a few noob W/R questions.

Hi all, I started a W/R a few days ago and I have a few questions. First off I'm considering focusing on ether hammer or axe mastery, I was just wondering if anyone knows the pros or cons to each. For my ranger side I'm focusing on wilderness survival, for traps and such, but I was looking into beast mastery. How are the skills there in the higher lvls? And dumb question but how do I name my pets?
Thanks in advance.

1. Hammers do more damage over a given period of time than a sword or axe, but are two-handed so you can't equip a shield or focus with them.

2. Don't know, haven't done enough with my ranger yet to answer that one.

3. /petname <name> or /namepet <name>

Yeah I am an axe man myself and well.... I might as well be using a drowned cat. Hammers are really the way to go - and the knockdown moves are just the cherry on top of the smackdown sundae. Pets are kinda lacking in my opionion just annoying ankle biters. If you can get a good Troll Urgent while you're slapping people around you should be a great tanker. Other than that, I'm dry of advice but good luck.

Well, I'm a level 10 W/R, so I'll give my two cents on the topic.

Hammers are nice and do a lot of damage per hit, but they are much slower to attack, which means if you miss 2-3 hits in a row, you're pretty screwed. That's 4-6 hits worth of a sword. I'll take my sword, shield any day because it gives me more stats. Axes could be cool with their AE attacks, but then you're stuck AEing things when you don't necessarily want to be. I like swords. I set aside 3 skills for them, (frenzy gash and hamstring?) something like that.

Pets are cool, but weak. Think of them as an energy-free dot that takes up a minimum of 2 skill slots. I use my wolf to get aggro off of monks mostly, or to start attacking things while I take out the shaman (ctrl+spacebar is your friend here.) Don't rely on your pet soloing things. They're also great if you let them die. Rez them so they gain aggro, then run in, it'll give your team a few seconds of surprise attack and round up mobs for AE spells to rain on them at the start of battles.

Traps are great, I use them in PVP all the time, but you're a sitting duck setting them. Problem is, you need a lot of points in them for them to do maximum damage, so that's something to consider.

Also, remember you can untrain stats, so I have my sword usually, then if I'm fighting something not flesh I can switch my points to hammers and use that for specific instances.

Another tip, fire up Frenzy and then use your bow to pull. That'll usually get you enough adrenaline to use one of your cool sword moves as soon as you engage the baddie instead of getting pounded on and waiting for it to build up.

Good luck!
Takr

Thanks everyone for the help, I'll have to do some stat rebalancing tomorrow.

There is a serious danger to accepting advice from a guy who's only level 10. I'm not saying he's full of crap ar anything, but there are some real gaps in his knowledge.

First off, W primes end up taking a lot of skill slots. You will generaly run 4 or 5 attack skills, Sprint is a must, a heal (Troll ungent is good), and that leaves you either 1 or 2 slots to experiment with. But we'll get to that in a second.

Swords vs. Axes: Swords have much higher minimum damage, slightly lower max damage, and bleeding. Axes have deap wound, the ability to attack multiple enemies with 1 attack (great for building adren) and maybe slightly higher average damage when skills are compared.

HOWEVER, Swords do their damage without any elites needed, while the only way I can see Axes beating them is with one of the good elites, which will obviously not be avialable early.

Swords standard skill set is Sever, Gash, Galrath, Final Thrust, maybe Savage Slash as a fifth. Those are all available from quests or trainers, and you get them all long before you get to the good axe skills.

Axes can vary a lot more, and there doesn't seem to be a consensus about which skills are just the best period. Also, Axes don't really have a skill to compare to Sever Artery, which is much better than its cost. Bleeding is amazing at low levels.

Axes/Swords vs. Hammers: Hammers are slower, but they're not twice as slow, something that an above poster hinted at. They do more damage, but not twice as much either. If you decide to go hammers, you will be waiting a LONG time for skills. Very few of them come up early on, and the ones you do get cost a lot of adren., and then there's the whole "lose all adren." thing.

I suggest Swords until after you get to skill caping areas, then figure out what you want to do. I DON'T recomend you switch between them the way the above poster does, you need to get used to the way your skills work, the timing, and positioning issues.

I would go:
Sever Artery
Gash
Galrath Slash
Final Thrust
Sprint
Troll Ungent
Apply Poison

The last slot goes for whatever you like. I would say Ballanced Stance, but you don't get that till pretty late. By the time you do get it, you really need to start using it for Caping, 'cause almost everything knocks down there. None of the above are elites, and I think if I remember correctly they're all available by the time you get just a little past Lions Arch.

For caping I would get Escape early, and run that as your elite while skill hunting.

As far as pets go, this is not from personal knowledge, but I'm told they can be pretty powerfull if you dedicate attrib pts. and skills to using him effectively. But you should have expected that. So now you're talking about 4 skills going into your pet, along with a whole line of attrib pts that you would normaly put elsewhere.

Attributes: W primes almost all use their weapon as prime attrib, followed by Strength and Tactics. There's arguement as to how many pts into Strength vs. Tactics, as both have usefull skills and they are both shield requirements. Strength shields seem to be much more rare than Tactics shields, but that might or might not matter to you.

Excellent post Sayshina!

As a W/R 20 there isn't really anything to add or disagree with in this post. Nice piece

While I agree with a lot of your opinions, and I may be level 10, it really concerns me that people feel there are MUST HAVE combinations in skills in the game. That's making everyone a cookie cutter class, which isn't cool and which isn't the idea of the game in general.

I was speaking in generalities in my post when I said it was slow and doubled, and I also think it's good to try other things to see if you like them better. If you take a sword against rock elementals, all of your bleeding skills stop working, so why take it? That's a lot of wasted slots. At least remove the bleeding skills and put in something useful.

In my group, my role isn't to be Mr. Massive Damage Dealer. My role is to keep the monks alive as the tank. I need to be able to take a ton of damage more than being able to kill things in 3 seconds. I need to be able to have 3 things beating on me and live through it. My pet helps with that, but not enough to waste skills on pet attacks. My shield helps with that, Troll Ungent helps with that, lots of things. I even take the Rez Signet to rez the healer if something goes wrong.

Essentially, my point is, figure out how YOU want to play and build your skills around YOUR wish for your character. I'm a defensive warrior with a pet. My points are in Strength, Swords and Beastmastery. I don't use tactics, not because they aren't good, but because that's not my vision for my character. I have no problem at all mowing down a ton of things with my build, and I'm sure there are a bazillion other builds that work just fine as well. Just decide what you'd like to be as a character and play to those strengths. If you go the cookie cutter route, people will have defenses for you in PvP and GvG soon enough anywayz. Try to be unique and make a character you will have fun with, not just a character that you spam the same 5-6 keys because it's the path of least resistance. Then the game just becomes a grind.

- Takr