XILE-RO ASSASSIN CROSS PVP GUIDE
by: HenHen
Introduction
Assassins are cool; I don’t think many people would argue that. In fact, I’m sure they’re one of the more common “starting characters” on any RO server. One of the interesting things about XileRO is that, unlike 99% of the RO servers out there, assassins aren’t overpowered in PvP here. In fact, if anything, they’re somewhat underpowered.
This isn’t a bad thing, though. In fact, it just makes assassins much more fun to play. However, for those of you who are expecting assassins to be a good choice for getting easy-kills, sorry but you better look elsewhere (perhaps Lord Knight or Creator would be more up your alley). Assassins require an insane amount of finesse to play, and only good players are capable of making an assassin shine. In the hands of someone who can bring out the true potential of an assassin, however, it is a force to be reckoned with.
In order to be successful with an assassin, you must take full advantage of its one strength – dealing damage quickly. This means that you need be strike fast without hesitation. This comes naturally with experience. Because assassins don’t many opportunities to do damage, but does damage in large chunks, it means that the difference between a fast assassin player and a slow assassin player is huge (i.e. you’ll either do a lot of damage or no damage)
The assassin that is more or less a full-bloody roar build, with equipment slotted to allow me doing adequate crits against people with no luk. There are many assassin builds out there, but this build is definitely the all-around best build possible.
Equipments
Weapons
Bloody Roar
Bloody Roar
Talefing [Marina Card x 4]
Talefing [Marina Card x 4]
Lord’s Knife [1 Magnolia Card 1 Metaller 2 Hydra Card]
Lord’s Knife [2 Savage Bebe Card 2 Hydra Card]
Oblivion Blade [4 assaulter]
Oblivion Blade [4 hydra]*
Phoenix Wing [4 Monkey Fist Cards]
Phoenix Wing [1 Monkey Fist Cards 3 Phreeoni Card]**
Xecutioner [2 Hydra 2 Assaulter]
Xecutioner [2 Hydra 1 Phreeoni Card]**
Katar of Chaos [2 Hydra, 2 Drainilar]
Ice-element Katar
Assassin Dagger
A couple of unbreakable weapons in storage.
* Replace some hydras with monkey fist cards if you can’t reach 195 aspd.
** These are used for flee-type enemies you can’t hit otherwise
Shield
Buckler [Thara Frog Card]
Guard [True Golden Thief Bug Card]
Helm
1) Several 4-slotted helms of your choice (which includes LKH, DH, EQW, and Event Hats)
You don’t really have much of a choice here. The event hats have negligibly better stats, but +10 event hats are fairly hard to come across.
All of them, except one should be +10
One of them needs to be +4 or +5 so that you can slot them with Gibbet cards
2) wings of angel [1] / wings of demon [1]
You will need a bunch of these. Obtainable from an NPC in exchange for 3 Golds; the +1 str is desirable, but for aesthetic purposes you could also use elf ears [1].
3) Omega wings [1] / Shadowcraft wings [1]
Str, Dex and Vit are all most important stats to a SinX, so Omega Wings (5 int/luk/agi, 15 str/dex/vit) is your best choice.
Cards you will need
- Bloody Knight Cards (as many as you need)
- Evil Snake Lord Card x 1 (anti curse/blind)
- Orc Hero Card x 1 (anti stun)
- Marduk Card x 1 (anti silence)
- Nightmare Card x 1 (anti sleep)
- Maya Purple Card x 1
- Pharaoh Cards x 4
You need to keep Maya Purple Card on yourself at all times, even against enemies that don’t hide. This is because you need to “see” yourself when you’re cloaked in order to be able to enchant yourself without having to uncloak first.
If you have a Guild Set or NPC Set, then use the appropriate set pieces instead.
Armor
You can get any type of armor you see fit, just make sure you have an armor with
- Ghost Element
- Fire Element
- Undead Element
- Holy Element (keep in storage)
- Water Element
- Unfrozen
- Wind Element
- Unbreakable armor (cornutus card)
Use the same type of armor for two of the above for easier swapping, but do not use the same armor for more than two, as it makes armor switching too inefficient that way.
