(Help) items for running warrens on champion

[DrakenKin]

Today i am trying this team :

I am mostly going for accuracy because i hate all the dodges and misses on enemies. But i might be wrong, i need to improve my item selection and composition.

Vestal : Junia's head (30% healing 20% stress), ancestor map (25% scouting, 10% stress)

Hound #1 (dps and marker) : Vvulf tassel (10 accuracy vs marked, 15% dmg to marked), distented croweye (10 accuracy, etc).. he is using rush, mark, stress heal, and self heal

Hound #2 (secondary 3rd position stunner, secondary dps) : focus ring (12 accuracy, -8 dodge), sun ring (10 accuracy and 15% dmg torch 75)... same skills as above, except he has stun instead of mark

Hellion (mainly stunner) : stun amulet (20% stun, 20% stun resist), ancestor candle (15% dmg, 2 speed, 5 dodge, 10 stress, all torch above 50)

Thoughts?

[Sir Francis]

Take an occultist instead of vestal to mark for the hounds.

more damage on the hound 1

a stun trinket (cudgel weight?) on the second hound.

give hellion a sun ring instead of the stun amulett.

[DrakenKin]

Thanks,

Quick question, i was on my recovery phase, and i got a very unexpected damage roll from the large flesh eater. If i look at the wiki, the flesh eater's "tentacle devour" does 7-13 damage, with 100% to marked... my hound was marked, and full health, yet he found himself at death's door with zero health... basically he lost more than his 37 health in one shot.

Isn't a critical double damage? The flesh eater should have done 26 max if he critted, i don't understand why his damage is so much higher. There are no debuffs on my hound that could have hightened the damage..

EDIT: Got it, it's 26 damage from crit, but also double damage from hound being marked, so pottentially 56 damage maximum. I'd still like a confirmation that a critical hit is double damage and not something off like 250% like some other games do.

[Sir Francis]

no mark on the hound? are you sure? the flesh eater can apply mark himself.
3*13 would be 39 for a crit and thus plausible, yes, crits are 1,5*max damamge.

[DrakenKin]

lol we literally posted at the same time (more like you posted while i edited), yes it was the mark.

A crit is 200% damage right?

[Sir Francis]

a critical hit, short crit, in this game always without exception takes the maximum possible damage of the attack and multiplies it by 1.5, or, in other words, adds 50% after all other calculations and modifiers.

[DrakenKin]

Oh so it's not even double damage, nice. Thanks

[DrakenKin]

Originally posted by Sir Francis:

Take an occultist instead of vestal to mark for the hounds.

more damage on the hound 1

a stun trinket (cudgel weight?) on the second hound.

give hellion a sun ring instead of the stun amulett.

I was worried about the bleed from the occultist, since there are enemies in the warren that debuff for something like -30% bleed resistance. But maybe i can just carry extra herbs. What was your experience using the occultist on that aspect?

Added damage to hound 1, disma's head for +25% damage to everything. I had another look at accuracy and realized that you're right i probably have enough of it with just one item. Monsters seem to be around 30 evasion, so if i want accurate shots i would need about 130 total. Hound rush has 105, an extra 10 hidden acc by default on everything (heard of that recently), another 10 from sun ring, that's only 5% chance to miss which should be enough.

Added a stun amulet instead of the cudgel, since i don't like the speed loss, and stun resistance sounds more useful than an extra 5% to stun.

My logic for stun trinket on the hellion is because 90% of the time he is just stunning. And even with that high stun, i still get resisted by things like centaur, so extra stun seems vital for him to do his job. The second reason is that his stun attack has 115 base accuracy, + the hidden 10 accuracy that's 125, again only 5% miss chance against the 30 dodge on average i am seeing. If i am missing something please let me know why the precision is more valuable than the stun chance.

[Sir Francis]

You can run stun hellion, sure, just not my style i guess... i know yawp is very powerful but i literally never use it, mostly because almost always SHE can take a kill on a high priority back rank stress enemy instead, which is worth more than stuning two frontliners imo.
HER melee skills dont have great acc, thats why i would take sun ring.

Sun ring + candle is just a classic meta-build for HER to iron swan first turn.

