Fun and Strange Builds

[Thrones]

Wanted to see what people have come up with. I've seen a Weaver/Scholar with auto-revive using Explode which is neat (Unfortunate that you can't Quick into that.. even tried with the passive that leaves you on 1 HP).

I myself was toying with a wind spell caster, that uses +100% variance on spells, but it didn't really seem to work any. Was really hoping that could be a thing. There's a passive that allows anything above 80% to always hit, which works with those wind spells quite well that I used a little bit in mid-game though, just couldn't really scale it to be useful.

Was really hoping to find if there was a way to use a meteor build. Dervish in particular went largely unused, but I was thinking there has to be a method of making it not kill the party off. If there was, Quick + Meteor would be pretty amazing. Would probably have to be Ninja's dodging spells? Doesn't sound too usable.

Then there's Mime. It takes on the passives from the selected subclass, but can exchange it's subclass mid-combat. It seems like there should be something broken to be discovered in that bit of knowledge, but couldn't come up with anything flashy.

Another I couldn't figure out was Samurai. On paper, it sounds nice, stack up tokens and take loads of actions, use a chemist to restore AP, and a Weaver to assist with turn orders for another go-around. In execution... it's just not enough damage for how much setup is required. Feel like I'm missing something there too.

Anyways, wanted to share of any stranger build ideas myself or others have attempted and if they've seen any success.

[Soul4hdwn]

Use the scythe that turns aoe into single target, to use meteor.

Sadly you lose second weapon if using mimic/ninja and swap sub for something else mid battle.

Class armor of samurai from jade gives yet another +30 max ap. At that point use scholar and adrenaline spell. Or a Valkyrie giving ap via it's spell. Dervish can steal ap but seems weakest option but can help some rare fights.
Otherwise one might get better milage via ninja/samurai, less ap to work with but combos and finishers hit twice.

I posted a few interesting builds around...

Like... Chemist/hunter to have every other turn be snipe or barrage. Use either hunter's mark on the off turn or weaver's robe to fix low acc issues as the 50 acc accessory is better used on someone else like...

A reaper (or aegis or both) with contract/lifeline sword and duelist shield. Refund costs and dmg taken and keep threat up with double counter (shield stacks with monk learned passive). There is a dagger that counters too but that requires being ninja so no auto substitute or hp max boosts.

Just an idea for humor, you can equip undead ring and bone skull and slime suit to have one character gimped in hp but only take 10% physical dmg (or whatever is 0.65*0.65*0.25)... Which enjoys double 25% dmg boost... Hmm might as well be a ninja/rouge for shadow strike because... The reaper tank mentioned earlier would love to be a mimic secondary to take all those boons.

[Thrones]

Oh yea. I've seen that scythe. That seems doable for a super-nuke character. Tradeoff is no AoE at all though, so pricey downside for normal combat.

I kind of forgot that ninja's dualwield allows double triggers on skills tbh. Really wish it was a passive we could slot in.

I messed around with Chemist/Hunter, but the accuracy was an issue, yea. It seemed like Chemist's stats were holding back the hunter abilities a bit.

And yes, mimics can copy buffs... again, something I've not thought about, and quite clever.

Anyone have a lucky dice build? I've seen accessories that can make it AoE, and that sounds like a gimmicky good time. (Edit: I'm going to start on a dice build next I think, see the potential of all luck upgrades. Hard to know what equipment I'm missing though.)

[Soul4hdwn]

And if the undead ring seems like too much if a downside, a scholar/weaver has that covered with the reverse polarity skill and anything else, might as well enjoy that barrier spell too.

[Xaelon]

I can't take credit for this one since I saw a streamer do it first, but if you use the Nomad's Therapy Stance with a weapon that swaps your attack for Aid, you get free AoE heals. I need to test the actual numbers, but I think it'll be a pretty decent heal when used with the nomad gear that boosts the damage/healing of your basic attacks.

I wanted to use "cleave" to turn my tank's counters into AoE attacks, but counters sadly don't use your basic attack. If counter did use your basic attack there would be all sorts of silly things you could do.

I completely cheesed the Sky Arena today by using a Hunter/Rogue with Dream Hunter bow. If Quickshot didn't kill I'd just sleep bomb them and give myself another 2 turns to deal with them. I didn't think about using this setup outside the arena, but there's some potential to allow yourself several free turns to setup and still do damage too. Hmmm.....kinda wish I'd thought of this back when I fought a certain boss that handed out random status effects.

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

Use the scythe that turns aoe into single target, to use meteor.

Wow...that's uh....that's really silly and I love it. I may be stealing this.

