Death From Above

[ShadowHM]

Thank You, King of Pain. I did a first round of testing. For this I didn't spend any points beyond what Hardly had already assigned.

I stripped Hardly of his clothes (except for his ethereal hat, which is now worn out ), equipped a couple of throwing weapons and went out to the Stony Field to see what I could see.

He has both Leap and Leap Attack at slvl 15. Leap had a respectable knockback and range of jump. Leaping in place a couple of times could really separate out the monster pack. Leap Attack only seemed to knockback the targeted monster and not all the time. The other monsters could and did immediately attack him. Further, it usually killed the targeted monster, but didn't use up any of the throwing weapons. Instead it seemed to Bash them, even though throwing was the selected skill.


Leap Attack did have more range than Leap, although Leap's range at slvl 15 was as much of a distance as I wanted to Leap.

Given the above observations, it would seem that for a BN character, Leap would be more advantageous for separating monster packs and letting the BN character Leap back out of the fray before his defenceless self gets whacked again. On the other hand, it might be of some use to Leap Attack when an Unraveller is cowering behind a wall of minions and raising them faster than the wussy BN team can take them down.

Is there more I could / should test ?

[KingOfPain]

Your observations are pretty well what I remember L/A to be when I created a test character for the skills before I started on the BN rules. Leap would be a better skill for, and more consistent with a thrower. It is cheap on mana and makes a good curse at higher slvl for all partners because of its range.

I didn't take Hardly out for a real test run yet because I was intended on lvling him from 1 to 40 in a couple of hours. It seemed to me Leap's knockback is not too consistent... Things I would test and have others test and verify:

- Sometime it knocks the same monsters back more than other times.

- And, I would also like to be able to predict the direction of the knockback more accurately (It is often, but not always in the exact opposite direction to the Leaper).

- what is the most effective way to Leap knockback in various situations? As in, how close should the leaper Leap to the target(s). I know what the AS say about its radius but we can only take that as a baseline for testing. It says Leap has a hiden knockback radius that increases with Slvl. It looks to me this radius is on how far monsters gets knocked back, but it also feels like this is also the radius of AoE. What I am getting at is, if Leap has a large enough AoE then it is not in the Leapers interest to always leap into the center of the pack and therefore one can employ better leap tactics - as in how far to leap and where.

- Maybe different monster types are affected differently.


PS: HardlyDavidson is open to anyone who wants to play around with L/A. If you know the PW to the mules, you know the PW to him.


KoP