Garment
You’ll need several slotted manteaus, refined as highly as possible, carded with:
- Raydric Card (-20% neutral damage)
- Jakk Card (-30% fire damage)
- Dustiness Card (-30% wind damage)
- Isis Card (-30% shadow damage)
- Mars Card (-30% water damage)
- Hode Card (-30% earth damage)
- Marionette Card (-30% ghost damage)
Shoes
Sleipinir or Boots of Guidance if you’re using a set
Accessories
Clip [Marine Sphere Card]
Megingjordes x 2
Rosary [Greed Card] x 1
The build: There is a large degree of flexibility in one’s build. This is just a rough
outline.
Str: ~220
Agi: Enough for at least 192 aspd with 2 BKC* while using bloody roar
Dex: Enough for ~500 “hit” with bloody roar
Int: 1
Luk: between 1 and 50 (enough for decent crit with katar)
Vit: Whatever’s left
You don’t really need 195 aspd if you’re spamming skills, so if you only have 192 aspd while sporting only 2 BKC, that’s fine. You’ll still end up having 195 aspd when you use more than 2 BKC, which is most of the time.
The importance of Weapon and Armor Switching
Playing assassin cross against an expert opponent is all about armor switching and weapon switching. The three main element at your disposal are:
- Neutral
- Fire (from magnum break)
- Poison (from enchant poison)
Make good use of your ability to use THREE elements to your advantage. Try to enchant yourself outside of your enemy’s field of vision so that he has to guess which element you’re using. There are some tricks below as well to help you improve the efficiency of your weapon switching.
General Tips and Tricks
Sonic dance: The most important technique you’ll learn as an assassin cross. Sonic blow’s delay is really long, but if you sonic blow, then click somewhere to move, then sonic blow again, some of the delay will be reduced. This is a life saver.
Breaker + Throw Sand Spam: Breaker’s damage isn’t all that great, but if you spam breaker and then throw sand alternating with one another, you’ll increase your overall damage per second somewhat.
The “cloak” cancel: Cloak cancels into many skills, including magnum break, enchant poison, meteor assault, backslide. Just get into the habit of using cloak whenever possible, because it helps you reduce the damage you take.
Flash-enchant: Enchant poison has almost no animation, but the words above the assassin is a dead give away. That’s why it’s generally in the sinX’s best interest to use a second skill to cancel out the word above your head as soon as you enchant yourself. Backslide tends to be a great choice, but meteor assault + cloak can work as well. Remember, if the enemy doesn’t see your enchant, it’ll be harder for him to counter
Fakeout: If you use magnum break, and then enchant poison, it’ll look like you’re using enchant poison while you actually still have fire element. This is because enchant poison cannot override magnum break. This is just another gimmick to throw armor switchers off their game.
Freeze-lock: Freeze someone with 8 Marina cards + Throw sand, poison them with venom dust and then wait it out. Before they unfreeze, use venom splasher on them and then hit them with a breaker and then backslide out of there. When venom splasher hits, there’s a good chance they’ll get frozen again, and you won’t need to stand there trying to freeze while taking damage. There are some LK’s out there that knows how frustrating it is to get frozen 5 times in a row with this trick, effectively losing 80% of their HP without getting to do a thing to me.
FRZ-PSN-EDP: A very useful routine. Freeze someone with marina cards and throw sand, venom dust them to shave off some HP, and then switch to the 2 drainilar 2 hydra Katar. When they’re frozen, the enemy is water element, so the 2 hydra 2 drainilar weapon will do full damage. Also, considering the enemy is frozen, their defense will be reduced, which further helps boost the damage. This is one of the few times where damage-mod cards can outdamage bloody roar.
Forward backslide: Instead of backsliding away from the enemy, why not do the opposite and make use of backslide’s mobility to help you approach enemies? All you have to do is turn around to face away from the enemy before you backslide. Very useful.
