Standard Tactics

[Mangala]

So, what tactics do we get, what ones should we look at using and all stuff related to Standards now we are Rank 5!!!!

PS looking for another Standard Bearer

[Kurtt]

Mememememememememeeeeeeeeee

[Mangala]

You know a Warrior Priest could be a good choice, after all you guys dont do anything on the field anyway

[Kurtt]

You know a Warrior Priest could be a good choice, after all you guys dont do anything on the field anyway

Lies dammit. We look sexy. That is our roll

[Caradir]

doesnt really matter who standard bearers are as we assign/ unassign as required really, to suit who is online at any time.

[Mangala]

Stolen this from another board, but its very handy for imparting a little know-how on Standards.

All guilds get one at Rank5 and you can name 2 people as standard bearers. The standard can be planted in the battlefield to give it's effect to all current party members. In tesjavascript:void(0);ting it looks like the effects go to your warband too, as long as they are in range. More on that in a minute.

First off, have your GM name you as a Standard bearer. You can check like this:



The red circle shows you the icon saying that I am a standard bearer. You can buy a standard and now equip it. It goes right between your weapons on your character's profile sheet. Put it there and drag it down to a toolbar like this:



Now that you have it equipped you can click the action bar button whenever you want to and you go into a ten-second channel of deploying it. You can move while doing this and damage does NOT stop the channel. Clicking the button again will stow the standard and bring your weapons back out.



So once you have the thing deployed you get two new actions like this:



The left hand one is the action to plant the standard and the other is a nice little shield buff:



Interesting note about the buff: It reduces incoming damage to almost nothing (1 point or so) and lasts for 15 seconds. It takes you 10 seconds to put the thing away, so if your attacked you can trigger the shield and put the standard away while taking trivial damage. Once it's put up, you bring your weapons back out and are ready to dance. Basically if you ever drop one in battle, well, you weren't paying attention.

So planting it puts the standard down for all the world to see your guild's glory and honor! It even highlights with your guild's name over the top. Of course once you plant it you can go about your business attacking and killing. Friendly players cannot grab it, but hostile players can, don't let that happen! When they attempt to grab it any sort of damage resets their channeling attempt so just keep hammering on them.



Here's is an idea of how far away you can be and still get the standard's effects. One step further back and I lose my buffs:




The standard can be planted for 1 hour before decaying (at a cost of 2g per standard, that's expensive!) so be careful with them. Pick it back up whenever you like and enjoy!

[Caradir]

sweet so theres no real reason for losing a banner except through carelessness

sure i saw somewhere that at another guild rank you get the ability to do an aoe throwback with the standard, so if enemies get close pound the ground and they go flying. 

also as guild gains rank there can be more standard bearers and ofc 3 different types of standard.

[Mangala]

Went with a 5% toughness tactic for our first tactic point, not sure if it actually cost anything though - renown or gold or whatever...

[Mangala]

Something for all who can add tactics to standards to bear in mind:

offensive tactic per banner, one defensive and one buff.

[Mangala]

Bumping this as we hit Rank 13 and unlocked the 3rd standard tactic slot.

And as I said above, we are only allowed one of each type of tactic per slot.

http://warhammeronline.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_guild_tactics

Finally found an out of game list!!!

I shal let Vac or Thar say whats equipped at mo, as I cant recall myself :S

[Nushka]

I think last time this game up in /gu someone suggested AP regen as this is useful to everyone, and at the time i thought that was a good idea. Its non specific and can be useful no matter where it is plonked (technical term..plonked)

[Stephen]

Here's my take on banners.

While we have only one banner it should probably be filled with tactics that everyone can use. Endurance for toughness, Vigor for AP and Wisdom for Willpower seems like the best set-up for the whole group.

Once we have multiple banners we could obviously consider having different banners for different purposes, although I'm not sure of the practicality of having multiple banners. There are so many possibilities, I guess we won't know until we try it.

