Swordsman Archive

well a good spd sliced hammer is great also, 1st time i mastered swords i used a 3.7spd 501max hammer. breezed thru things at low lvl, especially with the spin2

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HardwiredXMan wrote:

Hmm! I went speed first. In my opinion any combat profession you master, speed has to come first because the faster you attack, the faster you get the fight over with. That way, you talk less damage overall.

I personally don't like spin2 at all.....it attacks random HAMs and does less damage....so I used only mind attacks (head hit2) even when I'm surrounded...... with a speed sliced, speed powered up power hammer (which came out to be about 2.9 speed). Threw in one +2 SEA and one +1 SEA....total of +3 and my speed with a power hammer was sufficient for grinding at lower levels.....oh yeah plus I had an extra +5 speed from master brawler.

The problem with spin attack2 which is for fighting a group mobs.....is that people want to walk up to a lair, use nothing but spin attack 2 and take out the lair at the same time taking out the mobs around you. Well this works fine when you have speed. If you don't have speed, the mobs will just heal the lair faster than you can damage it, power hammer or scythe....it don't matter because mobs are not limited to long healing timers like we are.....they heal as fast as they attack.....normally 2 seconds. The only way you can do this little trick/exploit is to do it on lower level mobs, which in my opinion from experience is not efficient for grinding an elite combat profession (takes too long, too little xp).

Also, taking the speed line first it will allow you to grind the other lines much faster from the beginning giving you more specials and more overall damage sooner rather than later.....and makes it less boring also.

When I leveled Swordsman, I did 90% of it on dantooine on pikets and 10% on Squills on tat. Why? well because at lower levels of swordsman you want as much xp, combat xp in the least amount of time while still having the ability to make money.......afterall why kill 9,000 Squills and get only xp when you can make 7-10k per mission (no solo group) and up to 35k (with solo group). That would make you enough money to buy more weapons, armor and anything else you need later. The xp from the squill cave is only slightley better than pickets and even though the spawn rate is fast....how fast can you kill one with it's higher resistances.....not to mention the cave is jedi camped now and all the squills don't give the same xp like pikets do and pikets hit for like 200 damage max....squills hit harder.

Pikets also give you about 4.2k xp, they don't spawn babies as often as quenkers (sometimes I can get 3 babies out of quenker nest....sucks cause no xp or 1 xp for them), they spawn 9 per lair (no solo group) and 15-20 (solo grouped depending on how big the group is). Add the fact that if you can find an improved job market player city, that will cut some of your travel time because player citys normally spawn missions closer than static cities (I usually get mine within 400m - 900m @ 10k each). my typical hour came up with totals of about 500k xp per hour, 50k combat xp per hour and 120k credits per hour.....that's without a solo group. With a solo group, xp and cash increased almost double. I did 12 piket missions an hour (solo) and 8 an hour (solo grouped). The solo grouped missions also increase the pikets HAMs, Resistances, attack rate slightely, special attacks more often but spawn between more pikets....so more xp at the expensive of more time per lair but overall more xp per minute.

I used a PH over the scythe because more mobs are less resistant to PH's blast damage over the scythes kinetic damage.....which means more damage per hit. PH typically does more base damage than a scythe also. Even though the scythe is faster than the PH, it's more efficient to use the PH's blast damage. which would you rather have.....a PH with 500 max damage getting reduced by 15% blast resist or a scythe with 300 max damage getting reduced by 40% resist. Most mobs have significantly higher kinectic resist than blast resist.....the ones you should be grinding on anyway. Since the focus is to grind the fastest with less resistance.....PH is the way to go unless of course you don't have a high speed sliced one....then a scythe is probably more efficient at least until you hit techniques 2 or find some speed SEA's. But I still prefer the PH...scythes are too rare and limited since you can't get many schematics for them....really though, when you ever get speed capped, there really isn't any need or a scythe....escept when a mob is 100% resistant to blast at which point they more than likely are 100% kinetic resistant too.

