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the ULTIMATE support sin guide (part1)
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This guide is a very long read. Which it should be, considering the multiple strategies and tips discussed in this guide. If you have a low attention span, I suggest breaking this guide into chunks. Also, this guide is more geared towards RLB/DCZ sins. HOWEVER, even cz players and archers can benefit off some of the things discussed in this guide!
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Bankin's ULTIMATE guide to playing support sin (part1!)
Section 1: The Basic Background Info
What is a support sin?
Support sin is simply a style of playing assassin. Rather than focusing 24/7 on attacking, support sins play a more defensive role in the fight, opting more towards keeping the party alive by providing cures and minors to team mates, being a distraction when necessary, and attacking at opportune moments. By the end of this guide, I hope you will see why this is a MUCH better way to play sin then by simply attacking 24/7.
By playing as a support sin, you will learn how the rest of your party members work and react to certain situations. You will learn when they are ready to attack, and when they are at their weakest points. By learning this, not only do you familiarize yourself with how your party functions, but also you familiarize yourself with how OTHER parties function and what their weaknesses are (which is nice even if you are soloing)
In the above statement, you can see there are 3 main parts to playing a support sin. Minoring and curing, being a distraction, and attacking at opportune moments. Each will be discussed thoroughly throughout the guide.
Section 2: Playing as a support sin
Part 1: Minors and cures
If you have been playing a sin for a while, you should already be familiar with using these skills on yourself. What some of you may not be familiar with is the fact that you can use this on your team mates as well (or, you may all be familiar with it and choose not to do it....)
Here’s the blunt truth: if you aren’t utilizing the ability to support your team mates, in my eyes you are USELESS as a sin. I suggest playing warrior if you want to attack 24/7, as that may be more suited to your playing style.
Now here are some common things I hear whiners say when I ask them to play support
1. My minor sucks though, I don’t see how I could be much use as a support sin
- That’s a terrible excuse! I know a guy who could only minor about 10 times per soul pot, sometimes 13 if he got lucky, and he was a great support sin. Who is he? It’s me.
2. I got the most AP, why the hell should I worry about minoring other people when I could be spamming the chat bar and doing loads of damage?
- Because you can better utilize your massive AP by keeping alive your team mates to attack at opportune moments (see the section on attacking at opportune moments for a better explanation)
3. I don’t even cure myself, why should I cure a priest or a team mate?
- Big mistake I usually hear from cz players who get lazy do to being too used to party cure. If you really wish to play sin to its greatest extent, you got to work on curing yourself, as well as other team mates.
Before starting a PK run, take time to set your party bar. I like putting the names that I minor most often at the very bottom or very top, as they stick out to they eyes alot more. Put the big tank warriors in the middle of your bar as you probably wont need to minor them as much.
Let’s start with minoring a team mate. Minoring a team mate is really easy. Just click their name in your party bar, and start spamming minor. Yes, it really is that simple. If you want to know how to minor really fast, I can’t really help you, as my minor was not very fast.
The sins in my clan (the whopping 3 of us….) had a similar ideology: if you aren’t minoring or curing yourself, you better be minoring or curing someone else! A mana bar shouldn’t be at full unless you JUST used a soul pot. Does that mean drain your mana as fast as you can? Not necessarily, you need some of that mana for yourself in case the scene turns ugly and you find the entire enemy party on you (this will be discussed in advanced tactics)
Other than giving the person you are minoring a bit more healing ability, if you have a team mate selected and hold w and then push R, you can run straight to them as well! This is a really easy way of regrouping on and healing the guy that’s getting owned: not only do you save them in most cases, but with all of you in the same place it’s easy to demolish whoever was on them (or at the very least, make a wall so that it’s hard for enemies to get past you towards their intended target (see advanced tactics))!
Curing is easy. Curing EFFECTIVELY is difficult.
To cure a team mate, just click their name like you would if you wanted to minor them. Then just push the cure skill, and bam, they are cured. Sounds easy? Here are a few things you have to consider when curing someone.
