Warshade Questions

Hello, all!

I'm returning from about a 6 month break from CoH, and I was a pretty casual player prior to my departure, but I really want to get into the Warshade AT.

To make a long story short, part of me is a min/maxer, and I really struggle with the fact that shape changing doesn't allow a lot of other toggles/passives to work. On the other side of the coin, I also do like shapeshifting, and I see it as a bit like a druid from WoW (I know, WoW...).

Anyway, the problems I had with Warshades prior to leaving were the following:

1. I find slotting very very difficult on Warshades. I was used to semi tight builds with my scrappers (My main AT), but holy cow...

2. What are some of the various ways that I could play my Warshade? I see a lot of talk about the tri-form and human only variants, and I mainly want a solid hero that can team and solo very well. Can anyone help me with that?

3. Mainly, I'm looking for someone to maybe chat with a bit or to provide some guidance to a newbie! I know there are a lot of stickies and stuff that I've read through, but it always seems to help to get another perspective on things!

Thanks for any and all comments!

Head to the player guides - or find any post by Dechs_Kaison and read his "MF Warshade" guide. It's great for getting a handle on things, including the warshade mindset. No builds provided, and yes, slotting is tight. On the plus side, you don't have to worry about trying to fit stamina in.

Edit: Here. (for the guide.)

See my Guides and Tutorials

Bill beat me to the topic by a long shot (and thanks!), but yeah, that guide is intended to be appropriate for all audiences that want to get into a Tri Form Warshade. In my opinion, that's the best way to go. Again, that's only an opinion.

Slotting is going to be tight, but you can get a lot of mileage out of "one slot wonders" and frankenslotting (using set IOs as if they were hamis).

Tri Form and human only are the most popular variations, I think... but human/dwarf and human/nova are both viable. Leaving out nova reduces some of your damage potential and leaving out dwarf removes some of your buffs and mez protection, however, you'll be able to slot more human powers that way and make use of passives like Stamina or toggles like Maneuvers.

You're more than welcome to PM me or /tell me in game to ask any questions you like. If you're on Virtue, I can even give you demonstrations. Hope to see you around, have fun being purple!

Thank you, to the both of you, for your replies. I had previously leveled a Warshade to 14 during my last stay in CoH, and I'm honestly thinking of just rerolling one to get a fresh start.

One of the main things that I struggled with was the fact that I was used to playing my Claws / WP scrapper. I don't know if you guys have much experience playing scrappers, but I could essentially walk into a group of 4-10 enemies or an Elite Boss or practically anything and completely tear them to shreds.

I'm sure that will come with time with a Warshade, but I feel like the class is so incomplete at level 14! My strategy had pretty much been to hop into a pack, pop sunless mire, shift to nova, line up my AOEs, single target the stragglers. This seemed to work decently well, but it was a bit of a crap shoot...Some enemies would just tear me apart since I had practically no defenses.

It is exciting, yet daunting, but I hope I can just plug into the Warshade playstyle and not look back.

I have a 40 WS that I love playing. However, I struggled until about 32 with many of the same questions you had.

What I found that worked for me was that the WS seems best at being a human (using those powers in human form predominantly) and using the two other forms for teaming (if a team was short on tanking/scrapping or needed a nuker) or for specific instances or against specific mob-types.

The powers that the WS gets in human form are pretty powerful. I focused on Sunless Mire, Gravity Well, Stygian Circle, and Eclipse to power up, do a lot of damage, and recover as I needed to. Has worked very well for me. While many say it isn't great, and I agree you have to be careful with it especially early on, I also found Orbiting Death, especially once you could couple it with Inky Aspect, quite useful.

I took a PB up to 50 and found that they were better (for me) as a constant changer. I spent as much time in tank and nuke form as I did in human form (maybe more!). However, I found the opposite true of WSs... the powers of the human form are just so good and the tank form in particular is not as "tank-ish" (more like a brute or a really tough scrapper than a tank) with this set, that I felt I would be limiting my strengths if I didn't focus more on the human form and its abilities.

Anyway, that's my two cents worth.

Don't forget to respec! And when you do, scroll down on the inherent powers when slotting. At level three, you can start slotting those nova and dwarf attacks! That generally eases a little of the slotting crunch pre-22.