Semi-drifting until end of May (9/5/19)

Okay, the original plan was to write up some of my thoughts concerning the first chapter of The Children Of Hurin. However, I’m not feeling that well today. While this shouldn’t be an excuse for the Green New Deal to bypass the Congress instead of going through both ends of the red and blue powers, this also means I need to come up with a substitute. Thankfully, I still got Myrreas, Sheallyn, and Wolfhawk.

Before I continue, allow me to share a few videos.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6wyk5tGYTjY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hrpQgcMRpbY
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FhBxRe9_POk
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hmF0kP4zy9A

Please note that above vids have got nothing to do with events in recent days amounting to why the dream of seigi no mikata has always been an unattainable one.

Now onto the characters. I’m going start from Myrreas first since he’s one of my two alts/secondary mains together with Cyrea.

Running with a Whisperknife can be fun. Yes, it’s a shooting class. While this is not to say melee isn’t an option, plenty of the dps options revolve around mid to short range dagger sniping. In other words, this is a paragon class “defined” by two professional super criminals. Namely, Jarlaxle and Elaith Craulnober.

First things first, Brett Kavanaugh likes beer. And so does Steve Ang by my guess. Secondly, like how Brett and Steve like their beer, l like my Smoke Bomb. Seriously, it’s a fun thing trying to adjust to the stealth mechanic change for this encounter power. Gone were the days when you can afford to throw it minus the stealth. At least I didn’t really need the slow debuff effect since daze was enough to do some serious damage from the resultant acid trip. But with the revamped stealth effect that gives you free combat advantage so long you’re inside the gas cloud and not choke on the CO2, this has to be the best thing the devs could ever give to rogue users. There are two options to make this work well: Cloud Of Steel and Shuriken Toss.

Initially, Shuriken Toss intrigued me. That was during the live preview test run. Suffice to say, I didn’t like it. It’s not that this at-will sucked worse than the ongoing Brexit wrangling. Actually, I’m pretty sure Brexit wrangling was and still is a much worse case. The fact is, Shuriken Toss comes out way too slow. And note the present tense here, please. Ask me and I’d say the slow firing approach should be workable since Shuriken Toss is the only AoE at-will available for Whisperknives. If you’re going for a prolonged stealth based build instead of relying on high frequency of entering stealth, then Shuriken Toss may be your kind of thing. But if you prefer a quick firing game no different from the Celts, Anglo Saxons, and the other type of Saxons from Saxony, you wouldn’t want that. I play like that and I didn’t like how imitating the likes of Hattori Hanzou, Sarutobi Sasuke, and Fuma Kotaro turned out for me. Or Myrreas.

This left Cloud Of Steel as the only option for right click. Originally, I wanted Disheartening Strike in right click with Cloud Of Steel going to the other side of the mouse. Then I realised I still got Sly Flourish as Myrreas’ main hand weapon bonus. I considered buying cubes of augmentation for the change. That’s until my style wouldn’t allow me to stick Disheartening Strike onto more than one target in a go. As terribly Kloppish as this sounds, I thrive on momentum and maintaining it.

This decision ultimately resulted in a more evenly rounded range-or-melee at-will dps game that serves to add a tactical edge. After all, opponents are going to close in eventually, Smoke Bomb or no Smoke Bomb. This comes to the remaining two encounter powers: Path Of Blades and Lashing Blade. The first is used as compounding dps. Stealth bomb, then drop this. I have to say the dps went quite nicely. For Lashing Blade, it’s tempting to stealth and hit. But there’s a problem: Unless specified otherwise in the tooltip, encounter powers always break stealth. So no, you can’t execute two encounter powers via stealth mode and hit confirmation. Sorry to break this to you. In other words, please choose your stealth encounter power wisely. For me, non-stealth Lashing Blade wasn’t an issue to Myrreas. Due to massive dps compounding, Lashing Blade minus stealth was good enough to assassinate whoever unlucky enough to be targeted. And I didn’t even have to take into account which fellow got the lowest HP bar. In other words, this build relies on rotation once the mob closes in. Before that, it’s B2 Smoke Bomb plus Cloud of Steel to bait and damage.

As a result, cooldown reduction became a must. Initially messing around with Razor Action and Talisman Of Shadows for the sake of dps, Sneak Attack was surprisingly effective. Because Myrreas has Shady Preparations for the sake of cooldown reduction, Sneak Attack would just hike cooldown reduction efficiency. That plus 25% movement speed bonus in total due to this and Skillful Infiltrator.

Hidden Attacks felt a bit dodgy to me but that’s because I chose it for stealth survivability. After all, 50% passive stealth loss reduction means being able to stealth more often and pulling off stunts. I mean stealth encounter powers. This made the 10% stealth drain when using at-will powers felt really weird. Actually, that’s the reason why this feat felt a bit dodgy to me. Then again, maybe this is the devs’ own way of making this feat more useful during raids.

Daily powers wise, I went for Whirlwind Of Blades and Hateful Knives. Former was for crowd clearing, latter was for dueling.

Raiding loadout wise, I’m going to tinker a bit once l got a new PC. The reason why being that I need to experiment with an encounter power move set involving Blitz, Smoke Bomb, and Shadowy Disappearance. Smoke Bomb-Blitz two-hitter should be fun so long stealth is used first. As for dailies, it’s Whirlwind Of Blades and Killing Storm. That’s until Lurker’s Assault is unlocked. Then it’s Killing Storm and Lurker’s Assault.

Okay, change of plan here. I need to stop here because of my throat, drowsiness, and sweating like an Ainu living in Singapore.