Anyone have any advice for my TM strategy? (in General)

Hi folks,

Although I consider myself a CB1 veteran, I am starting to believe that I am very much a CB2 newbie when it comes to strategy.

I want to use a Tank-Mage (Mage-Tank?) strategy for my character The Mushies, and I've gone by instinct so far. I have seen some surprisingly in-depth strategy discussions in this forum but I just can't seem to keep up. And so far I can't get my score more than about 5% higher than my power rating. :(

My tank is using a Tattoo of Jigorokano and an Enforcer's crossbow. I used to use the biggest heavy crossbow in the game but I bought the exbow thinking it will retain its value better. My mage uses Cone of Cold. I have heavily favored my mage when buying/upgrading armor so that he will last longer and fire off more chilly blasts.

I slightly favor dexterity when training experience on my tank, and I go about 1/3 HP and 2/3 CoC when training my mage.

That's about all there is to my strategy. Does anyone have any advice? I'd especially like to hear ideas using a Tattoo of Flame or a Tattoo of Ice, since very few people seem to be using them. Unfortunately I would guess that the Tattoo of Ice would need a 3 or 4 minion team with Ablative Shield so that the familiar survives long enough to do damage. I imagine this would be less important for the ToF.

I'm only interested in a 2 minion tank/mage strategy for irrational reasons (one of which is that the character is named after a band that has two members)

Thanks a lot for anything you come up with!

Cheers,
--aia

you seem a little vulnerable to mages imo

First things first, I'd recommend putting AMF in there somewhere - you're leaving yourself open to mage attacks.

The thing to look at is that you have CoC, which is a great DD spell but obviously it doesn't hit until melee. You have a ToJ, which unless you're only using it as a meatshield also doesn't attack until melee. So your tank needs to cover the gap - ranged. Make it a ranged specific tank and you'll probably find you win more battles. So I would be looking at whether or not you could do more damage with archery.

You might also look at getting a ToE for your mage, especially with the new changes regarding endurance and AMF.

Thanks to both of you.

What about using a Tattoo of Flame for damage before the melee rounds?

Also, I think I can only equip one tattoo on my character. If I equip a second one on my mage the ToJ drops off my tank.

Yeah it's a pain to only be able to use one! Stick with the ToJ for the time being. If you go for a ToF you will need AS, because it will get killed before it has a chance to do any decent damage. That's the one to look at though because of it's ranged attacks.

ToFs has one issue, being CoBFs.. otherwise it's the better DD tattoo imo.
and.. if you could have one tattoo/minion, I can predict there would be only 4minion teams :)

I was thinking about the AMF suggestion and I'm not sure how I'd want to do it. If I train it on the tank it will suffer magic penalties from any good tank armor I equip. If I train it on the mage I would have to spread experience out between HP, AMF, and CoC... how much AMF would it take to reasonably protect me from mages?

As you're only training up HP/CoC on the mage I'd put it there. You only need small amounts to make a difference. Obviously the bigger the amount the better. If you are going to keep the tank as he is then you don't want to dilute the stats any more than they are already.

AMF doesn't necessarily need to be huge to protect against mages. I'm not too far away from you in score and I've got an AMF of about 8000. It cuts down a fair amount of damage. you can then just leave it for a while until you start to notice that it isn't as effective. As an extra on a two minion team you don't need to pour XP into it that often.

Finally before I shut up for the day - don't worry too much about your score/pr gap. Take a look at the top characters in the game - most of those don't have a huge gap between the two. The old CB1 way of checking how well you are doing - score being twice your pr - doesn't seem to work in CB2. Also remember that you're in a clan - most clan fighters seem to have a problem keeping their score more than 5% higher than pr due to the amount of attacks they sustain.

I just recently added a MM mage to turn my single archer into a 2 minion team and you could definitely do worse. I'm sure there are good arguments for/against any of the damage spells, but having MM means you get 2 spells off in ranged and if you have a decent ToJ your mage should at least live through that and a few melee rounds to contribute.

As far as the tank goes, Archery is almost a must if you are going to stick with just the 2 minions, I don't have much experience with xbows but using a compound and getting 3 shots in ranged with a high str/dex does wonders. Your survivability against most teams is going to rest on how much damage you can do before melee starts, especially against single FB/COC mages.

As to AMF, if you plan your armor wisely you won't suffer much of a magic penalty. I've been keeping AMF around half of my HP and it's been enough to make a significant difference. Even against single mage teams it usually stops enough damage to let me survive long enough to finish them. Right now my tank has 147 AC in what i'd consider fairly "heavy" armor(granted it's almost exclusively rares, but this is long term planning) and I'm only losing 3k on a 32k AMF. It would probably be more efficient to have a minion doing AMF exclusively but if you are sticking with 2 minions, it won't kill you doing it on the tank.

I addition to all that has been said, you might want to move the ToJ on to your mage. This will allow you to equip either tank specific armour, or heavy armour on your tank. You lose a MCM/LA slot and CoI slot on the mage in doing this, and the tank loses a little protection (from a meat shield in front of it).

:)

Your TM set up is good. Use to ToJ and don't even think about ToF. ToF = not TM strat, you need AS for it so more like a EM. Here what you do:

TM, with ToJ on Mage. Train Mage: HP/COC/AMF. TM with HP/Dex/STR. You may want to add EC for effect but that is pretty much a good set up. Your ToJ will let your mage survive until melee round (not counting seeker). Your tank will soak up damage on range and deal range damage. Don't bother with BL on your tank unless he has a good chance to survive until melee. You can replace to ToJ with a ToE for your mage if you can afford one and try new strat.

Many good points. I think I will try AMF on my mage, maybe I'll start winning some battles vs. mages.

Here's the story on who gets the ToJ:

On the tank, it serves as a meat shield and some extra damage. I imagine this would allow the tank to survive a bit longer, which means more opportunity to deal big tank damage. This assumes that the ToJ does significantly less damage than the tank, which is what I see using a ToJ lvl ~34k on a ~65k PR character.

On the mage, it is shielded by the tank (from stuff that comes head on). Also, I get to dress up my tank in some serious armor.

I think I will keep my ToJ on my tank for a while, because at the moment I don't have the dough to clothe my tank appropriately. Maybe when I'm rich, I'll move it to the mage.

I appreciate all the thoughtful replies, thanks again.