Tree of Savior Forum

Archer 2 > Hunter 3 > Falconer 3?

Class and Rank Archer
#1

Hi, I’m completely clueless when it comes to archers and in general still new to the game. With a little research i have gathered that Hunter is and pretty much always was a poorly designed class that players stayed away from. However, I’d still like to take a crack at it with this build path.

My question is, what is the “optimal” build considering this advancement path i have chosen? I’m a pretty casual pvm player and have considered playing this build will eat up 3 character slots, which I’m completely fine with. Thank you in advance!

#2

The only way to make Hunter 3 viable is Falconer 3, so yeah, your build will work.

Your best place is ET as a support, you helps a lot with circling in the DPS floors, and solo most of the rest with Growling + Aiming.

#3

Could you perhaps link me a sample build as to which skills i should put points in? The ones I’ve managed to Google were old (and I’m assuming outdated) ones.

#4

https://tos.neet.tv/skill-planner#311222eee.1a214a5564.1a213f456a7183.1135485a618ab5c5

I sport that build, you could take from praise and add to coursing (I’m still hoping that they’ll make praise a good skill, but, it’s been too long… too long since they’ve said anything about us)

You could also remove from hovering to add to pheasant.

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#5

Thank you! I’ll use that as a basis for what I’ll do with my hunter. I’m only at archer 2 atm. Concerning hunter skills, as i understand it they don’t work on bosses correct? For retrieve that would make sense, but even coursing doesn’t right?

#6

I like this one

https://tos.neet.tv/skill-planner#311222eee.1a4a5a.112f3f45617185.11355e618ab5c5

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#7

Thank you! Does snatching work on flying boss monsters? Rush dog seems to be the go to offensive ability to max since it’s the only ability you can use against bosses iirc.

#8

Yes snatching works on flying bosses.
As for other bosses, you can only rush dog and AA and falc pre-emptive.

Although weirdly sometimes it also works on ground mobs and bosses but I will presume it as unintended and a bug. I won’t send a ticket for this. Let me enjoy this as special feature newly added.

#9

As a fellow Archer2/Hunt3/Falc3, I’m just gonna leave a slight warning that grinding from rank 3 to rank 8 is going to be hell. Your pet sucks even as Hunter 3 and you’re going to find yourself struggling with glitches constantly (don’t use retrieve in party play ever, it’s just not worth it for how often it bugs out). Falconer 1 and 2 are also pretty mediocre, especially since you only have archer and hunter skills to fall back on. Get ready to hate your life a lot.

But once you get Falc3 the build truly shines and my god, is it worth it. Growling+Aiming can freeze huge hordes of mobs in their tracks, throw in Circling and you can make that horde explode with nearly anything. It’s extremely satisfying. Your bossing skills will be a bit lacking, but the mobbing potential makes up for it big time. Pre-emptive Strike is also enough to make Falc3 a great class by itself.

To give my own input, personally this is the build I use for PVE (if you’re more into PVP you’d probably want a way different setup tho)
https://tos.neet.tv/skill-planner#311222eee.1a25354a.142f3f456185.1121355f638ab5c5

  • Archer skills are largely preference before maxing Multi Shot/Swift Step/Kneeling Shot, so the other build Composition posted is fine too tbh. Do whatever you want with your extra archer points.

  • Retrieve and Coursing are only good for the debuffs in PVE since most of the time you’re fighting large groups at a time, not single enemies, and those single enemies are going to day too quickly to justify using single target skills like these for damage. Retrieve is for picking off enemies left in a room while you’re moving on to the next, dragging them along with you so you can attack on the move a little. Coursing’s debuff scales with its level so you can put more levels into it if you want.
    More importantly, though, both of these skills are EXTREMELY prone to glitching your pet. It usually occurs if they try to use the skill on an enemy that either dies or moves out of range before they can reach it, causing the pet to freeze in place and continuously return to that same spot every time. You can fix this by feeding your pet any kind of food, but doing this repeatedly can get expensive, especially if you have a TP shop pet. It’s impossible to know when, if ever, IMC is going to fix this bug, so for now it’s best to only invest in Coursing/Retrieve minimally and use them sparsely.

