Ive spent most of today reading up on battling, as I had put it on the back burner. With a recent turn of good luck I came into enough np on hand to buy a YBlaster (omg that weapon is an amazing! deal).
Basically I am strictly into single player battles, and I read a few mentions of not needing defense for 1p battling. Have I wasted my time and np in training that stat? My current stats are:
Species:Uni
Level: 33
Health: 60
Strength: 55
Defence: 45
Move: 24
Should I stop training d? and whats the logic behind this?
In battling, offensive icons are generally guaranteed (a certain number will land, and either will or won't be blocked) whereas defensive icons aren't guaranteed (a certain number might be blocked and are entirely dependent on the statistical odds of the opponent using whichever move). For defense to be "better" than offense, you need to defend more icons than you would have dealt (thus changing the icon trade-off ratio).
As a general rule, this won't happen. Leaf Shield and most of the dual-duties still cap at the same 13-icons that Ylanas Blaster falls just short of. (I'm ignoring the fractional difference.) Since Defense is harder to play (and requires a set of dual-duties and extra shields), this just equates to extra cost. This changes with Mask of Coltzan, Ghostkershield, and the Faerie Tabard, however. All of those have the potential to exceed pure weapons (the two shields can fully block an opponent's attack, making the ratio undefined, or even exceed the 13-icon range, leaving Sword of Skardsen as the only generally affordable weapon that might surpass them).
However, the limit with those three items is that, in One Player, you'll generally be battling opponents with well above your stats. Even though defensive measures may exceed offensive measures in this range, it remains a gamble. The next problem is that you'll be playing with a guaranteed freeze each fight (or more or less each fight) and you can make up for the stat difference based on purely offensive measures. (And while maxing out in Plot battling, offense means a quicker win even if not a guaranteed one.)
The next problem comes in the fact that most One Player opponents focus on one major icon type. Ignoring Dark (Ring of the Lost) and Air (Triple Turbo Dryer, Shield of Soaring, or Ring of Weightlessness), the cost of a full set of full-blockers/75% reflectors will cost a comparable amount to the two shields. And in several cases they will be more effective. (I haven't mapped out the opponents and their movesets, so this is more general terms.)
The final problem is training. You're effectively adding an extra 50% cost by training Defense on top of HP and Strength. However, the cost isn't the real problem: to get to the 700/700/700 stat balance, you're going to be spending a year minimum on each of those three stats (making for three plus years total).
In many ways it's short-term versus long-term efficiency: if you have the patience and funds to play Defense, you'll be happier in the end (especially against those opponents that you can infinite-win via G-Shield/Tabard). On the other hand, you may or may not be looking to play for several years, and you may not make money quickly enough to want to train Defense.
Personally, I scrapped my Defense and haven't looked back. (I'm running a full set of full-blockers/75% reflectors and finding them fairly efficient.) However, I've also never had any strong desire to compete in Two Player (where Defense is necessary). If there's even a 10% chance you'll look at Two Player in the future, I'd highly recommend carrying on with your Defense (for at least a while longer). As of the moment, you haven't wasted much time or money on your Defense, unless you're still new enough to the game where it feels that way to you.
Thank you for the well detailed answer. I am purely into 1p with no desire for 2p right now or in the foreseeable future.
What you are saying makes sense, and I think I will continue training it for the time being until I reach a higher level where training is more pricey. Im not new to the game by any means, and patience is a virtue Im blessed with on neo (thankfully, since dubloons are so much cheaper than codestones.)
I just joined this forum today, so Im not sure if I can plus rep you or anything, but you were extremely helpful.
I don't think you've wasted anything at all by training defense and I'd certainly encourage you to continue training it. I'm on the other side of things, having always trained defense, played for a loooooong time (despite being on slow dial-up the entire time and never making significant nps), got the 700/700 boosts and have never regreted it.
I agree with Shattered's explanation that an icon of (certain to come into play), is more valuable than an icon of defense (which may or may not come into play depending on your opponent's move) and continue to rank the ratio as an icon of offense being worth about 1.3-1.7 icons of defense.
