So, I recently moved to the Ebonguard guild, and took the Knight specialization of Axelord. I know most people go PB or BM, but I felt like trying something different. The problem is, I honestly am super clueless on how to fight as a warrior in general, not to mention an Axelord specifically. I used to be a Nekotai and found creating the forms and doing decent damage and/or bleeding to be pretty simple.

Are there any tips you can give me, or examples of avenues I can take as far as attacking during combat to be effective as an Axelord? Are there certain poisons I should be using? Certain areas of the body I should be focusing on, as an Axelord specifically, that may be different from the things a PB or BM might do? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I remember Ixion murderin' Wobs by using max precision weapons as an Axelord. Was brutal. O_o Went through stance/parrying like butter. First time I've seen a warrior own peeps usin' something other than max speed weapons.

Tell your guild envoy to support and comment on report 779.

You have a couple options as axelord that I'd suggest.

-Knockdown/ringing ear (3 bal loss/1s head stun at light wounds on jab) spam to get ahead of their wounds curing and hinder them into slitlock/behead range or execute.

-Rush execute not caring about anything else (aka only hitting chest/gut/head).

If they have good curing and your wound output isn't enough to outpace their healing there's not much you can do. Otherwise execute should be your easiest kill method. Though, as with anyone, find a weakness on their curing and abuse the hell out of it. Some people don't put any priority on arms, too much priority on head/legs, etc. I've found that you'll get into execute range easily, or pretty much never depending on the target. With the latest assessing change to be bal/eq free, you can auto-execute once they're at the required wound levels if you code it into your system.

lilija:

Tell your guild envoy to support and comment on report 779.

What is report 779?

REPORT 779.

Try for a burst wounding weapon (Damage: 106 Precision: 508 Speed: 240 has worked best for me so far)

Honestly, as an Axelord you are at the mercy of both the effectiveness of your tertiary (Hindering, additional afflictions, etc...) and your opponent. You will not kill someone quickly unless they forget how to cure deepwounds.

In a pinch, you can try for an early severed spine and build for an execute, but lately I've been finding myself trying for amputates more than anything. Just keep in mind that the vast majority of wounds available to you pre-critical (With the notable exception of RingingEar) aren't going to last long or even bother someone with decent curing, and knockdown is only useful if you have a way to keep them from immediately standing back up.

Axelord gets really overwhelming fast once you have say... one other warrior in the room doing anything (though, pinleg spam does this just as well). They can help you use your burst wounding capabilities to get into higher wound ranges, where you proceed to murderize.

Expect to see axelords jump in popularity after the wounding/armor changes go through, and as envoys finally get around to giving lower wounds affs. I'm really hoping to see upper level warriors nerfed after the changes make all warriors lives easier, really. Also hoping to see warrior stacking nerfs go through (possibly with stacking nerfs everywhere).

If the upper level warriors get any more nerfs, you're going to hear a lot of yelling from the ones who invested thousands of credits into runes.

Enyalida:

Axelord gets really overwhelming fast once you have say... one other warrior in the room doing anything (though, pinleg spam does this just as well). They can help you use your burst wounding capabilities to get into higher wound ranges, where you proceed to murderize.

Expect to see axelords jump in popularity after the wounding/armor changes go through, and as envoys finally get around to giving lower wounds affs. I'm really hoping to see upper level warriors nerfed after the changes make all warriors lives easier, really. Also hoping to see warrior stacking nerfs go through (possibly with stacking nerfs everywhere).

I think you are absolutely insane if you think Warriors need nerfing. They already went from being one of the best classes to one of the worst. Some of that is opinion but in general it is getting annoying that people want nerfs where they are a waste of time.

As it currently stands, you need a -minimum- investment of 3000 credits to even hope to reach mid-tier warrior combat, and even then you are one of the weaker solo fighters out there. The lack of reliable, on-demand hindering or affliction (I'm looking at you, RNG within an RNG within an RNG within an RNG) leaves most encounters up to luck unless you are considerably stronger than your opponent. It gets much better in groups... but group combat in Lusternia is a monster best left to its own thread.

