Pikeman Archive
Thread: This Hologrinders advice on getting through Pikeman fast
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LokSG
Mon Feb 02, 2004 12:49 pm
#1
OK here is what I did. There are probably better ways.
To pikeman 1111 you can pretty much get by with AFK macros on mount mites. The basic ingrediants here are:
1.A stat migration for good secondaries. I was human doing 800/500/500/700/550/550/600/600/600 for this period.
2. Get a NCH pet, set it to guard.
3. Find the spawn point of some mites around any city. Waypoint the location where you can see them as they spawn and are within 15m of where they spawn.
4. Your macro should target self, cycle target outward, use polearm lunge, pause whatever time required in order to do this indefinately, then repeat with a ui action toolbarSLotXX command, punching itself. Add to the very first part of the macro a harvest command to speed up the respawn (harvested corpses respawn faster). Do not bother with sit/stand routines, that will walk you off the spawn. Use the regular lance, the one with no range penalties, and use the best staff you can get otherwise.
The pet is important since the mites are social and will kill you with a few out at once. WIth a pet on guard, the pet will pick up the first at range and hold it there, reducing the odds of a triple team. You can get fancy with your macro and add a self heal if you like. I wore out one pike going to 2112 pikeman on mites. Diminishing returns is probably at around 1111 pikeman. Use the polearm lunge because it has the greatest range. I tried taunt, but the mites do not close when taunted.
Your tour of Dantooine: At some point you will want to gear up for Dantooine. There are 2 basic routes to go here.
1. Creature Handler Route- here you will fight unbuffed in clothes, or maybe with just sunburn. Migrate to say 800/400/600/700/550/550/600/600/700. Sunburn ups strength and stamina so you can minimize those, but if you wish to do dancing macros you will need to not zero out stamina. The basic method here is to stand at 70m from the nest, send the pet in to aggro whatever is out there, and you attack the one your pet is on. If you outdamage the pet, it will aggro you, so back off. I would suggest if you are a MCH to have a nice CL50 pet with 60% kin and armor as your main with a Mtn dewback as your ride. Ride out on the dew and hold it in reserve (IE train it with a different attack command than the 50th and put it on guard). What this does is give you another creature to pick up adds. Avoid herding beasts that run when hurt, as they will kite your pet all over the place. Good missions are regular quenker missions (5100 cred on terminal, dantooine). The big plus here is you can just range all over killing whatever you find without being a slave to buffs, but your xp gain per hour is less. I like resorting to this when buffs are petering out or when I cant find a doc.
2. Standard Route: Migrate to something like 400 in everything but 1000 mind/focus/willpower. You will be in armor, and using doctor buffs. Absurd mind like this may let you ignore muon gold and just function normally. Another option is to do something like the creature handler migration, then get doc buffs, and either (dancer/musician buffs) or (muon gold). I am a big fan of the entertainer buffs since there is no downer and you can fight nonstop for max xp. If you go the muon route, you probably want to get a couple quenker missions, speed out to the lair, pop muon, kill both nests, and speed back on the downer to get new missions.
For build plans, it really helps having alot of combat xp from a previous life before you become a pikeman, since all your accuracy comes from the 4th line and accuracy is your biggest problem. So be smart in a previous life and dont get RWS from marksman.
I then would reccomend this:
010X ...the first leg hit
410X...get speed and spins
411X...get the first sweep
441X...max offensives for the areas and advanced leg hits
4444...do defenses last
Go out and get some ubese, and get it sliced. You should be able to get 60% kinetic ubese with not too much difficulty. Do not even think about using armor unbuffed. Your HAM costs are absurd as pikeman, and encumberance just makes it worse. With all buffs and armor, your rate of incapacitation drops enormously.
Continued in part 2
LokSG
Mon Feb 02, 2004 2:02 pm
#2
OH and why UBESE.