Also, I'm not sure how the different banners work, I know all of the banners are purchasable from quartermasters so I assume any standard bearer can use any standard if they have one of each in their inventory. Is this right?

Possible banner set-ups:

A Support Banner (Wisdom, Mending, Vigor) for the support and an Assault/Defence Banner (Brawn, Endurance, Magic Avoidance) for those up at the pointy end. Has the advantage that you could plant them up to 100 feet apart and retain the vast majority of the benefits. Would probably only work on defence though, where the enemy don't just have the option of going round the Assault/Defence group.

And my take on the individual tactics:

Enhanced Brawn - Increases Strength by 5%/10%/15%.
Very nice for melee classes obviously poor for everyone else.

Enhanced Endurance - Increases Toughness by 5%/10%/15%.
Good for everyone, although obviously better for people who stack toughness. As an aside toughness vs wounds is an interesting discussion we should have.

Enhanced Readiness - Increases Initiative by 5%/10%/15%.
I'm not really convinced Initiative is worth having. Being uncrittable sounds nice but it's not documented how this stacks up with bonus crit chance. I doubt anyone stacks it (which is required for percentage increases to be valuable), therefore this seems a pretty poor.

Enhanced Knowledge - Increases Intelligence by 5%/10%/15%.
Obviously very nice for offensive casters, which is not that great a portion of the population. Swings between decent and poor depending upon group make-up.

Enhanced Wisdom - Increases Willpower by 5%/10%/15%.
Increases heals and disrupt. Although even on healers stacking Willpower I think the disrupt is negligible, you'd hope everyone would benefit from better healing.

Enhanced Aim - Increases Ballistic Skill by 5%/10%/15%.
Good for classes whose skills increase with BS, useless to everyone else.

Enhanced Reflexes - Increases Weapon Skill by 5%/10%/15%.
WS is like Initiative, I'm not convinced it's a good stat. Negligible parry chance, and armour penetration which just isn't good. Melee shouldn't really be hitting tanks too often (magic is the tank killer) and it's not really worth penetrating a squishy's armour.

Forceful Weapons - Increases critical hit chance with melee by 2%.
OK for melee, but probably not as good as 5% more strength, never mind 15% more strength. From my experience as a non-strength-stacking tank I'd say more than 40% of my damage comes from strength, which (I think) is the point where 5% strength looks better than 2% crit.

Forceful Bolts - Increases critical hit chance with ranged attacks by 2%.
Same with this in comparison to BS.

Forceful Magic - Increases critical hit chance with magic by 2%.
And this versus Intelligence.

Forceful Mending - Increases critical heal chance by 2%.
And, guess what, this pales in comparison to Willpower.

Arrow Avoidance - Increases Dodge chance by 2%.
Just plain poor.

Blade Avoidance - Increases Parry chance by 2%.
Poor.

Magic Avoidance - Increases Disrupt chance by 2%.
Probably the best of the avoidance buffs due to the fact it works against *all* offensive spells, but still not great.

Weapon Deflection - Increases Armor by 5%.
Tanks don't need more armour (they should all be over the 75% cap anyway), squishies have so little armour that 5% is uselss and armour penetration skills abound. Poor.

Corporeal Deflection - Increases Corporeal resistance by 5%.
I'm not really into casters but I think BWs/Sorcs do a lot of corporeal damage, as do magi. Still, 5% against one school doesn't seem that great, 2% disrupt is more consistently useful.

Elemental Deflection - Increases Elemental resistance by 5%.
BWs/Sorcs primary damage. Decent I suppose but not as good as 2% disrupt.

Spirit Deflection - Increases Spirit resistance by 5%.
There's not that much spiritual damage flying about really. Poor.

Enhanced Training - Increases Experience gain by 3%.
Pointless, you're much better off slotting a skill that will let you kill more and reap the extra XP and renown that way.

Enhanced Glory - Increases Renown gain by 5%.
Same as above.