Backslide-Run-Turn-Backslide: This is a technique you can use to outrun just about anything (barring a true-backsliding Sniper or snapping champ). You can do this forward offensively, or backward defensively. You can outrun champions and priests doing this, even when you’re decrease agi’ed. This is what you do: backslide, then right as you land on your new cell, click on a cell further away (in the same direction you were backsliding to), this will let you cancel backslide delay. Walk a couple of cells, then turn around and backslide again.
To clarify: backslide, move-cancel the backslide delay, walk a couple of cells, turn around and backslide again.
The whole point of moving is to allow you to not “waste time” during backslide’s cooldown, and it makes the critical difference as to whether you can outrun certain things.
The controversy of using EDP
This is more like a disclaimer. From time to time, you’ll have some people you fight call you “EDP noob” because you used EDP to kill them. When this happens, the logical retort is to tell those idiots to go **** a banana.
Enchant deadly poison is the only way of giving assassins a fighting chance against practically every class. Breaker is an okay skill, but it gets outdamaged by almost everything other classes have. Enchant deadly poison isn’t cheap. In order to make good use of it, you need to get close enough to the other guy to hit them in the first place, which isn’t an easy thing to do. Therefore, I am telling you right now: it’s okay to use EDP, and if anyone tells you otherwise, I suggest you screenshoot it and then post it on this thread so I can personally tell that guy to kiss my ass.
PvP Tactics
Moving on to the heart of the guide, which is the battle tactics against individual classes. Note that this guide cannot possibly cover all the scenarios in combat, it can only give you a rough foundation on which to build upon. Know that the actual battle tactics are
much more intricate and rely on your personal experience more than anything else.
Remember, there are no “easy” match-up for an assassin cross. The easiest matchup is probably a whitesmith, and even they can easily destroy you if you aren't good enough.
Lord Knight
Difficulty: 5/5
Comments: Very hard to win, but not impossible. In order to beat a Lord Knight, you need to be very good at weapon and armor switching, and also at moving around.
Lord Knights will just use sight and then spiral pierce you to death. Spiral pierce has really bad stunlock, so don’t even try to move around once you’ve been hit by spiraled. Instead, rely on backslide to move.
Spiral pierce > Breaker, so don’t try to go head to head against the LK with your breaker.
HP stacking from 8 MFC will be invaluable against the LK. Start the match by breaker-ing the LK once or twice, which should shave off at least 20k damage from the LK, then backslide out of there and switch to bloody roar. Because you started the fight with 8 MFC, that’s like having 80 more vit that you got for free. You need all the advantage you can get here.
The trick is to bait the LK and then backslide INTO the Lord Knight, then sonic blow. If you’re lucky, you’ll land a sonic blow, maybe two if you’re using sonic dance technique. The LK will respond by magnum break or bowling bash to knock you back. If the LK uses bowling bash, don’t attempt to force you way back in, instead backslide out of there and then bait him again. If the LK uses magnum break, then what you should do depends on whether he cancels his MB. If he doesn’t cancel his magnum break, then go in and sonic blow him again. If he cancelled his MB, then backslide away and bait him again.
Freeze is a very useful status against the LK as well since LK’s have very low luk, making them easy to freeze with 8 marina cards. Of course, you cannot freeze a Lord Knight if they have undead armor on, so what you want to do is magnum break and breaker once or twice to force him off undead armor, and then quickly switch to 8 marina cards and freeze him with throw sand. Once he’s frozen, try to freeze lock him.
You definitely need anti-stun, because the last thing you want, after working so hard to get close to the LK, is to be killed by bash spam.
Paladin
Difficulty: 5/5
Comments: Another hard one. I can safely say, no matter how good you are at a sinX, against a great paladin your chance of winning borderlines 0%.
There’s just nothing you can really do. Pressure destroys attempts at breaker spam (though if you curse the paladin, their pressure won’t drain SP anymore; you still can’t outdamage his heal with breaker though). 70% reflect and more than double your HP > any attempt at melee, and they’ve got heal, bolts, smite, and freeze/sac on their side as well.