Ubese is much cheaper with lower encumberance than composite. You will not be PvEing verses any marksmen etc as a pikeman (well you can, but its painful), so all you really care about is kinetic resistance. Ubese gives you that, and you can actually migrate stats to wear a set pretty comfortably without buffs, if so inclined. I tried wearing ubese with no helmet and using sunburn, but the problem there is some things smack your head alot and mind is something you cant lose. Spamming specials drops all 3 attributes (health, action, mind) and in order to spam them endlessly, you got to buff. An elecric lance with 600/600/700 mind/focus/willpower and no armor is enough to spam leg hits endlessly, and tat sunburn will by itself keep you past the drain on health, action. But you can only really pull this off if you are receiving zero damage, IE having a pet tank.
On the subject of doctors: Coronet is the place to hunt for Docs. Usually you will see a clog of people seated, with the doctor guru there in the middle. Go for master docs. Don't bug them. Ask them once. Imagine being in tell hell all night long for buff requests, and that is the frame of mind that doc is in. They are the soup Nazi's of SWG...and you dont want them saying 'No Soup For You!' Stay close on the buff. The game has a dumb bug where it will move you off while seated sometimes, so periodically check. Typical tip is 6k for a full set. So 3 quenker lairs worth of credits bascially pays for 2hrs worth of buffs...its well worth it. If you really want a good in with a doc, harvest high qq, pe avian meat and offer that to them. I think they also need reactive gas and regular gas. Try to line up your next buffer.
If you are a dancer/musician, you can probably make a killing by setting up shop at the imp outpost on dantooine. Same goes for Docs.
Daros
Mon Feb 02, 2004 9:52 pm
#3
How about this...
Everyone has great advice about using bleeds to help get Pike XP...
What about those of us who had to spend our combat XP on other things? Any tips for those of us who are stuck at 0020? 
LokSG
Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:08 am
#4
There are alot of things you can kill, but the ease to reward ratio seems greatest for quenkers. Before you get spin attack 2, you will need to go up, bleed and leg hit to kill them. You can do this and still get 2 lairs in under a single muon dose. After you get spinAttack2, just use that directly on the lair. You fly up stealthed right close to the lair on your speeder, dismount, target the lair, and turn on your area of effect macro,
/parea;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlotXX;
with:
/alias parea /polearmSpinAttack2
....here you alias parea to be either spin or area2 attacks, so you can switch quickly without rewriting the alias. Put the macro on slot XX so it punches itself. Hit the macro once and it will just flood your combat que with this attack.
I like a dump macro
/dump;
/peace;
/loot all;
/pickharv;
with:
/alias pickharv /harvest hides
...here you can change the harvest alias without changing the dump macro if the hides stink. Quenkers only yield meat and hide. The basic idea here is you can dump your combat macro, peace, and harvest all in one keypunch. When I get to piket lairs, Ill show how this is useful.
I also like a single target quick kill macro for bleed and then the leg hits
/polehit;
/pause 2;
/ui action toolbarSlotXX;
with
/alias polehit /polearmLegHit1
or leghit2, leghit3.
The bleed macro
/polearmActionHit1;
/polearmActionHit2;
This will stack a couple action bleeds.
To drop something big fast, bleed it then hit the leghit macro. Add stuns and posture changes for extra punch.
After you master a line or two, quenker lairs will start to crap out. At this point consider doing piket plainswalkers. Here is the general method:
Come in armoredbuffed, park speeder near (<10m) lair. Watch out for dismounting on the lair, the game hangs then. Whatever is out there bleed. You bleed piket1, piket2, then piket 3 in the opening rounds. Then move off above your speeder, and open up with the area attack. When they run off, let them. You do not want to follow them all over because the lair will respawn and you may pick up even more agg. Stay at your speeder. Its ok when they run off since they are bleeding. When they all run off, heal/rest til they come back, or if you are good, go pop the lair with polearmHitX until another creature spawns. You then bleed it, and turn on the area attack with the lair targeted. This will force the 2nd wave to spawn. Piket 4, 5, 6 are now out, and you quit whacking the lair (dump area command). As each of them came out, you dumped the area attack macro, then bled the most recent piket. Once piket 6 is bleeding, move back to your speeder (out of range of the lair) and start the area attacks up again. Again they will wander off, and again you hold your ground. Once they have wandered off, go in for the 3rd wave. Pop lair with area attacks til the 3rd wave spawns, dumping the area macro to bleed stuff as it comes out, and resuming to the area attacks with lair targeted. Piket 8,9,10 come out, and once all are bleeding just stand on lair with the area macro running. The pikets are in a jam now. Either they wander off and bleed to death and let the lair die, or they stand there spamming heal on the lair while you mow them down with area attacks.
