Generally, I prefer my katanas for bashing. Over time, the faster speed with crits pays off a bit more, but honestly mostly I like that the fast balance means that if I do something dumb, I'll get balance back quicker, so that I can run the hell away.

The one time I prefer the claymore is against life-leeching mobs, just because one big crit basically ends the fight, giving them less of a chance to chain-leech to full. However, as I've circled and gotten a higher crit rate, even this has become less of a thing.

Speed wins when it comes to bashing.


That's why my 4 second symbol is so awesome. /Sarcasm

Man, wish I could hunt like that. My 1.8 second kata is sooooo worthless.

Speed for bashing. Damage matters a decent amount but once again there is a threshhold for how fast you want your minimum swing timer and claymores do not cut it.

All right, that works for me.

Now to sit back and waste my days off forging...

While maybe not the intent, it does work in their favour. No reason to change a skill that will always be used and in demand as long as it keeps bringing in money. IRE is a business, after all, and we can take for granted that it CAN be played free, but can't be played EFFECTIVELY free, unless you go through the enormously long process of getting credits in game through other channels.

True, but I've always looked at it like this: you should be expected to spend some money on credits in order to learn skills and be effective in combat and other areas. This is reasonable, although a bit irritating to those of us who work hard for low pay. However, artifacts should not ever be required for general play. A forger should be able to forge without absurd expectations without an artifact. The artifact, however, should make forging exceptionally easy. Therefore: once you've already spent money on 300 credits to trans forging, you should be able to do so within reason. The extra 400 credits should be completely optional, rather than required, but make the process almost stupidly easy.

In reality, forging is screwed up. They know it, we know it, and we know they know it. It has been under "internal review" for who knows how long, but people seem to think there are more pressing matters than forging overhaul, gigglefits!

True enough. I don't really expect to see any results from my comments, but I can't help but be irritated every time I have to go and forge something.

Especially since I've had a transed forger in Aetolia... and forging there requires (required?) a single forge and refine.

Right, but it also requires a pile of gold since you lose most of the comms. A lot of times you just take what you can get there as a .0003% chance forged item doesn't make or break your class.

It's worse when you're runing though, I think. You're about to spend 1000+ CR but you can't because it takes two weeks to forge the right items.

And in the other IR's you just spend those credits on a weapon.

I agree. And theoretically, because you can get credits through other means besides money, it can be argued that you don't need to buy credits to buy artifacts which aren't "required". But we know it's not true, just like it's not true that you don't need artifacts to PvP. I really wish artifacts weren't required for certain things.

Sadly, the only reason that artifacts are expected for PvP is because some people seem to have both limitless funds and time. I don't think that the people who started the first IRE server anticipated people spending thousands of dollars on the game. I assume that was only a pleasant surprise.

This thread makes me appreciate my x/235/190+ morningstars.

Ugh. 640 forge attempts later, i still haven't gotten acceptable stats...

Keep going.

up to 700 now. Are stats really important enough to justify this?

That is something you'll have to answer for yourself.