- When you cure someone, contrary to minoring, you will NOT be able to move around.
- Curing has a cooldown. I’m not sure of the exact time on it; I know it’s shorter than that of a pot, but a lot longer than that of a minor. Let’s just say, it’s a 1 second cooldown.
There are 2 ways you can cure. The first is to cure when you see the duff on you (aka, you can see the parasite symbol where your hp scroll used to be). The second is a bit more difficult, it’s to start the cure animation BEFORE the duff hits you. You need to know when to use each cure strategy.
Let’s say you are in a solo situation. You just killed the enemy priest and you know there is nothing he would like more then to see your dead body and to get points for the avenge kill his party members got for him. He is stated parasite 1920, and you KNOW that the parasite is coming straight for you.
When should you cure?
First thing you have to do: Put yourself in the priest’s shoes. He’s got a pack of melees with him all ready to kill the fuck outta you. He just needs to weaken you so you are fresh and ready for the slaughter. As soon as you are in range, he’s gonna let out a parasite and then you will be a sitting duck!
So already you know that you will be getting hit with a parasite. This means if you want to stay and try to pick off the noob mage or something, you gotta live past the parasite. Literally the second you see the priests arm going up, your should be spamming the cure button and the hp pot button. If you timed it right, just as the parasite hits, your cure should hit as well! This basically made the priest’s parasite useless. You get hit with a malice, but you quickly cure that as well, and are able to tank your enemies to get to the noob mage in the back!
Now that priest AND that mage don’t like that shit. They decided to bring ANOTHER priest with them, only this guys got torment… YIKES.
You start to run a bit to the side, try to jump the mage when they are not paying attention, but the priests see you! The torment priest is in range, he lets out a torment on you!
This is where it would be really stupid to stop and cure right away, or even to cure early!
Instead, after the torment goes off wait till you see the parasite priests hand moving. Most times, the priest will be out of sync, and they will send 2 parasites at you, so you must be able to kill 2 birds with one stone (in this case, 3, because you will be curing the 2 parasites that are coming at you AND the torment that’s already on you)
Ok, that’s all good for solo PK, but I thought this is a guide for party pk support sin! How does any of this apply to a party situation!
Simply put, if you can grab someone’s cure when they need it, you are their best friend. Be it a priest, a mage, hell, even a warrior, you become a tremendous help. For a priest, it means that they can stop and use a complete heal on themselves instead of stopping to use a cure.
Here’s a simple situation to better grasp the concept of curing someone (and curing yourself for that matter)!
You are approached by a party loaded with a party healer and a tormenter (yikes.) You have an awesome mage friend with you, but his gear is very poor. Torment goes off; you see melees gunning towards your friend. (Ill use examples like this a lot, as I mostly pk’d in small parties.)
When should you cure?
Well, think about the situation: you know that logically, a torment priest ¾ times will drop a torment first, then a parasite.
You know that since your friend is pretty weak, he’s gonna get owned if he gets attacked with duffs on, especially parasite.
Some of you guys might think, let’s just cure the mage right when the torment had goes up. This is a really bad idea for 2 reasons.
1. You cured torment on the mage, grats. Parasite lands on either your mage (who will die really really quick) or on you (and you still have torment on you!)
What to do in this situation? I call it cure consolidation.
Simply put, when the torment hits, minor your friend move in a direction away from the melees, but still close enough to toss a cure on your friend. If you see skill failed too far, then you are doing it wrong. Be far enough to be out of sight, but close enough to toss the cure. When you see the parasite arm go up, that’s when you toss a cure to your friend. This solves the problem of your friend getting owned on parasite, and the problem with the duff actually being intended for you (since you are a safe distance away, you have time to cure yourself as well). Make sure as soon as you cure, you minor the hell out of your friend, as by this time, the melees will be on him.