  • Rush Dog and Snatching are you Hunter damage skills, so max these.

  • Praise is pretty decent, especially at early levels, so max it.You should have points to spare for it anyway.

  • Growling lv5 is also optional, you can get by with lv1 but if you can spare the points I think it’s worthwhile to give it extra levels for a longer debuff. This ensures that mobs won’t be swarming you if the debuff fails between ticks or your pet gets knocked out of position, you’ll have a few more seconds to react and reposition.

  • Hounding lv1 is unnecessary. Originally it was recommended to get around your pet bugging out from Coursing/Retrieve, but it doesn’t actually fix the glitch. All it does it make your pet follow you for the skill duration, it won’t use auto attacks in this state and if you use any other skill the bug with resume. It’s much easier to just avoid using Coursing/Retrieve in the first place and feeding your pet to fix the glitch when needed. Save yourself a skill point for something more useful.

  • I put a point into Roost because I felt like it, and it’s somewhat useful when you’re levelling through falc1~2, but you can skip it if you want since it’s pretty useless at falc3. But it makes a cute roost for your hawk!

  • Hovering is honestly a terrible skill and only good while levelling through falc1~2 because you don’t have a lot of options. Put 1 point into this if you want, but don’t bother investing more than that since you’ll never use it after you hit falc3. If you think you can manage it, though, avoid putting anything into it since it’ll actually cost you silver later to buy an attribute for Pre-emptive Strike if you also have Hovering.

  • Pheasant is actually pretty decent, it’s not gonna be your go-to damage or utility skill but it does decent damage and can stun, and the AoE effect is actually larger than you’d expect from it. More importantly, you can use it to cancel your hawk out of the Circling animation after the skill is cast (once the circle appears on the ground for Circling your pet is stuck in the animation but the skill won’t cancel if you direct your pet to use a different skill). Sonic Strike also does this but has a long cooldown, so Pheasant is handy for when it’s not available.
    Also, I don’t use a lot of skillpoints elsewhere in this build, so maxing Pheasant isn’t a problem. If you want to invest points elsewhere, lv1 here is fine.

  • Sonic Strike, Aiming and Pre-emptive Strike and must-maxes, so do that obviously. Hanging Shot is kind of pointless most of the time but if you have leftover points you can throw them in there for fun.

That should cover just about everything, but I can answer questions as well if you’ve got any.

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#10

Now that I’ve more time to elaborate.

The reason I use my build is simply as follows:

Snatching at 1, The enemies that fly are so rare that I won’t bother increasing the damage of this skill, before when it increased its duration, it was amazing. But now, I only use it as a way to double my strike damage agaisnt flying bosses (rush dog, sonic strike and hovering)

Retrieve & coursing are the second damage option I’ve got, I use them while rush dog is on CD. If you want, you can use either skill while the pet is afar from the target, followed by a rush dog. This way rush dog propels the pet towards the target, executes rush dog and whatever skill you executed before. If you do this while an enemy is under the effect of either skill, rush dog will cancel said skill.

Hounding I’ve got it for PvP purposes, as for fixing the pet I’ve this video explaining how to : https://youtu.be/mNIzgrvo2xA basically, feed your pet and wait for it to finish eating.

Growling at lv 3 means that enemies must resist 2 growling checks, growling effects are triggered once every 3 seconds. So this means that at lv 3, it last 6 seconds and thus it last 2 checks and enemies must resist those 2. It also means that with a savage bow and growling gem / or divine might, it last for 3 checks.

Hunter I’ve found that my particular play style makes me move alot, so I never took archer’s kneeling shot, I’m always getting near and away from enemies in order to move the pet the way I want.

On the falconer side, I just recommend that, you can choose whatever skill level for either pheasant and hovering, but please, never put one level beyond hanging shot. Hanging shot is the single worst most unreliable skill in the game, it is even worse since it began giving that silly “companion not near” message.

