Swordsman Archive

Thunderheart confirmed that def stacking will be out...but after the combat revamp, which is at least a month down the line.

And possibly after everything has been redone from the ground up, a more fair system will be in place where def stacking doesn't work, and isn't needed.

They are right, bleeds eventually will not stack. However while I love the fact that I can put 4 bleeds on something, stacking bleeds are not the best justification for going Rifleman/Swordsman anyway. I went Swordsman after getting Rifleman to be able to 1) have melee ability and defenses when they closed on me and 2) to be able to continue to attack mind once they got in on me.

As I was leveling Rifleman, I had been using a pistol to defend myself at close range (especially during the days of the 2.5x melee modifier). However, that also meant that I went from attacking mind to attacking random pools or specifically targeting health by switching to pistol. Adding Swordsman means that I now can bleed mind from range, continue to do ranged damage to the mind pool until they get close, then switch to 2H Sword and continue to attack mind to finish them off. Alternatively, I can reverse that, hit with a 2H Sword bleed, attack mind until they decide to kite me, and then switch to Rifle and blast what little mind they have left as they run.

The fact that I can currently put additional bleeds on their mind helps, but it is not the primary reason to choose this as a complementary profession to Rifleman. Think of it this way, for a bleed to have any real benefit, the battle has to last a minimum of 40 seconds (two bleed ticks) and probably more often 60 seconds (three bleed ticks). Why?

The way bleeds work is that the initial hit does not cause any damage, but is only registered as the amount of damage to be caused by the bleed. The timer starts, then every 20 seconds the damage registered by the initial hit is deducted from the bleeding pool.

Thus, assumeI hit with a mindhit bleed then start pounding away with headhits. If I kill the creature before the 20 seconds is up, I wasted one hit (because the bleed timer never ticked off, and, thus, the bleed hit never caused any actual damage). If I kill the creature before 40 seconds expires (2 bleed ticks), then I may as well have just hit it with a regular hit in the first place because only one bleed occurred. Finally, bleeds ignore armor and resistences currently, so the bleed gets no armor rating vs. armor piercing values bonus. So inmost situations, a non-bleed will tick off more damage than will a single tick of a bleed. Thus, even if the bleed timer does tick of two times, it will likely take three ticks (60 seconds) of fighting before the bleed starts actually paying for itself.

In short, bleeds are great tools in that they continue to cause damage after the initial hit, but once you reach Master of most professions, you are doing so much damage so quickly, that bleeds become far less important compared to just kicking the crap out of something as quickly as possible.