*work in progress, feel free to contribute ideas :)
You’re attempting peaca along with a handful of other competent guildies. You guys do fine, until a guildie misses his wm and dies. Another guildie gets multi’d because of this and eventually succumbs. In another room one dude dies after getting hit with 5 chaincasted icebolts from a white. Room after room of ghouls and whites begin to take their toll on your guildies’ morale. Eventually one dude leaves after running out of hw, another gets tired of dying and just afks. Party falls apart, run fails.
Mabi combat is very sharp, with a single mistake often leading to death. The point of a party is for members to assist each other in killing and surviving, but a lot of people play stiffly, keeping to themselves and avoiding team play. This makes it painful to move through higher level dungeons.
Your partymates are the key to your survival. Think of how much you hate dying. That’s how hard you should try to keep your partymates alive, because in the end they’ll be the ones keeping you alive.
There are a lot of high-level tactics that produce stellar dps while drastically cutting risk through coordinated party play, the kind that take place within guild walls and ventrillo. This guide is not about that, just common sense stuff that you can apply to any party, just as easily with friends as strangers, to keep the run smooth and silky.
Some people never use their pets in their fights. In solo play, I can understand that, playstyle blahblah. But not even to save their friend from multi aggro? Let’s compare the costs. A human death costs:
* 3 hw = 5k (say 3 blessings fade on death)
* 1 feather = .1k
* 10 sec/blessing = 4k*3 = 12k
* healing wound and hp = 3k (bandages involve sitting down and taking time, heal takes mp, otherwise pots cost gold)
* exp loss = 2k
* frustration and shame of dying = 7k (all else aside, dying sucks)
Total = about 30k
The cost of a pet death is:
* 1 feather = .1k
Total = .1k
The life of a human is worth 300 times that of a pet. So if it takes 301 pet deaths to save your friend, feel free to abandon your partymate. For anything less than that, you are obligated to save your friend’s life, if only in order to save money, cause that’s what friends are for!
If you see your teammate in trouble, here are your simple options.
* Move toward your teammate as you spam wm to keep some the multi off. Wm doesn’t draw aggro unless you hit something in defense. Does not generate self-multi.
* Pet ram. Keep yourself alive with something stupid but consistent like wm spam or icecounter (or trans; cutscene removal mod is useful!), until your friend recovers and you can pull your third hand back. You can lengthen a single pet’s diversion time by calling it to you after ramming, so that the enemy follows your pet, right into your wm! And when you eventually fail to save your pet, the enemy will wander back to attacking your friend, giving you plenty of time to ram it with something else. Does not generate self-multi.
* Magic/arrow/melee any archers/mages on your friend. Archers are especially easy to divert because they’re defenseless with their bow out.
* You can also just hit your friend’s multi. Not very classy, but it buys your friend time.
Res dead partymates fast
The worst part about dying, imo, is being dead. You can’t do anything. You can’t heal yourself, can’t replace your blessings, can’t fight, can’t save lives. Get used to the ctrl + J shortcut to res. When a partymate dies, hover over his dead body, so that you can pull him to his feet as soon as he reaches out.
Typically you’ll be in the middle of a fight when your partymate dies. Disengage as soon as you can.
* If your enemies have low hp, ohko them and go res.
* If you’re fighting one chunky enemy, ram it and go res.
* If you’re fighting two chunky enemies, swipe one and ram the other, and go res.
* If you’re fighting more than that, keep fighting, but don’t forget to ditch the fight and go res as soon as you reduce the fight.
* It’s a good idea to let your pet take the fatal blow here, forcing the enemy into post combo recovery and buying you ~4 more seconds. Getting hit while ressing sucks.
* If the enemy gobbles your pet and goes after you, not leaving you enough time to wm after res, feel free to turn around and play dead. Your newly ressed friend should be doing something useful like wm, so that you can get back up quickly.
Res dead pets too
* Having a pet die on you is inconvenient, because you’ve lost your third hand. But if you cycle to a new one, you have to remember that your old one is dead, so that you don’t pull out a broken hand in the next battle. Also, you may be low on spare hands.
* That’s why one of the best ways to assist someone mid-battle is to res their pet. They can choose what to do with their pet, so you can never mess them up as you might with a surprise spin.
