Ask a Pirate Thread

After having gone through a probably too-long argument on Basil, I was wondering if I'd been a little too forceful in my views.

Basically, this was his build.

120 - 1 ship, 2 cannon
Cannon to max (30)
Then do 2 air strike, 1 ship, til ship is at 5.
Then air strike to max .
Bullseye max.
Wrath of the Octopi max.

His argument was that since "you'll be at skeles FOREVER" you should do air strike instead of torpedo, because apparently skeles "hardly ever form tight mobs". Personal experience made me take offense to such a statement, so I had to respond. Keep in mind that the guy is still in his 12x, so personal experience with his own build is actually impossible. I was wondering if I was being too dismissive of a Air Strike build, or if the guy really had no idea what he was talking about.

It is unconventional, to be sure. Going without Torpedo means he's using Air Strike for pretty much all of his multi-target damage. At higher levels (perhaps 15x or 16x), Air Strike can 100% 2HKO skeles, meaning you'll never have to travel to half of your section of the map. Even though the cooldown kind of sucks, that might not end up being too bad. Bullseye is next for obvious reasons.

Wrath of Octopi instead of Rapid Fire is an interesting choice. Since he went Air Strike instead of Torpedo he could use it during training (if he had gone Torpedo you wouldn't cast it because you'd be in your boat all the time and Octo would just cause unnecessary aggro). Imagine this scenario: standing on the second platform of Skelegons casting Air Strike and Octopus the second they cool down while using Burst Fire in the downtime. I've done something similar (though with 21 Air Strike, 10 Octopus, and max Rapid Fire), and it actually worked out really well. Octopus instead of Rapid Fire actually works out incredibly well for most bosses, too.

All in all it's a weird build. Not that bad, in my opinion. He'd still do just as well at Newties as anyone else from 120 to 130, and 130 to 145ish sucks for just about any Corsair anyway. I think it would do decently at Skeles after maxing Air Strike and incredibly well at Skeles after maxing Octopus. Once Octopus is maxed, he'd probably be doing better single target damage than most other builds too. If it has problems, I'd say its that his build is only good for training at Skeles or Newties. He couldn't move over to Oblivion until he got some more Torpedo because the mobs aren't nearly thick enough there. Also, since it's not spammable, it will suck raising Air Strike because it's only barely worth using at levels 1 to 20. I honestly can't think of any disadvantages to being forced to use Burst Fire instead of Rapid Fire for a while -- damage aside. Dusk is doing somewhat of a similar build (he said he max Air Strike early, and he's doing Octo before Rapid, but he did do Torp already), so maybe he'll have some opinions on this.

I'd like to see it done though. I think it would train somewhat more slowly from 130 to 140, about the same from 140 to 149ish, and then better once Octopi is over level 10. Assuming Skelegon training from 130 on, of course. It is also somewhat likely that he had no idea why its a pretty good build, because Skelegons is one of the most mobby places in the game.