it will bring down the damage from his weapon. You also need to max out your Dodge skill (and preferably Evade and Duck), so you aren't getting crit-hit every third shot. You also need to not neglect your self-heal nanos and your first aid skill/kits, because eventually you're going to be "chaining" them between special attacks ... which means you're going to need as much nano pool as you can afford. Oh, and for crying out loud, get Subconscious Guiding as fast as you can and never fight anything without it running.

Now you know why there are lots of 30th to 50th level martial artists hanging around Reet's and Bab's. They've got nothing else they can do.

[Brad, STL/MO]

I see a few things in your post I missed. You have a reflect shield of your own, that makes you an enforcer or an adventurer.

If you're an enforcer, you need a bigger weapon, one with higher minimum damage. There's a reason why the hammer is the generic icon for an enforcer. Edged and pointed weapons have too low a minimum damage.

If you're an adventurer, you need to post over on the adventurer forum and hope that someone will tell you which shield nanos can be run simultaneously, so you can do as much reflect-shield damage as the other guy does. Oh, and you do need a bigger weapon, one with burst fire, and the advice about chaining heals and first aid kits between special attacks still applies.

If you're an enforcer or an adventurer, what weapon are you using that also lets you dimach?

[__________________si]

Thanks for the advice Brad and yes you're right, I'm an adventurer.
Right now I've been using a low level reflect shield purely as it doesn't seem to generally be doing me any good and it's very expensive IP-wise to maintain a higher one. Never heard of stacking them though so that is something to look into.

I'm using dual Riders (Dimach and Brawl), which are lvl 50 and I've had them since lvl 35. My armour is organic and is spread between levels 39-59 again most of which I've had for a while.

I guess my gripe really comes from the fact that normally I handle myself ok and don't run into these scenarios too often and so when I did and it took me by surprise. The difference between the mob running with reflective shield and without is just incredible and through anger and frustration I posted my gripe. I feel sorry for you MA's if you have this all the time.

I just wonder that to save cross posting whether someone can tell me which Adv shields can be stacked if at all ?
Thanks

[_____________Barakon]

Well its been a looooong time since I played an adventurer but the stacking rules should be the same as other classes like the engineer.

You can only have one:

Reflect shield nano running at any one time.

Damage shield nano running at any one time.

AC shield nano running at any one time.

Basically, a higher QL version replaces the lower QL version so you can't stack two shields of the same type(unless there is a bug).

Also you mentioned putting on your shield and getting hit for exactly the same damage... that is because, if I remember right, Adventurers don't have reflect shields, they have a lot of different QL versions of damage shields(albiet pretty useless for defense), which explains why you where getting hit for the same ... they are basically offensive shields.

[______________Krneki]

Yep, adventurers don't have reflect shields. Just need to understand that if you are running a ReflectDmgAC 10 reflect shield on you, you will get hit 10% less as would otherwise. If you are running a ShieldDmgAC 10 damage shield, the mob will get hit for 10 dmg each time it hits you.

[Brad, STL/MO]

I keep running up against 35th or so level mobs with deflection shields that hit for something like 25 points per shot. If they're not adventurers, what are they?

[_____________Barakon]

If a MOB has shields up it will say something like this when you hit it:


MOB's damage shield hit you x damage..
MOB's reflect shield hit you for y damage..

You also have to remember that MOBs have a tendency to buff each other.

ie*
Engineer-class MOB can run reflect shield nano on Adventurer-class MOB in the next room over.