Try to freeze-lock the paladin to shave off HP. If you weaken him enough, then maybe you can kill him with sonic blow. However, while you’re trying to weaken him, he’s going to be weakening you as well, and he’s much better at it.
That water armor comes in handy here, since he’s going to be using fire and cold bolts on you, most likely. Beware of sacrifice, though. If he’s an str-based paladin, then adjust your armor switching accordingly.
Also, don’t enchant EDP until you’ve weakened the paladin enough already.
If you can’t freeze the paladin for some reason, it could be because the paladin is wearing unfrozen armor. However, this means that he’s ditching orc lord armor (30% reflect), so try to kill him directly.
Wizards
Difficulty: 4/5
Comment: Not the hardest class to kill, but unless you have a +10 NPC set on your hand, you’ll have some trouble dealing with the magic crashers.
Best way to deal with wizard is to armor swap to counter magic crasher while wearing a TGTB. Wizards have low luk, so you can try freezing them with throw sand, which should end things right there (use freeze-psn-EDP). If the wizard puts up a safety wall, then freeze him with crits instead of throw sand, because you won’t break the ice that way and it’s much quicker.
If the wizard uses gravitational field, backslide towards the wizard. The wizard cannot move when he uses gravity, so take advantage of that.
Overall, the key is fast armor switching. If you are too slow, then you’ll die before you hit the wizard.
If the wizard ****s, then you can probably get away with just using breaker while sporting a TGTB, and armor switch against the magic crasher. However, you won’t win like this if the wizard is equally good at armor switching. Against a competent wizard, you’ll really need to rely on EDP to score the win.
If you’re hitting the wizard and you can predict he’s going to put up safety wall, the best thing to do in that case is put on your second weapon (thus ditching TGTB). With one weapon, you can’t break safety wall before he can put up a new one, but with two weapons, you can. He can’t storm gust you during the safety wall delay, and if he tries to cancel the delay by moving, he’ll be moving himself out of SW. Be quick about re-equipping TGTB, though, if he’s not dead already.
Professor
Difficulty: 4/5
Comment: There are two kinds of prof. There’s the common prof that you’ll be able to kill with just EDP-crit while wearing TGTB, occasionally switching to two weapon to catch them offguard. These Profs are easy, and if all Profs were like that, the difficulty would be a 1/5 at best.
However, there’s the second kind of prof, the ones that actually know how to play the prof. These profs not only will constantly spider web you, but they also know that once they soul burn you, you will NOT be regen-ing SP. This is quite dangerous because this makes it supremely easy for them to armor switch on you – all they need to do is wear undead or fire armor to counter your primary element, then switch to GR when you switch back to neutral element. You won’t be able to re-enchant yourself anymore. The ice katar is quite useful here, because he might not expect it, and not react in time to use magic on you, and you’d be able to score some nice crits.
When starting a fight with prof, you should avoid EDP from the start. Instead, run around next to him, harassing him with breaker and backslide everytime he spiderwebs you. He’ll eventually have to soul burn you to get rid of your SP, so that you can’t backslide out of webs anymore. When he soul burns you, just be patient and wait for your SP to regen, then backslide again. He’ll have to soul burn you again and again to get you. The goal here is to get his soul burn to fail, so keep attempting to run until his soul burn fails. You want his soul burn to fail because it’ll drain him of his SP, which will probably do around 20k damage to him right off the bat and more importantly, gets rid of his energy coat. With energy coat, you’ll do puny damage against the prof. Without energy coat, the prof becomes easier to kill.
If the prof puts up safety wall (and he probably will), first thing you should try is to freeze him via crits. However, if he puts up safety wall AND wall of fog, then don’t try to freeze him. It won’t be very effective because you won’t land that many hits (prof’s high luk prevents critical hits, and wall of fog blinds you so it prevents non-critical hits). One weakness of him putting up wall of fog is he won’t be able to bolt you easily, so you can crit him with the ice katar with less worries (still need to worry about AoE though).
Holy armor and undead armor are useful against a prof, though it might not be enough. How much you can armor switch against a prof depends on your own skills.