Anyway, for the best experience as a hunter

  1. get a rocksodon (this is the best available pet right now for us, it eats… non tp food, meaning you can heal it on battle without breaking your bank account)
  2. keep /comeon in a macro, spam it.
  3. be aware that your pet can execute skills while it is close to your enemy, this means that you can have your pet be far from you and your target near your pet and execute a skill. This also means, that it will fail triggering skills if it is 1 small tile too far.
  4. turn off pet auto attacks, many times it decides to auto attack a dead enemy and stays put, until you feed it.
  5. edit If your pet is not executing either retrieve or coursing, use /comeon, it will refresh its pathfinding forcing it to go after the target, you can achieve something similar with heavy shot, by forcing it to recalculate the new position of the enemy. It also helps that heavy shot roots the enemy for a split second.
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#11

Awesome insight! Thank you so much for the break down.

I don’t mind grinding much, i have 2 other alts that i’m primarily going to be focusing on and this just a “for fun” character to role play with. Hence going hunter3 despite it having known issues.

I don’t have much else to say/ask (yet) other than…STAT DISTRIBUTION. I always feel like these can be a tricky mix between str and dex. I come from a ragnarok online background where dex was where archers got their power. This game…not so much. I guess the stronger you are, the farther you can pull your bow string eh?

Edit: I keep seeing circling pretty much always left at 5/15, any reason we don’t get this past 5 levels?

#12

Valid points concerning efficiency of skill duration/cd. Also thank you for the youtube vid reference! watching the different stuff the content creator has on about hunters!

#13

No problem, as for your question about circling 5/15, the answer is simple:
Right now monsters at most have 5 AoE Def, so circling 5 reduces that to 0, sinec 1 point in circling = -1 AoE Def.

If they ever plan on increasing monster’s AoE def further then we might need to reset, until then, the only reason for circling beyond 5 would be PvP, and it is a pretty awful reason.

#14

https://tos.neet.tv/skill-planner#313222eee.11244555.15253144.132f3f45617185.11354351618ab5c5
This is my build but i guess no one wants a 0 dps char.

#15

Pardon all the noob questions but, aoe def is how resilient monsters are in a mob yes? Meaning my aoe damage is reduced by some equation involving aoe defense?

Edit: magic attacks aren’t affected by aoe defense are they?

Also, do you not do more damage if you get a mobs’ aoe defense in the negatives? Or can you not decrease it past 0?

#16

mi first main character was a hunter 3 falconer 2 ( there was no falconer 3 yet) ad was hellish in that time there was not as much quest and dungeons like we have now, so grinding was a must… my guildmate hated me and make me feel worthless… . but i manage to level by MYSELF in maps that are even 15 levels more than myself, thanks to the safety net that is our pet coursing / retrieve and growling.

i remember that the falconer class change mission was a hell of a test. having to defeat a boss without being touched not once… with my abismal damage and since i can only hit with rushdog. it take me hours. ( 1hours 39 minutes to be exact) try to go there full buffed, the best weapon possible, sharpened!

the only i can add to all this excellent advice is that in preventive strike - maybe is worth buy the remove circling attribute ( is expensive) so the falcon only throw sonic blast at your targets and don’t get struck in circling when u move away

hunter is suposed to be a suport class that control enemys so in this dps based game sem lackluster. but here s some great fantasy when it come to a hunter /falconer that make us want to be that master of beast

( would be great if they create a “Beastmaster” secret class that require u be hunter/falconer to get into - rank 10 im looking to you!)

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#17

AoE Def does not decrease damage dealt by AoE skills, instead, it dictates how many monsters will be hit.
Your attack starts with… say 10 AoE atk ratio, if you hit 10 enemies with 1 AoE Def each, you’ll hit them all because each enemy hit will subtract 1 AoE atk ratio from your ATK.

If you hit 3 enemies with the following distribution: 5, 5, 1 AoE Def. You’ll only be able to hit the ones with 5, it prioritizes the ones with the highest amount of AoE Def, so by the time it reaches the one with 1 AoE def it no longer can do anything because 0 cannot beat 1.

