Speaking of AA/combat abilitiesFollow

A recent thread got me thinking about various AA/combat abilities. Some of which are *really* useful, and others not so much. Since I've hardly played more than a small handful of characters enough to know their specific abilities, I was curious which abilities people find to be the most useful for various classes, and which the least useful.

As I mentioned in that other thread, I think that the repel line is massively useful for my paladin. I use it all the time and it has a huge benefit to my tanking capabilities. On the flip side though, one of the most useless abilities in the game is the breather ability. In theory, it sounds great. You're low or out of endurance, you click the ability and you gain it back at super high speed. Great right? Here's the problem. It only takes you up to a certain level (caps at 21%, 25%, or 29% depending on rank). Let me be clear on this. It actually caps your endurance gain at that level. You can't go higher than that percentage in End, while it's up (you'll actually see it increase on a tick and then drop back down).

The kicker? You can't use it during combat, or while combat mode is activated. So you have to wait until you drop into ooc mode to use the ability. So, um... you could just sit down and get the 3%/tick regen rate at that point, which will actually regen faster (eh, about the same), but is *not* capped. If you make the mistake of triggering the ability thinking it'll increase your end regen, you'd be mistaken. They don't stack. You get either ooc regen rate or the breather rate. And if you have breather activated, you'll sit eternally at the cap, never actually recovering your full bar of end no matter how long you rest.

I'd actually have to double check, but I think it clicks off if you enter combat, so you can't activate it and then start fighting allowing you to regain end super fast the whole time (that would just be way too powerful actually). Um... so... it's completely useless. Most of the time, if you sit down you'll have regained endurance pretty close to the cap by the time 30 seconds have gone by anyway, so it's not even like you get a boost at any point. It's just useless all the way around. And actually hurts you. If I'm stopping to wait 30 seconds to recover end, I'm going to take an extra minute or two to just recover the entire bar, so I can go kill tons of stuff before stopping again. There's no point to waiting 30 seconds just to recover a quarter of my bar.

So yeah, pointless.

Do they actually do no damage, or just very very little damage? With my wizard, the swarm pet AA is an occasional thing. I'm honestly not sure how the damage is on it, but on a boss fight, no reason not to drop it, right? Oddly enough, I actually do load up the stupid sword pet summon spell against some content. This was a while ago, but I recall there were some mobs in Katta (the Buried Sea one), which would summon a pet and send it at you. The pets themselves were more or less magic immune (and would continue whacking you even after you killed the mob which summoned them). Summoning my own pet solved that problem nicely. Obviously, the AA ability wouldn't help because it would not be usable every fight. So yeah, abilities can still sometimes suck.

Oh. And my wiz has several that suck. First, obviously, the stupid wards. So instead of an aura like everyone else, we got a ward. Um... It's bad. It was bad then, and it's still bad. Damage is silly small, and it basically just hits any NPC that comes in range, so great way to accidentally agro stuff, or break mez on a pull, etc. The AA ability that grants ward is arguably even worse, since it lingers around for a while and follows you around (kinda). Nothing worse than finishing off that last see-invis mob to clear a path to somewhere, clicking invis and zipping through the remaining mobs to bypass them only too see your AA ward start helpfully hitting them with damage. Ooops.

Then there's the whole dimensional displacement AA (or whatever it's called). Ok. You know about the very nearly useless netherstep spell, right? Maybe not completely useless, but very nearly so. Older versions just teleport you in a random direction (but you can only vertically travel down, so there's some interesting limitations). Let's be clear on this effect. It's an effect that was one of the most devastating things that bad guys did to raids trying to break into Fear back in the day (the imps/eyes/whatever that procced an effect that did this to you, often sending you into another group of NPC and causing a wipe with the adds). But we get this as a spell. Yay! The latest version of the spell is at least directional (it only sends you in the direction you're facing). So... maybe useful. Occasionally. Maybe. I've actually never loaded or used it, but who knows. Maybe someone can find a use for it.

The displacement AA basically puts this on you as a defensive ability. When you are hit in combat, it ports you in a random direction (why does anyone on the dev team think this is a useful thing at all ever?). Cause that's just what I want when I'm hit. To be randomly ported. Doesn't turn you invis. Doesn't do like a fade or anything. I think it does have a minor damage shield/guard/whatever on it (honestly forgotten because I used it literally once, got dropped into the water channel on the side of the hallway in Ferubi, making it a pain in the butt to kill the mob I was fighting and never used it again. There's an "upgrade" to it, that I think I have (autogrant and whatnot), but I've never bothered with it.