Enhanced Fame - Increases Influence gain by 5%.
Who uses banners in PvE? I suppose it could go into a specialist banner build.

Thornshield - Deals 10 damage back to the attacker when struck by a melee attack.
Possibly the most useless ever. Not enough damage to be meaningful and completely negated by a HoT, oh I don't know, every half hour or so.

Enhanced Vigor - Increases Action Point regain rate by 10%/20%/30%.
Absolutely fantastic, everyone needs more AP. It allows more healing, more sustained burst damage. More everything. A must on every banner I'd say, unless you're planning on overlapping banners.

Suppress Destruction - Reduces the chance that you will suffer a critical hit by 2%.
Again, poor, although as it should apply to physical and magical damage one of the better mitigation skills.

[Jarkko]

Just to point out a teeny weeny point: Healing Warrior Priests don't need extra AP's that much, it's RF we are always short of (I did whack a rank 40 siege pad for over 15 minutes without going AP dry at any point, and I used an ability after every GCD). *But* this is just one of the three specs for one of the ten classes, so I guess "everybody needs more AP" is a good enough way to say it



For healing, Willpower scales depending on spell between 0.3 and 0.6 healing for 1 Willpower. Thus Willpower is not actually a no-brainer when compared with +2% crits to heals, on the contrary!

Lets say we have a heal that heals for 500 and has a co-efficency of 0.6, and the character has 300 Willpower. The effective healing thus is 680. Lets look at the two initial standard tactics affecting this

1) 5% extra Willpower: 300 becomes 315 willpower, thus the effective healing would be 689, an increase of a bit under 1%

2) 2% extra crit on heals: Over time it means 2% extra healing.

It is good to notice that purely from healing point of view only the +15% Willpower is more efficient than the +2% crits from heals. However, there is the additional Disrupt from Willpower, but even considering that I think the +2% crit on heals is at least comparable to +10% Willpower.

Purely for healing again, the +5% Willpower is better (if casting only co-efficieny 0.6 heals that have a baseline healing of 500) than +2% crit only if the caster has about 800 Willpower or more.


Strength adds 0.2 DPS to abilities, so its co-efficiency is even lower than heals. Thus +2% melee crit is way better than +5% strength unless you happen to have massive amounts of strength.


There is already a discussion going on about Toughness and Wounds at http://handsofjustice.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=229.0 , but it seems to attract quite little attention. In my opinion Toughness and Wounds and which to value more in which situation is one of the more interesting question regarding the mechanics

[Mangala]

As a guild levels it opens up 3 levels of banners.

First is what we have now, 2 SB titles and 1 banner setup. Thats 2 banners in the field at once, both with same setup mind.

Next at 18 or so is a further 2 Sb titles and the chance to field another 2 banners using a different setup to the first. Thats 4 total banners in the field. 2 of one setup, 2 of another.

At a higher level we get another 2 Sb titles and the chance to field yet another 2 banners using different setups to the prior 2 level banners. So 6 in field, 3 pairs of setups in total.

Remember when choosing banner setups we currently we are limited to purchased tactics (cannot be changed I am afraid, once a point is spent its spent) and also one of each type on a stanard. Standards have tactic slots that unlock at different levels too, so until we hit 13 yesterday we didnt have 3 slots available, only two, so tended to stick with AP regen and Toughness.

One issue with switching tacs out, is its a 24hr cooldown on changing again.  Which with 1 banner setup at mo, is hardwork when we do use them.

[Gunnarr]

Remember when choosing banner setups we currently we are limited to purchased tactics (cannot be changed I am afraid, once a point is spent its spent) and also one of each type on a stanard. Standards have tactic slots that unlock at different levels too, so until we hit 13 yesterday we didnt have 3 slots available, only two, so tended to stick with AP regen and Toughness.

I didn't quite get this. Can we change banner tactics with a 24h cooldown or not at all?
What other type of tactics become available except for the purchased ones?