[Soul4hdwn]

Originally posted by Xaelon:

I completely cheesed the Sky Arena today by using a Hunter/Rogue with Dream Hunter bow. If Quickshot didn't kill I'd just sleep bomb them and give myself another 2 turns to deal with them. I didn't think about using this setup outside the arena, but there's some potential to allow yourself several free turns to setup and still do damage too. Hmmm.....kinda wish I'd thought of this back when I fought a certain boss that handed out random status effects.

The double counter leeching reaper I mentioned, soloed the arena too. Was slightly iffy on the joker but everything else was disturbingly smooth.

[Thrones]

I've seen the cleave thing too. Mayhap on Ninja for dualwield, since that command should technically fire off twice. Would be a variant of Mime/Ninja imo. But would need a cleave weapon that's 1H, and I can't remember off hand if any exist.

Pretty sure I done the arena with Nomad stancing for damage mixed with evasion from Ninja. Very luck based, that. But you can apply extra damage from the stance of choice with the seals too, so that's a fun gimmicky one as well.

As for the dice build thing, variance from beastmaster or using an axe doesn't seem to work on it any. So it just seems like something you'd use quick on instead unfortunately. This comes back to my wind build I attempted before. Variance does not seem to work with magic unless it's a single accessory, which is odd to me. Feels like it should be global, or identify between magic and physical.

[Arkhne]

Originally posted by Thrones:

I've seen the cleave thing too. Mayhap on Ninja for dualwield, since that command should technically fire off twice. Would be a variant of Mime/Ninja imo. But would need a cleave weapon that's 1H, and I can't remember off hand if any exist.

Pretty sure I done the arena with Nomad stancing for damage mixed with evasion from Ninja. Very luck based, that. But you can apply extra damage from the stance of choice with the seals too, so that's a fun gimmicky one as well.

As for the dice build thing, variance from beastmaster or using an axe doesn't seem to work on it any. So it just seems like something you'd use quick on instead unfortunately. This comes back to my wind build I attempted before. Variance does not seem to work with magic unless it's a single accessory, which is odd to me. Feels like it should be global, or identify between magic and physical.

Katanas are 1Handed, and a few of them have Cleave.

[Illuminia]

Sounds like you had a lot of similar thoughts on some of those classes as I did.

While I find some of these builds interesting, they require a lot of very specific or end game gear, or gear that you have to have a certain vendor access and mount to get.

I haven't done Quintar Racing, giant Cube labyrinth, giant Tree dungeon; maybe forgetting something else.... Thus I don't have a lot of the mentioned end-game gear, or any of the gear locked behind a certain mount/vendor.

Regarding Dervish - it's ability to recover MP per turn (based on AP recovered), gives it a lot more MP sustain in longer fights.

I beat 2 Depths bosses thanks to that - at a point I maybe shouldn't have been trying them. :) Even if it was a 20+minute slog - with a "standard mixed/use party" and not something specifically tuned for specific boss per someone's strategy or "die first, learn, change party" - that was really fun. <3 Dervish/Warlock heal/revive carried me through those. :)
So don't underestimate what you can do with a "high sustain" strategy.
(Think I was Reaper/Aegis, Ninja/Rogue, Dervish/Warlock, Scholar/Shaman)


Due to other things, I decided it just wasn't fun anymore, and waiting to see what/if Balance patch changes before I do anything else.

[Soul4hdwn]

Originally posted by Illuminia:

Sounds like you had a lot of similar thoughts on some of those classes as I did.

While I find some of these builds interesting, they require a lot of very specific or end game gear, or gear that you have to have a certain vendor access and mount to get.

I haven't done Quintar Racing, giant Cube labyrinth, giant Tree dungeon; maybe forgetting something else.... Thus I don't have a lot of the mentioned end-game gear, or any of the gear locked behind a certain mount/vendor.

Regarding Dervish - it's ability to recover MP per turn (based on AP recovered), gives it a lot more MP sustain in longer fights.

I beat 2 Depths bosses thanks to that - at a point I maybe shouldn't have been trying them. :) Even if it was a 20+minute slog - with a "standard mixed/use party" and not something specifically tuned for specific boss per someone's strategy or "die first, learn, change party" - that was really fun. <3 Dervish/Warlock heal/revive carried me through those. :)
So don't underestimate what you can do with a "high sustain" strategy.
(Think I was Reaper/Aegis, Ninja/Rogue, Dervish/Warlock, Scholar/Shaman)


Due to other things, I decided it just wasn't fun anymore, and waiting to see what/if Balance patch changes before I do anything else.

sounds like you already reached endgame based on that team, yeah actual builds don't need specific gear.
the tree only has three items, a spear with defense debuff on hit, a robe with 10% spirit, and an accessory for more gold drop. spear and acc are locked behind gold choco.
yeah some "class armor" is locked behind gold choco, i didn't use those in funny builds but some funny builds are that specific.

my reaper tank is midgame build =p or even earlier via aegis.

