Over the varied tiers of mobs our charecters are capable of achieving a dominance over what is spawned which enables fast leveling, successful wells and a complete build.

It is important to understand what it is I mean by dominance: your charecter will do more damage, have a higher defence and litteraly overpower what it is faced with.
I am going to deal with arena leveling here, this is different to maze and nomaze. The reason for this is that the quality of the mobs are different between the three. When dealing with team play the same factors need to be taken into account but can be balanced over the team, not on just one charecter.

First off defences:

Your defences are made from 3 factors all of which must be weighed into consideration and balanced accordingly.

1. Normal melee hits. negated by vitality, ee on armour and armour base defence.
2. Dexterity crits. Reduced by dexterity.
3. Caster damage. Reduced by intelligence.

The standard blow which is applied to your base and apparent defence is often considered but the other two are not so. If you are to achieve dominance you require to take them into account and their differing behaviour.

Standard defences. Your armour and your vitality allow you to negate some or all of the direct damage to your charecter from standard melee blows.

Dexterity. You must consider the mobs dex modifier. You can negate a great deal of dexterity hits to yourself without achieving offensive dominance over the monster faced. If you manage to take your dex too low then especialy vs wells you will discover that the door has opened for damage. They will achieve a high proportion of critical hits. Large gains can be made defensively with great ease it is far harder to achieve offensive dominance.

Intelligence. The relative effectiveness of your intelligence for defence is not aganst any int modifier to calculate crits. You are facing direct casting damage which has a range. Stats added to int will reduce the overall power of the shot but what makes the difference is when you eat into the 50% amplification which a dominant int build achieves. If you can wipe out the charecters amp you can reduce him to listed damage and below. Optimal for this alters through the levels, when you have reduced amp the gain is far less and any further addition should be to making other aspects more effective. However as I am sure you can imagine this means it needs be higher than most people consider.

Welcome to the world of The Trust casual 9 wave accomplishment by the way, I am sure the more astute among you will realise how it is so easily achieved now.

Offence

Offence is relatively easy to comprehend but in practice even more difficult to achieve

Direct damage.
This is achieved through your charecters strength and the ee upon the weapon. Use a weapon every 5 tiers to take advantage of the increased power from your proficiency, enhanced effect and strength. You do not have to but we are seeking dominance here not viability. Once it is achieved then you level swiftly, simply gaining levels is easy.

Dexterity critical strikes.
To enable truely fast levels you must also have dominant dexterity. With strength and inteligence covered your charecter will function (and very well too) but to go from 7 mins per lvl down to the fast ones which you will be missing the dexterity must also come to play.
It is important you remember here that when each mob spawns it has a relative quality. By this I mean it will have say 70 stats and how they are applied will vary upon a base. Some have more inteligence, some more vitality and some dexterity. To achieve dominance in dexterity therefore is in itself a variable and that should be bourne in mind. Even with very low dex you will crit some monsters to death. However if you can factor unreasonably high dexterity into your build for the level on top of the inteligence and strength required to function the suddenly a great proportion of your foes will be 1-3 hit kills just as a good caster does.
However reliance upon dexterity as your only form of damage will cause an ill effect even at the best of times. Should dominance of dexterity fail then you will plunge into a region where you do very little damage at all. vs a mob with heavy armour and vitality too very ugly indeed.
In many ways dexterity is the difference between your charecter being functional and sexy.

What is required to be dominant alters as we have seen over levels 1-71
We begin naturaly dominant and the added strength or dexterity which people gain there makes for impressive leveling. This can still be achieved but the crunch points of lvl 9 and lvl 19 will prove hard to get by at the same rate. Yet it is not impossible to do so and most certainly you would leave an average player for dust anyhow.
Our ability to overachieve when it comes to mana, health and the other direct aspects that effect our charecter are also what I would think of as dominance: having more of a health bar than 40 mobs can deal with sounds dominant to me.

Everyone still with me? Good lets move on to the next part.

I wish to examine a form of dominance build which I created to take advantage of the areas of the game which my items naturaly lent me abnormal strength and power.
I wish to point out though that the key part of a melee build is and has always been balance, and one on a knife's edge. Just a small push in one direction or the other being the difference between a 44 chain and a 4 chain wether %lifesteal was a factor or not. wells killed or wells destroying anything you bring to bear.
This is very important to bear in mind whatever route to creating a charecer you deem to take.