The guys that wander off tend to come back when you whack on the lair, and if you position on the side they are returning, they have to go through your area attack to heal the lair. I like to harvest corpses if I wipe a wave, IE pickets 1-3 are dead and nothing else is spawned.
Continued part 3
LokSG
Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:28 am
#5
I may be wrong, but I think the difference between polearmArea and polearmSpinAttack is the former can multihit a single target, and the later single hits all targets within the radius. The multipliers are better on the spin attack (think its a 3x spin2, and 2.5x for area2), but you get a nice stun going on the area attack and from my experience you mow stuff down faster with area2. This is why I climb offense after stances.
As far as lances go, there are the two vibros. One is light AP with electricity damage and -35ish accuracyypenalties, and the other is medium AP with energy damage and -55ish accuracy penalties. Even at xxx4 pikeman I feel like I miss too much with the -55 penalty one. WIth buffs running, the electricty one seems to burn out the action faster, and the energy one seems to burn out mind faster. For this reason I tend to just use the electricty vibrolance unless I am facing something with low kinetic resistance and high electricity resistance.
I prefer speed slices. I am not at the speed limit, and my reasoning is that if you are going to miss alot, you want something that swings fast so you can reliably and quickly apply bleeds etc. I avoid powerups because (a) it wears out your weapon even faster, and (b) its one more crate to clog up the inventory. Go out and buy a nice quality sliced lance, and just use it til you clear master.
Dancer is a good thing to have at novice level. When you are riding muon (IE cant get dancer/musician buffs), you can pop a camp up in the field and dance during your downer to kill some mind wounds. Its not much, but waiting on downers is pretty annoying. If you do ride muon, you want to pretty much do this:
park your probot, grouped, at the mission terminal. Tell it to stay. Get a couple quenker missions in the same direction. I like to just accept any two missions that are quenker, then refresh until I get a match on either, and abort the one that doesnt match, IE accept SW, accept North. Refreshing yields another quenker north, abort quenker SW, accept 2nd north mission. This speeds up the process of getting missions in the same direction.
Have a speeder. Make a mount macro,
/dismount;
/pause 2;
/mount;
If you are on the speeder with the speeder selected and you hit this macro, you will hop off, pause 2, and mount again. This lets you hop off, hit a quick heal, and remount, or hop off, restealth, and hop on. If you select anything other than the speeder and hit the macro while mounted, you will dismount. If you are not mounted and you hit the macro with speeder selected, you will mount. The game is buggy in where it dumps you on dismount. Usually you need to wait for a complete stop to have a chance in hell in actually dismounting near your speeder. If you have the speeder selected when you dismount, and you are dumped far off, you can follow the dark blue arrow to your speeder. Do not dismount over a liar, the game will hang for a good 5-10minutes with everything frozen. I used to use these macros as a BE all the time for sampling...I would dismount, sample, remount then fly off if things went bad. For our quenker missions mount the speeder and head out to the lair furthest from your mission terminal (mission term is waypointed), and point he speeder at the lair such that it is pointed to the 2nd lair. Every second counts with muon.
Then you get a stopwatch, set it for 10min, start the stop watch, pop the muon, and fly at the lair with it selected. Dismount, area attack the quenker lair til nothing else lives, harvest the corpses, remount the speeder, and fly to the next lair. Check stopwatch if you are worried about time. Some like having nag macros tell when spices are expiring, but I find with my dump macros, that doesnt work.
