What skills/build are you guys using, and how is it working out?

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Originally Posted by Crissa

...And I really fail to see how 'summoner' and 'support' are contradictory terms. Are you saying AH shouldn't be used for offtanking, aggro management, or include heals?

Lastly, head to head comparisons are usually bunk, as that's not what this game is supposed to be doing. Every skill is supposed to have advantages and disadvantages, and gear matters quite alot. So that's not really evidence. The aggro and damage outputs from running a similarly geared character are much better, though you do have to track power consumption.

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First of all, Charm Rat is not Animal Handling, it's a preview without the skills for support of the pet.

Then for the role you mentioned: Of course pets could work as offtanks, if the mods for that would be better and they had skills for it (life leech, parry, absorbs like shield or staff, and better aggro generation/snap aggro mechanics) or damage (if their damage would be higher and they had abilities like armor penetration for, say, cats). You would then play AH with a support skill for normal grind or glass cannon style as DD, high risk for high reward. There is currently no reward tied to the risk.

Furthermore, you mention gear, but, as I showed above in my videos, naked Psychology level 42 outperforms optimized gear for Animal Handling level 63, and that's where you need to stop assuming and start actually playing a skill you post about on the forum.

<clearing throat>

We know there are bugs with AH. We are working on them. And AH will almost certainly need some ability changes and other balance work after the bugs are sorted.

So let's drop this escalating argument for now and get back to the original topic of the thread, okay? Seeing how people sell other players on a skill - or warn them away from it - is really valuable for another peek at what is working and what is not.

Thanks!

Sorry, srand, I don't even know what they think they're arguing with. 'would' and 'assume' aren't statements of fact or existence.

Clearly, if AH isn't living up to other support skills, then something is wrong.

It's not quite just AH, either, as all pets end up being almost detrimental after around level 50, especially when there's broken threat. Nothing more rage inducing than taking 5 minutes to make yourself a graveyard while being hardcore just to have your work destroyed 20 seconds into the first fight, or in some cases, seeing one of those pets just sit there doing nothing at all while the other does maybe 100 to 150 damage *total* fighting things with 20k HP+. So, pets in general just are not worth it right now post 50. Before that, they actually are pretty decent.

That being said, the only class I try to steer people away from is necromancy. The moment you throw pets out of necromancy, you're basically left with 2 spells with long cool downs and a fairly weak basic attack. Even if you were to fully mod said 2 spells, they look far better on paper than real scenarios allow. You'd have better luck killing things with a real-life butter knife stabbing at the screen screaming in Russian.

As for the rest of the skills, they are all pretty viable (including AH, but it's still weaker than the rest minus necromancy.) I settled with staff/ice as a 'primary'. With a set of gear for general tanking, a set for damage, and a set for soloing manticores. Could go one more set for AoE, but really no need these days. It's not as much damage in shorter fights as fire/archery/psych, but it will average out to be equivalent in slightly longer fights (say 30 seconds.) Overall, it's been a good time.

I'm really hoping priest becomes a thing that I can use with spider... because it sounds absurd.

My favorite skill set so far has been knife/battle chemistry. I enjoy the battle chemistry aoe and feel that between the bc and knife healing abilities, I can survive very well when soloing. I also like that I have many different damage types available to me and even a semi-reliable stun from a knife mod proc for those pesky ghosts. ( That stun proc is possibly one of my favorite games to play since there is only a 33% chance of it going off. It usually cooperates, but when it doesn't go off a few times in a row, fighting ghosts gets very ... interesting. I'm pretty sure it's possible to have 2 items with this proc equipped at the same time to increase the chance, I just haven't gotten around to collecting them since I find gear maxing not all that interesting these days.)

If you are looking for a gimpy skill combo, I don't think this is it. Battle chemistry is outright scary in dense mob situations like Kur Tower where you can aoe-freeze and aoe-bomb a whole lot of zombies at once. Freezing mist is possibly my favorite spell in the game since it gives me time during combat to step back and think about what I'm doing.

People have complained about knife's damage output before, but to me it's a very nice balance of self-heals and damage. Knife also got some damage buffs semi-recently, so those complaints may no longer be applicable. When I remember, I use calligraphy to boost my slashing damage from knife.

Edit: Thinking about this a bit more, knife is a very nice skill if you like sustain builds. It doesn't seem to use a lot of power (not precisely sure since I get a fair amount of power from bc), and between blur's evasion, surge cut's heal and several nice mods like slice's armor heal and blur's delayed heal, you can stay alive for quite some time. In particular when coupled with bc's healing mist, healing injection and golem heal/power restore. ;)

@srand
Actually, we are on topic. The OP wrote he'd think about playing AH and I've been trying to explain what's wrong with it, as well as provide data (in the form of my videos) to show I'm not exaggerating "to make my class op".

Animal Handling doesn't only need reworked skills on the user's end - or rather, the handler's skills are fine, except for Clever Trick, which doesn't work at all.

What needs work are the pets themselves. Pet roles and skills to support them, damage/aggro/avoidance/mitigation tuned for these roles. When bear (tank) and cat (damage) work, you can add more pets, like wolves (buffs), spiders (crowd control) or worms (debuffs).

I feel if I find the skill is weak enough to warrant posting about on the forum, I might as well produce data to work with and provide my angle on what's wrong how and why, and how to fix it.

I don't even mean this to be a "avoid AH" statement. The skill needs a lot of testing to be sure. Just in this special case, I feel like "don't even think about it" does the OP the best service, seeing what he expects to do with it in his original post.

Srand, no one dares argue with crissa because they'll just try belittle you. :C

But I felt that because crissa was wrong, (I would say as usual but ah I'm feeling generous), I -politely- corrected them, addressing what they posted. I kept on point on to the thread but crissa should change their pic to a train crash, I mean they love derailing.

No one was arguing, their 'opinion' could be taken as fact by other players, thought commenting on its accuracy would at least help people reading through.

(They said they'd leave the conversation after imploding it which isn't right.. :/)

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Originally Posted by Tsugumori

But I felt that because crissa was wrong...

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...Which is perfectly valid.

The problem is most of your argument was about something I didn't say. I'm sorry you find me distracting, I realize I can be verbose and bossy. I apologize. Your arguments were all valid and interesting and I read every one. I think srand meant we were starting to derail as I failed to explain my side.

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Originally Posted by Asashoryu

How so?

You get Charm Rat on the newbie island, but that's not part of the Animal Handling skill tree. You end up buying Animal Handling from Gisli the stable guy in Serbule after getting off the newbie island... so it's more similar to Fire Magic in that way. I *think* the only combat skills you get on anagogue are sword, unarmed and (potentially) psychology.

Or by 'same point' do you mean the early game in abstract? (pre-Elt, pre-Khur, etc.)

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You also get archery if you find the box with the bow and arrows.

I think the chronological order of attainability isn't even relevant, seeing how Sword, Archery and Psychology are among the stronger skills right now. There was time for a lot of testing and fleshing these out, while other skills didn't change much since their implementation and have various problems.