Decay - Please explain (in General)

This spell is very interesting.

Yet no one uses it.

Convince me on it, I'd like to include this in future strategies of mine, but I've never liked using weapons and DD on the same character. And as I've always favoured CoC out of the DD spells, I've never had any need for decay...

But it looks interesting, so if you've gotten it to work well in the past (prefferably higher level characters as I'm not interesting in farm strategies... but hey, why not).. convince me that it's good. :)

Thanks! :)

Decay is easly beaten by AMF.

how so? if it is, go with the RoS, DM protection :)

I had a 4minion EEWT toa team before.AMF/VA on 1st AMF/HASTE on 2nd standard wall with base decay and last toa tank.How it work is basically enemy will have either dm or amf so when vs amf team i lost decay but with VA and haste toa tank is unstopable during melee. If enemy is dm team i will have my decay which make sure i kill 1minions each round.. But it was before ToA nerf and RoS don't think it work as well now.

Decay. Mmm. I've used it in the past. I always just trained up a base decay. When my main targets were FB/DM mages it was useful but not essential to beat them. But a small AMF kills it stone dead. So, train it up people say. But personally I think you're better off investing in CoC or MM if you plan on investing in a DD spell. Decay doesn't kill your opponents. That's obvious. So if they're a large minion you can get rid of half their HP in one stroke. But you can do that with a large CoC or FB as well. And then in the next round kill them.

Having said that it's one of my favourite CB things. A base decay costs next to nothing and yet can have devasting effects. Nice.

Sorry if this sounds like fence sitting - when it works it is one of the most useful spells. But it's too easily negated for general use. Still it's cheap. Unless you're planning on investing lots of xp into it.

Urgh. Hangovers...

Mantra, if it's not trained high enough.
But otherwise, it's as resistant to AMF as anything else.. from memory anyway, I never did find any reliable stats on decay.

Chelon, that's not a bad idea. Only problem is that against AMF, once your tank has chewed up the enchanters (usually in ranged anyway) the decay fires at a wall/tank/mage and as it's reflected back at your wall... well, you take a pretty big hit. - Again, not entirely sure on that, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Almost forgot my favourite thing about decay - like protection you can train a base spell on a minion that has a mage shield. Mage shield reduces enchantments/spells to base not zero. And base decay still casts for full effect.

Johnny, yeah, I figured it's a big penalty seeing as when you train more into it, it becomes more resistant to AMF, but against opponents who don't train AMF, it's completely wasted EXP.

But anyway, the key to it seems to be firing one or two shots at the strongest minion.
The thing is though, with todays walls... it strikes me as a great chance to double it's effectiveness, you get to do 2-4 big hits... unless it runs into an MgS...
This is looking less and less impressive by the minute.

ToA tank mostly finish off battles within 4-5 melee(must have weapon close to allowance all time)..in my opinion wall only job is to keep tank alive or just be there to reduce coc and fb damge. when against amf your wall will last fully effective for 3 range round and 1-2 melee rounds which should be enough since your tank have VA. But again this is back when ToA give good st and there is no Ros which do both dm/amf same time...

Decay is more trouble than it's worth, IMO.

"Decay is more trouble than it's worth, IMO. "

Hence the reason I want to use it. :)

Decay always targets the first minion (I thought it targetted the minion with the largest HP, butit doesn't..) and inflicts 1/2 HP damage (bar AMF reduction) ignoring any protection.

It would be more useful if it targetted the minion with the highest HPs.

Also, PL is nice for stopping Decay.

And you need some other form of damage on the team to actually kill with.

On the whole, a VB is probably better.

Unless you do the base Decay on a MgS Wall thing.

