Whats the best build for a dexxer pvp?

[Malaikat]

Archery is good as an opener, but nothing more. The swing timer is separate from the melee timer so it doesn't reset with wrestle. Once you switch you're never going back in a 1v1, but it's possible to hit with a heavy and immediately hally. You're 50% to hit on each tho. It's a waste of skills points. At that point, you're better off rocking eval even with no med. At least you can finish with an ebolt that's guaranteed to hit for something and doesn't need a few seconds to charge.

[JBURNS]

Parry. Every 2.5 seconds, throw a shield on. 41 AR, parry, and a well toggled MR piece makes you invincible 1v1 against a mage. I'd suggest doing the math to find the max swing speed for your desired weapon and then rest on a blend of dex/int that will net you + or - 10 dex to max swing. Minblast is a serious threat to 100 dex fighters, and if your chugging blue and red pots you'll never need it. There are few weapons that swing faster with 100 Dex than they do with 80ish.

Archery is good as an opener, but nothing more. The swing timer is separate from the melee timer so it doesn't reset with wrestle. Once you switch you're never going back in a 1v1, but it's possible to hit with a heavy and immediately hally. You're 50% to hit on each tho. It's a waste of skills points. At that point, you're better off rocking eval even with no med. At least you can finish with an ebolt that's guaranteed to hit for something and doesn't need a few seconds to charge.

All valid points Mala, but I would still take archery over parry. If you use high end magic armor, you can get armor rating in the 50's without having to use 100 skill points. Not to mention when you have a shield equipped you cannot drink pots or switch to a 2h wep quickly. I would take my chances with something that could kill someone and watch my life bar. Eval is a good idea but you would probably want more int at that point to make it more useful. Again, this is all personal preference. Best thing to do is make a char and play it. If you don't like it, change it .

**EDIT** The one thing I can say with 100% certainty is if you want to be a real threat on any dexxer, you are going to have to spend some cash on good gear (Not GM) and prepare well. It is more expensive and time consuming to run a well equipped dexxer than a tank mage by far.

[farnk]

dex and armor

[Vlastslav]

Rofl.... you need skill son. That is all.

[Onslaught-]

There are only a few viable dexxer templates out there, but it all really depends on your playstyle. Example being, all of my dexxers have GM magery because I like the option of cross-healing if needed, and the option to heal myself with something besides bandaids/potions vs tank mages is a necessity. The only necessary skills for a dexxer that you can simply not live without are the following;

1.) a combat skill (fencing being best, swordsmanship second, macing third)
2.) Tactics
3.) Anatomy
4.) Healing
5.) Magic Resist
6.) Magery (again, this can be a playstyle choice)
7.) ?

The seventh skill is always the one in question. Options I would try and stay away from:

Meditation - You can't use armor. A dexxer without armor is a wasted character slot.
Evaluating Intelligence - If you're using anything besides cure, heal, and greater heal, you're doing it wrong.
Hiding - You have something like a 40% chance to hide @ 0 skill against any random house + invis items if needed. Wasted skill points.
Archery - People don't stay on screen and you can't shoot while moving. Wasted skill.
Second combat skill - Not necessary. Why would I need to carry more weapons?!

Assuming you decided to go the magery route, the best option for any dexxer is one of the three skills:

Poisoning - Is going to be your best and most expensive choice. You can make it work on a budget by using greater poison, instead of DP, and going swordsmanship instead of fencing. Good broadswords are cheap and kryss/warforks are expensive. It doesn't work with macing, but if you go a swordsman/fence route, it will be best for you simply because it adds another variable to the combat situation as well as giving people a timer (timer being how many cure potions they can use before restocking or dying). One poison potion gives you something like 1 - 4 applications of poison and normally you would carry 8 - 10 poison potions when fielding. Most of my solo battles come down to them running out of cure potions, and me interrupting their cure spell. It also makes using 2-handed weapons a slight pain in the ass for your opponent since you have to keep that one hand free to drink a cure potion, which is a nice added bonus.