Note: if someone is slowed, and you see a pack of melees nearby them, they need to be cured ASAP!
Note 2: Find sprint and place it on your skillbar somewhere. If you are slowed, and you find you cannot use light feet, tab over and find sprint! Use it, until you see the cooldown for light feet to be done, then cancel sprint and use light feet! Remember, KEEP MOVING!
I suppose that in a nutshell, the 2 things you gotta remember when curing are Anticipate and Consolidate. Cures are awesome, but if you cure yourself or someone else 24/7, you are open to an attack yourself! And remember; after the cure goes off, you better be minoring yourself or your friend!
Part 2: Attacking
When it comes to attacking, what do you think is the most important part as a sin? Attacking 24/7? Using spike soon as its available?
Actually, the most important part of playing the offensive aspect of a support sin is to use the LEAST amount of attacks as possible. At this point, most of you must be ready to exit out of this guide, but hear me out.
Let’s say you are with your friend who is a priest. You go in there guns a blazing and just start comboing the hell out of the mage. The mage gets spam healed by 1 priest, while the other one duffs your priest. 3 melees come and kill your priest and then you are easy pickings for the entire party as you do not have a priest for yourself.
Above is an explanation about the inherent flaw of being an attack sin (attacking 24/7). You cannot effectively play a sin with a warrior mentality.
Other then the ability to minor and heal yourself and your team mates, the BIG difference between a warrior and a sin is how the damage is dealt. A warrior essentially spams 1 skill that does fairly constant damage.
A sin however has a limited amount of skills that do massive amounts of damage, with the remainder of skills dealing significantly weaker amounts of damage. I’d say that these skills are Spike thrust and pierce/cut (depending on the situation) for a 69- sin (bloody beast ftw 70+).
To effectively attack as a sin, you have to be able to work with the members of your party, be it a priest, an archer, whatever. For this part of the guide, we will be dealing with how to work with the duffer in your party to effectively use your attacks.
Let’s go back to the situation before when you are duoing with your friend. Instead of using spike right away, wait for the purple clouds (an indication that the duff has landed) and then use spike. If you are working with a parasite 1920 priest, and you know your target has issues curing, an alternative to this is using thrust with the parasite, and using spike as the malice hits, to maximize the amount of damage done.
Now let’s run the play: parasite hits the mage, you use thrust, malice hits the mage and so does your spike. The damage is massive; the mage drops in about 1 second. Now that you aren’t attacking 24/7, you can address the issue we faced before: your priest getting dominated on! If you learned anything from the section above, you would know that right as soon as the target is down, you better be minoring the hell out of the priest (or curing if its applicable).
The less you time you spend attacking, the more time you have to keep your party alive via curing and healing!
What about canceling priest heals? What about being a distraction?? Don’t worry, it will be covered in advanced tactics (gotta walk before you run!) and if you employ the items I discussed above, you should already be a handful for the enemy.
Section 3: Gear setup
Something you have to realize from this guide is that ANYONE can do it. It doesn’t matter if you are running in chitins 9 or fp+7, your gear does not affect how you play!
If I had to suggest a gear setup for someone on a modest budget, I’d say something like this
- Dual Shard +7
- Dual old EME
- Old Skele belt
- Old WP
- Chitin +7
- A dd +6 helmet
- Quest rings/old rols (if you can afford)
- Large shield+3 reduce (has just enough stats for you to equip it)
- Scorpion bow +3 (see advanced tactics for the fun you can do with that!)
This set up gives you ample amounts of ac, resistance, and some weapon defense. The AP is not the greatest, but if you attack like I told you above, people will be calling you a babashopper in no time!
I suggest you practice all that I have said above before continuing on, as I’ll be talking about a bit more advanced stuff down here, stuff that pertains more to unit pk (pking without a full party, rather with 2-5 people total)
(2nd part of the guide is here)
[ame]http://www.gamers4life.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2676778#post2676778[/ame]
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Originally Posted by thesmallone101
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