Feed ME!

[Cyrene]

(Little SHop of Horrors shoutout, there...)

Ok, those of you who were in the beta have figured this out a loooong time ago, but I didn't figure it out until this week. We're talking about feeds, attribute points, legendary armor, and a theory, here.

This is solely from a MM point of view, and from one who hasn't finished the game yet (been blocked by flame levels that reduce game to a slide show in Act 4). SO this is about *mid-game* only. I'd like to hear from those that have higher level characters if this holds up into NM.

My initial approach: Legendary items can be wicked sick, slap them babies on! Use your stat pool so you can equip them. Dang, this feed system is fubar, I'm *never* going to have enought stats.

Revised approach: The appropriate response to getting a Legendary drop for your char class is to look it over carefully, go "Wow", then deconstruct it. You should only wear one or two, and they should have the majority of their bonuses aligning with this character's *primary* needs.

Theory: Legenday armor items are a feed-sink that is greatly out of proportion to what they can actually do for you, in most cases. The culprits are (a) high requirements for their bonuses, and, (b) a mixed bag of bonuses that cannot all help (wtf is up with mixing bonuses that are mutally exclusive as far as character type? Is this intentional? Why? Who thinks it is a good idea to mix a couple of MM-exclusive bonuses on the same item with a couple of engineer-exclusive bonuses? I think that FSS is a bunch of burnt out SysAdmins that all hate their users).

Case study in progress:

HastyPudding--clvl 21 MM, Run & Gun Armor over Shields, High Crit, Ricco + Reflect + Deadeye build. Loves Legendaries. Dabbles in RF, but that won't be developed until NM.

SlapDash--clvl 14 MM, start in Tact Stance (or Sniper with a single point for Summoner types or where you can get a verticle advantage), then Run & Gun with Armor over Shields, High Crit, Ricco + Reflect + Deadeye build. Hates Legendaries.

*Very* similar builds, with the main difference being playstyle.

The tale of the tape:

HastyPudding Clvl 21 (attributes include gear--that is rather the point, though a naked comparison would be cool, come to think of it).

Wearing: 1 White, 1 Green, 5 Legendary.

60 Acc
69 Str (owww--twin raptors hurt)
33 Sta
58 Will
(no attribute poins in reserve)

5% Crit on Run&Gun for 190% Crit Damage
85 Shields and 95 Armor for 42% Damage mitigation


SlapDash Clvl 14 (attributes include gear).

Wearing: 5 Green, 1 Blue, 1 Legendary.

57 Acc
42 Str
32 Sta
30 Will
(17 attribute points in reserve)

3% Crit on Run&Gun (but 10% in Tact stance) for 164% Crit Damage
82 Shields and 109 Armor for 54% Damage mitigation.


SlapDash is 7 clvls lower, hasn't pumped up some +crit and +crit dam skills yet, but is arguably a better character, already. SlapDash also has better Overshield/Penetration and almost as good an Ignite, as well.

My conclusion so far? Mind your feeds and Legendary items. So far, I can do more with less cost by combining effects coming from low-feed Greens and Blues.

I'm really interested in hearing form RBD foks that have moved on to NM, though, as to if this still holds. Another interesting thing would be if it holds for other classes, or is MM-specific.

Subjectively, Hasty kicks ass, and SlapDash is awkward at times. That said, Hasty has left a trail of tombstones, and SlapDash has one death (Millinium Battle--got ganked from the rear--the low health alarm went off at the same time the tombstone popped 8-0).

And now, some humor!

Ok, I have to look all over a level for three things to tag. I need to look in every deadend tunnel, every side room, every upstairs room, every dedend room, every nook and cranny, every, oh, never mind:




Dude, I know you get tired of being killed 18k times a day by questers, but hiding in this bonus area isn't going to work out, either, and the only sedative I have is my gun:



Apparently, the Source of All Evil is a manhole cover in a warehouse in London. Man, you'd think the Church would have picked up on this a bit sooner, really. Think of all the heartache it would have prevented:



--Cy

--ps "Press 'K' to allocate your skill points!

[BeefontheBone]

Just coming to the same sort of realisation myself now that my TacStance MM has a pile of legendary gear. Quite a few stat points have been spent due to gear requirements.
It's also worth noting that upgrading your equipment can increase the equip cost - not a good idea if you're fully feeded already
Incidentally, my Evoker of a similar level has yet to hit this issue - partly due to having fewer legendaries, but largely due to the dual-wield skill which reduces the Will feed massively. 2 legendary focus items with a lot of relics in them is no problem to equip with a few skill points in Dual Wield.