There are certain magic skill that utilize the AoE mechanic, such as magic missile. But, magic skills in their majority just have a fixed amount of targets they can hit regardless of the AoE mechanic.

This is why circling exist, it was awesome during rank 7, it got even better in rank 8. In rank 8 we got the circling [expand] attribute, this attribute makes one physical hit expand to one other target, and thus one hit becomes 2.

It will always be one hit becomes 2, but since it also makes your AoE physical skills hit everything, it’s one hit that has hit 20 enemies, and those 20 hits have a chance to expand. So, it’s extra damage for any physical skill casted within circling.

edit
I’ll add this: Circling requires a minimum of 2 enemies to do anything, if you had only one enemy within circling, it would decrease its AoE def, but you would of had hit it anyway. It also cannot expand damage to the root target, so a minimum of 2 enemies is required.

Only sappers choose to cast circling with only one target around, since they can use a skill called “Detonate” which makes circling explode dealing damage to enemies. If you are not a sapper, please, avoid casting circling agaisnt a single enemy.

Does Archers have 0 Aoe Attack ratio by default?
#18

I’m currently building a Archer2>Hunter3>Appraiser>Cannoneer3 and I believe that it’s pretty viable.
Hunter helps providing a good amount of damage skills that can kill small mobs/stronger single monsters for low amounts of SP and has the best CC capabilities of all low-Ranked Archer Classes (you can disable monsters with Coursing,Retrieve and Growling, and Coursing boosts your crit chance and decreases the enemies defence; Rush Dog has a chance to stun enemies with its attribute).
Pointing also provides a good provoke ability and a nice decrease of the enemies accuracy and evasion (effectively boosting your hit&evasion rates; useful against boss monsters as you can’t use normal skills during Kneeling Shot/Bazooka).

I think Hunter is quite useful for Classes that can’t use normal attack skills as much due to their restriction to secondary weapons (e.g. Cannoneer, Bullet Marker).
For these Classes, the only real alternative is Sapper (or Quarrel Shooter, though it works less well without a shield). However, Sapper uses up several different items and also lacks CC utility.

All in all the things that make Hunter bad are the following:

  • Companion uses up a character slot
  • non-premium companions have less weapon&armor slots
  • lack of better AoE skills (Rush Dog only has a small AoE)
  • bad companion A.I. that still bugs out a lot
  • companion is too weak without constant feeding/high equipment reinforcement and not every stat can be upped at the trainer NPC

Btw, I had an Hunter>Falconer before, but I didn’t really like the many skills I had to use so I mostly wasted the full capabilities of the build; I especially disliked the idea to recast Pre-Emptive Strike every 60 seconds or the Falcon would inadvertently get stuck after the last use of a skill because, guess what, Falcon A.I. also sucks and bugs out with 100% certainty after using a skill manually, gg.

No idea what I’m gonna build into it after Rank 9, maybe I’ll go for Archer C3 or Falconer C1, although the premise of non-C3 Falconer is just Circling and nothing more pretty much :frowning:

#19

You will be disappointed in the end.

The problem of Hunter is that they don’t have any useful skill outside of Growling, and even then Growling area is so small that it need outside helping of a skills like Aiming.

Coursing and Retrieve are mediocre because in this game PVE when we need CC it’s against multiple monsters, don’t have any place where you want to disable a single enemy, and if it have, QS 1 with Stone Shot and even Full Draw do a way better job. Pointing is just as bad, it go after a single monster after another, taking a long time to agro a sizable amount of monsters

The pet A.I. is not only bad, it’s horrible, a lot of times you cast a skill and it go in cooldown without doing nothing.

And for classes with weapon restriction we have way better classes, like QS, Sapper and Wugushi for ranks 2,3 and 4 if needed. And Musket now can use more skills from Archer so that is a better option as well.

And Facloner don’t bug as much, and if it bugs, nothing like a Call or two don’t resolve, and at least the skill don’t go to cooldown without doing nothing.

#20

Circling does sometimes, due to terrain problems and IMC trickery.