Author Topic: The ins and outs of scouts  (Read 2604 times)

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The ins and outs of scouts
« on: February 03, 2017, 12:45:35 PM »
Scouts are excellent at delivering consistent damage, they have unique soloing capabilities but they have very low hit points for a tank type class. They are divided into three paths, ocean mountain and sky and their instincts are what set them apart from each other.

Scouts are a hybrid class. They combine the stealth skills of a thief such as sneak, hide, fade and evade with tank skills such as rescue, fence (improved parry) and riposte. They have a few unique skills such as instinct, scout, wildfire hunt shoot and camp.

Stealth skills can be trained as per instructions in how to begin with a thief post. One thing not expressly mentioned there is that thieves and scouts make excellent training partners. One can hide while the other sneaks in and out and the scout can refresh to make things go quickly.

Fence and riposte will be trained while soloing or acting as the main tank for your group. In this scenario you will also train rescue at the same time. Simply fence engage and you will automatically try to block your opponents attack. If you are wielding two weapons you will automatically use your offhand to block with and still land attacks with your prime. If you are only wielding a prime you will use it to block with and sacrifice any attacks. This can be situationally useful, for instance fighting a stone skinned ice shield and fire shield mob. As an ocean scout you can use your piranha instinct swarm to frag the mob down while fence and riposte keep you healthy and the lack of a melee attack stops you from taking damage from the shields. It should be noted that crossbows will also allow you to land a melee attack while not taking damage from fire shield or ice shield etc.

Riposte pairs with fence. This skill gives a scout the opportunity to blind, silence, cause fumbled attacks and a few other effects to his opponent. A scout can riposte thrust, riposte slash or riposte bludgeon. The damage dealt and the effect applied by a successful riposte will then vary with the weapon used. Riposte thrust with a piercer will apply a short blind to your opponent. Riposte slash with an axe will apply a short silence to your opponent and riposte thrust with a miscellaneous offhand will attempt to land an uppercut on your opponent that causes them to fumble attacks. Personally I have found riposte slash with an axe to be most useful.

Both fence and riposte will be improved by dexterity and I believe hit roll will also make thes skills more effective.

Instinct is simply used to swap between available instincts. Use the quell command to release an instinct and the instinct command to connect to it. The easiest way to train this skill is to quell and then reconnect to an instinct over and over again. A failed connect is about 2 rounds of lag so best done in the safety of your guild. Once your instinct skill hits about below average you will find that your offensive instincts will always work, at lower instinct skill you can fail to use them properly.

Camp can be used in outdoor environment rooms. A successful fire will grant those resting next to it improved regeneration and at high skill level it also helps casters to memorise their spells faster. This skill will also provide more than 5 lights to a room which will grant the ability to use scan at night or in dark areas to see what mobs are in adjacent rooms. If the mobs are undead I believe you need night vision to see them, for other mobs you will only need to be infravision. If you do not have infravision you will be unable to scan into dark rooms.

Wildfire skill is simply additional damage for scouts. Just make a trigger from its cool down message and it will train quickly.

Scout is essentially a useless skill in my opinion. It can be used to get a snapshot of a room next to you without entering the room by typing scout north etc. If you fail the skill check you can move in the direction scouted and fall over. Don't train the skill next to death traps. You can also do scout long to scan multiple rooms, approximately 5, in a single direction. I am yet to use this skill in game once it has been trained, although it sounds like it may have some uses, it doesn't. If you are exploring a zone and you think a room is a dt, eventually you are going in there with a character, probably a lvl 1, because it's not enough to just scout it. In pvp you might think it handy to be able to scout long your opponent in an ambush situation. It's not, you already know where they are due to hunt if your close enough to scout long and hesitation just means people might recall. Speed is everything.

Hunt can be used actively like track skill or passively. Active will lag you, but provides directions to your target. Passive will not lag you and will give you a message if your target is within a certain range. This can be effective for avoiding enemies if you are flagged but don't want to fight, or if you are in a locked zone but you are worried they can teleport in or some such. Due to whining on forums recently I believe the range on hunt has been vastly reduced so it's usefulness is questionable at the moment.

The shoot skill trains quickly and easily through use. Non sky scouts must buy arrows to train. While training I suggest archery settings of accuracy 4 speed 4 and power 1. If you ar a sky play around with what bow you have available. I believe there is potential for shooting 4x per round with the right gear at legend.

Ocean path

The instincts available to this path provide constitution, hit points, a limit damage effect, immune negative energy and a mass sit effect. One unique bonus is the frog instinct. This allows you to leap targets. Leap will engage you against your target without lagging you, which allows you to riposte slash and then swarm or bite etc, giving you the potential to silence a pc or mob in the first round of combat. An ocean scout with a good main tank set can quite easily achieve 700 hp plus and for certain fights they can be the ideal main. They will never compete with barbarians as mains for end game fights because their rescue skill is unreliable, many dragons etc are unfenceable and they don't have the raw hit points required.

Mountain path

This path is all about the melee damage. They get mainly strength from instincts as well as plus damage, passively and through the active on wolverine. They can also sit opponents with their melee attacks and the active of grizzly, roar can be used to great affect on certain fights to make them much easier. Roar makes opponents save from fear and also applies a minor debuff allowing them to be hit harder, and to deal slightly less damage. Mountain scouts have the potential to do the highest amount of damage to a single target in a single round once they hit legend.

Sky path

Sky scouts are designed around shooting with bows. They do have some direct damage instincts but they deal significantly less than the other paths. They do however have the kingfisher instinct, swoop. This is basically an auto land bash but the lag is often only 1 round and it also sits the scout. Can still be useful in an ambush. They can also create their own arrows and roc instinct gives them volley, which allows them to release a storm of arrows, unsure of exact limits on it these days but it is something like target +4 mobs or pcs which allows them to get off around 15 arrows per round. The damage potential is good, but shoot is set up differently to melee attacks and the damage is much less consistent, hard plunks combined with annihilates etc. Sky scouts also have harrier, which gives hover. This is about 4 rounds of nobash. Obviously this can have great situational use in terms of being combined with stone skin and moving the group past the sky scout, zones such as lunitari, spire, shadows to name but a few can see this ability taken advantage of.

Hope this guide is useful, and please point out any errors or omissions and I will fix them. Or any cool tactics that deserve inclusion.