Wrestling - Obviously this skill is only an option if you go the magery route. This skill is usually overlooked and always under appreciated by most, but once you use it, you'll understand why its an awesome choice. It's basically a quality of life choice. It makes it so you don't have to put distance inbetween you and your target if you need to cast greater heal, and it gives you the option of using magery without being 100% interupted against other dexxers. It's great in both field and one vs one situations, but I would prefer this over your other options if your playstyle involves more 1v1 type battles, especially in duel arenas (if people even duel on dexxers anymore).

Parry - This is probably the easier of the skills to raise, but the harder of the three to use properly. Against PvE monsters or other random dexxers, it is quite awesome. Just equipping a shield can add something like 15 - 20+ AR. But in the worst case scenario, you'll be fighting poisoner dexxers and tank mages - so it gets a little more complicated. To make parry worth the 100.0 points, against a tank mage, you really have to time your shield equip with their halberd. Having a shield up for all of their halberd swing kinda just makes them a mage, instead of a tank mage. Unfortunately, you're going to have to have your shield unequipped when they aren't going for the halberd swing simply because you need that other hand for potions, and it reduces time required to disarm and cast greater heal (if you went magery @ slot 6) Against poisoners, your shield will be unequipped more often than you would actually be using it. Choosing this skill really just comes down to whether or not you PvE with your dexxer, and if you don't mind cycling your shield against most opponents. If you don't mind the latter, parry is a great choice.

Being a "good" dexxer really comes down to your experience with the playstyle and your budget. The pacman-playstyle isn't preferred by most because the damage is random (most of the time), where a tank mage can do damage in a more controlled manner. But if played and equipped properly, you can be an absolute monster. However, If you don't know when you need to line-of-sight purple potions, run a screen to avoid multiple dumps, pick your fights, know when to refresh your mount, disarm to successfully cast a greater heal, know when to use heal/lighting wands, know when and where to use rings of teleport, etc -- you probably won't do very well. And if you dont have the gold to buy the best armor, weapons, teleport rings, etc -- you certainly will not do very well. Luckily, you can learn by playing the template more, and you can earn gold by farming so if playing a dexxer is what you want to do, it's an achievable goal.

I've been playing a dexxer in PvP for most of my duration on UOSA and I played it religiously during factions on OSI. Obviously, this post is all opinion, but the opinion was formed based on my extensive experience playing the dexxer "class". I still find it challenging at times and I'm still learning from it so it can be a rewarding playstyle if you spend the time/money to make it work.

[Jay]

1. Use attack mount macro when player attempts to refresh. If this fails proceed to step 2.

2. Teleport. If this fails proceed to step 3.

3. Make forum post blaming death on connection.

[Onslaught-]

1. Use attack mount macro when player attempts to refresh. If this fails proceed to step 2.

2. Teleport. If this fails proceed to step 3.

3. Make forum post blaming death on connection.

We have an entire forum for stuff like this. Keep it there.

I'm just trying to help a dexxer brother out, don't be a doucher.

[morgan1109]

Nice write up onslaught. I agree with pretty much everything you said.

The key thing to remember as a dexxer is you are at a disadvantage. The reason 90% of the PVPers are mages with halberds is because it’s a better set up. If you want to PVP as a dexxer you have to maximize every advantage. As onslaught pointed out spending in magery and allocating stat’s to intelligence is basically a necessity to have a chance. As a hybrid dexxer, when I lose I can typically link it to not casting enough defensive spells. When I win it’s usually attributable to a timely cast of an offensive spell or an interrupt.

A couple quick points:

1. Take the number of cure pots you think you need and double or triple it. Those mages don’t have room for poisoning, but they will usually be carrying a deadly poisoned Hally. They will be casting poison every chance they get to mess with your bandage healing. You need a crap ton of cure pots.

2. Carry lots of magic trapped bags. Set up the use once agent in razor and a macro to use them quickly. They will paralyze you frequently in the wild. Breaking paralyze is second only to curing poison in importance.

3. Make a treasure hunter, do a bunch of level 1 treasure maps (can be done with no lockpicking or cartography skill), or both. You’ll want lots of jewelry, vanqs, and charged weapons. Paying for them is quite painful and people keep the best stuff for themselves. The level 1 maps will yield some jewelry, but mainly charged and vanq weapons, and fort/invulnerability armor. If you want lots of jewelry, you need a lockpicker to do level 4 dungeon chests. You are heavily gear dependent, so you need to invest in some way to get the good stuff.

