Puppet skill rank order?

• Samri wrote on 2013-10-24 01:39
  I have no clue if I should rank the Marionette skills first or if I should work on acts.
  
  What order should I rank the skills?
• ironwoman wrote on 2013-10-24 01:46
  Acts. And control marionette.
  
  Especially crisis and climactic crash. Also, I'm really not sure you should be starting puppet at your level...
• cheese758 wrote on 2013-10-24 01:49
  Do them all at the same time. The cool downs will drive u insane if you train them separately. Not to mention that puppets should be treated as a skill set and having just some skills at high ranks will make the skill set seem rather weak overall. I would suggest passively ranking 1 (of the 2) marionettes and control simultaneously while deliberately ranking Climactic, Crisis, and Rising Action. Run into a basic mission and spam those 5 skills whenever their respective cool downs hit 0. If you're finding that you have time between cool downs, add a 1 vs 1 act into the mix (these skills are really sub par so they aren't a priority).
• nandattebayo wrote on 2013-10-24 05:12
  High Priority (rank these first in this order):
  Marionettes
  Control Marionette rank 9
  Act 7
  Act 6
  
  Medium Priority (rank these whenever):
  Act 4
  Control Marionette rank 8+
  Act 2
  Act 1
  
  Low Priority (rank these last):
  Wire Pull
  Puppet's Snare
  Act 9 <-- rank this dead last, its almost entirely useless.
• ewire123 wrote on 2013-10-24 16:04

  Quote from ironwoman;1162554:

  Acts. And control marionette.
  
  Especially crisis and climactic crash. Also, I'm really not sure you should be starting puppet at your level...

  
  
  Puppet can be rank at any level. Have you seen how much free base damage you get by ranking just the mastery? Guaranteed to have minimum 300+max from skill alone, excluding damage add from char stats.
• Darkboy132 wrote on 2013-10-24 17:16
  Generally, it would be better to rank them all simultaneously because of how tedious they are and the long cooldowns of each, like cheese said. But, like nandattebayo said, there's priorities.
  

  • Colossus/Pierrot Marionette - Generally, you're going to want both Marionettes at their tip-top shape. Not only it gives them a tremendous boost in offense and defense, you're going to need to switch them out on occasion (because A unsummoning them puts them out of harm's way and causes the enemy to lose aggro and B there is a stupid glitch with Control Marionette whose cooldown reduction doesn't even work unless you unsummon and resummon the marionette). Although everyone has their own preference, the only difference between them is that Colossus's Act 2 animation and execution speed is much faster than Pierrot's, so you're going to want to prioritize the former, but that still doesn't mean Pierrot is useless.
    
  • Control Marionette - This skill further arguments the strength of the marionettes, and its a pretty good amount too. Though this one is incredibly tedious to work with, I would say rank it with the other skills.
    
  • Act 7: Climactic Crash - This is the entire skillset's bread and butter. Its an area of effect line attack that deals 550% damage three times at rank 1, dealing a hefty damage of 1650% at maximum. Big badass crowd clearer, 'nuff said.
    
  • Act 6: Crisis - This skill is an area of effect that pulls enemies toward your marionette and holds aggro from them. Think of it as taunt with a pull. It will help you group up a batch of enemies together so you can follow up with Act 4 and then 7 and wipe them out with ease. However, this skill is also extremely flawed: during the pull, enemies gain invulnerability frames for a few seconds, leading you to piss off your teammates or vise versa if you don't learn to coordinate (e.g. your Act 6 interrupts someone's Crash Shot after they fired the arrow, someone's Windmill pushes the mobs away from your Act 6, so forth).
    
  • Act 4: Rising Action - Another area of effect attack that strikes enemies all around you, think of it as the Puppeteer Windmill, with higher damage but longer cooldown.
    
  • Act 2: Threshold Cutter - A 1:1 three hit attack that racks up huge amounts of damage. Think of it as the Puppeteer Smash, on a larger scale.
    
  • Act 1: Inciting Incident - A 1:1 attack that instantly knocks an enemy back. Although its not exactly a powerful skill, it can pretty much slingshot across the room to save your or someone else's butt before they get hit, and its low cooldown makes it nonetheless valuable.
    
  • Wire Pull - Uses wires to pull an enemy toward you so you can smack them in the face with a melee attack. This skill isn't exactly grand, unless you're doing something like Offering, then you can pull them into the circle.
    
  • Puppet's Snare - Binds an enemy while using wires to deal damage over time. This skill isn't exactly too grand, but it does allow you to hold an enemy for someone to attack, at least until they knock it down. However, this skill is extremely valuable against knockdown immune enemies like Ghasts and Blinkers where you can hold them down and let your teammates wail on them, though not every enemy can be restrained.
    
  • Act 9: Invigorating Encore - This skill temporarily gives your marionette an AI and slightly increases its attack power and reduces the loading speed of the act skills. However, this skill is actually next to useless; the AI is stupid, the attack power isn't much, and you need to build up a gauge by attacking with your marionette which takes an incredibly long time.
    
• ironwoman wrote on 2013-10-24 18:06

  Quote from ewire123;1162843:

  Puppet can be rank at any level. Have you seen how much free base damage you get by ranking just the mastery? Guaranteed to have minimum 300+max from skill alone, excluding damage add from char stats.

  
  
  300 max is a poor maximum damage for puppets. If you only ranked puppetry, you wouldn't even reach 400 damage, which is still a pretty poor damage.
  
  That leaves you to 210 puppet damage and your climactic crash would only do 1k (2.5 if crit)
  
  With the same amount of ap, you can do more in melee or range, and anyone who ranked puppet would agree on that you need a decent pool of good base str and dex. For example, even though only crisis and climactic crash is rank 1 for me, reason I can wipe out hm and elite rooms is because I have 560 max with basic control bars, which isn't even high. 300 max would barely clear out hm rooms, and only if it crits.
  
  The reason I said why he probably shouldn't go into puppet is that he's only 1.7k according to mabination, and said almost dies on ss basic. If a user hasn't learned to time his/her wm right to avoid this commonly known glitch, I'm pretty sure he's also not a user with completed melee nor range, at least in combat tab. And because of this, he wouldn't really deal great damage with puppets. The point is, you can rank it whenever. But it generally is better to rank it at later levels. At 1.7k levels, it's much better to work on other skill sets and dex for range damage and balance while you're at it.
• Bunny wrote on 2013-10-24 19:20
  [FONT="Arial"]Pot everything at the same time o/ [/FONT]
• cheese758 wrote on 2013-10-25 00:19
  I don't get why Act 9 is getting bashed so much. 90 seconds of +60 max is almost like puppet trans. The AI is good for distracting Merrow and hitting random things in convoy to keep em off the carts.
• Gensokyou wrote on 2013-10-25 01:00

  Quote from cheese758;1163015:

  I don't get why Act 9 is getting bashed so much. 90 seconds of +60 max is almost like puppet trans. The AI is good for distracting Merrow and hitting random things in convoy to keep em off the carts.

  
  
  Ain't nobody got time for dat.
  
  And leaving your puppet out for 90 seconds in a row means you have no aggro management and are affected by the cooldown glitch. You should be swapping puppets all day erry day, which cancels the act 9 effect.