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Spirit shield is actually quite useful even without any AP in spirit tanks.
2. Spirit shield drains your mana according to how much damage you received. Spark only cares about your hp dropping below 0.

I think you mean draining spirit?

So basically Spirit Shield functions as a sponge to absorb hits that would otherwise wreck your entire HP bar, and Spark of Life is another chance if you get banged by a bunch of small hits?

yep. with spiritshield you should be virtually immortal in a 1v1 unless a) the guy quad taps you four big ones or (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) you run out of spirit

308 9 You gain 50050 Credits!
308 8 You gain 6050 EXP!
308 7 Your HP and MP have been fully restored!
308 6 Arena Token Bonus! [Token of Blood]
308 5 Arena Clear Bonus! [Fine Estoc of Balance]
308 4 Real Life dropped [Black T-Shirt]
308 3 You are Victorious!
308 2 Real Life has been defeated.
308 1 You hit Real Life for 604 void damage.

thanks to you (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Thanks guys. Looking forward to the 190 tier. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I just beat the gods. How the hell do you people do it without using items? My mace is 28% proc stun and I'm sure I used 5 greater mana pots and 2 greater spirit pots (+5 or so infusions for IPU and FSM each). I kept Spark of Life, Protection, (and the proper infusion for IPU/FSM) on myself and Weaken on them constantly and I was being 1-shot'd by their spirit attacks left and right. I'm sure the stuns helped, but I can't imagine how I would do it without pots.

I probably could've saved on those pots if I had Silence, or if the stun proc can be refreshed if the target is already stunned. (ie I can stun them again back to 3 turns when they still have x turns left.) But that'd make maces overpowered.

Why shouldn't you use items? They drop in enough numbers that they sholdn't be holy and used only in extreme emergencies.
For me, in longer arenas it seems to drop more pots than I can carry with me in my inventory.

Being one-shotted by their magical and spirit attacks is the big problem.
One way to fix that is spark of life, except that spark will only work 2 or maybe 3 times, more than that and you will be out of spirit.
Silence makes things much easier, because that means no magic or spirit attack, so all you have to worry about is having high enough health to survive a standard attack that crits.
If you can do that, then you don't need spark of life, and can save a little mana there.

Also, you should try out using haste, having more turns compared to your enemy is really nice.
And poison is good to, I'll say why later.

Spirit Shield is useless without any AP in Spirit Tanks, right? I can't imagine 151 Spirit lasting long between Spirit Shield and Spark of Life. :\ I need 25 AP to get everything I want out of the 190 and 200 tiers, so it seems like it will take forever before my Spirit is at a respectable level. Adept Learner is high too, and I want to start saving up for Hath.. ugh
When you do this, what do you do about your buffs and HP? Whenever I do this all the MP I earn goes right back into healing and restoring Supportive spells, so I never get anywhere.

Spirit shield is superior to Spark of life in most cases.
Spirit shield will activate when you get hit for more than 25% of your health, and will then remove spirit points dependant on how much damage above that 25% of you health that it has to absorb, maxing out at 20% (with full APs) of your base spirit for a hit that would do more than 100% of your health in damage.
So in theory, if you get hit by something that would take off 30% of your health, it will only do 25% of you health in damage, and 1% of your base spirit.
Meaning you can survive quite a few hits that would have easily killed you, provided you can heal up between them, since them doing 25% of your health means you will only survive 4 of them before you run out of health, no matter how much spririt you have.

Not having enough MP is a problem for melees, but if that wasn't a problem, the game would be easy. Just gotta prioritize.
Not having enough AP is only a problem for lowbies apparently, the really high level players have more AP than there are things to invest them in, leaving them with spares.
As for money and hath....well, you gotta have something to strive for.
Spark of life is superior here, since when you HP hits zero, it will activate and nullify all other attacks that round, giving you a chance to heal up, as well as giving you that cloak buff that reduces damage for a few extra turns.

I guess Avatar scrolls are all that and a bag of chips. I actually stopped keeping Poison on for IPU and FSM because the 114 damager per turn and the mana required to keep it up didn't seem feasible. That might've been when I got their Spirit Attack way more than RL (on which I kept Poison on constantly). I didn't even know Poison slowed the target regen rate. Good to know for future battles. Thanks!

