magic staff

[ocefur]

thoughts from a low ranked player:
1: Is magic staff the best reaper item in the game??? with survival being so important in this game and moon shields feeling like a must have item (its the only shield available to the reaper that blocks range). there is an abundance of mana in every match (I find i get about 60 mana from using 2 moon shields). the best use of this mana to me appears to be either the mana globe, dark saber, and magic staff. most games it feels like their is enough mana to keep up the dark saber and the magic staff while activating one use of the globe.

2. goobers are too strong at the moment??? it appears atm pet builds are the meta across the board. ranger pet build, dragon pyro build, zerker dog build??? this means that the goobers are inherently strong. poison goober is putting out about 40 poison per match. cheese goobert is a great source of max health,.chili goobert is a great source of heat for sun armor, phoenixes, and other sources. ranger pet build has a chance to make every pet act twice. it appears to me that at least one goobert is wanted for every build.

3. cleanses are too common for every class that building anything around it feels difficult. This goes for buffs and debuffs. meaning anything that gives protection from cleanses are very important. (I assume this is what makes poison and snake so strong for the reaper atm). you probably can still out perfrom any cleanses for any dedicated build. you still have to put in what feels llike twice the effort than pure dmg builds. (I assume this and saphires are what make the double axe and busted sword so strong for the zerker)

4. cards atm are little more than a gem box(resource) for reapers. It feels like a shame a unique mechanic like this doesn't see more play. Its cool that the reaper gets the best dragons in the game with the use of cards. cards though feel like they take up too much space (usually at the cost of survival/damage) for the little effect they do. potions also appear to have the same issue. I don't think cards should have a loop effect since they already feel too slow for what is trying to be achieved with them. I can only imagine how strong they would have to be to reliable be worth substituting out usually better sources from pure items. (weapons, armor) ((personally I wish we had a class item for this instead of the snake. just because of how unique a mechanic this is for the reaper.))

these thoughts are probably wrong but discussion is fun not necessarily being right. I can't wait for the people to tell me how wrong I am. I just ask that if your gonna disagree please give back thoughts and reasons(show your work :P). I welcome any discussion this thread should bring. thanks for reading it all the way through.

fyi I am a reaper main and enjoy the reaper class the most in the game (not shure if this is evident).

[Nightstrasza]

The best reaper weapon is killing the enemy in 4s, every character has those. Can Magic Staff do it?, no, don't bother with it except for fun theorycrafting.

Pet builds are far from being the meta, only squirells and pheonixes are the meta, dragons are mediocre which die out in platinum+, wolves stop existing the moment you learn Stone Helm exists (just get crit resist and they do 0 damage), wolves are good otherwise tho, not great tho, they don't stop 4s nuke builds, they are a ramp up with focus on crits and block while bypassing block. Goobs are goobs, eating 2 cheeses is probably much faster than planning a build around a Goob, not to mention you get 20 max hp vs 15, I rather connect a bunch of cheeses to the falcon blade. Poison goob doesn't give 100+ poison on start of the match, does it?, it's very weak. Only steel, chilli and rainbow goobs can be considered op.

Cleanses are very weak, you can't cleanse debuff nukes that some builds do, they are only usefull against bad or generalist builds but not against specialized builds, cryomancer will freeze you regardless, reaper apply 100+ poison on start of combat and any class can goob you with tens of blinds on opening + sand too. Your only hope is stacking lots of resistances against those effects, that crown dispelling 1 blind every 2.5s won't keep up with a blind build applying like 20 blinds per second to you. If you mean protecting your buffs from being dispelled then yes, that's rather easy to dispell buffs and even crusader which has 25% chance to protect buffs will get eaten by squirrels.

The sapphires are good for agro builds bcs they go thro armor, there's no armor gain reduction but you can simply equip high quality sapphire on your weapons and go right thro it and then just some amethysts to stop the healing. It's not for the freeze or mana.

Cards are fun, you can tank up, strip enemies from all buffs and using the mana gained power up the mana orb and then nuke them with holo fire, problem is, they take all the space leaving you with nothing, they are useless once revealed so if you didn't nuke you lose, they are good early game due to lover dealing damage, healing and giving regen as well as giving 2 luck from the deck but past that not so much, I already struggled in silver with them. On top of that, they take forever to activate even with fools and on top of that you don't want too many of them bcs you need your cards to actually be doing something. The 4s burst meta builds will kill it before you activate even the first 3 cards. It's fun when they work tho, after dispelling having a line of crit holo fires, but you could for cheaper and less effort just get a scaling weapon doing same damage but 5x faster and not taking entire backpack snaking around.

[ocefur]

I feel like your doing a little embellishing at the very least exaggerating. again though I am low rank so its hard for me to argue. if your dying in 4s I can only assume you lack enough defense to win (this makes me assume your a ranger main :P).

