Increasing my Dreadful Countenance

[Maskoz]

I got to lvl 10 last night after sitting through the patch. Pretty excited about some of th enew abilites and such. I definitly appreicate some of the "flavor" wording of our abilites, Symbol of pain!

I was the MT for a group of 5 with a lvl 7 fighter. I would pull, group sof 2, we would root the other and dot it up, the first one though I would grab and try and maintain aggro.

This was not as smooth as I thought it should have been, often time I was chasing a mob and using my Harrow ability I believe it was called ( you can only use when facing the back of an opponent).

2 major things I noticed;

1) Provoke is not instant, so I started using provoke at the beggining of my pulls. However it was too hectic to test to see if this indeed was actually working or not.

2) My chain ability was triggering 1-2 times every pull, with buffs from ranger, druid and Necro. I am not sure if its a pattern, or if certain criteria is met that these chain abilites are useable. I have to say it was great fun.

Question then;

1) Can anyone else give feedback on how to use provoke, or increase your Dreadful Countenance to make provoke work faster? It seems to me that is a race to build hate, and increasing your Dreadful Countenance should help that tremendously.

2) Anyway to guarantee chain strikes?

3) I now have access to 2 stances, has anyone seen a statistical improvemnt of one over the other?

Thanks much!

[XeroKill]

1) Can anyone else give feedback on how to use provoke, or increase your Dreadful Countenance to make provoke work faster? It seems to me that is a race to build hate, and increasing your Dreadful Countenance should help that tremendously.

2) Anyway to guarantee chain strikes?

3) I now have access to 2 stances, has anyone seen a statistical improvemnt of one over the other?

Well let me give this a shot.

1) I have only been MT in a group once so far, and I was having very little trouble with agro. I would use Provoke after the pull (usually with Devour Strength and Torture on INC) then I would just spam Vexing Strike / Malice while waiting for chains to open up and use Wrack.

2) The reason the chain was opening so often is because in a group other people can start chains for you. I have yet to figure out a way to use the chains more often but thus far I have concluded it is more random than anything. I have seen it open 3 or 4 times a fight, and I have seen it go for 3 or 4 fights with out ever showing.

3) I can't answer this one as I have not played with the stances yet.

EDIT: About chains! In a post I read by Tazzrin, the old system of Openers, Bridges, and Finishers is gone and now to initiate a chain all you have to do is achieve a critical with a normal attack. In our case if you crit with something like Vexing Strike, it would open the chain up and then you can use Wrack. Check out Tazzrin' post here for more information.

As for raising the Dreadful Countenance, well as you level up it will get easier and easier. We gain several abilities that increase the rate we gain it at, gives us raw Dread, and even one that tops us off. Check out the link in my signature for a list of these abilities as they sit now in Beta 5. They are subject to change of course, but it will give you an idea of how easy Dread may be to get at later levels.

[Reakk]

One thing I noticed while fooling around with a disciple when Beta 1 went down was anyone can open up a chain, you just have to have someone use an opening move (and the moves still state that they are opening/bridging/finishing moves), if its anything like EQ2 then it will probably be up to one of the light fighters or other to start a chain, IIR the DK chains are mostly finishers (thereby adding hate).

The higher your Dreadful Countenance doesnt speed up your Provoke, but for every point it adds 10% to your provoke amount, thereby giving you more hate.