Pikeman Archive

I don't see it anywhere in the patch notes, but I'm almost 100% sure that the costs for Warcry and Intimidate have drastically increased. This has affected my solo game quite a bit. I like to solo on occasion, though I'm no stranger to groups either.

This is bad for my own personal play style. I PvE as a Pikeman/Scout, and so my typical approach for attacking a high-level mob usually goes like this:

1. Throw Wire Mesh trap
   
2. Wait for mob to run over to me
   
3. Intimidate, repeat until Intimidate goes through (odds seemed like about 1/3)
   
4. Warcry, repeat until Warcry goes through (odds seemed like about 1/3 also)
   
5. PolearmHit2 (which has a nice stun effect), repeat until mob is dead.
   
6. If health becomes too low, just let regular attacks finish the mob off
   
7. If Intimidate wears off, go back to step 3.

OK so here's the problem. I used to be able to do this whole process to take on fairly tough mobs, things that conned yellow to me at least. I didn't have much success with it for red-con mobs. It was a rare and lucky day that I could kill something red-con. But yellows, I had a good 4/5 success rate with, though I would have to heal for a few minutes in between attacks.

But these days it looks like HAM costs for both Intimidate and Warcry have gone WAY up, to the point where if I try the above, here is what happens:

1. Throw Wire Mesh trap
   
2. Wait for mob to run over to me
   
3. Intimidate, repeat until Intimidate goes through
   
4. Die

Intimidate now appears to take a good 1/5 of my HAM in one shot, whether it works or not. Just BAM. Since it usually takes two or three tries, getting Intimidate to go through usually brings me down to about 1/3 health. That rules Warcry or using any kind of special attacks like PolearmHit2 straight out.

It seems to me that Intimidate and Warcry are there to be used. Right now, I can't use them. Maybe I'm missing something, but this has taken my chances of killing a yellow con from 4/5 to about 1/10. This is what I have to do now:

1. Throw Wire Mesh trap
   
2. Wait for mob to run over to me
   
3. Intimidate, if it doesn't go through, tough.
   
4. Warcry, if it doesn't go through, tough.
   
5. PolearmHit2 until either I get incapped or the mob dies.

I assume this was changed for PvP balance, which is all well and good, but in its current state it's kind of taken the strategy out of PvE for me.

My suggestion would be either to lower HAM costs on Intimidate and Warcry, or to make their chances of success much higher, at least for PvE.

Unless, of course, this new difficulty level that I've described was the intent, in which case I'll just shut up about it.

Thoughts?