I'm still a fairly new face around here, so I know much of what I type will probably be disregarded... but I've been crunching the numbers nonstop for a few weeks now and something just doesn't add up. The responses of other, seasoned warrior combatants tends to support the results too.

Svana:

As it currently stands, you need a -minimum- investment of 3000 credits to even hope to reach mid-tier warrior combat, and even then you are one of the weaker solo fighters out there. The lack of reliable, on-demand hindering or affliction (I'm looking at you, RNG within an RNG within an RNG within an RNG) leaves most encounters up to luck unless you are considerably stronger than your opponent. It gets much better in groups... but group combat in Lusternia is a monster best left to its own thread.

I'm still a fairly new face around here, so I know much of what I type will probably be disregarded... but I've been crunching the numbers nonstop for a few weeks now and something just doesn't add up. The responses of other, seasoned warrior combatants tends to support the results too.

The thousands of credits...having to be a demigod (which isn't hard to get...but still), and the RNG...bah...the RNG....

Enya's just got major problems with using stance and parry, and her wound curing is utter :censor:, so warriors seem incredibly overpowered to her. She tends to argue toward nerfing them either based on that skewed perspective or the fact that they stack well in group with other warriors, whereas almost all other archetypes in the game stack well in group with almost any other archetype. (Bolded for emphasis over this silly little point that crops up every time you mention buffing warriors)

If you can stance and parry effectively, and cure wounds in a logical fashion, against an AL you've got plenty of time to kill them. If they can get to an execute before you can kill them, they are either:

A ) A much better combatant than you, much, much, much better.
or
B ) Have no access to any sort of reliable kill method. Maybe someone like a Glamours Minstrel with low int and charisma? Or a Hartstone Druid Dreamweaver that can't remember how to drain enough mana to drop their insta on a str/dex/con skewed warrior with 12 bloody int.
or
C ) Never bother to step out of the room and remove all progress they've made due to how long it takes to get anywhere, before stepping back in, executing your point a to point b soulless setup, and flinging your now fully charged card.

So, my advice as an Axelord:
Focus on burst wounding and try to identify if they have a major flaw in their stance/parry or wound curing, and then ruthlessly exploit that. If you can find such a flaw and chain and can either power straight to execute, or amp their parry arm and then build head, to force a s/p change opening up legs to string kneecap, or if they've got a HUGE flaw, go straight for severspine with possibly an arm setup, and pray your tert is reliable enough, or they're unfamiliar enough with fighting warriors to keep them from just walking away throughout this process. If you can't find such a flaw, bring more warriors to help.

I think it's awesome Kaya's gone the axe route. I trust Svana's opinion on it. Might be time to start envoying AL issues to give it a viable niche within the knight specs.

tl;dr: While I disagree heavily with some of the assessments made in the previous posts, I fully agree with the suggestions/conclusions (unless I'm missing something), and the only reason I'm posting is to defend my stance on warrior issues in general.


TL:
(All personal attacks asssssiiiide:)

Oh no, average warriors totally need buffs. Without a huge investment into weaponrunes and a huge dedication to transing a bunch of skills, you won't get anywhere on anyone. Average axelords don't really have any way to get you into the higher wound levels, or hinder you. Not to mention that there needs to be at least one fewer layer of RNG. I've always lobbied that at trans, you should never natural miss, that's just so dumb.

The problem is that if you just look at the average effectiveness for a warrior, you're totally missing the mark on what the power level of a top tier warrior will be. More than any other class in the game (IMO), warriors have a really annoyingly huge range of power. As a Druid combatant, there are two or three artifacts that will boost my strength, and none of them really make me that much scarier. I just stack on more damage wooooo. For warriors the difference between nothing and a 3000 credit (wowza) investment is far far larger, which is a big problem.