Poison is actually quite good.
It does a bit of damage, and deprecating spells gets twice the amount of bonus duration from proficiency compared to supportive spells, so the high cost of poison might just be that you haven't increased your deprecating proficiency enough.

Apart from doing damage, which is actually quite respectable in my opinion, based on it's cost and duration (try calculating it's damage per turn, that it got a 100% chance to do that damage, not counting misses when casting the spell, and how many turns it lasts) but it also halves mana and spirit regeneration for the monster, which admittedly doesn't do all that much if you use silence, but if you wanna use weaken + spirit shield instead, that might be good.
And it also gives you a reduced chance of missing the affected monster with attacks, so it will also help out your melee damage, and also it's proc chance, since you can't proc if you can't hit.

Poison is a nice spell for bosses, since it gives some nice effects and lasts a very long time with decent proficiency.

I'm pretty sure APs are a problem for everyone except older players.
I'm level ~240 and still 300 APs away from completing my Ability Tree.
Mostly because Artifacts keep giving me crystals I do not want.

I only have 300 AP now, which is not enough to complete even the SP tanks.
Those older players get tons of AP before that AP revamp.

Huh....I give up. Practically useless to say that.

This post has been edited by varst: Sep 29 2011, 15:18

So basically Spirit Shield functions as a sponge to absorb hits that would otherwise wreck your entire HP bar, and Spark of Life is another chance if you get banged by a bunch of small hits?

I feel an urge to rip your av out of your posts for some reason >_>

Maybe it's time you got a new Mokou avatar (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

Meanwhile, I've now got 5 OC overcharges maxed and I'm still not feeling much of a difference. Though I am now starting to spam spirit attacks on giants. Tends to one shot them on 3-4 spirit points.

Why shouldn't you use items? They drop in enough numbers that they sholdn't be holy and used only in extreme emergencies.
For me, in longer arenas it seems to drop more pots than I can carry with me in my inventory.

Being one-shotted by their magical and spirit attacks is the big problem.
One way to fix that is spark of life, except that spark will only work 2 or maybe 3 times, more than that and you will be out of spirit.
Silence makes things much easier, because that means no magic or spirit attack, so all you have to worry about is having high enough health to survive a standard attack that crits.
If you can do that, then you don't need spark of life, and can save a little mana there.

Also, you should try out using haste, having more turns compared to your enemy is really nice.
And poison is good to, I'll say why later.

...

Poison is actually quite good.
It does a bit of damage, and deprecating spells gets twice the amount of bonus duration from proficiency compared to supportive spells, so the high cost of poison might just be that you haven't increased your deprecating proficiency enough.

Apart from doing damage, which is actually quite respectable in my opinion, based on it's cost and duration (try calculating it's damage per turn, that it got a 100% chance to do that damage, not counting misses when casting the spell, and how many turns it lasts) but it also halves mana and spirit regeneration for the monster, which admittedly doesn't do all that much if you use silence, but if you wanna use weaken + spirit shield instead, that might be good.
And it also gives you a reduced chance of missing the affected monster with attacks, so it will also help out your melee damage, and also it's proc chance, since you can't proc if you can't hit.

Poison is a nice spell for bosses, since it gives some nice effects and lasts a very long time with decent proficiency.

What can I say? I like the challenge (since other people seem to be able to do it at the same or lower level) and I'm cheap. I'll definitely look into investing in Haste, but that's after I max Silence when I hit 110. (Should I regret plopping down my first-time winnings from the gods (350,000) on Archaeologist (338,776) instead of Ability Boost? lol)

And yes, I've learned to keep Poison on those bad boys now after almost losing to FSM. But in doing so I've learned just how awesome my Spirit Attack is now. I tried it out once or twice when I just started but it did so poorly that I vowed to never use it again because I'd much rather have the bonus +% damage than a weak 1-target spell that left me doing less damage for a few rounds. It hit FSM for 40k and finished it just as I had run out of pots and used up my remaining mana on my last Spark of Life and FSM had full mana and spirit.

