Teras Kasi Archive
Thread: Just mastered TK ... already mastered heavy swords... (balance between melees)
Heh I hate to say it but this profession is 10x more fun then swordsman. I got pretty sick of just using headhit3 and mindhit2 all the time. I mean, half of the TK skills are very useful. I love meditating to heal my wounds, being able to get up from incap, knockdown/dizzy, unarmed hit 3 which does a ton of damage super fast, and being able to choose which HAM bar to hit. Oh yeah and the self buffs for ALL health action and MIND which will be coming out next week. I am a master of both Heavy Swords and Teras Kasi and honestly I don't even use Heavy Swords anymore. Haven't found a situation where its more useful. Anyways they are going to have to get REALLY creative (a lot more creative then I can get, then again I just assume they will never do anything the players think of) to make swordsman or any other melee as good of a profession as TK.
In other words TK basically does everything you could want fromeach melee profession with the exception of bleeds. On top of that it has a ton of super useful skills. They seriously need to give swordsman some niche as well as the other melees because basically TKM is the best of all 3plus a ton of awesome moves and abilities. They need to seriously upgrade other meleespecials...
Useful skills at Teras Kasi Master
-Meditate: heals all your wounds very fast
-Knockdown2: knockdown and dizzies a target. I keep people on the ground between 10-20 seconds. They are basically dead if I hit them with this
-Headhit: targets the mind bar and does 500-1000 damage with low ham costs at extremely fast speed
-Bodyhit: ""
-Leghit: ""
-Force of Will: gets you up immediately about half the time from incap
-Powerboost: as of next patch buffs your health action and mind for 10 minutes at 1/2 your mind bar. Ie. 900 900 1000 becomes 1400 1400 1500
-Unarmed Hit 3: does a ton of damage extremely fast.
-Unarmed stun: speaks for itself
-Unarmed blind: speaks for iteself
-Unarmed Combo2: Devs saidwill become effective in future patch
-Unarmed spin attack2: not THAT useful but does fast powerful damage over an area.
Master Heavy Swordsman useful skills
Hit3 - does a very good amount of damage to random bar
Headhit3 - does a very good amount of damage to just the mind bar (less then hit 3)
Mindhit2 - Basically our shining skills. Puts a huge mind bleed on a creature
Areaattack3 - In some cases this skill can be alright. The posture change is useless but the damage isn't that bad for an area attack
Mindhit1 - arguably still useful since it stacks.
As you can see the list for Master swordsman is a fraction of TKM. Like I said in order to make the swordsman equivilant and unique it would take some creative thinking. Swordsman would need some kind of super skill to match all these TK abilities since they aren't going to just dish them out to all the melee classes. The best thing I could think of to make swordsman unique is to have some kind of attack that blacks out the mind bar. Heh at least thats what I would like as a PvPer. Or maybe make us have alot more defense.There is basically nothing on the horizon they can do to make swordsman or other melee classes as good as TKM. I'd like to get at least a glimmer of hope from the devs.
-Ketaken Liie Master TKA, Heavy Swords, Medic
The 2 mind bleeds are crazy good in any scenario if you ask me - **edit** nice things to have but yea i agree the other melee professions do need some love - but remember tka moves have armor piercing none unless your going to use vk's and pay crazy HAM for the moves - I have a few friends who have swordsman and/or pikeman and they can do alot more dmg to armored opponents than i can with my specials unless i've got somebody there to keep me from suiciding.
UH3 cost VK's is about 200 for your average TKM which is alot of HAM for a hit that does no more than 1800 average dmg with VK's
Coparison Stopping shot does about the same and has about 50-100 ham cost depending on your pistol choice.
Not very familiar with the other melee profs though so can't really compare them to TKA - i do know that a mate of mine who's a master pikeman hits crazy hard with his specials.
Pyradius, I agree with everything you said except for the very last part. I'm a TKA novice, 0121, and i have a pikeman friend whom I group with quite abit...He does a great deal of damage, without specials he does about 800dmg per hit, with specials, I've seen him do about a 1900 hit, he's probably done more than that though.
The other classes are formidible, it's just a matter of wether or not they know all of their secrets and tricks. And can use strategy
Kiteticbacca,
My strategy against TKM as a master pikeman is usually: miss miss miss die.
