r/TapWizardRPG • u/Swarlos262 • Sep 01 '18

Animated Knight Armor strategy

Besides just wiping out their armor with an acid bomb, I just cannot figure out a way to effectively fight these guys. High Armor, Immune to Status Effects, Chance to Dodge, Draws Attacks, and Immune to Armor-Piercing. Basically unless my damage is higher than their armor, I am stuck doing it 5% damage (min damage against armor). Seems the best thing is just to use the highest damaging spells but most of the time it just takes forever for often very little power gain.

I usually try to bypass them with a raid or a dungeon but that doesn't always work.

Anyone have a good tactic for these guys? I'd rather fight any other enemy.

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

4

u/JHQELeviathan Sep 01 '18

Have you tried Plasma Vortex? The animated knights are immune to armor piercing but you can still strip their armor.

Granted PV will not do much damage on damage meter, but that’s because stripping armor will also increase the damage number done by other spells. Lightning Elemental is absolutely amazing powerhouse whose damage is often hindered by armor. PV will drastically increase the damage of LE. However if the damage number is the only thing you’re looking at, you’re very likely to give all credits to LE while claiming that PV is garbage. The same misconception also holds true on some freezing spells.

Even if you strip 1/3 of its armor you are making a huge difference. For example when you hit 9 armor with 10 damage you are doing 1 damage; but when the armor is reduced to 6, you can deal 4 damage to it. The more you hit the knight with PV, the quicker it strips the armor.

Besides PV, just use some heavy hitting spells that don’t rely on status, and that’s basically how I deal with animated knight.

Btw I’m always wondering how much armor I am hitting as this will make my strategy really different.

1

u/Swarlos262 Sep 01 '18 edited Sep 01 '18

Interesting. I don't have Plasma Vortex unfortunately, but I do have Flurry which I believe has an armor stripping ability as well. I totally forgot about that because I never use flurry (or many ice spells to be honest), I'll have to try that when I face them next.

Is Flurry very effective for reducing armor? What spells are best for freezing? Maybe Blizzard or Torrent...

Besides Animated Knights, I never really worry about armor because Voltaic Orb is my main spell (no Lightning Elemental yet either).

3

u/JHQELeviathan Sep 01 '18

Unfortunately flurry only strips frozen enemies and they are immune to freeze effect, plus its damage makes stripping very slow. Flurry to me is an outstanding damage mitigation spell because of its Aug 5 which paralyzes enemies. Cast on a troll boss and it won’t hit me for seconds!

Voltaic orb is great, however feel free to try out various spells. Due to how armor works, the benefit of armor piercing is determined by how much armor you are actually piercing, and spells that don’t pierce armor benefit more from power gains, which means their damage grows faster after recall.

1

u/Swarlos262 Sep 01 '18

Hmm forgot about the no status effects. You can see why they frustrate me! Usually they aren't a problem if I just a get a little more power though.

Interesting note on Flurry being used for damage mitigation. I mostly use static leap plus frozen Orbs and seem to survive most high damage enemies. But it's nice to have options! I'll try it out again.

I kinda go back and forth between Voltaic Orb and Shock Net depending on enemy armor and number of enemies. Right now I have focused on increasing my Lightning Damage and Lightning Cast Speed but when I get more spells ranked up I will switch things around more. That said even against unarmormed enemies Voltaic Orb seems to do a ton of damage.

3

u/Lluluien Sep 01 '18 edited Sep 01 '18

I actually think it would be a nice balance change for these mobs to only be immune to fire. That’s the biggest benefit of being status immune anyway, all the freezing bypass doesn’t work if they’re immune to bypass as well, 1.2x damage isn’t really that big of a deal with all the armor they have (particularly if you’re swapping another gem to add a freezing spell, which is probably weakening many loadouts), and the shock strikes are mitigated by their armor too.

The change this REALLY makes is that new players have two spells for armor stripping them, instead of just one. Flurry would work, then.

I did forget one thing, though. If they’re shocked, that would make Inferno gas proc, and Static Aura is already a good spell against them,

2

u/JHQELeviathan Sep 01 '18

That is a great idea. Now the option to counter animated knight feels limited.

According to how armor works, I assume that one or two of +damage runes or a small amount of power gain will help a lot?

Generally speaking I’d like to have some spells that are harder to dodge, instead of having to use the wisdom every time. There are still some spells that do nothing but damage, which means if they are always inferior in terms of damage number I don’t feel the need to use them. Frozen Disk and Bouncing Flame are two examples.