Assassins are cool; I don’t think many people would argue that. In fact, I’m sure they’re one of the more common “starting characters” on any RO server. One of the interesting things about XileRO is that, unlike 99% of the RO servers out there, assassins aren’t overpowered in PvP here. In fact, if anything, they’re somewhat underpowered.
This isn’t a bad thing, though. In fact, it just makes assassins much more fun to play. However, for those of you who are expecting assassins to be a good choice for getting easy-kills, sorry but you better look elsewhere (perhaps Lord Knight or Creator would be more up your alley). Assassins require an insane amount of finesse to play, and only good players are capable of making an assassin shine. In the hands of someone who can bring out the true potential of an assassin, however, it is a force to be reckoned with.
In order to be successful with an assassin, you must take full advantage of its one strength – dealing damage quickly. This means that you need be strike fast without hesitation. This comes naturally with experience. Because assassins don’t many opportunities to do damage, but does damage in large chunks, it means that the difference between a fast assassin player and a slow assassin player is huge (i.e. you’ll either do a lot of damage or no damage)
The assassin that is more or less a full-bloody roar build, with equipment slotted to allow me doing adequate crits against people with no luk. There are many assassin builds out there, but this build is definitely the all-around best build possible.
Equipments
Weapons
Bloody Roar
Bloody Roar
Talefing [Marina Card x 4]
Talefing [Marina Card x 4]
Lord’s Knife [1 Magnolia Card 1 Metaller 2 Hydra Card]
Lord’s Knife [2 Savage Bebe Card 2 Hydra Card]
Oblivion Blade [4 assaulter]
Oblivion Blade [4 hydra]*
Phoenix Wing [4 Monkey Fist Cards]
Phoenix Wing [1 Monkey Fist Cards 3 Phreeoni Card]**
Xecutioner [2 Hydra 2 Assaulter]
Xecutioner [2 Hydra 1 Phreeoni Card]**
Katar of Chaos [2 Hydra, 2 Drainilar]
Ice-element Katar
Assassin Dagger
A couple of unbreakable weapons in storage.
* Replace some hydras with monkey fist cards if you can’t reach 195 aspd.
** These are used for flee-type enemies you can’t hit otherwise
Shield
Buckler [Thara Frog Card]
Guard [True Golden Thief Bug Card]
Helm
1) Several 4-slotted helms of your choice (which includes LKH, DH, EQW, and Event Hats)
You don’t really have much of a choice here. The event hats have negligibly better stats, but +10 event hats are fairly hard to come across.
All of them, except one should be +10
One of them needs to be +4 or +5 so that you can slot them with Gibbet cards
2) wings of angel [1] / wings of demon [1]
You will need a bunch of these. Obtainable from an NPC in exchange for 3 Golds; the +1 str is desirable, but for aesthetic purposes you could also use elf ears [1].
3) Omega wings [1] / Shadowcraft wings [1]
Str, Dex and Vit are all most important stats to a SinX, so Omega Wings (5 int/luk/agi, 15 str/dex/vit) is your best choice.
Cards you will need
- Bloody Knight Cards (as many as you need)
- Evil Snake Lord Card x 1 (anti curse/blind)
- Orc Hero Card x 1 (anti stun)
- Marduk Card x 1 (anti silence)
- Nightmare Card x 1 (anti sleep)
- Maya Purple Card x 1
- Pharaoh Cards x 4
You need to keep Maya Purple Card on yourself at all times, even against enemies that don’t hide. This is because you need to “see” yourself when you’re cloaked in order to be able to enchant yourself without having to uncloak first.
If you have a Guild Set or NPC Set, then use the appropriate set pieces instead.
Armor
You can get any type of armor you see fit, just make sure you have an armor with
- Ghost Element
- Fire Element
- Undead Element
- Holy Element (keep in storage)
- Water Element
- Unfrozen
- Wind Element
- Unbreakable armor (cornutus card)
Use the same type of armor for two of the above for easier swapping, but do not use the same armor for more than two, as it makes armor switching too inefficient that way.