Start getting Ability Boost if you can't earn that many credits on a daily basis. Trust me when I say Archaeologist won't start paying off for a very long while.

Also, start using Haste. With the way mobs dish out damage now, you'll be much better off being able to take double or triple turns over large mobs.

Meanwhile, I've now got 5 OC overcharges maxed and I'm still not feeling much of a difference.

The difference is not that large. But its there... (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

However, this is depends largely on the situation as well. Sometime, the difference could be that it may help you kill in 10 hit instead of 11, which is a small boost, and sometime it may help you kill in 2 hit instead of 3, which is a huge difference.

You can try using 1 Soul stone to see the difference between no/small OC boost VS maxed OC boost. It might help you decide whatever you should try to quickly get maxed OC boost or put AP into something else. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

This post has been edited by buktore: Sep 29 2011, 18:20

Start getting Ability Boost if you can't earn that many credits on a daily basis. Trust me when I say Archaeologist won't start paying off for a very long while.

Also, start using Haste. With the way mobs dish out damage now, you'll be much better off being able to take double or triple turns over large mobs.

Would Haste be useful for me if I'm not having much difficulty with the daily arenas on normal? I was thinking of getting Haste after Silence at lv110 to have an easier time with the gods and other bosses.

And about training other useful things, I'll just leave this here: [imgur.com] http://imgur.com/rVuAt

I just figured I had the money for Archaeologist, so why not? I'm going to go right back to Adept Learner and Ability Boost afterwards since I'll be broke again and I'm already on my way to lv110.

Archaeologist doesn't vastly increase your chances of dropping artifacts alone. You need some Scavenger levels first if you ever want anything to drop at all.

If you're just going to stick with Normal difficulty, then Haste shouldn't be an issue, but as it is right now, Haste provides much better bonuses than Protection does.

If you are going to move beyond Normal difficulty, however...start getting Pack Rats. I found that I wasn't able to do the later arenas with just 6-7 item slots on Heroic+ difficulty. And maxing Pack Rat doesn't cost all that much either, for something that allows you to go 100+ rounds before running out of mana.

@butkore: Yeah, I do have a few soul stones lying around. I'll do some tests on FSM when I get some tokens. Do they stack btw? As in, using like 5 soul stones in a single round would boost your damage by 200% or something.

This post has been edited by Koudesu: Sep 29 2011, 18:27

Each soulstone increase your current OC by 120% and it can go pass your normal OC limit. It also restore your SP.

So basically, yes, they stack, but I'm not quite sure would it increase your damage by 200% (too lazy to do the math!). Also...

- It increase your current OC ... So in order to gets its full benefits, you have to hit the monster until your OC is maxed first before using it.

- You also have to wait until its effect expire first before using another soulstone.

- OC boost from soulstone last the entire battle.

- However, OC boost from soulstone disappears if you use spirit attack, so using SP attack after using soulstone is not recommended, unless it's the last round or something.

I recommend to use just 1 soulstone in one of your normal grinding (Arena, IW, etc) ... Using it in RoB will not going to tell you much apart from the "it boost damage" ...

This post has been edited by buktore: Sep 29 2011, 18:45

I recommend to use just 1 soulstone in one of your normal grinding (Arena, IW, etc) ... Using it in RoB will not going to tell you much apart from the "it boost damage" ...

Although I haven't tried it yet, soulstone should be feasible for arenas end of days and above.

I feel an urge to rip your av out of your posts for some reason >_>

I wouldn't mind if you used it after I do my weekly/monthly avatar change.

Just hope people won't mistake us at first glance via avatars.

Alright, I'm confused.
What does the effectiveness of Cure depend on?
The patch notes for 0.5.3 say Elemental Prof enters into the equation now, but I'm seeing jack.

Some tests:
Elemental Prof 271.5, Divine Prof 239.6, Holy EDB 0 → Cure heals for 2593 HP
Elemental Prof 238.5, Divine Prof 264.0, Holy EDB 10 → Cure heals for 2851 HP
Elemental Prof 238.5, Divine Prof 327.6, Holy EDB 48.1 → Cure heals for 3839 HP

AFAIK it's only curative prof now.