Falconer - Pre-emptive Strike DPS question

[zellista]

I just came back to the game after a long hiatus, so I’m wondering what has changed with Pre-emptive’s mechanics.

Phesant currently does more damage than Sonic Strike, so would it be more DPS to only learn Phesant? Or does Pre-emptive have separate cooldowns for both skills?

[Enkii]

If you don’t have one of the skills, the Hawk will use a free level 1 version of it. There are no attributes to disable one or the other like before.

From my experience, it will just randomly select one of the two skills. Like, you might see the Hawk casting two consecutive Sonic Strike.

Sonic Strike still does a decent DPS, specially if you have some investment in the attribute, it’s just that it has a really small AoE.

[IHadesI]

Also, Pre-emptive Strike has a separate cooldown from the other skills, it doesnt matter if Phesant or Sonic Strike are on cooldown, if you have Pre-emptive Strike on, it’ll use the skill every 5 secs regardless of the other skills cooldown

Ohh and yes, Phesant is big boy damage, always max that, i like to max Tomahawk too and use spare points on Sonic Strike, but you can totally max it instead for Pre-emptive strike, up to you really, the important one is Phesant

[zellista]

If you don’t have one of the skills, the Hawk will use a free level 1 version of it. There are no attributes to disable one or the other like before.

Wait, so the skill description is wrong? It says you must learn the skill first for it to auto cast.

Also, Pre-emptive Strike has a separate cooldown from the other skills, it doesnt matter if Phesant or Sonic Strike are on cooldown, if you have Pre-emptive Strike on, it’ll use the skill every 5 secs regardless of the other skills cooldown

Yea I understand that the skill cool down itself does not affect pre-emptive, but right now pheasant is doing like 70% more damage than sonic strike + larger aoe radius. If not learning sonic strike lets me get only pheasant auto cast by pre-emptive, it should technically do more DPS than having both skills learned.

But if pre-emptive will still cast sonic strike even if I only learn pheasant, then I would have to max sonic strike regardless.

[7aniki]

i ended up maxing both pheasant sonic because i have 22AAR from just lv 3 circling

[Enkii]

Wait, so the skill description is wrong? It says you must learn the skill first for it to auto cast.

Descriptions can be misleading or completly wrong in-game, it’s nothing new and it gets patched later if the devs have nothing else to do. lol Most likely they didn’t update it correctly when the changes to Pre-Emptive Strike came to iTOS.

I did the test a while back, if it has changed recently I have no clue.

<Re:build> Falconer-Mergen

Funny thing when I was testing the new Pre-Emptive Strike, I had allocated a single skill point into it to test if it would cast any of the skills on level one without investing into them. It does, no matter if you have allocated points or not. The funny bit is that the game gives you the level 1 skills temporarily, and yes you can cast it on your hotbar. lol [20191029114406_1] Notice that I still have 44/45 skill points. After changing channels it goes back to normal.

[IHadesI]

But if pre-emptive will still cast sonic strike even if I only learn pheasant, then I would have to max sonic strike regardless.

Ohh ohhh gotcha, i missunderstood your question

But yeah;

Wait, so the skill description is wrong? It says you must learn the skill first for it to auto cast.

Pretty much, like Enkii said, it’ll cast the lvl 1 version of the skill even if you haven’t learn it, so yes, the tooltip is misleading

So since it’ll cast Sonic Strike no matter what, it is better to dump some points into it, i personally dont max it but im sure its ok if you do