Garment
You’ll need several slotted manteaus, refined as highly as possible, carded with:
- Raydric Card (-20% neutral damage)
- Jakk Card (-30% fire damage)
- Dustiness Card (-30% wind damage)
- Isis Card (-30% shadow damage)
- Mars Card (-30% water damage)
- Hode Card (-30% earth damage)
- Marionette Card (-30% ghost damage)
Shoes
Sleipinir or Boots of Guidance if you’re using a set
Accessories
Clip [Marine Sphere Card]
Megingjordes x 2
Rosary [Greed Card] x 1
The build: There is a large degree of flexibility in one’s build. This is just a rough
outline.
Str: ~220
Agi: Enough for at least 192 aspd with 2 BKC* while using bloody roar
Dex: Enough for ~500 “hit” with bloody roar
Int: 1
Luk: between 1 and 50 (enough for decent crit with katar)
Vit: Whatever’s left
You don’t really need 195 aspd if you’re spamming skills, so if you only have 192 aspd while sporting only 2 BKC, that’s fine. You’ll still end up having 195 aspd when you use more than 2 BKC, which is most of the time.
The importance of Weapon and Armor Switching
Playing assassin cross against an expert opponent is all about armor switching and weapon switching. The three main element at your disposal are:
- Neutral
- Fire (from magnum break)
- Poison (from enchant poison)
Make good use of your ability to use THREE elements to your advantage. Try to enchant yourself outside of your enemy’s field of vision so that he has to guess which element you’re using. There are some tricks below as well to help you improve the efficiency of your weapon switching.
General Tips and Tricks
Sonic dance: The most important technique you’ll learn as an assassin cross. Sonic blow’s delay is really long, but if you sonic blow, then click somewhere to move, then sonic blow again, some of the delay will be reduced. This is a life saver.
Breaker + Throw Sand Spam: Breaker’s damage isn’t all that great, but if you spam breaker and then throw sand alternating with one another, you’ll increase your overall damage per second somewhat.
The “cloak” cancel: Cloak cancels into many skills, including magnum break, enchant poison, meteor assault, backslide. Just get into the habit of using cloak whenever possible, because it helps you reduce the damage you take.
Flash-enchant: Enchant poison has almost no animation, but the words above the assassin is a dead give away. That’s why it’s generally in the sinX’s best interest to use a second skill to cancel out the word above your head as soon as you enchant yourself. Backslide tends to be a great choice, but meteor assault + cloak can work as well. Remember, if the enemy doesn’t see your enchant, it’ll be harder for him to counter
Fakeout: If you use magnum break, and then enchant poison, it’ll look like you’re using enchant poison while you actually still have fire element. This is because enchant poison cannot override magnum break. This is just another gimmick to throw armor switchers off their game.
Freeze-lock: Freeze someone with 8 Marina cards + Throw sand, poison them with venom dust and then wait it out. Before they unfreeze, use venom splasher on them and then hit them with a breaker and then backslide out of there. When venom splasher hits, there’s a good chance they’ll get frozen again, and you won’t need to stand there trying to freeze while taking damage. There are some LK’s out there that knows how frustrating it is to get frozen 5 times in a row with this trick, effectively losing 80% of their HP without getting to do a thing to me.
FRZ-PSN-EDP: A very useful routine. Freeze someone with marina cards and throw sand, venom dust them to shave off some HP, and then switch to the 2 drainilar 2 hydra Katar. When they’re frozen, the enemy is water element, so the 2 hydra 2 drainilar weapon will do full damage. Also, considering the enemy is frozen, their defense will be reduced, which further helps boost the damage. This is one of the few times where damage-mod cards can outdamage bloody roar.
Forward backslide: Instead of backsliding away from the enemy, why not do the opposite and make use of backslide’s mobility to help you approach enemies? All you have to do is turn around to face away from the enemy before you backslide. Very useful.