Ok, some stats, just in case they're useful. I had started training Decay just to have my enchanter do something useful other than cast & die. UserFriendly, bartjan's char, has the 4th largest AMF according to stats. The decay on my minion Upir stands at 373k. bartjan casts a 0.81 AMF on Upir. Impact of Upir during melee then reads:

Upir takes damage from his own Decay (11665)!
Upir's Decay hit Pitr [10305]
.
Upir takes damage from his own Decay (11193)!
Upir's Decay hit Dust Puppy [48984]
.
Upir takes damage from his own Decay (10739)!
Upir's Decay hit Dust Puppy [27877]
.
Upir takes damage from his own Decay (10305)!
Upir's Decay hit Dust Puppy [7861]
.
Upir takes damage from his own Decay (9887)!
Upir's Decay hit Dust Puppy for no damage

Btw,Upir is wearing a ToE - not sure whether that has an impact on AMF damage suffered.

I used to have a decay mage on an EEMT with a ToE 1st E was all AS, 2nd E was AMF/GA, T had a TSA MgS and all the good boosting elven gear and a HoE. The decay mage i trained like a CoC mage 1/2 hp then max decay it worked rather well the mage weakened big targets in melee and the tank cleaned them up. A base decay would have never worked for this (I had the 2nd highest decay in the game i think) as it had to be big enough to not be nerfed by AMF. The key was the ToE on the mage to reduce AMF backlash. And decay tears Walls apart as it completely ignores anything but AMF.

i have a decay mage strat im gonna use on my next char and i actually that it will work but if i post it it will gat flamed and ill feel less about doing it but useing the worst of um everything i think it will work lol

"tw,Upir is wearing a ToE - not sure whether that has an impact on AMF damage suffered."

no it doesn't since you get the backlash damage which is calculated before your opponent is taking damage.

I use it, and I use it on a minion with an ELB, too. And it's the only reason I can defeat certain characters. It doesn't work every time for every enemy, but when it does, it's very effective. And it allowed me to add a DD spell on a team that was already established at higher level without it - there's no way I could add an effective CoC or MM at this point, without a major strat re-arrangement.

Decay? I love it! But then, I've always loved UC, so there's no accounting for taste... :)

Decay AMF backlash is diffeent to the rest. It's based off of the casters HP at the time of casting. Max damage taken (facing a 100% AMF) is 1/2 HP. The AMF effect is the amount of that you take (so facing a 50% AMF you would take 1/4 of your HPs as backlash).

:)

ToE reduces this as normal.

E(as)/E(Haste)/Super Heavy Tank/nothing but decay

That was the Spid/Kronos killing strat I was working on for CB1.

GL's point is important in that if you can keep your Decay mage protected, the AMF backlash is somewhat meaningless -- your mage will never die from that alone.

Decay was very effective for me in CB1 because, at the time, I have a decent PR advantage over everyone but Spid. So, I was able to tailor my strategy to beat Spid (and still be able to beat everyone else).

I did this initially with Decay in an EETM setup. Spid had only his tank in EEET stance. And no GA. So, though my Decay mage was getting heavily hurt by backlash, he could never die. Meanwhile, my tank was doing a decent job (especially when I trained dexterity higher than Spid's tank).

Any number of things would have made my Decay mage far less useful: GA, FB, and CoC would all have taken him out quickly because of the huge AMF backlash he received. But against a tank that is simply fighting front to back, it worked wonders.

If you are wondering why Spid didn't use seekers to kill off the mage in ranged fighting, it is because he couldn't. This was before ultra-powerful ELBs were roaming the earth, and I had a massive AS (with no DM to take it out). At that point he couldn't land enough damage to take the mage out.

All of that lasted at most a week before Spid rejiggered his strategy and started pummelling me again. *smile*

I use a decay in my WTME team on the E, and it works like a champ. Not only is my enchanter in the back to protect from MM's new back-row targeting, but he's also protected from much physical damage being in back, and has so few HP (relatively, after the giant AS he casts) that any AMF backlash he does take really is nearly negligible. And when people aren't using AMF? Creamed. Just ask PitSpawn. ^.~

in's Decay hit Booni [729832] :) not bad for a 6k xp investment. I only trained it to get son of Lorhar back on my list once he switched from AMF to DM and I agree that often it is more of a liability than a help. Are you thinking of using base decay or actually training one to try and counter AMF?