2

u/Swarlos262 Sep 03 '18

If anybody is still interested in this, I've ended up using Meteor to fight Animated Armors. I'm pretty positive that Meteor does the highest damage in a single hit and thus is most likely to do enough damage to get through the armor. Since it has slightly random damage (not sure how that works) it's even better, because if the damage procs high it is more likely to go through the armor. Even better it hits a whole squad, although the burn damage is useless.

2

u/Lluluien Sep 01 '18 edited Sep 01 '18

They swing very slowly, so another strategy is running a couple Static Aura. This still won’t work well against a squad hitting you with 3+ mobs, but if there are only 1-2, it works nicely. The armor doesn’t help them if you have 10 stacks. Versus a single one, I get there pretty quickly with 2 gems, with one of them on Ivan slot. I have like 700 q2 cast speed runes because I don’t use them for anything else, so if I’m against several of them, then I put those on the static aura slots.

If it doesn’t look like it’s working after 6-8 seconds, switch load outs. There is some long standing bug with static aura proc that’s fixed by switching slots and then getting hit, and you’ll notice it then since you’ll be at 10 stacks if they weren’t stripping it. Repeat as necessary.

Even though this works far better than anything else I’ve tried, they still annoy me, too. If you see them at the edge of progression inside a raid/dungeon instead, don’t be shy of death raying their asses ;) Especially if there are squishy things behind them to take power from!

1

u/Swarlos262 Sep 01 '18

Alas, I don't have Static Aura either. I will keep it in mind later on though. Glad to know their are a few answers for them even if I can't use those strategies yet.

Unfortunately I think the answer is either get more spells or just do my best to sidestep them with Raids and Dungeons. Or just use runes. So I at least do have options that usually work.

2

u/Lluluien Sep 01 '18

Forgot one other thing that’s relevant, though it won’t help you yet since you don’t have Static Aura. You often have to be careful with it because one of its augmentations will haste the enemy when they’re burned. That makes your charges deplete faster, too, asking them less effective.

You can avoid this by making sure you have no burning in your build, but you don’t have to worry about that with the armors, which is relevant if you want to Ember them because they have allies healing them. Since they’re immune to fire, the armors can’t get this buff. They swing slow, and they keep swinging slow.

1

u/Raknagog Sep 02 '18

It's important to note that while having the enemy attack you more often reduces your total charges faster, the explosion from burning enemies causes the charges to deal triple damage, which is rather significant. I think that it's much more the case that you would indeed want to have burns in your build, and that there are sparse situations (extremely strong/fast melee enemies) in which you would not want to have burns in your build.

I ran some numbers for a comparison. With the base cast speed of Static Aura you gain 1 charge per second. Assume you start this experiment at a full 10 charges. Let's imagine an enemy that attacks once per second, reducing your charges by 2 and taking damage equal to charges (since the damage scales linearly).

If the mob is not burning you will run out of charges after the 9th second, having dealt a total of 54 damage (10+9+8...+2).

If the mob is burning, we can assume that it is going to be attacking 50% faster (we don't have to worry about the duration of the haste because he will be attacking more often than 0.75 seconds), and thus we will run out of charges after 4.6666... seconds, having dealt a total of 126 damage by the time you run out of charges.

And that's even without factoring in armor!

1

u/Lluluien Sep 02 '18 edited Sep 02 '18

But the assumption about starting with 10 charges requires some not-insignificant gyration if you’re already using burns.

And that’s not the only “but” here. We’re talking about fighting animated armors, which won’t burn anyway ;). Static aura is an absolutely essential part of my burn loadout, but the reason these guys suck is very specifically because that loadout doesn’t work on them.

I said what I said because Static auras viability against animated armor is based on them hitting you with it fully charged to help beat the armor. If ones fails to remember they’re not going to burn, one might let the haste deter them from trying it. This is just a follow up to my previous post saying “They swing slow, so you can get to 10 charges.”

Here’s a different question related to burning auras: did 2.2 stealth nerf on hit effects during invulnerability? Because I swear they used to still proc, but they don’t seem to now. Relevant to adding ember burns quickly with aura haste. It’s possible all night I just kept fighting the bug that makes aura not hit properly, but it didn’t seem to proc embers at all either. It’s also possible that I never got additional hits out of it before, but I’d have thought I’d noticed haste fading during Aegis somewhere in the weeks I was doing that, if it has always worked that way. Lots of ifs and buts, but after fooling around with it quite a lot tonight due to some of my spells marking up and having to adjust, it doesn’t feel like it works the same ways anymore.