*shrug*
Elsifr - Master Pikeman - Kettemoor
Swordsman have a medium armor piercing weapon and also can do other types of damage (blast with the powerhammer).I prefer TKA but Swordsman are pretty tough. Mind hits rule in PvP too.
"-Meditate: heals all your wounds very fast"
Yep, and we have an entire tree dedicated to it at the moment. Downside is you can only use it during downtime and only if certain state effects are not on you, but yet it is definitely useful.
"-Knockdown2: knockdown and dizzies a target. I keep people on the ground between 10-20 seconds. They are basically dead if I hit them with this"
The dizzy does not always land, for me anyway. I even have unarmed dizzy hotkeyed because I do not expect the KD2 dizzy to land that often. And with the dizzy nerf, dizzy seems to wear off almost immediately. I did however test it on my friend, and when he did get knocked down again from dizzy, we waited for like 2 minutes and he never could get up, heh.
"-Headhit: targets the mind bar and does 500-1000 damage with low ham costs at extremely fast speed"
Not sure why you list the PvE dmg, because this is really a PvP skill. I would never use this over Unarmed Hit 3 in PvE. It is a very cool PvP ability though, I can hit players for about 200 dmg mind with it.
"-Bodyhit: """ -- Never use
"-Leghit: """ -- Never use
"-Force of Will: gets you up immediately about half the time from incap"
With zeroes on all your HAM bars yep. The most fun I have with this is denying people the faction points for deathblowing me when I can Force of Will 3 times in a row successfully. Fairly useful in PvE, but nothing compared to the usefulness of something like Feign Death.
"-Unarmed blind: speaks for iteself"
Actually I never use this because Unarmed Hit 3 also blinds, and since it's a move I use so often on what I am fighting, they are almost always blinded.
"-Unarmed Combo2: Devs saidwill become effective in future patch"
Being useful in the future does nothing to make a move useful now. It's a bit misleading to list upgrades as part of what you find useful about TK since those moves are not useful yet.
"-Unarmed spin attack2: not THAT useful but does fast powerful damage over an area."
To my knowledge it's not as efficient to use this as it is to just focus unarmed hit 3 on a single opponent at a time. I've jokingly used it on Lok for fun on things like Perleks, but I'd hardly consider this a seriously useful skill. I virtually never use it anyway...
There are a TON more TK's than their are of all the other melee classes put together. This is not due simply to the fact that they suck, though I am sure some people have left their professions due to these reasons. TK's and martial arts are just more popular in general, and it makes sense that they focus their development where the bulk of their players reside. Not saying that the other professions SHOULD be ignored, but from a logical priority view of satisfying the most of your players with the least work that is the order it should go.
I do hope the other melees get the upgrades they seek, but that is the battle for them to fight really. I don't know enough about the other melee classes, and I do not like to fight for causes in ignorance. And really, the only truly way to understand a class's plight is to experience it for yourself.
A few points to Pyradius
The meditate line is the single coolest tree I've seen in this game. It cuts down on my downtime tremendously, and considering the large amounts of downtime possible in this game to me at least that is well worth any amount of skill points.
If dizzy always hit in PvP there would be no point in even dueling people anymore. If dizzy lands I win.If dizzy doesn't land the fight will usually end up being an endurance race (especially if there are buildings around for me to hide behind). Those types of fights usually end up with me winning also because I can target mind and wear someone down while theyusually are stuckeither missing me, or going after health and action.
body and leg hit are things I use fairly infrequently, but they do have their uses at the end of fights.
unarmed blind: because you need something to help you get to tkm. 
unarmed combo 2: it displays one dmg in your combat window, but does actually work. I usually only throw it in when I want to look cool, but I have used it from time to time when I'm just trying to wear someone down by beating on all their ham pools at the same time.
unarmed spin attack2: I'm usually a mage type player so having an AoE attack makes me smile, even if it isn't all that amazing. Killing 3 baz at a time though will make most people around you start considering tkm.
As for other melee professions. Go duel some of them. Hell, don't even bother with KD2. Just use unarmed 3. You will bet them over 80% of the time. We have much better overall defense, and can usually do more dmg than our melee counterparts, yet we don't use any more skill points to get where we are. To me this is a problem that should be fixed. Have you ever considered that TKM is only more popular because there are those of us who realize that doing something like pikeman would just be a complete waste of our time?