Now when you add in the fact that you use head hit over spin attack 2.....you are focusing in on all mind damage.....KD your opponent and double that damage all to one HAM bar (mind)......the more speed you have, the faster you can attack that mind bar, the faster you grind.

This is my personal oppinion, nothing set in stone and it might be more efficient ways.....everyone's situation is different though. Myself, I preferred to stay close to my entertainer buffer which was located on dantooine and my scythe cost too damn much to waste grinding with it.

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It depends how many mobs are surrounding you and upon the damage multiplier of the attack you are using and how often the attack targets a specific pool. If you are only surrounded by 2 animals then yes using headhit would be a better idea (why do you use 2 and not 3, headhit 3 does more damage per second in all situations, there are no exceptions. From novice brawler to speed capped master swordsman, headhit 3 always does more dps. You can check this using the swordsman speed calculator). But if you are surrounded by 10 mobs, you are going to kill 10 mobs quicker by using an area attack that damages all of them at the same time than if you concentrate on each mob individually. All this stuff can be calculated if you are interested in doing so, all you need to know is the attacks % chance to hit a certain pool (usually health) and the DPS using that attack, multiply your overall DPS by the % chance to hit health and that is your average DPS to the health bar. If that DPS (multiplied by the # of mobs you are fighting) is higher than your DPS on the mind bar on a single mob, you are better off using area attacks rather than single target head hits.

I have been using speed sliced 2h curved sword, and 2h claymore (with low mind cost). Both had their delay around 2.0 dmg on 2hcs was close to 300 (rancor made sword) and the cleaver in the low 200's , but speed and low mind cost made it the best to spam spin attack2 when you have 10+ mobs around you

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Nealoc187 wrote:

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HardwiredXMan wrote:

Hmm! I went speed first. In my opinion any combat profession you master, speed has to come first because the faster you attack, the faster you get the fight over with. That way, you talk less damage overall.

I personally don't like spin2 at all.....it attacks random HAMs and does less damage....so I used only mind attacks (head hit2) even when I'm surrounded...... with a speed sliced, speed powered up power hammer (which came out to be about 2.9 speed). Threw in one +2 SEA and one +1 SEA....total of +3 and my speed with a power hammer was sufficient for grinding at lower levels.....oh yeah plus I had an extra +5 speed from master brawler.

The problem with spin attack2 which is for fighting a group mobs.....is that people want to walk up to a lair, use nothing but spin attack 2 and take out the lair at the same time taking out the mobs around you. Well this works fine when you have speed. If you don't have speed, the mobs will just heal the lair faster than you can damage it, power hammer or scythe....it don't matter because mobs are not limited to long healing timers like we are.....they heal as fast as they attack.....normally 2 seconds. The only way you can do this little trick/exploit is to do it on lower level mobs, which in my opinion from experience is not efficient for grinding an elite combat profession (takes too long, too little xp).

Also, taking the speed line first it will allow you to grind the other lines much faster from the beginning giving you more specials and more overall damage sooner rather than later.....and makes it less boring also.

When I leveled Swordsman, I did 90% of it on dantooine on pikets and 10% on Squills on tat. Why? well because at lower levels of swordsman you want as much xp, combat xp in the least amount of time while still having the ability to make money.......afterall why kill 9,000 Squills and get only xp when you can make 7-10k per mission (no solo group) and up to 35k (with solo group). That would make you enough money to buy more weapons, armor and anything else you need later. The xp from the squill cave is only slightley better than pickets and even though the spawn rate is fast....how fast can you kill one with it's higher resistances.....not to mention the cave is jedi camped now and all the squills don't give the same xp like pikets do and pikets hit for like 200 damage max....squills hit harder.

