Ecology's unfortunately the poorest choice for a BT tertiary. Your main kill tactic - the only one that'll work against people with a clue - is to lock 'em in sap. That involves using every means you can think of to keep them from rubbing their cleanse enchantment, namely keeping them off balance, off eq, prone and/or with broken arms:
- Paralysis from the swarm does that, so you should always make sure you've dissolved their protection scroll (keep in mind that this is a very fast attack you can do while off-equilibrium, so use it when you're off eq), and always sap when swarm's about to hit. Set up a timer to let you know if you have to. (Mine only ever annoyed me.)
- Vines keep people from cleansing, and they stack with webs (i.e. have to be writhed from separately), so get a web enchantment and alternate the two. Keep faeriefire up on shrouded people: it'll let you see when they've writhed out, and also when they've woken from sleep.
- Being sprawled keeps people from cleansing; hallucinations given out by spores in your demesne 1/3rd of the time can cause this (you see 'em take a dive), or you can also accomplish it with mountain smudges. Being sprawled with broken legs keeps them from getting up 'till they've mended the legs; you can break limbs with treebane and mountain smudges.
-The spiders in your demesne give blacklung, which throws people off-balance periodically, so they can't cleanse; you'll know they have it when you see them coughing up phlegm, you'll know they've cured it when they apply salve to their chest. I don't know if the affliction list for Crow Spit's been updated: it used to give blacklung and 2-3 useless things like vomiting; if it now gives blacklung and more useful things, you can use that too.
- Being chilled or frozen occasionally causes people to shiver, throwing them off-eq until they concentrate. Can't rub cleanse off eq. Apply mactans liberally. Spiders also help you by giving mactans from time to time. (Confusion, given by spiders 1/3rd of the time, keeps you from concentrating and has to be cured first. This is more of a get-lucky thing, because you have no active skill for giving it.)
- Broken arms from dendroxin fetish keep 'em from cleansing.
Sap only works in the trees, so treelife is very important. Just have a climb up;sap alias, watch that at least two of the conditions above are met, and hit it when you see treelife and swarm hit. The aim of the game is to cast sap, and have the person not be able to cure it until you've regained eq, so you can vine/web. If you get to that point, you've got very good odds of keeping them in sap. One thing you should not do is then switch to damage immediately. You'll stop hindering them, and they'll get the chance to get out. Wait for a few rounds of the demesne to keep messing them up and whittling them down, keep alternating webs, vines, maybe the odd broken limb or mactans. Switch to damage when you know they're not going to get away anymore

Forget about morphite. You'll never keep people asleep with it, especially not with poison shrugging. (You'd need a hit to strip insomnia, one to put 'em to sleep, one to strip kafe. But even if you doublefetish it and they don't shrug, they'll wake before you can strip kafe. Also, any damage from your demesne will wake them, so it's pretty useless.) Single charybdon fetish doesn't pile on afflictions fast enough, and double fetish will eat up your power, which you need to save up for sap.

Lastly, elevation changes are your friends. Treelife, treebane, shove, swoop, raise cudgel can all be used to get people where you want them, and all tend to throw others' offence off, especially in the case of guardians and wiccans who don't have channels open, so they can be separated from their entities. If you ever need time to catch up on curing, for instance, perch and cast treebane; together with treelife, it'll toss people about like yo-yos, and the broken limbs and losing-eq from treebane will keep them from getting up immediately. You'll find you're pretty hard to knock out of the trees, and people will try to stick to the ground more since you can't sap there. Elevation changes also count as movement causing bleeding from thornlashes, and you can use swoop to add more bleeding to that, but good luck actually keeping thornlashes on people.

Trample's not worth the cost, you've definitely got better non-guild skills to pick up first - like everything except Arts.

Other random points: An enlarge enchantment will slow people from writhing a little. An enfeeble enchantment is nice for saving your sorry posterior against warriors (temporarily lowers their strength.)

I had great fun with BT combat, hope you do too.

EDIT: Other thing that came to mind. You can rub enchantments while blind; niricol won't keep people from cleansing.

My post got eaten by the evil disconnection robot, anyway, I've found treebane to be killer with sap. Treebane isn't instant, so if treelife hits you have time to climb up and hit them with sap, luck permitting they'll be thrown down breaking their limbs and giving you an extra round to get the lock in. Nirrti broke the other stuff down, so I'm not gonna re-type my whole deally.

You have to ignore every post in this thread except the one about demesne timing, Shamarah's brief intro, and Nirrti's.

Anyways, like Shammy stated, your kill method is primarily sap. Everything else requires opponent incompetence (panic, lack of skill, system bug, drunk, etc.), which is a bad factor to rely on. Sap is very similar to aeon: it delays all of your opponent's actions by .5 sec (aeon delays by 1 second), costs 5p, only cast at tree elevation, and is cured by cleanse. The real distinction is in the cure method. Aeon curing is only prevented by anorexia. Sap curing is prevented by all of the standard prone conditions: entangled, sprawled, paralyzed, and everything else that sticks the "p" in your prompt, and takes a 4 second equilibrium. So, the art of the saplock is keeping your opponent prone for as long as possible.

