PSA for people with archer and fighter pawns

[falloutgod13]

Stop giving you archer the medusa bow. It consumes a lot of stamina, especially when paired with heavy stamina consuming attacks. Too many people look at the big strength numbers and miss the description that it eats up stamina fast, and without careful use it makes the pawn run out of stamina all the time. That means less damage and an archer that stands around doing nothing.

Same with people equipping Rioutous Fury on their fighter pawns. The AI has zero concept on how to manage stamina with that skill and ends up getting beat up more often because of it. When they run out of stamina they are open to critical hits and become useless for tanking the damage. Also, it leaves them open if they miss.

I was hoping people would figure these things out the more they played but I'm at lvl 80 and I'm still seeing this. Especially the fighters with Rioutous Fury. Makes it really hard to find a decent tank to hire.

[Knavenformed]

My Pawn runs Riotous Fury because it has a great knockdown value
The melee pawns don't really use their abilities very well anyways, so having them brute force a knockdown with Riotous is still good, though you might want to check if the Pawn also has the warrior perks for knockdown even applied, if not then sure it's not that good

Also Warrior pawns are better tanks anyways because of their hyperarmor, Fighters will anyways get knocked off balance during weapon skills after shield summons unlike a Warcry'd Warrior charging their attacks.

[Usagi-chan]

Medusa bow = burst
Other bows = DPS

If you give appropriate augments and skills it should be ok

[Markco]

Hydra bow = bis for pure damage and full dwarven smithing for knockdown power.

[falloutgod13]

Originally posted by Knavenformed:

My Pawn runs Riotous Fury because it has a great knockdown value
The melee pawns don't really use their abilities very well anyways, so having them brute force a knockdown with Riotous is still good, though you might want to check if the Pawn also has the warrior perks for knockdown even applied, if not then sure it's not that good

Also Warrior pawns are better tanks anyways because of their hyperarmor, Fighters will anyways get knocked off balance during weapon skills after shield summons unlike a Warcry'd Warrior charging their attacks.

I haven't played around with warriors much but I always ran fighters for tanks. Warrior abilities are all geared to DPS and they're slow - that would be funny if they actually managed to perform better than a fighter at tanking, but given how poorly I've seen people optimize their builds it wouldn't surprise me if that does happen. People also play all vocations early on not realizing your stat gain is affected by it. I wouldn't say it has significant impact on things when you add on good gear but you can tell when someone's core stats weren't class focused.

[falloutgod13]

Originally posted by Markco:

Hydra bow = bis for pure damage and full dwarven smithing for knockdown power.

If only pawns had better AI or we could edit their attack rotation with situational variables. Sadly, the AI's about as good as it was in the first game and will screw it self if you give it the opportunity.

[Knavenformed]

Originally posted by falloutgod13:

Warrior abilities are all geared to DPS and they're slow - that would be funny if they actually managed to perform better than a fighter at tanking

Warrior's cry is just better than Shield Summons, and the tankiness for Warriors is just the passive hyperarmor that can withstand a Cyclops butt slam while charging an attack, if you really want to go for it you can give the Warrior the aggro taking passive so enemies run into the slow attacks

Fighters are very good at nimble DPS and can do well climbing on enemies, personally I prefer a guard breaking, knockdown applying Fighter over a "tank" any day