Wildewood

Allehnon

So I am a Wildewood Ecologist and want to eventually get into combat. I have been reading the information on the xieltalnara site and it looks like Wildewood have more synergism with Runes or Dreamweaving. Has anyone been successful with Wildewood or have any pointers as to strategies or just tips in general?

Rheatsis

I've been a -Chem in the past, but I can't really base any of my experience with that with Wildewood, the woods seem to have different ways of functioning..

Paging Doctor @Enyalida! Help this poor little guy out?

Shaddus

Tip one: Don't. (Sorry, had to put this)
Tip two: draw lots of power, link with druids to extend your range, deepbond a badger for more dmp, make your charm protect against fire, and remember that YOU ARE NOT A TANK.

Enyalida

I'm away from my computer (and state) right now, so I won't go into great detail.

Ecology is a fine choice for a Wildewood, in fact ithat is the 'default' choice, the tert around which I tried to balance during the special report, we'll see what happens post-overhaul.

Runes is also a decent choice, for the curious. I would highly discourage picking dreamweaving or shamanism, though.

Allehnon

Thank you for the advice.
Hopefully I  can get it figured out.

Another question, should I teach my mount to poison spit, due to my poison usage as an ecologist, or use hypnotic gaze?

Shaddus

I don't know that either really synergises well with -wood, but I've never actually played one. Beast spit sensitivity might be useful to hit right before your bombs, or having it spit a poison that mimics your required affs for increased damage on said bombs.

Maligorn

Right now, the biggest boon for Wildewood is that they have a flower
that causes stupidity passively every ten seconds. If I had to be a
Wildewood, I would focus on being a command denial monster -- try and
find things that build on this. Use your monster strength stat, learn a
lot of combat to learn shieldstun. Have a beast to spit paralysis or
dulak in between your flower hits, use ecology for herb bane, have your
eco friend poison with more command denial or do it yourself with Runes +
your garland.

BlueHorn should be your favorite bomb. It does mana drain which is key to Serenwilde's kit as a whole.

Make sure to use Flurry and set it on the main target -- 9 times out of 10 they'll panic and somersault or tumble out because of the miniature gravity effect. Use defensive Wildecall animals until you feel confident enough to move on to wolverine/treefrog.

EDIT: Here's a useful site to peruse too. https://sites.google.com/site/xieltalnara/Wildewood

Enyalida

Spit.

Maligorn has details wrong, but im almost home to reply!

EDIT: Whoops, wrong person. No idea how that happened, blame parkinglot posting.

Enyalida

The flower @Maligorn referenced actually does fractured skull, not stupidity. Fractured/broken skull acts just like stupidity, but it stacks with stupidity and is/was a salve cure instead of being a herb/focus cure. 

I use beast spit for a few reasons:

- It's very versatile, allowing for different affs on command in different situations.

- It's free: You can cast it every time on beast balance without worrying about your beast running out of mana or ego.

- It's reliable: You always know what aff you're going to get (as long as you aren't using charybdon), and with allergies or snake bane, you have a 5/6ths chance to hit with said aff.

Hypnotic gaze costs your beast a lot to cast, and the resultant affs are too random and dispersed to be much use, imo. It's good to use if you have a mental overwhelm/aeon kit (like Illuminati, etc.), but otherwise loses out on beastspit - one of the best common abilities in the game.

That said, you aren't likely to be using it to augment your bombs: The majority of the bombs approach total uselessness. Even assuming the bombs even hit your target, which is difficult due to their base design, the majority of effects are on the weak side, especially with the extremely poor (but thematically locked in) damage typing.The BlueHorn bomb's mana drain is negligible, and as a Wildewood you will have zero way of maintaining the resultant succumb affliction. As a result, your go to 'damage bomb' should actually be HartPine: It's easier for your group to maintain the aff through a bard's octave, and it does the most damage against the majority of combatants, being half poison damage (which very few characters have high resists to), instead of 50/50 blunt/magic - which every player has at least 15% resistance, with many races resisting it inherently.

@Maligorn was correct in describing the role of the WW in group combat: Be a hinder monster. Learn up to shieldstun, have a forger craft you a combat-ready sword, with precision maxed, enough speed to match your shieldstun balance time, and the rest in damage. When you shieldstun, have that sword envenomed, in hand, and jab at your target with it for an extra aff alongside your stun (I like dulak for this, or potentially morphite if combined with beast spitting morphite as well, to prone them. Mantakaya also works, for more hinder.). Keep in mind that you can always use vines, and that vines is a full second faster than web. Alternating vines and your shieldstun combo, alongside your passives, herb bane, and a careful eye on the flurry attempt message should keep that one opponent from doing much while your allies try to kill them.

 In general your battle flow as an ecologistwill look something like:

- Set flowers on target

- Consider starting bond sting. It costs a lot of power, and I advise a melding druid to never ever use their familiar for anything... but WWs don't have much active they can do, or good power moves, so go ahead.

- Sheildstun/jab

- Vines

- Repeat above two, keeping an eye on tumbling so that you can headbutt back in (which does damage based on str) until ally kills the target

- Also, discern or assess a lot, so that you can gore for kills when appropriate

        - Remember to always envenom your antlers when you gore. Gore actually does okay damage as a WW, and as I said earlier: WWs don't otherwise use power, so the high powercost for spamming it isn't a big deal as much.

- Outside of lasthitting a locked enemy with damage, or getting a gore from discerning a hurt enemy, don't expect to lead charges or get solo kills. It's just not in the cards right now, we'll see what happens with the Overhaul.

Maligorn

I knew it was fractured skull

It's even better that it's a salve cure since you have a slickness pollen thing too.

Enyalida

Yes, and the cure for slickness was on the same cure balance as the cure for another aff given every 10 seconds: Blindness... and of course, you also get a broken limb to compete for salve balance on that fractured skull.

Siam

Wood reworks on the way, peoples! Slowly but surely they shall become feasible! 

Neos

Siam said:

Wood reworks on the way, peoples! Slowly but surely they shall become feasible! 

Such optimism.

Siam

Optimism is a virtue among Gloms, you silly cat.

Marcella

You can envenom hart antlers???

Shaddus

Marcella said:

You can envenom hart antlers???

Yes, one envenom.

Saran

There really should be stuff like this in game to help people. I think Aetolia has a smaller version as part of the class descriptions but the Calas at least should have something if it doesn't already.

Enyalida

It did/does for some of the loadouts, and there are projects in the HS intended to eventually hold step-by-step basic combat strategies. Right when I started with it, the overhaul went in, potentially invalidating anything written in.