Backslide-Run-Turn-Backslide: This is a technique you can use to outrun just about anything (barring a true-backsliding Sniper or snapping champ). You can do this forward offensively, or backward defensively. You can outrun champions and priests doing this, even when you’re decrease agi’ed. This is what you do: backslide, then right as you land on your new cell, click on a cell further away (in the same direction you were backsliding to), this will let you cancel backslide delay. Walk a couple of cells, then turn around and backslide again.
To clarify: backslide, move-cancel the backslide delay, walk a couple of cells, turn around and backslide again.
The whole point of moving is to allow you to not “waste time” during backslide’s cooldown, and it makes the critical difference as to whether you can outrun certain things.
The controversy of using EDP
This is more like a disclaimer. From time to time, you’ll have some people you fight call you “EDP noob” because you used EDP to kill them. When this happens, the logical retort is to tell those idiots to go **** a banana.
Enchant deadly poison is the only way of giving assassins a fighting chance against practically every class. Breaker is an okay skill, but it gets outdamaged by almost everything other classes have. Enchant deadly poison isn’t cheap. In order to make good use of it, you need to get close enough to the other guy to hit them in the first place, which isn’t an easy thing to do. Therefore, I am telling you right now: it’s okay to use EDP, and if anyone tells you otherwise, I suggest you screenshoot it and then post it on this thread so I can personally tell that guy to kiss my ass.
PvP Tactics
Moving on to the heart of the guide, which is the battle tactics against individual classes. Note that this guide cannot possibly cover all the scenarios in combat, it can only give you a rough foundation on which to build upon. Know that the actual battle tactics are
much more intricate and rely on your personal experience more than anything else.
Remember, there are no “easy” match-up for an assassin cross. The easiest matchup is probably a whitesmith, and even they can easily destroy you if you aren't good enough.
Lord Knight
Difficulty: 5/5
Comments: Very hard to win, but not impossible. In order to beat a Lord Knight, you need to be very good at weapon and armor switching, and also at moving around.
Lord Knights will just use sight and then spiral pierce you to death. Spiral pierce has really bad stunlock, so don’t even try to move around once you’ve been hit by spiraled. Instead, rely on backslide to move.
Spiral pierce > Breaker, so don’t try to go head to head against the LK with your breaker.
HP stacking from 8 MFC will be invaluable against the LK. Start the match by breaker-ing the LK once or twice, which should shave off at least 20k damage from the LK, then backslide out of there and switch to bloody roar. Because you started the fight with 8 MFC, that’s like having 80 more vit that you got for free. You need all the advantage you can get here.
The trick is to bait the LK and then backslide INTO the Lord Knight, then sonic blow. If you’re lucky, you’ll land a sonic blow, maybe two if you’re using sonic dance technique. The LK will respond by magnum break or bowling bash to knock you back. If the LK uses bowling bash, don’t attempt to force you way back in, instead backslide out of there and then bait him again. If the LK uses magnum break, then what you should do depends on whether he cancels his MB. If he doesn’t cancel his magnum break, then go in and sonic blow him again. If he cancelled his MB, then backslide away and bait him again.
Freeze is a very useful status against the LK as well since LK’s have very low luk, making them easy to freeze with 8 marina cards. Of course, you cannot freeze a Lord Knight if they have undead armor on, so what you want to do is magnum break and breaker once or twice to force him off undead armor, and then quickly switch to 8 marina cards and freeze him with throw sand. Once he’s frozen, try to freeze lock him.
You definitely need anti-stun, because the last thing you want, after working so hard to get close to the LK, is to be killed by bash spam.
Paladin
Difficulty: 5/5
Comments: Another hard one. I can safely say, no matter how good you are at a sinX, against a great paladin your chance of winning borderlines 0%.
There’s just nothing you can really do. Pressure destroys attempts at breaker spam (though if you curse the paladin, their pressure won’t drain SP anymore; you still can’t outdamage his heal with breaker though). 70% reflect and more than double your HP > any attempt at melee, and they’ve got heal, bolts, smite, and freeze/sac on their side as well.