[ShadowHM]

Apparently, the Source of All Evil is a manhole cover in a warehouse in London. Man, you'd think the Church would have picked up on this a bit sooner, really. Think of all the heartache it would have prevented

Isn't that the nature of Evil? To be able to disguise itself as something perfectly innocuous?

[KingOfPain]

Bah, Sexist! The source of evil could pretty well be a womanhole

The math is beyond me atm

How do you guys get so far already, I have 3 chars at ~10, that's it.

KoP

[BeefontheBone]

Another similar thing I noticed - items which increase attributes can be flagged as unequippable if you're close to your maximum feed in that stat already, even when the boost would make it perfectly equppable. Basically, it's a good idea to take other things off and put on stat boosters first - which is a pain.

[Thecla]

My basic experience is that the primary purpose of stats in HG:L isn't to add to your life, increase your power pool, add to your melee damage, or anything else like that, as you might naively suppose --- it's primary purpose is to equip items. The other stuff comes a long as a secondary benefit.

Of course, there are many trade-offs possible: less willpower and more to other stats at the expense of equipping less powerful items; more willpower (or strength in some cases) and less skill points used in a feed reducing skill; equip a weaker +stat item to be able to equip another stronger item with otherwise unmet stat requirements (the resulting juggling of items does get annoying though); and so on.

I mostly don't assign any stats until I need them to equip an item I want to use. This means you don't assign any stat points at all up to clvl 10 or so, because your base stats are sufficient to meet the item requirements (but all of the classes do just fine with their base stats). But once you get to higher clvls, say around 20, you get to the point where you need almost all (or more than all) of your stat points to meet your item requirements, and it only gets worse from there. (One reason why it pays to do the various side-quests with a 1 stat-point reward.) But letting my items be my guide to stat point distribution seems to have worked fine with all the characters I played, and I'm sure that a preplanned strategy of xyzw to abcd isn't the way to go, though no doubt you could make some early skill-point allocations if you know you'll need them later.

As another example, my lvl 31 Guardian has an (equipped/naked) stat-point distribution of:

Acc: 35/10
Str: 99/74
Stam: 108/70
Will: 143/114 (!)

I put nothing into accuracy, which means pretty much not using any guns, and have 5 skill points in spiritual strengh ("reduces strength feed by 60") to minimize the amount of strength needed. Stamina is needed to equip shield and armor, and willpower for almost everything, especially a legendary sword. I don't think it would've be better to use most of those willpower points to boost the other stats and wear green/blue items with lower willpower reqs, but who knows? Maybe that's just as viable an approach, or maybe even more so.

I do think the game design is kind of interesting and offers a lot of choices---I just don't have much idea at this point which ones are better or worse...

[Zed-F]

I think the main thing to do in HG:L regarding equipping items and feed is to make sure that most of the affixes your items have are affixes you actually want. It might be better to go for a green or blue item that has affixes which align with your character's needs, rather than to go with legendaries and above with superfluous affixes which seem a bit better on the surface, but jack up the feed cost too much relative to what you're getting out of them. What feed capacity you save by going with a green or blue armour, you can use to make sure the pieces that you do have are of a higher base quality, or spend on other slots where you've got other legendaries available that are more worth the feed expenditure.

For instance, with GearSlack1, her first and foremost need from her armour is stats, pure and simple. She needs stats from her gear because she hasn't done any personal training at all, and if she wants to keep up with damage potential she continually needs better weapons to do it with. So anything that doesn't involve better stats -- and a particular combination of better stats that maximizes how much +attributes she can actually equip, for that matter -- gets the axe.

The only exception to the rule I would make is for legendary weapons. For starters, if there's a place to splurge on stats, that's it. You only have one or two legendary weapons at a time, compared to multiple armour pieces. Damage is often king in HG:L, especially in softcore, and legendary weapons that do more damage are, of all legendaries, the ones most likely to be worth the feed cost.

I also agree with the sentiment of saving up attribute points until you have a real need to use them. There's always better gear available, just by progressing through the game. For most characters, for most or all of the game, you know that at some point you're going to have to upgrade your weapon to a better baseline. If you get to the point where you need to equip a better weapon and you don't have the attribute points to do so because your armour eats up too much feed... well you're going to have problems. So always be aware of future needs and be cautious with your attribute points until you've established what you need to spend them on.

[Quark]

--ps "Press 'K' to allocate your skill points!

*grumble*