However, defense is NEVER wasted, as it does have an impact, ranging from small to great depending on your boost and your opponent's power. That impact may allow you to last an extra round or two in a fight, and to use your offense in that extra round or two to score additional victories.
Indeed the Y-Blaster is an extraordinary value on a price for power basis.
Remember too, that while an offesive icon is always in play (i.e., you use the offensive weapon, you know you'll either do damage with it OR, and it's a decent OR, your opponent will block it). Thus, you may not achieve the resulting damage you'd want or expect if your opponent has any defense against any of your attacking icons - again, a backwards way of saying that defense does have value and on an icon per icon basis, while I prefer offense, it's not ALWAYS better.
In one-player, you'll eventually be overpowered by your opponent's continuing gain of boosts and maximum hit points unless or until you have enough training and defense to shut down his damage creating abilities. Your offensive weapons, including of course the Y-Blaster, will be doing a fraction of the damage per icon that a one-player opponent will eventually do, and, as is the case of defensive weapons, you offensive weapons will simply be overpowered, and unless you have a virtually unlimited budget, you won't have the ability to buy enough offensive icon attack to compensate for this.
I guess what I'm trying to say is you can win with either offense or defense, but over the long-haul, your best bet, in my opinion, is having both options available to you and adapting your battleset and battle plans to the particular opponent that you're fighting.
A more lengthy debate of points both Shattered and I have mentioned is found in the following thread
http://forums.finalhit.org/showthread.php?tid=19953
Shattered and Vermont have covered both the major angles fairly well, so I'm just going to point to one other factor you need to consider in your decision:
Incremental Training Costs.
Training Defense equally with other stats does cost 40% more than just training Str, HP and Level does, and in the long run the regret of folks who train defense (hi Nannerz) is that they could have instead trained a lot more HP for the same cost.
However: training costs rise as stats rise, and training costs at the schools are a function of your current highest stat.
- Your level 33, and 60 HP can get a defense point for just a five dubloon coin (about 9k);
- A level 101, and 200 HP pet requires 5 codestones to get a defense point (about 68k average)
- My level 278 and 479 defense kyrii requires a red codestone to get a defense point (about 85k average)
- My level 101, and 1105 HP lab pet would need 452 levels before he could train defense, and even then it would cost him 4 red codestones per defense point (about 340k), thus training isn't even worthwhile, as neggs and serums can give defense for only 150k-200k per point
You'll notice that a 40% increase over your current training cost is still a tiny fraction of the higher-level training costs. You'll also notice that the cost of training defense is always based on the highest stat, not the current value of defense - Lab pets can be stuck negging to values they could have reached via dubloon training had they kept stats even along the way. Thus the regret of people who choose not to train defense is that they could have done so for a whole lot cheaper had they trained it evenly along with other stats.
In many ways, it is a "grass is always greener" situation, with those who trained defense wishing they had higher Strength or HP instead, and those who did not train defense wishing that they had done so back when it would have been cheap.
As someone who has both labbed a pet into the untrainable range and also trained a pet with even stats to SNTS range, my advice is to train defense while it is a cheap stat, and consider giving up on it when it starts to get expensive. Those are relative terms, but if you ask me, it's fairly foolish not to continue to at least the top end of Dubloon Training. The 35 Five Dubloon coins it will cost you now are less than the cost of a single SK Negg later.
Due to the break points in both costs and boosts multipliers it's worth giving very serious consideration to continuing to train Defense up to the 200 boost before deciding to give up on it. The additional 400 codies are not a trivial cost, coming to 3.4 million at today's wiz prices, but the x4.5 multiplier is a notable increase in power and opens up a couple options for theoretically infinite wins in 1p.
I wish all forum had members that reply like this O.o
I think the training of defense up into the much higher levels is the best way for me to go, since it cost such a relatively small amount.
Rabid's points are well taken, and I don't disagree with them, but would like to expand upon them a little. I didn't actively train maximum hit points, as they've been the easiest and least expensive stat to obtain. Also, to my way of thinking 1 strength or defensive point is 1/700 of the maximum your pet can get to have parity with all other pets, while there's no cap on maximum hit points, and no boosts associated with increasing the number. They DO of course have value, but the difference of 20 strength or defensive points from say 480 to 500 is much more meaningful than the difference of twenty in maximum hit points from 631 to 651.