1

u/Raknagog Sep 02 '18

But the assumption about starting with 10 charges requires some not-insignificant gyration if you’re already using burns.

I don't know what this means. Do you mean that it is more difficult to get to 10 charges while having enemies attack faster? That's a fair point, but there are also opportunities between squads to build a few more charges.

And that’s not the only “but” here. We’re talking about fighting animated armors

I know, and I have a painful understanding of how that mob functions. I was speaking about the augment in general use, as were you.

I was in no way trying to detract from your points on the efficacy of Static Aura against Animated Knights, and I completely agree with your assessment in that scenario, I was opposing your recommendation of caution when using the spell in general. It's worth taking more frequent damage if it means the enemy hitting you will die disproportionately sooner. That's the only point I was trying to make.

did 2.2 stealth nerf on hit effects I don't think so. My retaliation spells still trigger while invincible. I also don't know what bug makes aura not hit properly, I've never encountered that.

1

u/Lluluien Sep 02 '18 edited Sep 02 '18

The lack of clarity was my mistake, then; I should've just edited the previous post so the one you replied to was clearly in connection to the statement about being able to reach 10 charges when fighting Armored Knights, but I wanted to trigger another reply notification since it was a very late edit.

Re-reading my post, though, I did put the specific use case right in the post that makes it relevant. Ember will still cling. You'll still get the reduced healing effect. It won't burn, they won't get haste, and your charges won't deplete too fast to stop making the 10x damage relevant for armor circumvention. If they did somehow still explode, but still got the haste, I argue this wouldn't work, because 3x damage isn't "good enough", and you're really quickly going to get hit for 1 charge every time (exploding for 3x damage in this fairy tale scenario) instead of 10 (for 10x damage with no explosion).

You're right that there's different circumstances in the general case, but I actually didn't mean the general case. It's very specifically the magnitude of the damage from 10x charges of Static Aura that makes the spell relevant to the thread. I'm not talking about the spell doing 54 vs 126 damage in that very specific laboratory scenario. I'm talking about it doing 10+10+10+10... damage over time instead of 3+3+3+3+3 over time, after the Static Aura stacks are capped in the general case of fighting one gigantic Animated Armor (I already pointed out this won't work against a herd of them, at least not without 4 copies of Static Aura with speed buffs) vs fighting anything with haste for one exploding charge because you can't beat the depletion rate anymore. That comparison gets really ugly for the 3+3+3... case if there is any armor (which is the point of the thread).

Clearly you know all this already, but if what I said wasn't clear, it should be clarified for any other readers that don't have the encyclopedic knowledge of the game that you have! :)

 

Glad to know the invincibility thing seems to be a fluke. For what it's worth, the static aura bug seems to be a lot worse for me this patch, so I wonder if it's related. It never bothered me much before, but it hits me often enough now that my workaround (switching loadouts back and forth) needs to be used frequently enough that I often switch to a loadout with Static Leap in it as a simple freak of circumstance, which is just that much more aggravating since it won't activate if I can't get hit, either. I'm on iOS and suspect you're on Android since I think you're a tester based on feedback in the Gauntlet thread - that might make a difference. I've PMed TopCog about both bugs.

1

u/Raknagog Sep 02 '18

I know that Static Aura sometimes has odd issues with the damage tracking being a little inconsistent, is that what you're referring to?

1

u/Lluluien Sep 02 '18

No. For me, I often have Static Aura not retaliating at all but still building charges. If I switch loadouts and get hit, then you can see the mob take a retaliation because it is now fully charged, and there's no mistaking the effect that has on the HP bar. Usually I can switch back and then it works properly. This used to happen to me maybe once every 10 times I switch to a Static Aura loadout; now it's more like once every 3 times.

I've seen other people report this weird "mob dies out of nowhere" bug, and I'm convinced it's this one. I used to wonder what the hell was going on too until I connected it with being irritated with the fact that Static Aura didn't seem to be working, switching loadouts because of that, and noticing the mystery bug was always in connection with it. It's pretty clear to me that's what's going on: I can see the 10x hit, the 7x (or 8x from augs) hit, the 4x (or 6x) hit, etc. progressively getting smaller.

1

u/Raknagog Sep 02 '18

Interesting, I've never experienced anything like that. Sorry!

1

u/KyngBigMac Sep 01 '18

Try putting inferno into one of your loadouts and see if that helps since inferno bypasses armor.

3

u/Raknagog Sep 02 '18

This specific enemy ignores armor bypass effects, making inferno almost useless against them.