After your second lair, stealth, and speed back home. If you have 3min or so left on muon, feel free to pop stragglers on the way home, but get to the mission terminal when the downer hits. Then get another set of missions with the downer on, and fly out under your downer to the next pair, line up your speeder, and repeat. You get 2 lairs a cylcle, netting around 15-25K per lair (depending on your level of training in pikeman), and this is pretty fast.
Continued in part 4
LokSG
Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:43 am
#6
When your doctor buffs are expiring, that is a good time to go deal with your battle fatigue and perhaps get a set of dancer/musician buffs. Pay 5k to the dancer, 5k to the musician, and expect 10min of watching/listening to each. The rate at which you get buffed seems to depend upon their flourishes, so they can go in a high burn mode and get you buffed sooner. You must be grouped and watching them when they buff you, and to see the buff, you need to stop watching when its time.
Some people advocate deliberate suicide=deathblow to kill a buff. This will of course be faster, but usually if you start the process of training/healing/rebuffing, it all works out fine.
Things you want to avoid fighting as a pikeman:
1. any marksman- they just run off and kite you all over. Its not worth the trouble
2. herd beasts which flee when hurt- unless you got a lair to reel em in, you will spend alot of time trying to stop them with polearmlunge.
3. anything which deathblows. Pikeman pretty much sucks, and expect to get incapped every now and then. A trip to the clone center kills your buff and just adds alot to your downtime
4. anything which mind bleeds
This means for dantooine you are looking at quenkers, some species of voritor (think grasslands are ok), sometimes a thune will be ok and not kite you all over, huurtons dont flee, but in general stink for xp, although stalkers (deathblow) and matrons can be ok. Grauls, graul maulers are actually pretty good since they usually dont run off and they are vuln to electricity. Avoid force sensitives unless you got a pet, they will cut you up quickly. I didnt spend much time with kungas. I avoid the lairs with mixed piket types and protectors, since your DPS sucks so badly as a pikeman you can not really get ahead of the respawn, and it seems like at about 3 or more pikets your odds of getting rapid bar drainage from the stun thing go way up. Some quenkers are ok, but some will bleed you (not fun) and some like to stand off and plunk your head with a ranged attack like a marksman.
When fighting, watch out for getting stunned. Stun seems to do doodliesquat to monsters when you use it on them, but if you are stunned, you cant change postures easy, or harvest, and it seems like most of your skill based defenses zero or at least sometimes you start taking damage like mad. IF you are in the stun downward spiral, its best to dump the macros, go to autoattack, and move off either on your speeder to break the rhythm, or on foot. Focus on hurting one so it runs off and the number pounding you is less. If you use the sweep while moving away, you can thin the crowd.
And so there you have it. Apply the above and your pain as pikeman will be over sooner.
LokSG
Tue Feb 03, 2004 10:10 am
#7
Well, at least until DoT's get fixed, you can go to the bazaar, buy a crate of grenades. Then you go out, bleed something, run off, and come back and grenade it for the kill...all xp is combat xp that way, and you can rack it up fast. After they fix DoT's, the DoT damage will count towards the kill for xp purposes and this trick wont work. Grenades which still yield way more combat xp than regular weapons can be used, and I suppose you would do something like the following:
Get buffed. Wear armor. Find some lair that spawns a lot of creatures which die in about 3-4 grenades. Beat on the lair with the pike till they spawn, letting your armor and buffs make you immune to their attacks. Then spam grenade toss the lair. Hopefully the blast radius will catch them all and net you a big hunk of combat xp. Durni lairs, womp rat lairs might be really good for this. I havent tried it though. Grenades are really the only way around combat=10%weaponxp though.
Maybe a poison using pet can poison a creature and you grenade it when its low? I havent tried that. I am not clear on how much pet siphons off the experience by when its special kicks in.
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