Yes, more herbs are a good measure to take against the occasional unfortunate slasher-debuff.

Noteably, you want the occultist to be able to tentacle pull swine skivers to the front where they are way less of a pain in the butt.

[Skinny Pete]

I might cut stress recovery short in that situation and just finish something with already moderate damage and a mark. A single crit doesn't just take you to DD, it more or less obliterates any stress relief you accomplished.

(Tentacle Devour has a 17% CRIT chance.)

[LaserGuy]

I agree that an Occultist makes MUCH more sense than a Vestal in this team. All of your characters have self heals available to them anyway, so you shouldn't need a whole lot of healing power, and you should always be bringing bandages into the Warrens as well. This team has loads of firepower with and should be very strong in the Warrens. Occultist is also usable in any position and has a good rank 2 stun, so you can push him forward and stress heal pretty quickly if you feel the need.

Constantly stunning with your Hellion feels like a waste of her talents to me. I feel like your battles must be taking very long with basically only one character attacking each round.

You don't need to bother stunning the Swinotaurs more than once really... if you kill all of the other mobs with them, they're harmless little puppies.

(Aside: If you have it, I think Ancestor Scroll is superior to Junia's Head for your Vestal. I haven't calculated the rounding on 30% vs. 25% extra healing, but I expect that it's probably almost the same in most cases).

[DrakenKin]

Hellion attacks position 4 on the first turn, unless the enemy on position 1 is nasty (stress etc). But basically she only attacks once on the first turn, then keeps stunning, and only attacks when the resistances of whatever she's stunning are too high and it would be a waste of a turn (basically every 2-3 turns once). She has a stun chance of 185% with items, basically once a monster goes up to 150% resist or so i attack with her instead of stunning.

I use her bleed attack to reach enemy position 3. I don't use the self heal.

I did quite a few champion warrens the last days even long dungeons and it was surprisingly easier than i expected with the dual hounds, the damage vs beast on hound is really useful. It's all good, now i am running Weald, and will be doing the champion bosses soon.

On weald I swapped a hound for an arbalest, and will soon swap my vestal for an occultist (need to get rid of a bunch of quirks first).

I'll check if i have the ancestor scroll when i get back to playing, thanks!

[Gluecost]

Personal input, i have visited marking teams time and time again and employed the strat in a lot of different ways.

Ive noticed over time, while Marking can be very effective, it is best left saved for either the large imposing monsters (ghouls, SOME bosses, skiver, etc)

In most of your run of the mill encounters or combats, I would typically not recommend it simply due to having to commit turns to it. More often then not, just attacking like normal and giving priority to those that need to be killed tends to be more than enough. Mark becomes more of a 'kill it harder' ability in case that would of been a dead body if the marker had just attacked instead.

Exception being, you have a very fast occultist who can drop a mark for a Bounty hunter for the lovely one hit kills.
Even then i find the scenarios that is more useful marking instead of attacking are very far and few.

I've witnessed some fall into the trap of 'it has mark synergy, therefore, i must use mark'
Simply because it tends to be more... cumbersome than you would expect it to be.

And yes, as stated before, if your team already has self-heals, the vestals value diminishes greatly and an occultists more offense oriented/burst heal kit has a much higher payout.

[DrakenKin]

Oh I definitely don't over mark. I basically try to do some basic math and see if i can kill something this turn with regular attacks, if i can i do it, if i can't i use stuns. I usually only mark if the target as protection (since i am using the hound's mark that reduces protection) against protection targets it's almost always better to use mark, since the hound attack next turn will double damage, recupping the lost attack on the past turn.

There are few exceptions, with some enemies having protection but low HP, meaning killable with some basic attacks and bleed. An example of that are the swine slashers.

One other factor to keep in mind in using marks or not, is also how many stunners you have. Because my hellion stuns 2 targets, and i have a stun on my healer and one of the hounds, it is often possible for me to kill position 4, stun position 3 and either 1 or 2 (or both if it's a large enemy, which is often the case), and still be able to mark. Because most enemies are stunned and can be killed on the following turn, using the mark can be an easier decision, basically use it while everybody is stunned to have a much easier time killing on turn 2.