Hally Mages are deadly because they are hybrids. They have a strong melee, and ranged attacks. They have strong ranged defense (magery), but weak melee defense (no armor or bandies). If you go pure dexxer you will only have a strong melee attack and strong melee defense. Poison is the main way people augment this so you have a “stronger” melee offense. You still have no ranged attack or defense. Do you see the problem? The strong melee abilities won’t matter if you can’t get in melee and stay in melee for an extended period of time.

Your dexxer basically needs to be a hybrid, so you can at least add some ranged defense. That’s why onslaught is pushing you towards adding some more INT so you can add some defensive magery to your skill set. It will slow your swing down a bit, but you’ll be able to cast more.

You are still lacking offensive magery though. That’s where Eval comes in. Adding Eval to a hybrid dexxer gives you the same ranged attack and ranged defense you were missing, with better melee defense. The cost is a smaller mana pool and no regen which means you will be drinking a lot more red pots. It’s easier fitting Eval into a Mace build precisely because you don’t have an ability to take poisoning. Hally mages have notoriously low stamina. While a quarterstaff won’t hit as hard as a hally, it will hit as fast as a kryss (interrupts). Throw a clumsy in at the beginning of a fight, and you will cause them to burn through all their red pots, much like poisoning causes them to burn through all their cure pots. Mages need red pots to keep casting in a protracted battle. While onslaught puts macing third for PVP, I tend to view it as the #2 option. It’s much easier to add Eval to a macer, and the stamina loss benefit is much more useful in PVP than people give it credit for.

An Eval hybrid dexxer using bought poisoned katana's and Halberds is probably a little better than an Eval macer, but not by a lot and comes with a bigger price tag.

[Ragancy]

This shit isn't rocket science. Carry a good ONE HANDED weapon and throw purple pots constantly. It's not that complicated.

Hell, you don't even need good armor - just wear a protection item as they are cheap and abundant. Casting RA negates a couple hally strikes.

With 25+ purples and a good one handed weapon, you should always be on offense.

Your greatest asset as a dexer is a good connection.

[PorkTornado]

It looks like you joined just today. The standard PVP build is the Hally Mage, but that isn’t a dexxer build. Pretty much any PVP build has GM magery, and GM resist (yes even most dexxer builds). Those two skills cost A LOT of gold to GM and be effective. Here’s my quick down and dirty guide for starting a warrior:
1. Make a 50/49/1 magery/healing/swordsmanship character. You can swap mace or fencing for swords if you prefer. Magery and healing are the most costly to raise so you want to start them high. Make sure to spread your starting stats between str, dex, and int. Healing and magery are very costly to raise while the others are very cheap.
2. Run to stables and buy a crook to train herding. Set up a razor macro to double click the crook in your hand, and click an animal at the stables, then click the ground beside you. now stop recording the macro. On the last line add a “special construct” for a time delay of 1100 (1.1 seconds). You’ll do this until you reach 95+ strength or GM herding.
3. Make a second character on second account to make money, basically some type of crafter. I did a 50/50 blacksmith/tinker, and went about mining ingots. Buy some shovels and hit the mountains to the west. Create a mining macro (search the boards) and start gathering ore. Once have ore smelt it into iron ingots. Once you have iron you can make your own shovels with your tinker skill, and every ingot you produce is basically 5-6 GP.
4. After about 36 hours your fighter should have str/dex/int somewhere around 100/85/40 after macroing herding, musicianship, and anatomy. Feel free to sub snooping for muscisianship, but it has a karma loss associated with it and you need a secon character, but it is faster.
5. Now sell most of your ingots to get some seed money to buy regs, scrolls, and bandages.
6. Use the rest of your ingots to make a couple sets of AR 26-27 armor, and a couple decent weapons.
7. Now it’s time to start beating up on some monsters and working on your fighting skill. Go out and start killing stuff and having some fun! You can actually start this as soon as you have your first load of ingots, but you want your stats as close to the 225 cap as possible for survivability. You’ll die a lot if you don’t wait.
8. Mark a rune to town or ask some nice stranger to mark one for you. Make sure to get the recall spell added to your spell book (or buy a stack of recall scrolls). That way you can warp back to town instantly when you are done fighting.
9. Once you have swordsmanship (or fencing or macing)/tactics/healing/anatomy in the high 90’s you can start thinking about building your PVP character.
10. Buy a small house with all the money you have from mining ingots and killing stuff
11. By now you’ve probably procured a full spell book and lots of regeants and have a good stash of cash (maybe not after buying the house). Starting putting them to use by casting firefield and walking through it to build up your magic resistance. This will get you to 55 resist.
12. Any dexxer build is almost certainly going to have those 6 skills maxxed at 100 or darn close to it (weapon skill/tactics/healing/anatomy/magery/magic resist).
13. Now buy up the regs for the appropriate magery skill level (lightning,ebolt,then flamestrike) to get magery gains and resist gains at the same time and cast them on yourself in the house in the exact middle tile of the house. Make sure you are applying bandages so you don’t die.
There’s lot of other tricks like once healing and anatomy are above 60 you’ll want to cure poison instead of heal. At 80/80 you’ll want to try and rez instead of cure, etc. That should be enough to get you started. Good luck!