Pikets also give you about 4.2k xp, they don't spawn babies as often as quenkers (sometimes I can get 3 babies out of quenker nest....sucks cause no xp or 1 xp for them), they spawn 9 per lair (no solo group) and 15-20 (solo grouped depending on how big the group is). Add the fact that if you can find an improved job market player city, that will cut some of your travel time because player citys normally spawn missions closer than static cities (I usually get mine within 400m - 900m @ 10k each). my typical hour came up with totals of about 500k xp per hour, 50k combat xp per hour and 120k credits per hour.....that's without a solo group. With a solo group, xp and cash increased almost double. I did 12 piket missions an hour (solo) and 8 an hour (solo grouped). The solo grouped missions also increase the pikets HAMs, Resistances, attack rate slightely, special attacks more often but spawn between more pikets....so more xp at the expensive of more time per lair but overall more xp per minute.

I used a PH over the scythe because more mobs are less resistant to PH's blast damage over the scythes kinetic damage.....which means more damage per hit. PH typically does more base damage than a scythe also. Even though the scythe is faster than the PH, it's more efficient to use the PH's blast damage. which would you rather have.....a PH with 500 max damage getting reduced by 15% blast resist or a scythe with 300 max damage getting reduced by 40% resist. Most mobs have significantly higher kinectic resist than blast resist.....the ones you should be grinding on anyway. Since the focus is to grind the fastest with less resistance.....PH is the way to go unless of course you don't have a high speed sliced one....then a scythe is probably more efficient at least until you hit techniques 2 or find some speed SEA's. But I still prefer the PH...scythes are too rare and limited since you can't get many schematics for them....really though, when you ever get speed capped, there really isn't any need or a scythe....escept when a mob is 100% resistant to blast at which point they more than likely are 100% kinetic resistant too.

Now when you add in the fact that you use head hit over spin attack 2.....you are focusing in on all mind damage.....KD your opponent and double that damage all to one HAM bar (mind)......the more speed you have, the faster you can attack that mind bar, the faster you grind.

This is my personal oppinion, nothing set in stone and it might be more efficient ways.....everyone's situation is different though. Myself, I preferred to stay close to my entertainer buffer which was located on dantooine and my scythe cost too damn much to waste grinding with it.

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It depends how many mobs are surrounding you and upon the damage multiplier of the attack you are using and how often the attack targets a specific pool. If you are only surrounded by 2 animals then yes using headhit would be a better idea (why do you use 2 and not 3, headhit 3 does more damage per second in all situations, there are no exceptions. From novice brawler to speed capped master swordsman, headhit 3 always does more dps. You can check this using the swordsman speed calculator). But if you are surrounded by 10 mobs, you are going to kill 10 mobs quicker by using an area attack that damages all of them at the same time than if you concentrate on each mob individually. All this stuff can be calculated if you are interested in doing so, all you need to know is the attacks % chance to hit a certain pool (usually health) and the DPS using that attack, multiply your overall DPS by the % chance to hit health and that is your average DPS to the health bar. If that DPS (multiplied by the # of mobs you are fighting) is higher than your DPS on the mind bar on a single mob, you are better off using area attacks rather than single target head hits.

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Actually I think you got my post confused a bit, I was speaking of grinding up the skill tree. you get head hit 2 at techniques1 and head hit 3 at techniques 3......that's why I said use head hit 2 rather than spin 2 (at least until you get head hit 3)......the original poster stated that he can get 0-0-1-4 swordsman when starting out his grind. That would give him spin 2.....at that level getting head hit 2 and continuing up the speed line (sword techniques)will make his grind easier, faster and more efficient because you not only get speed but a more effective special.

Also, when I was saying I like head hit 2 over spin 2, I meant it from the point of viewthat if you have 10 creatures around you while your using spin attacks, sure you hit them all at once but the general idea for spin attacks is to attack the lair while also attacking all the mobs around you.....at low levels your speed is just not fast enough....they heal the lair faster than you can damage it....so spin attacks at lower levels are not very efficient when grinding a combat profession......targeted HAM specials are better until you get enough speed to increase your rate of attack. Then you can do more damage than the mobs can heal.Plus at low levels, you should not have 10 mobs surrounding you....so again, no real use for spin 2....at least from a grinding standpoint.....well then again, I guess it depends on the type of mob your grinding on also.