Defensive rage?

[Garlic88]

Hi folks. I just had an idea of making a defensive(ish) rage. Ok hear me out i know it might sound stupid, but im gonna have a try. The idea would be around having a high activity, and training lots of skills like create distance, barrelling attack, signature move, hamstring.. anything that stops the enemy from attacking. The idea is less about absorbing damage, war style, but about having you enemy as incapacitated as possible whilst you beat them down.

My glads stats are: 77, 60, 84, 67, 60, 69, 68. I went for maces duel maces for a higher chance to stun (not sure if this works but makes sense). Chose urk for extra stamina as i'm gonna be using high activity.

A couple of questions though: Would my rage use her defensive skills, as she is an offensive class? Would setting high activity make her spam all her skills as much as possible (what i want) or just the offensive ones? Also, if i chose to go beserk style for extra attacks, would this give her more create distance and signature move etc attempts as well?

What do you think? Is she doomed to failure? I'm hoping she'll at least do well against 2 handers. We'll see :)

[CaineDeSoulis]

well... there are a couple of problems with this idea. though i do hope you succeed in making a defensive rage. Firstly Hamstring is a war only skill, if your running berserk/killshot your Create Distance will trigger only very rarely. maybe once every 10 fights or so. your best and really only option would be the bash strategy. as it has some defense and will make your Create Distance trigger. even with +defense armor you may parry some shot's but the shot that are going to get through are going to do significant damage as rage have no damage reduction. you wont get the initiative on war's or other rages. making both of those match's poor. your best would be against theatrics but with so many using counterstrike they are going to be able to both parry and hit you more times than you can hit them if you can hit them. not to mention they have armor capable of deflecting your shots.

In short I dont *think* its going to be an effective strategy for a rage to be defensive. but i do hope it works out and a new breed of rage's is born because of it ^_^.

[nova1491]

your glad has nice stats. try going for +100 hp achievement to boost his/her health or go for +5 throne achievement.

otherwise focus on the glads best abilities.

i guess you've to make it work through weeks of trial and error with tavern and black market fights.

Hope you succeed.

PS: why not get + stats and def armour gear. then equip your glad with def power achievements..

thats something to think about

[Garlic88]

Ah damn it can't work... The whole idea was based around high activity, with hamstring, barrelling attack, signature move, create distance and intimidating shout stopping the enemy attacking whilst i hammer them down. If i can't beserk and use these skills there's no advantage to going rage over war. And i can't use half these skills anyway... should have gone for a war and tried the same tactic doh!

I don't think there's any point going for + defense and health, the idea was to stop the enemy attacking rather than to absorb damage.

Anyway cheers guys, hope she's got a good future as a regular gal!

[Narol]

I've tried to make a Rage with some defense by raising Create Distance to 10, but as Caine said I found out it was very rarely activated...

This has been explained later by Nate himself in a tip of the week worth thinking :

Tip #8: The chance of activated skills going off is influenced by your fighting style. If you are using a defensive fighting style, offensive skills won't happen as often and vice versa.

The idea of defending by preventing the opponent to attack is a good one however, but you need to focus on offensive skills available to ragers that put an attack penalty on their opponent : Barrelling attack, Shock & Awe and Signature Move...

Called Shot and aiming the head can be useful too as it seems to raise your chance to get a stunning hit.

[Dainoji]

I actually ran Thunder Lips with all defensive gear at one point back in the days of Solstice vs Thunder Lips (sad panda face ever since Team Kaos took his ball and went home) and it worked with limited success. I had all 6 achievement slots full of agility and defense but didn't have a complete build fleshed out. I think you could probably get something to work but it's going to take trial and error, a new option not available to me back then was races, so if they had I might have tried becoming a Spite to get the additional defensive bonus as well.