Alphaeus
Member
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Well, I've been here since just after Beta closed (well, I haven't been in the forums until recently), and I have seen all forms of poison. Personally, I don't see a problem with blocking poison. Over three turns if you do maxed poison, you're still doing 300-400+ total UNBLOCKABLE damage. Personally, I used poison on my BH (and later CH) and sometimes its blocked, sometimes not...but even with a block, you can still win if played well. Using Massacre with Venom Strike is not really a good strategy. Massacre has HUGE energy requirements (literally the largest energy consuming skill in the whole game, if I remember correctly), and really using ANY skill that has more the 170 energy requirements with it is going to force you to seriously jack your energy, which will make your other skills suffer. If you want to use Venom Strike, the build that seems to work best is to just go tank. Reasonably high hp, high dex, high tech....that way, you can just outlast your opponent, dealing guaranteed damage each turn. With high Dex, you'll have a good gun skill, and if you do your skills right (particularly at higher lvls) , the high tech might even give you a decent bot attack. Either way, Mass/Venom Strike is a bad combo, because you essentially need high everything...in which case a focus build is better overall. I don't mind having Venom Strike be blockable in the least, additionally, because it does make it fair to other opponents. Poison entirely negates the principle behind super-resist/def Focus builds, and is quite devastating to them. Often, on my Focus TM, if I had not blocked the initial attack in Venom Strike, I would have died quite quickly. When you consider that many of the most popular builds around have a very low block chance, being blocked now and then is not that much of a problem. Venom Strike would just be too terribly OP if it could NEVER be blocked. There must be weaknesses to everything (even if those of us who use skills would LOVE to just be able to have epic pwnage with it), and blockage is the weakness of Venom Strike. As a last note, there are passive primary cores that increase your likelihood of dealing full damage and decrease your chances of being blocked. They aren't a fix all, but they do help. Also, check out the block-chance data in the balance data post at the top of the Balance Forum section. That will help you figure out how to reduce block chance.
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