As an ecologist, you don't have much to initiate the saplock, but you have a couple tricks to perpetuate a saplock. So, to start off, we're going to be focusing on druidry. Swarm, the demesne skill that paralyzes, is a good first step, since it's passive. Unfortunately, you can't count on getting more than one second of paralysis. Next in line is vines, your novice-level nature skill. It entangles, lasts a fair bit longer, but has a four-second eq time of its own. Third factor is going to be your opponent's own eq time. I can write a textbook on that third factor, so I'm just going to skip over it for now. Anyways, to get sap to stick for those crucial first four seconds, you want to cast sap while your opponent is going to be off-balance for a while and you anticipate the demesne hitting before they get balance back. It either means 1) a lot of waiting and hoping your opponent doesn't smash your face in (druids have the flimsiest defense of all archetypes), or 2) a lot of disappointment trying to get sap to stick. If you have to choose, choose option 2. Curing sap at least buys you a couple seconds, and since it involves fairly complex system work or good manual combat sense, you might get a lucky kill anyways.

Good news is that, once you actually regain equilibrium against a sapped opponent, the entire fight is in your hands, and your hands alone. As an ecologist, you need to immediately get to work by adding as many proning conditions as you can. First up is vines. It's reliable. Your fetish can use mactans (shivering causes severe loss of eq and requires your opponent to CONCENTRATE before regaining it) or morphite (sleep causes both sleep and proning, unless they have metawake up, which is not entirely bad news for you either). Unfortunately, mactans has fire potion, morphite has insonia, and everyone has resilience for potion shrugging. You're probably going to have to hit the beserkfetish button a couple times. Good news is that fetishes are fast.

You basically want to keep repeating the vines/mactans/morphite thing until your opponent is dead. The ability to track curing is essential. If your opponent is using invisibility, cast faeriefire. It's best if you're able to do this before sapping, although it will eventually wear off. Your demesne deals minor damage and moderate bleeding passively. Don't bother turning off storm for morphite. They'll wake up paralyzed. Just put them back to sleep. If your opponent is frozen and asleep, you can go ahead and branch out a little. Charybdon is good for anyone in a deep saplock. Shyness will sometimes buy you half a second while they try running. Just make sure you can catch up to them again, and fast. You need to watch their curing. Use disloyalty against guardians, wiccans, and trackers.

Anyways, I'm hoping to be in game again on Monday. Catch up with me then.

EDIT: Nirrti is a fully competent fighter in her own right and will forever give you good advice, but I disagree with her on the use of treebane and mountain smudges. Neither of those work at tree elevation. Since you can only cast sap at tree elevation, that means moving them. Moving them means that, at least for a split second, you can't track their curing.

EDIT 2: See? She's always giving good advice. Poisons fixed. That's what you get for protesting against Glomdoring. Not only do you lose sleep at night and feel your brain leaking out of your ears when you log in, you also lose your combat edge.

Every post needs ice cream, even when it's been ninja'd. Also, smudges now work at tree elevation too, yay joy. Also, treebane doesn't simply break limbs, it also throws off-eq for a few seconds when it flings them out of the trees, which is not bad at all for keeping up a sap-lock, and keeps 'em from getting away immediately. It's true that you do run some risk by letting them out of your sight briefly, though.

Xavius care to say that all again but replace ecology with runes?
There never seems to be a runist on when I am

Pretty Please Perhaps?

Now if only there was one for Dreamweaving, everyone would be set.

Just embed narcolepsy and deepsleep x5 ftw.

The necro is welcomed. I believe I have everything set up now as best I can. The issue will be remembering all my alias/macros in the midst of combat. I fully expect to die alot.

There's much less to say for Dreamweaving!

For Dreamweaving, you can go two routes. If you go the sleep route, as Shamarah suggested, you'll want to prepare a demesne that doesn't do damage, since that wakes people up. So, don't use Storm and Thorns. I never liked that option much because I didn't think most people would be silly enough to sit still while I deepslept them... I liked embedding memoryloss. It's a hefty bit of blackout, which causes people to fall behind on their curing and react more slowly to being sapped, giving you time to work on a lock. Flicking memoryloss at people is an even longer bit of blackout, which you can use to mask some subsequent action (try eyepeck). Daydreaming and epilepsy cause eq and balance loss respectively, both of which keep people from cleansing sap; however, neither of them is a better choice to embed than narcolepsy or memoryloss, and flicking them isn't very effective.

Thus remember: Dreamweaving is the most lesson-expensive option for a BT - or, for that matter, probably a HS.

Incorrect.

Not at all. Ecology's by far the most expensive. The base skill, Hunting, is fully useless, and the most useful combat skill is berserkfetish, which is Mythical. Without that, you're not doing much.

Likewise, runic doublesling is Trans, although you can make do with single sling and Fuse, which is high Expert. Runes does give you stupidity, paralysis and impatience - your three best runes - early on, though.

Dreamweaving gives you sleep control (an awesome defence) at Capable, your first useful mote (daydreaming) at Adept, mote embedding at Expert and memoryloss (blackout) at 50% Virtuoso. That's all I had for a very long time and that's all you really need.



I think he meant anorexia-like effects (including throatlock, slit-throat, crushed windpipe), things that block drinking. And aside from that there's only crucifixion.

I stand corrected.

Helpful.

I assume he is talking about things like sleep, recessional, and stun. But you're right on about the quality of the help provided with that post.

Right. Ok. Aeon curing is only prevented by anorexia and its knockoffs and the things that prevent doing basically everything else, which, as an alt of a Dancer, he already knows about.

Yes. His response truly was helpful, no?

I try, vale_kant summed it up. Xavius's post, which was quite well done, is a bit arrogantly stated- being an underlying motivation for my post. Everyone makes mistakes, and there never one "perfect" way to do a saplock in -all- situations. Saying that he can forget everyone's posts except for two others' when a very obvious incorrect statement exists in his own is ironic, no?

Except... that doesn't have anything to do with what you posted.