MarvelatMee

Originally Posted by EricHough

For a melee bane you want all the melee mace attacks, as the ranged mace attacks all pretty much suck except for poison ray, which makes a ok filler attack at low levels and a way to take out runners. Some folks take venom grenade because it is such a great debuff but I only played my mace bane build while solo (had a huntsman as my alternate, group build) and found that it was better to stay concentrated on single, hard targets. Then you take surveillance for the resistance debuff and at higher levels pick up shatter armor from the mace mastery pool for another heavy duty attack that also debuffs resistance (20%).

From level 24 on your attack chain will be (from Stealth for the large stealth strike) Shatter -> Bash->Pulverize with poisonous ray as a filler. I took Placate for extra crits from shatter, but I am not sure it was worth it - the crit on shatter is good, but not as good as a stalkers crit. Add surveillance at 28 (which you can use without breaking strealth) and Crowd control at 32. Then you can keep mobs bouncing around with shatter + crowd control. Once you get shatter armor at 44 you will be able to do a ton of single target damage (there is no mace redraw between the bane mace powers and the patron pool mace powers).

Defensively try to get as much melee def as you can - now that the fitness pool is free its fairly easy to fit in tough + weave and well worth it as banes DO have some resistances to stack with tough (7.5% to all in the bane spider armor upgrade). I found my bane to be a good solo char who worked best when I turned on bosses and cranked up the level, as they do a lot of hard single targets.

For the huntsman the general strategy is to try to cap ranged def, push up recharge and take all the huntsman attacks: single shot, burst, heavy burst, venom grenade and frag grenade. Add in WaWG and your strategy is to web mobs in place and mow them down from range. The basic soldier gun attacks are all fairly fast activating and do good damage, get a decent amount of global recharge (or take hasten) and you will have them up most of the time as well. From the bane trees you take the bane spider armor upgrade, cloaking device (for the def and stealth), surveillance and maybe build up if you don't mind the weapon swap animation at the start of a fight (you have to draw the mace to fire off build up). I decided that double stacking assault (TT:assault + leadership pool assault) for 30% damage buff all the time with no redraw was better, but YMMV.

At higher levels another option for the huntsman is to add in more area attacks from the patron pools. On mine I dropped frag grenade (due to its small area - its a nice attack otherwise) and picked up arctic breath and bile spray from leviathan mastery. Arctic breath adds another -15% resistance debuff to venom grenades -20% (for -35% to all resistances) and bile spray is toxic damage, so it gets double the debuff from venom grenade (40% instead of 20%). Personal choice here - I think this option does a little more AE and adds more to the team but it isn't as fast and you have to be ok with your character spewing all over the place.

Originally Posted by Myrdinn

Sorry I missed; don't count on me until (likely) I buy a new MB. Apparently, the one year warranty on my current one was actually the declaration of lifespan. :-S

Originally Posted by Luna de Nocturne

This week I plan on dragging my hvac out as soon as we zone into the door. Where I hadn't done the TF before, I didn't realize that BM would be *right there* when we zoned. Then all the issues with the blue goo started happening.... so this week, drag the hvac out first, debuff BM, and then run around the map trying not to die (and thus killing the Hvac) (oh, and rezzing E's corpse).

Originally Posted by Master-Blade

I tried joining one in the early afternoon, but the leader was clueless and kinda spaced out. We waited about 5 minutes for them to get back from PI just to talk to contact. By then, the server hotfix announcement was displayed, so we just left. There was no way we were going to be done in time. lol

Then I was invited to another STF later in the day (with Myrdinn) and it went beautifully. A couple of people didn't seem to know much, but the rest of the team filled in the gaps and made up for it. It ran rather quickly and I don't even think anybody died. We probably could have run it as "Mo". Good times.