Pikeman Archive

I keep seeing people post on this board about how the pikeman move HAM costs are so horrible. I'm not saying they shouldn't be lowered, but until they do something about it, here's a good way to deal:

1. Find any master artisan, ask him/her to make you a Reinforced Combat Staff and use as many experimentation points as possible on lowering the HAM. The rest can go into dmg/spd or whatever.

2. Put this weapon and your primary weapon (LVA / VL / L, whatever) in hotboxes.

3. Switch back and forth between weapons as needed.

This allows you to use the combat staff to spam specials for desired effects (knockdown/stun/dizzy/etc) without wasting your HAM doing so. Sweep1 costs me 40 HAM points, polearmhit3 around 60, area2 around 70, sweep2 around 80. As opposed to my LVA where its on the order of 150/220/230/260.

If I'm soloing single creatures, I typically will knockdown with my combat staff, then equip my LVA and just use normal attacks for 8-10 rounds of combat, then switch back to the combat staff and knockdown again. Rinse/repeat. You lose hardly any HAM as long as your regen stats are decent.

Another slightly more expensive strategy is to use knockdown with the combat staff until you are successful, then swap the LVA in and use polearmhit3. I get 5k dmg hits fairly frequently due to the knockdown dmg bonus.

The combat staff really shines while attacking groups of monsters. I can solo whole rooms in the Tusken Fort or6+ baz nitches at a time because I can just spam sweep2 and area2 without losing hardly any HAM. I often will swap my LVA in to throw on an area2 right after a sweep2 (the knockdown damage bonus makes this VERY effective - hitting 10 tuskens for 3-6k dmg) as my HAM dictates. The important thing is that the combat staff allows you to spam knockdowns without running out of HAM. Successful knockdowns = life in this game.

This tactic will work at any level of skill, but it becomes more and more effective the farther you get up the pikeman tree. You'd be surprised how much damage you can do with a combat staff when you can chain specials with it.

Again, I also think that HAM costs are a little bit high when it comes to our high end weapons, but I don't think theyre totally out of whack either. Doing 3k hits with polearmhit3 and an LVA shouldn't be cheap. If you could spam it with little repercussion, that would be very unbalancing.

I welcome any questions or other strategies that people have for getting around high HAM costs.

I've used this strategy so much, I've almost stopped using my LVA and VL. The only timeI equip my LVA is when I'm attacking things that dont fight back, like hives/camps. Otherwise its RCS for me, all the time. The DOT seems about the same if not more than my LVA due to the simple fact that my RCS has 9/9/9 instead of -58/-58/-58 for range mods, even though my RCS does about 1/3 of the damage as my LVA. But with the missing 1/10 instead of 6/10 and the much lower HAM costs I can use a lot of special moves and be much more effective than ifI use my LVA.

So for those of you that can actually GET the VL, you are saying that my wait of 2+ months isnt worth it?

And what about the Reg lance, i dont see any mention in this about that one.....wouldnt it be worth asking my master weapon smith to lower the ham all to heck and then add extra damage and speed?