The ironic thing is that while my wizard gets that spell line (and AA) as a class thing, the only really good use I found for it was with my Paladin. There's some boots he got way back when that have a clicky shadowstep on it (the earlier version of the spell). It was actually useful to use these since the port was random, but it basically picks that random direction, then plots a course along the ground, stopping if at any point the Z axis is higher than a previous point in the course. What this meant was that you could use it to safely drop off very high cliffs (any height actually) without taking any damage. You'd just appear on the ground safely (if it randomly picked the direction of the drop to go, if not you had to try again). Since paladins don't get levitate (and wizards do), it made the effect useful for him.

I may be one of those weird wizards who actually keeps all his combat skills maxed out. I get whacked enough on the occasional swipes you get via kitting in close quarters (or root n scoot), that dodge and defense are pretty much always maxed. And if I'm in a group, depending on the mobs and the tank, I'll go stand in melee range and whack on stuff in between blasts. Cause... why not? With the agro meter you have a much better idea of whether the spell pattern you're using on a given mob type in a given zone is safe to do this or not. I'm usually not going all out with the spells on grind/trash mobs anyway, cause otherwise I'd be medding every few fights instead of fighting.

Yup. And I also think that level ranges affect that as well. When I came back to playing the game after a long absence, I had previously pretty much never (or very very rarely) ever gotten hit with my wizard (since the old school methods were really dependent on just not getting hit, ever). As I was leveling him again, and got those self rune spells, I started being more willing to take more hits (and there was a nice range where I'd get one of those big honking regen buffs and just go to town, tanking and nuking), so my dodge and defense went up rapidly. I think this was in the 60-70 level range though. And it was very very noticeable how much less damage I'd take or hits I'd receive with those maxed versus maybe only halfway along.

I'd guess that "half skill vs maxed skill" is a bigger difference in those (now) more mid levels than at say 105. And I agree that it almost certainly has to do with class and armor type as well. I think that as the levels got higher, the sliding scale of avoidance and mitigation soft caps for various classes in relation to the hit and damage tables of the mobs make it such that those defensive skills make very little difference for cloth and leather classes. I suspect that for a chain and especially plate wearer, it's probably still more of a big difference though, since the mobs are basically tuned for hitting them. Just a guess based on casual observation, of course, it's not like I've done specific experiments (nor do I intend to, cause.. yikkes!).

Again, I can't speak to the amount of difference today and at the highest level (cause my stuff is pretty much always maxed), but I can say that I do remember AA abilities being *huge* in some cases back in the day. I distinctly recall a day I was in a pug in WoS. I honestly can't remember if that was still max content, or if the level range had increased, so my level was either in the mid to high 60s, or low 70s at the time. What I do recall is that there was a SK in the group who was like 3 levels higher than me, who's stated HP/AC levels were a bit higher than mine (I want to say like 1k more hps, and maybe 150 more ac, which was significant back then), so he was picked to be the MT for the group. There was a guy there boxing his shaman and ranger who was basically slumming from one of the top raid guilds on the server at the time. He was actually a pretty nice guy, and to be honest, his ranger could probably have just tanked instead, but he was boxing and didn't want to deal with that, so he just sat back and did damage instead. His shaman was the main healer for the group. So the SK is out grabbing stuff and pulling it to the wall, and on each pull his hps are kind dropping fast to about 80%, then to about 60%, then the shaman got slow to land and was able to heal him, but even then his hps were kinda yo-yoing in the top 40-50% of his bar the whole time. Not a disaster, at all, and we managed just fine.

At some point, the SK had to leave, so I was asked to tank. So I go about tanking and I notice a huge difference in damage taken. I'm dropping like to 95%, then 90%, then slow lands, then I'm bouncing around the top 30% of my hp bar, and that's mainly because the shaman is waiting longer between heals. And this was even on stun immune mobs (or in between stuns, since back then we still only had two that could be used). I was just taking less damage over time. A lot less. After a few pulls like this, the shaman actually sent me a tell commenting on how much less damage I was taking over time, despite on paper having fewer hps and ac. I had made a point of spending exp on AAs and had maxed my defensive AAs (CA, and LR, and whatever else they were called back then). The SK had obviously just spent the time leveling and had not bothered with them. And yeah, it was very very obvious.

So at least back then, I know for a fact that those abilities really did have an effect. And a pretty darn significant one at that. You really could tell which tanks had taken their defensive AAs, and which didn't. I'm guessing that's still the case today, although with autogrant stuff, it's probably not as obvious, and again, I suspect that that reduced bang for buck effect makes it even less so. Being "close" to max is probably not much different than being max. Of course, I'm still going to be maxed, cause that's just the way I am. But I can see some people skating by on less. In fact, I wonder if that's not by design, in order to make f2p characters still somewhat viable in the game at higher levels. Not sure.