The changes being proposed for warriors will help mitigate some of the bad RNG that goes on with trying to land affs, as well as make the upper levels of wound resistance be less effective. Racial changes for races that are supposedly 'Warrior races' will make there potentially be some much higher burst wounding capability than already exists (some of which is already crazy). Possible changes to the way that stats work to mitigate warrior wounding and the ever possible (hopefully) change to the way that weaponstats work will also buff warriors. All of these things taken together will mean that the average warrior will have a good chance to get somewhere on a competent opponent, which is great! It will also mean that the warriors that are currently able to hit pinlegs/tendons in two (or so) volleys will be even more astronomically powerful than the average warrior combatant.

What needs to happen is:
0)Bring up baseline warrior potency
0)Average in outliers a bit, introducing diminishing returns on some weaponstats and str as appropriate. Not familiar with all of the numbers enough. (with appropriate credit adjustments*)
0)Remove natural miss, and adjust (or remove) another layer of RNG.
0)Adjust affs to give a fair spread across wound levels.
0)Due to the nature of deepwound curing (literally hindered by every class in the game's bashing attack), possibly institute diminishing returns on multiple warriors smacking a single bodypart.

*This is why warriors will always be either OP or UP, imo, and why it won't get fixed.

If you did go Night, make sure to keep up Drink and musicboxes, lowering regen means they'll have to sip sooner from bleeding and lose out a health application. If each hit = 2 applications, then you can eventually pull ahead, Drink will let you tank a bit more of their offense overall. If you're going to need to get to severedspine/amputate legs for your kill, don't focus overly much on the head imo, you don't have as much time before their offense gets you, so just do headshots to slow down attacks when you need the time (the stun isn't going to let you push through a second hit like it would for BM or BC). When you can get it, amp the leg and choke, keep them knocked down and work towards either a second amp or renewing your first one, and you'll be able to just hack down until success. Yes, you'll need the head eventually, but without shutting them off first you won't get anywhere.

Charybdon really helped me out early, just because sometimes you'll get a few going and hidden and they'll diag and suddenly go into a burst of curing (not so good against high resil or Nekotai, bluh). That's where I found I got more time to get ahead, but of course that's completely random. Additionally, if you're not foreseeing a need to Green, just remember to hammer power into them. If you can't do enough wounding to outpace health applications, you're pretty much going to have to set up on both legs/gut just so you can eventually chain the big affs together to finish, as opposed to being able to suddenly burst out a tendon and renew it at will.

Get every single buff you can. Nightsweats, war blessing+kirigami, crow spirit, I'd say even work on getting Beer +DMP, tattoos, forging runes (just ask if you need someone to etch for you), anything to get more resources out so you can force that sip. Try to get poisons that cure on the same balance as the aff you're giving, just so they stick a ltitle bit longer.

Naia:

I think it's awesome Kaya's gone the axe route. I trust Svana's opinion on it. Might be time to start envoying AL issues to give it a viable niche within the knight specs.

I agree completely. We should be envoying changes for AL so that they find their own little niche in the guilds. Acelord used to be good except they got nerfed...which is what nerifing tends to do. I have seen very few nerfings in any game that actually make everything more balanced.

As a warrior and one who has fought other warriors, it does not take any runes at all to be among the top tier warriors. I am not a top tier warrior by any means but know a few who are and can stand with the best of them, and they have no runes... All artifacts do is shorten the length of time one needs to spend understanding combat. If you use trigger lines, highlights and the available resources for tracking your opponents wounds, shield, rebounding and parry(If all apply), you can get the upperhand, it just takes time.

Zilias:
As a warrior and one who has fought other warriors, it does not take any runes at all to be among the top tier warriors.

It doesn't take any runes at all to be among the top tier warriors....but it takes runes to be among the top tier fighters out of all archetypes.

Should also keep in mind that nightkiss/drawdown weaponaura is the equivalent of 550cr in weapon runes! Don't know how many credits people would pay for a 24 dmp all too! *jealous shakefist

Who are these top tier warriors without runes? /curious