I agree with that getting stats up first is the way to start out. However, after I've gotten my STR maxed and INT at least over 40 (I like 44 INT because my low level magery macro casts 4 consecutive Lighting spells) I will macro meditation up until 90 and then start on GM'ing my magery and resist. Having meditation GREATLY reduces the time it takes to GM magery and resist. You may lose a day macroing meditation but you'll gain that back 3 fold at least. Once I've GM'd those skills I'll drop meditation and INT and use snooping to raise my DEX to my desired level and continue to finish my character off with the remaining skills.

[morgan1109]

i absolutely agree. Meditation (specifically drunken meditation) is paramount when training magery. It dramtically speeds up magery training.

[JBURNS]

I disagree wholeheartedly about parry being a viable skill in a pvp build...only time its useful is if you are new/poor or pvm. If you are doing pvm on a dexxer, chances are you are new/poor anyway. Parry is the gateway to a mediocre build no matter how you look at it. I have actually tried a to run a parry dexxer, unlike most of the people in this thread. Unless you want to stay in town for all of your fights, its worthless. If i see a dexxer with a shield, i already know the fight isnt going to be long. Stealing is another skill that gets overlooked for that 7th skill in dexxer pvp. Its hard for mages to cast spells without regs and hard for dexxers to heal without bandies. Play around with different combinations to find one you like...there are some great ideas in this thread.

**Edit** If someone says you dont even need good armor to run a pvp dexxer, you can pretty much surmise that person has never played as a dexxer and probably never pvped against a good one either. You need every advantage you can get as a dexxer, and you should spend a lot more time and money gearing up compared to a tank mage.

I know these videos are old, but they are relevant. Watch this guy attempt to pvp with parry & hiding instead of poisoning and resist, I think. He had his wep poisoned to begin with. The actual fighting doesnt start until about 1:30 into the video. He equips a shield in the middle of the fight, and my weapon damage doesn't change at all. It is a complete waste of skill points for pvp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNmCuzlbjeM

This video proves why poisoning is the best 7th skill for a dexxer, in my opinion. This guy has a similar build to mine, but minus the poison skill and probably eval. I would guess he has more intelligence to make eval "worth it". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a74MLlbM8SU

[JBURNS]

Double Post

[AshBorn]

Doesn't stealing require you to have empty hands? If so, without wrestling, I would see that very difficult to do.. I mean against a tank mage it would be easier except when they are hall hitting. But against another dexxer.. I dunno..

I mean you could just run in, steal, and run away and equip again but every time you do you're guaranteeing them an auto-hit.

[Dunder Mifflin Inc]

Doesn't stealing require you to have empty hands? If so, without wrestling, I would see that very difficult to do.. I mean against a tank mage it would be easier except when they are hall hitting. But against another dexxer.. I dunno..

I mean you could just run in, steal, and run away and equip again but every time you do you're guaranteeing them an auto-hit.

You can steal with both hands equipped