*When convenient, you should res pets that are out of the way, so that their owners don’t have to double back to res.
* Res pets of people who have magic loaded, because ressing requires that they drop their skills. MP is expensive!
Avoid splash
* When fighting enemies that splash, try not to overlap with partymates.
* Same applies with pets. When stunning multi aggro, it’s a good idea to swipe and unsummon so that enemies don’t get the chance to splash.
Keep pets at low health
* This way if they get partymates splashed, the enemy will only swing once before the pet dies.
* Also keeps pet interference consistent, because auto-retaliation still forces enemies into post combo recovery. This way, when your partymate rams something, you can depend on that enemy being defenseless, no matter what happens.
Ramwall
* Really good way to assist a partymate who is smashmilling a walled enemy.
* Problem with smashmill is that sometimes the smash will kick an enemy up (undown), or fail to stun long enough (redown), so that wm won’t follow.
* Position a pet adjacent to the enemy and tell the pet to attack it. When the enemy recovers from knockback the pet will immediately ram, keeping everyone safe.
* Cycling to a new pet when your old one has rammed will prevent auto-retaliation.
* Otherwise, orient pet so that if it gets auto-retaliated, nobody will get splashed.
* Feel free to smashmill with your partymate.
* Don’t trigger enemy’s wm!!!
Heal
* Heal does wonders for party morale and survival, but can be difficult to slip in without interfering with your own fights.
* Disable nagle, so that you can dispense all 5 heal charges asap.
* Use it after a ohko smash.
* Use it after a lethal wm.
* Run ahead in corridors and spam heal as partymates approach; works best with inf range heal mod
* Use it instead of joining the other 5 dudes cornermilling. They don’t really need you, really.
* Don’t be the noob running around with full mp when your friends are pouring blood.
Bandage
* Help mend people who sit down.
* Wounds suck and bandages are free.
* Inf range mend is useful.
Party feather
* Nifty little trick; you can actually use a pfeather in the middle of wm invincibility.
* This means, as long as you can pull off ONE wm, you can prevent party wipe.
* Press “Use†on pfeather before the fight, and move the dialog box to an obscure corner of the screen. You can do this multiple times to bring up multiple dialog boxes.
* When everyone is dead and you’re being multi’d like crazy, find a way to wm.
* The moment you spin, press “Ok†on the dialog box.
* Be fast! Wm invincibility only lasts 2 seconds.
* A typical desperation sequence might be: run backward to buy time to pet swipe --> pet swipe to buy time to wm --> wm --> pfeather --> turn around --> play dead --> more pet swipes --> get up --> go spin with your friends
Stagger trans
* Trans makes the run easier for the few minutes that it lasts.
* Full party trans at 5:50 am means that the entire day we were fighting without any super powers, and now for 3 minutes we have a power overload.
* The run would be a lot smoother if partymates spread out their trans.
* A good way to stagger trans is just to use it when you first feel that you need it, instead of hanging on for as long as possible.
* Use it when you get multi’d.
* Use it when you get wounded.
* Use it when you run out of mp/sp.
* Use it when a partymate detrans.
Switch rooms
* It shouldn't take more than 10 seconds to decide if you guys want to skip or fight. Ask.
* If you stay and fight, don't pop more switches than you guys can handle.
* If you get to the switch room first, take one of the switches on the far side, so that those coming in after you have less to travel before you guys are ready.
Barricading dungeon doors
* When you run into a locked door, wait on the side. It's hard to open doors when other people's bodies and pets are in the way. Easy to forget sometimes.
Initiating icetennis (smash --> ib)
* Basic and effective 2 player combo that leaves both players’ third hands free
* The problem is that you don’t know if your partymate will hit the ball back or throw his racquet on the ground.
* After you smash a monster, load ib. This should scream icetennis to anyone who knows it. Ib after the monster recovers. If your friend doesn’t smash, he doesn’t know it.
* After your friend smashes a monster, load smash and run circles around the monster. This should scream “I has smash!!!†If your friend doesn’t load ib then don’t smash. He should have wm loaded so he’ll be fine. Press spacebar repeatedly to express your disappointment and continue running circles around the monster. If your partner still doesn’t get the message, swipesmash and load ib. If he doesn’t smash then he doesn’t know it.