The real questions is: How was the Fencer class important during that massive brawl?
You didn’t use any of Fencer skills to maintain aggro, the only Fencer skills you used were Preparation and Lunge(once)
If anything this video just proved how ineffective Fencer is at tanking/maintaining aggro against a herd of monsters.
uhhh that was before the pouncing update so it was pretty bad and didn’t help much. I didn’t use those to MAINTAIN aggro, just to get it since I could hit more mobs easily. That doesn’t mean fencer skills can’t do it, it’s just easier with others sometimes. Also before the hitbox updates that helped a LOT
I also guess you somehow completely missed the 4321432423 composee’s I casted. Whenever other classes skill cooldowns occur that’s when fencer shines. Most other swordsmen classes have to resort to regular attacking after blowing their AoE cooldowns. Where is the mass mob aggro maintenance then? Regular attacking? That’s worse than fencer skills in both range and capabilities
There’s just no getting through to you eh? Well that’s okay everyone is entitled to their own opinion
Well Fencer skills are exactly what we’re discussing, if Fencer skills didn’t do a good job, what other skills from other classes could have done a better job is what we should be asking ourselves.
Maybe Pelt 3 builds could’ve just spam Swashbuckling 15 on cooldown and that’d be enough
Maybe Squire C3’s can use Arrest 9 and that might have been enough.
How would a Dragoon do in that situation, how Dragoons skills could’ve impacted that situation in a way that Fencer skills couldn’t?
Don’t take this personally, i’m discussing whether or not Fencer is a good tank class.
I’m not discussing/judging your build as a whole, that’s not the point of this thread.
Yeah I’ve no idea what the point even was because I didn’t read before the post that gave me a notification in this thread (I probably should have)
Swashbuckle doesn’t really seem to generate and hold aggro when you’re playing with people that have reached a sort of soft cap in DPS with meta builds
Arrest doesn’t generate aggro (but it would do a decent job at locking down some enemies for the rest of your party to DPS but then you won’t be able to contribute any DPS yourself and during the duration other mobs can rush in without being arrested)
I have a 272 dragoon which is what I quit for my fencer actually, it wouldn’t do well at all from personal experience. I pretty much had to choose between holding C to survive and doing DPS to maintain aggro. This also IMO defeated the main point of dragoon - being able to use 2h spears, but that’s another discussion entirely. Playstyle wise I would just hold C and dragon tooth and serpentine with cancelling the final swing when they were off cooldown to attempt to hold aggro which wound up not working and I got extremely frustrated with the class and rerolled fencer to do a better job at tanking, dpsing, and surviving.
Oh and no worries I’m not taking it personally, quite a few people bring up the same issues you do to me regularly
Don’t worry man, from another fencer who constantly tops dps if there isnt a fletcher/wugu or gimmick icewall build. Fencers are by far the best sustained dps for swordsman and single target tanks in the game, its not even comparable. I will admit we struggle with very large groups of mobs, but if you went barb3 that becomes a non-issue with seism and pouncing. Even composee or flanc spam hits 5-8 targets now depending on size and gear, the hit boxes are massive now compared to what they were.
If you’re talking to me as well as implying I do the same, I don’t top dps ever. I’m lucky enough to even get ranked in the top 5-6. But the people I play with/see around are very strong dps builds anyway
The thing dragoon can do is, keep swap weapon between tank mode and dps mode. And burst dps during pain barrier.
Well on fencer I don’t have to swap and can be everything at once
weapon swap lag is also still a thing somehow
This is true, but don’t be baited into picking peltasta or rodelero. Fencer is pure damage and with C3 will have 2 big penalties for equipping a shield.
With the card system coming you’ll be able to get +7 aoe ratio from a single card and that will make barbarian completely useless since it’s less than half the damage of highlander (even though barb is higher rank 
)
it’s saying u need spear lunge at lv10 for 0% chance of the debuff being resisted in iToS. and that the damage bonus didn’t increase from lv1 in iToS.
But you don’t need to equip a shield to take advantage of the relevant peltasta skills. It’s not being baited to sacrifice a bit of damage for being a more useful party member
Aside from dragging mobs to you…
The +hp% from swash is really good and will always be relevant since it’s a percentage scale
The evasion from guardian is amazing (though, perhaps not so great if we get the guardian change, I have hopes they will change their mind about the -% attack scaling though)
As far as your cards are concerned, +7 AoE attack ratio is…almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. That’s two more medium sized mobs (which most mobs you’ll encounter are). You’ll also be sacrificing card slots that could help to increase your DPS instead.