Try to freeze-lock the paladin to shave off HP. If you weaken him enough, then maybe you can kill him with sonic blow. However, while you’re trying to weaken him, he’s going to be weakening you as well, and he’s much better at it.
That water armor comes in handy here, since he’s going to be using fire and cold bolts on you, most likely. Beware of sacrifice, though. If he’s an str-based paladin, then adjust your armor switching accordingly.
Also, don’t enchant EDP until you’ve weakened the paladin enough already.
If you can’t freeze the paladin for some reason, it could be because the paladin is wearing unfrozen armor. However, this means that he’s ditching orc lord armor (30% reflect), so try to kill him directly.
Wizards
Difficulty: 4/5
Comment: Not the hardest class to kill, but unless you have a +10 NPC set on your hand, you’ll have some trouble dealing with the magic crashers.
Best way to deal with wizard is to armor swap to counter magic crasher while wearing a TGTB. Wizards have low luk, so you can try freezing them with throw sand, which should end things right there (use freeze-psn-EDP). If the wizard puts up a safety wall, then freeze him with crits instead of throw sand, because you won’t break the ice that way and it’s much quicker.
If the wizard uses gravitational field, backslide towards the wizard. The wizard cannot move when he uses gravity, so take advantage of that.
Overall, the key is fast armor switching. If you are too slow, then you’ll die before you hit the wizard.
If the wizard ****s, then you can probably get away with just using breaker while sporting a TGTB, and armor switch against the magic crasher. However, you won’t win like this if the wizard is equally good at armor switching. Against a competent wizard, you’ll really need to rely on EDP to score the win.
If you’re hitting the wizard and you can predict he’s going to put up safety wall, the best thing to do in that case is put on your second weapon (thus ditching TGTB). With one weapon, you can’t break safety wall before he can put up a new one, but with two weapons, you can. He can’t storm gust you during the safety wall delay, and if he tries to cancel the delay by moving, he’ll be moving himself out of SW. Be quick about re-equipping TGTB, though, if he’s not dead already.
Professor
Difficulty: 4/5
Comment: There are two kinds of prof. There’s the common prof that you’ll be able to kill with just EDP-crit while wearing TGTB, occasionally switching to two weapon to catch them offguard. These Profs are easy, and if all Profs were like that, the difficulty would be a 1/5 at best.
However, there’s the second kind of prof, the ones that actually know how to play the prof. These profs not only will constantly spider web you, but they also know that once they soul burn you, you will NOT be regen-ing SP. This is quite dangerous because this makes it supremely easy for them to armor switch on you – all they need to do is wear undead or fire armor to counter your primary element, then switch to GR when you switch back to neutral element. You won’t be able to re-enchant yourself anymore. The ice katar is quite useful here, because he might not expect it, and not react in time to use magic on you, and you’d be able to score some nice crits.
When starting a fight with prof, you should avoid EDP from the start. Instead, run around next to him, harassing him with breaker and backslide everytime he spiderwebs you. He’ll eventually have to soul burn you to get rid of your SP, so that you can’t backslide out of webs anymore. When he soul burns you, just be patient and wait for your SP to regen, then backslide again. He’ll have to soul burn you again and again to get you. The goal here is to get his soul burn to fail, so keep attempting to run until his soul burn fails. You want his soul burn to fail because it’ll drain him of his SP, which will probably do around 20k damage to him right off the bat and more importantly, gets rid of his energy coat. With energy coat, you’ll do puny damage against the prof. Without energy coat, the prof becomes easier to kill.
If the prof puts up safety wall (and he probably will), first thing you should try is to freeze him via crits. However, if he puts up safety wall AND wall of fog, then don’t try to freeze him. It won’t be very effective because you won’t land that many hits (prof’s high luk prevents critical hits, and wall of fog blinds you so it prevents non-critical hits). One weakness of him putting up wall of fog is he won’t be able to bolt you easily, so you can crit him with the ice katar with less worries (still need to worry about AoE though).
Holy armor and undead armor are useful against a prof, though it might not be enough. How much you can armor switch against a prof depends on your own skills.
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