[redpandersbear]

I'm in the midgame and I am doing a 4 of a kind playthrough (each character has to be in the same class and learn the same skills at the same time) and one I have really enjoyed carrying me is Monk/Fencer. Fencer has 60% innate crit damage bonus, i throw on some crit damage gear, then I use Focus energy to make my next attack a guaranteed hit and i spam thunder chops/wind chops usually, or earth split in aoe fights (if I ever hit a ground immune aoe fight I'm gonna switch to monster magic subskill and spam whirlwind.) . Really high turn 2 burst damage for where I am at in the game and if I switch over to rapiers/swords at some point, i can mix it with nighthawk which I am excited to get too late game for that juicy 500% crit damage on the skill. Once I start doing that, the AP will just accumulate and I can spam Ki burst on the following turn. Still need to grab some warrior passives for AP and I'm excited to see how this roles once I get deeper into the game.

[redpandersbear]

Err, 150% not 500% crit damage on nighthawk that is a huge diff. Still though 150% crit damage is nothing to sneeze at on top of a bunch of other crit damage modifiers. I also forgot eagle stance adding another 25% damage for free when you crit

[Ahzi Dahaka]

If the earth deity Ioske gets you down, try a nomad with the Gaia Axe. It sounds counter-intuitive to use an earth elemental weapon, but 50Gs doesn't dispel the axe's float effect like it does the Float Shoes, and you can use En-Ice to switch to ice damage that calculates off of Isoke's vastly lower resistance stat for damage instead of his beefy defense.

[crgmyster]

I've been using a strategy that is pretty broken and can beat pretty much endgame boss.

The engine behind the strategy is to have one character who is an assassin aegis. All other characters (or some number, the details are pretty flexible) should use the mimic class or subclass. Basically, Turn 1, the Assassin/aegis will use avid assault (you need to equip adrenaline or an item to start with 12 AP). Your cooldowns are now 0, so you can proceed to entrench every single turn (or until you run out of mana since entrench got nerfed. This should be plenty to win just about any fight though. You can even use refresh/chemist/beatsmith to restore mana to increase the number of entrenches but I think this is unnecessary for most fights).

Your other classes will initially just buff the assassin who then propagates those buffs. Eventually, your other classes can use Mirror (the mimic skill) to copy the incredibly buffed assassin. Your team is now buffed out of their mind and pretty much invincible.

There are many variations on this strategy, but what I have typically done is used a weaver + sleep causing class (shaman, rogue, scholar) in order to initiate the fight with status amp (allows the assassin to propagate first turn buffs like eagle eye) >> avid assault >> sleep (allows you plenty of time to set up). I will then propagate buffs like stalwart (using HP reducing items you can make it easy enough to heal to full every turn becoming unkillable), smokescreen (literally never get hit by physical attacks), haste (some enemies can outrace you if you're too slow) and more.

[zimfier]

Dunno if this counts, but on Anubis I had everyone run Scholar and shred his MP to 0. The boss then can't do anything, except die. Which still casts meteor.

[「Lukja」]

Originally posted by Xaelon:

I can't take credit for this one since I saw a streamer do it first, but if you use the Nomad's Therapy Stance with a weapon that swaps your attack for Aid, you get free AoE heals. I need to test the actual numbers, but I think it'll be a pretty decent heal when used with the nomad gear that boosts the damage/healing of your basic attacks.

I wanted to use "cleave" to turn my tank's counters into AoE attacks, but counters sadly don't use your basic attack. If counter did use your basic attack there would be all sorts of silly things you could do.

I completely cheesed the Sky Arena today by using a Hunter/Rogue with Dream Hunter bow. If Quickshot didn't kill I'd just sleep bomb them and give myself another 2 turns to deal with them. I didn't think about using this setup outside the arena, but there's some potential to allow yourself several free turns to setup and still do damage too. Hmmm.....kinda wish I'd thought of this back when I fought a certain boss that handed out random status effects.

Originally posted by Soul4hdwn:

Use the scythe that turns aoe into single target, to use meteor.

Wow...that's uh....that's really silly and I love it. I may be stealing this.

Where's that bow at?