I wasn't trying to say anything was op or not just that goobers on the whole are relatively strong atm.

the only reaper build I can think of that can kill in 4s is a posion bomb. That seems to be relatively rare compared to the demo. if you can think of something else please elaborate.

at least we can agree on something. :) cards are fun when they work.

[Nightstrasza]

I'm not exaggerating nor do I build squishy, and no, my ranger is like, bronze or silver, I played her like 3 times only, I don't like her hyper focus on doing damage and her subclasses being just "wah, more damage", I tried doing blind build with her yesterday for funs using lots of sand, rats, shovels with pigs and dark saber but I really don't like playing her. My crusader build if not killed instantly will go to 100+ fatigue, that's not squishy but is suspectible to stun and to lesser degree squirrel rangers. My wolf, shaman or blacksmith builds can go into high fatigue as well and the shaman and smith builds have enough defense that you won't kill them any time soon as they are nearly immune to pretty much anything, it's fun to meet stun, poison or crit builds with these two since I just afk thro them, I even had once 1400 max hp by eating lots of cheese as these. The wolf one tho has no early defenses and is a ramp, can be stunned or completely nullified with crit resistance but I like their happy awoos, especially the wisdom ones, I spam click them while sorting inventory for fun. I also made a semi-tanky dragon build but I don't want to be food to the meta, maybe if I polished it more with extra defenses... I only recently embraced the marvels that is crown and stone helm stacking.

By 4s nukes I mean that poison bomb does it to you, stun builds does it to you (meet a ranger with a hammer and a bunch of lucky pigs and daggers, you are dead unless you have stun resist in 3 hits bcs your items literally can't activate. To lesser extend berserker can do it too but it's a worse, more defensive build. I have my own nuke build, it requires a short ramp period but when complete, it takes 6s to reach it and then I permastun ppl, it's stupidly op for how little it needs, I just grab a crown or two and other random junk for defense and as long as I have my primary aim items I just plow thro other builds by simply making them not work. Even if I can't stun them reliably due to resistances I have poison, lots of pure damage, crits and a steady but very slow ramp, no survivability tho, it's a glass cannon with a bit of protection for the ramp up process.

There are builds besides the 4s meta, like pheonixes, blinds, dual axes, squirrels, they take longer but are still extremely effective and very common so it's kinda boring when at least 1/3 builds you meet are pheonixes, 1/3 dual axes and the remaining 1/3 some other meta builds, daggers + stun suprisingly became very common in last 2-3 days so get some shields and helms for these bonks, my build for example was defeated just bcs when I reached the infinite damage treshold, the daggers were blocked for long enough that with a bit of luck I missed a stun and they booped me for my last 30+ hp after 2+ seconds of not being able to act.

"Too strong" implies "opness", or so I felt, that's why I answered the way I did.

Yes, I meant the poison bomb, if you don't have high poison resistances you just got 100-200 poison on the opening and their scythes criting you, on the contrary, if you have poison resistances (like my smith or shaman builds) you just kinda, munch cheese in front of them like popcorn.

[Olliff]

Judge for yourself with the top builds found here for high rank. I don't think magical staff is meta, but I do believe there are more meta builds that what the other person is implying.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR-DXCdJ_zomGJ-Ti7tsiK2kaWPZgKw_jWayM97qWyOHf4AwBg1n6GKw0exQSvmjk2LxdZ1sCsunYQ9/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true

[Nightstrasza]

None of my builds are on the list, that's good. Also, putting dancing dragon on the list is cheating, it's a unique scaling with heat, of course if you get it on pyro it's an instant win.

[ocefur]

thanks for the list. glad it supports some of my theories. I feel it emphasizes the need for weapons a little too much. no fatigue builds on the list?? what defenses items go with what weapon??(this might be obvious maybe not). are people really playing the game with only weapons???

I realize its a tier list and trying to be simple. maybe its too simple though??

[Nightstrasza]

Weapons ramp too absurdally quickly to make fatigue and defenses viable long term, you can make a tank build work (I did them and they are fun, not necessarly to fatigue ppl, just to be a sponge but still having at least a single weapon) but dual axe, dark saber, death scythe, mana, vampirism, ice or all the fire stuff, they all ramp up super quickly. You can apply like 50 stacks of freeze in just 4-5 seconds and crit your opponent while they are unable to activate anything for example.

Also bcs ppl love big numbers and doing things fast, look at other games, for example hearthstone, ppl just make agro decks and who cares there are cool 10 mana cost cards with fun effects, must rush with swarm of tiny minions, easy and cheap to assemble deck and finish the game by turn 4. The same is here, weapon damage is much easier and faster to stack than defenses, devs will have to slow it all down (but at the same time, if you make a proper tank build and survive early, you can just eat tons of cheese as berserker, it's best tanking food, you could even have lots of cheese + stone plates to get armor for all that tons of missing hp but I'm not sure if that's better than 15% damage reduction with bunch of spiked collars, you would have to munch that cheese real fast to not trigger the plate too early).