Originally Posted by
Miles_T3h_r4t
body pressure. 6 points is 2 levels worth, and given that, in 2 seconds you can have a high chance to negate touch damage all together, and not have to worry about pots as much, I found this to be far more helpfull. I'm poor, and can not afford to buy pots in bulk, and CPQ doesn't last forever. body pressure however, will.
Once again, mastery and triple swing are much more important at beginning levels. I'm not saying this is a horrible skill, as it helps tons post 3rd job, should you decide to go after kents around 70 for fast, fast leveling.
2nd, Triple swing and mastery, Both improve damage quite a bit, and it's far better to improve your 3 hit set of moves, than add an occasional 4th, in my opinion anyway.
Through the entire game(or at least til about 100), you should always be mobbing stuff, so your damage will be lower should to tackle on a mob without mastery, regardless of what level TS is.
3rd Combo drain. yeah, it depends on where you train, any time within CPQ its totally useless. Altair/past PQ, might be useful, but I'd still rather have better damage.
If you're not able to potless train somewhere, then you shouldn't be there at all. Also, Ellin forest PQ is for adventurers only.
4th, Final charge. I can not stress this enough, a maximum of 90% damage to me is not worth it. if you don't max it, and you leave it at 21, thats only 72% damage, thats pitiful, in a game where your max damage is one of the most important things, thats a total waste of points.
Final charge is one of the most useful skills in 2nd job. It allows you to charge into monsters, similar to a warrior's rush skill. Obviously, you don't see heroes or dark knights spamming rush on everything, so it's not meant to be a top damaging skill. It's made simply to mob up things easier, and gain some combos as well.
and as for 'the aran needs to do less damage to maintain a combo'. This is only true for the 'lower levels' IE below 3rd job. Either train on maps with large numbers of mobs, such as Roids, or in MP3, or train on mobs with HUGE HP, like thunderbreakers, pre 3rd job. sure it will help, but by that point you should have drain. that said, I doubt drain will save you from thunderbreakers @65, and you'll probably *still* need pots, unless your leaching your max hp.
Given that I don't think ANYONE has hit lv 200 with the aran yet, at least not in global or SEA, I don't think anyone here can really judge that far quite yet. from what I can tell, the way that the aran is "supposed to be played" changes quite dramatically over the levels. you go from wanting 1-hit kills, to wanting things to take 20 hits to kill, to wanting things to die in about 3 hits, that you can kill alot of, to wanting to hammer against one big thing, and thats all before lv 40.
If your fighting ONE thing that doesn't die until your 400'th combo hit, from that single mob, because it's a BOSS, things like final charge are a 100% waste. It really all depends on if you'd rather fight 'damage sponges' or run around 1-hit KOing things. I personally like to kill 'big things', and looking at things like time temple, there's going to be a LOT of them.
Until 4th job, you get knocked back with every hit. This becomes very annoying, since you have to stop your combo to walk back. With final charge, you could use this to get back fluently. Of course, this is just one example of it's uses.
Now here's one last comment, back to body pressure again.
body pressure is great for mobbing. walk around the map with it on, bump into EVERY monster, then wait for everything to catch up, it takes like 2-5 seconds, and given we have nimble foot (now renamed to something stupid), AND combat step, going from one end of a map to the other, is pretty fast. that negates final charge, a second time, AND gives another reason for body pressure. But that doesn't matter, it's just more room for opinion.
derp, you can just attack them for the same mobbing effect.
-edit
oh, and i was wrong, drain maxes at 5%