Not to mention if we get to keep the current state of linker and buy joint penalty with rank 8, the AoE attack ratio will serve even less of a purpose
No, it’s 3 more medium mobs. 4 if you previously had an odd number AoE attack ratio. Linker is not capable of linking a significant % of the mobs in ET.
Concentrate gives 4% extra STR scaling and 2% extra DEX to attack per skill level which gives a lot of value to swordsman C2 and C3.
Highlander’s cartar stroke is 600% attack scaling and is as strong as the R7 skill dragontooth. Skyliner with bleed is 400% attack scaling. Double Slash and Moulinet’s huge boosts to crit chance will have enormous extra value with Fencer C3’s Epee Stance which boosts crit damage. etc.
IMC is doing a smart thing giving an attack penalty to guardian. The extra evasion can easily be made up for now with the shade dancer and shade skirt equipment if you care about that.
Also, barbarian skills are so weak that even the ability to hit some extra mobs doesn’t allow them to equal the damage of highlander for example.
Especially since at the end of the day there’s bosses to fight too.
Concentrate additional damage really adds up to almost nothing because it just gets added at the end of the damage formula (according to skill description anyway)
and idk in my testing it takes 3 more AoE attack ratio to hit 1 more medium sized mob, but I still wouldn’t sacrifice a huge amount of damage to hit a couple more mobs
As far as the rest of the discussion, I was referring to only one circle (pelt vs another single circle) so that excludes skyliner, double slash, and moulinet. I don’t think I’d like to get in to a discussion about 7 ranks worth of a class build because there’s always good points from everyone’s sides but they basically always wind up being the same thing and its just been discussed so many times over and over again I don’t want to say the same stuff that has already been said
That being said, where does the 600% attack scaling come from for cartar stroke? I’m actually curious and am interested to see if I overlooked something because I don’t see anything about %s for it except for the collision damage attribute
No, evasion can’t easily be made up for with shade equips, 18% can be a lot more than the evasion from shade equips (not to mention shades evasion could just get multiplied as well) and you lose SO much def which is pretty significant
With your claims at the end, I feel like you haven’t checked out barbarian since the most recent buff patch, I mean even for highlander and other future class rank relevancy you’d want to fit in at least one circle of barbarian somewhere for the cleave slash debuff and 50 crit rate
Cartar stroke is 4 hits. Each hit is 150% scaling for a total of 600%
Seism is 1 hit with 150%-250% scaling (can’t remember) the damage is then divided up to give the illusion of 3 hits.
I see that you’re not familiar with the hard cap of 80% on evasion. You can hit this with only around 100 dex and shade equipment.
Small = 1 AoE ratio
Medium = 2 AoE ratio
Large = 3 AoE ratio
To every hit. It wouldn’t be unusual for concentrate alone to add 45,000 damage to rush using a galin trident, for example. Really adds up to nothing, huh?
I’m actually very familiar with it. To reach the 80%(up to 85%, actually according to tos mechanics) evasion cap in EVERY case with the current mobs you need 1235 evasion
How do you know it’s 150% scaling? I don’t see where this comes from
Unfortunately unless they changed it recently galin trident doesn’t work like that (and tbh either way 45k really isn’t that much damage in the grand scheme of things). It actually just visually represents one line of damage as 3 lines split at certain percentages while not giving you any more damage
That’s only panto archers in ET. They are not dangerous so building evasion around their insane accuracy would be moronic.
Yes, it does work like that. Concentrate and blessing are applied to every line of every hit- even seism, earth wave, doom spike, and galin trident divided hits.
Average case for evasion cap is still pretty high, 1025 for 85% cap and a bit lower for 80%. it’d be pretty difficult to reach that still without the evasion boost from guardian
but now I’m curious about that additional damage (assuming this really is the case) - would concentrate make using a galin trident more DPS than using some other high end 2h spear?
edit:
Okay, i just tested it and it’s pretty consistent because fencer doesn’t have to worry about min-max damage.
So here’s my seism with no concentrate on:
5872+2455+2441
that’s 10,768 damage
Now, with concentrate on
5298+3432+2149
10,879
10,879-10768 = 111 exactly
and
Try it on something weak to slash. I did see someone saying concentrate isn’t t4 anymore. It could be getting multiplied.
Seism is a fake multihit skill and therefore will only benefit from something like Blessing/Concentrate once. Things like Stabbing/Rush, etc will get +111 from each hit.
And yes, Concentrate and Blessing will not scale with attributes or any other multiplier as well. Unsure about armor type weakness, but I do think it is constant there as well.
15,102 - concentrate
14,991 - no concentrate
Yeah I know but the claim was that it applied to each line of fake multihit skills. I can’t comment on the rest but it seems like it doesn’t work for seism at least