Keep in mind your other options for training. The lab ray is possible if you don't mind your pet switching places, but it traditionally has zapped down levels, while adding greatly to hit points, some to strength, being fairly neutral to defense and adding some speed. I say traditionally as intuitively I've noticed what is either sudden good luck, or a subtle change since the Terror Mountain Scratch Cards went down and have actually been adding levels lately, and have seen them in higher proportion in Kitchen Quests as well.
Which brings us to the K-Quests. Whenever what the chef requests is inexpensive in relation to the cost of school training (31% or so), I think they're worth doing. And the higher your stats become, the more worthwhile K-Quests become from a budgetary point of view.
If you're lucky (I wasn't and stopped it), and are an insomniac, you can always try to add levels from 12-1a.m. with Count Von Roo at his crypt. Also, Turmaculus will occasionally grant strength points (I've gotten 15 or so from him) if you catch him awake, and for low level pets, Coltzan's Shrine will give out random stat increases. Further there are the bonus stats you occasionally get from the training schools themselves and the ones you get from Random Faerie Quests.
While I wish my pet had more maximum hit points, I'm not at all unhappy having used a training plan that focused on Strenght and Defense (with levels only as requrired to continue training), and ignored both hit points (which both the lab and K-quests tend to be most generous with historically), and speed. I think you'll find that if you blend in other stat increasing activity, along with school training, you'll accumulate a fair number of hit point and speed points as byproducts of what you're trying to obtain in K-quests, Random Faerie Quests, and labbing.
Unfortunately my pet is my dream pet (unconverted grey uni) that I cant risk to the ray. I am labbing a pound pet that may eventually become my main BD pet once its stats become comparable to the unis, since it is such a cheaper route to take. Until then I'll keep leveling my little uni and keep its stats relatively even.
An important question to ask, with the cost per point of defense, what's the minimum useful amount of defense?
Fully understand crispinrecess......but do try the K-quests as I think you'll find them helpful in speeding up your training, and if you start seeing one stat pull ahead, just don't train that one at the schools until you get the overall stats evened up.
Nightwind, ALL defense is useful, just as all strength is useful....it's just a matter of the more you train, the more useful it becomes, so I'd argue that anything over 7 defensive points is useful as it moves up your base (at 0 defense multiplier from 0.5 to 0.75) and any and all additional uses are better still.
Keep in mind that early on, fights don't last more than two or three rounds and "Sink" and "Burrow", the faerie abilities are probably the best defensive at that point. Downsize! is cheap, and does provide defense not related to your pet's strength boost. But when you start getting into fights that last beyond those three rounds, any and all defense becomes useful, though not necessarily enough to be the focal point of your set. It just adds a bit of utility to some of your species abilities and puts more bite into your shields and dual-duties. An example on the cheap would be the Scarab Ring, which for a pet with balanced stats is of decent value as you're working your way up if you're on a budget.
There are various points that different people will suggest as areas where one can reconsider defensive training, but for both offense and defense, the fact remains that at any point before 700 that you stop, an additional boost in either would be helpful.
Your Pet's Strength and HP will determine the general point that you can push an opponent to naturally. It's at that point (when you're nearing a natural maxing out) that Defense starts to matter, and the question then is how the ratio of their Strength to your Defense compares. I generally round this to saying 550 on up matters (with 450 on up starting to be noticeably effective), but this is compared to a 700 Strength Boost opponent.
At 550, you're managing an 80% ratio, while at 450 you're managing a 65% ratio. (Note that I'm almost exclusively considering G-Shield and Tabard in this regard.) Therefore, comparable points rising up would also matter. 200 versus 300 and 300 versus 450, for example. But it's a much narrower margin even there (a range of three Boosts as opposed to six).
These ranges can be expanded in cases where your primary weapon is being significantly blocked and/or your shield is more likely to block.