This post was edited by wigwam on Jan 26 2009 10:41am

After 35+ Hybrid climbs I can vouch on the effectiveness of this build, maybe you want to post some of the gear you use for your build here? So people know what to look for

Im going to scare you all to death with some walls of text out of your worst nightmares
may eventualy get around to stuff like gear but that is pretty boring anyhow, gear is secondary you can optimise in a whole host of ways

let me regen, i don't like posting much but I thought we could investigate what is faced and what is accomplishable at the various tiers. then people can go off and have a think about what they can do too.

Tim, I may have to grab out the notebook and put some of our thoughts down on this and get back into the mindset of this.

Give me some time and I think we can get all of this into something the larger public would love to read over and over.

if you need that raw version of a potential guide/discussion thread again i made on the basis of your thoughts some weeks ago, let me know.

should be a quite current topic now

sounds really good and i am looking for a character like this
but no gear/stats posted =/
other wise im gonan keep checking up on this thread and hopefulyl you will have posted

aye my 4 am rambling erratic style could prove a little taxing to any but the most dedicated reader

Actions speak louder than words:



This is a defensive orientated charecter. One made which on his own from his base potential can face and stand down 40 monsters one after the other. It lends itself to glyphs very readily, things which you would think only give a small 10% boost here or there suddenly shift because your base upon them is so high originaly.

It is tricky to gain that level of defensive dominance at a level so out of kilter with your tier, 15 levels from your armour and added stats and wherever you may be either 70 or 45 you will falter badly.

My preference with this build is for a 50% chain but with enormous onus upon attack. With that you can kill as well as any melee type within the arena and are able to take advantage of the shrine. Upon a robe definately the way to do for while you can prevent damage you will receive a constant and steady rain of blows due to the robe you are wearing.
Killing them swiftly mean you fight them for a shorter period of time too and as long as you can maintain that efficiency you can 100% dominate the level required.

Time wise it is very similar to all good melee balance as in a normal well powered level is 7 minutes (50's+) and very stable. that can dip swiftly if the power is not there or if you utterly dominate go down to 4-41/2 mins. Is very interesting to watch as you attempt to balance, a push or shove one way or the other can lift you or drop you to nothingness.
I have never achieved 4-41/2 in the 50's and sixites and am happy when i get the 7 considering that to be a very effective charecter, of course I am constantly muting and on the look out for items that would shift me into the next level.
I have done so though in the thirties and forties it is much easier as you are using items directly relating to the tier. Levels beneath that are a given, I should point out though that the very fast leveling we are used to is a lot more tricky to accomplish and takes a little thought.
glyphing over a climb is something which fascinates me, the difference between my 20 stat 26 prof main charecter and any old replacement is very notable. the boosts available could really capture a wonderful level of performance even for people with very average gear properly applied.

The great advantage to all this is that you kill the wells, there is no one mob that can spawn which will have a hope of facing what you bring to bear. Through all the classes up to Warlock I have never had a secondary well charecter nor needed one, sometimes using gear which is disregarded utterly and extremaly cheap to obtain.
Even classic lifesteal builds were in trouble when at level 70 they faced a well mob who not only cast at them but had a high level of defence. Hence the reason people are often quoted as saying melee cannot well.
A mage (as a matter of note) is a dominant charecter by it's very nature, utterly overpowering through it's health bar and it's direct damage. Principle is the same application can vary.

This post was edited by wigwam on Jan 28 2009 10:21am

Sorry for posting before reading, but I promise, I'll try to read asap.
But it hurts my eyes to read a wall of text, so if possible, could you make
some kind of forming in the text?

And I'm interested in this build, might try this.

not a chance
it's far worse on vent believe you me



lends itself especialy to hardcore, reason my profs are so high across the board is the stability and difficulty in dying of the builds.
only died when i hit Warlock which just goes to show how blase i am about deaths at the best of timesit being traditionaly one of the harder charecters to croak on
Adam

This post was edited by wigwam on Jan 28 2009 10:54am