Thank you Bazill, your post was very informative as i can tell you know your game. However i have a 35 paly and 55 SK that are coming up pretty quickly so my question to you is: Why play my Zerker when my Paly and SK can do everthing my Zerker can do and so much more, am i missing something?? This is a sincere question, not sarcasm, i'm actually hoping you can give me a reason as this is my original character from launch. PS Just want to clarify, when you say "crusader" you are implying that paladins, are just as formidable as the sk, correct?
Yes I have taken down crusaders on my zerk. Not all crusaders are created equal. As for you other question as to why play a Zerk over Sk or Pally. I would say its a personal choice as they play differantly. They can all do the same content granted a SK can do some of it easier than a zerk but a zerk can do it. Just depends on how easy you want it I guess.
I have a lvl 82 pally and my zerk is 83 at the moment. As for preference to play thats really down to which class best suites you, which is better well it has long been argued that warriors have the slight edge over crusaders when it comes to mitigation and avoidance. The problem is life taps and self heals seem to be a more viable way of getting through mobs at times compared to our temps. To put it into a better understanding i have tanked everything in TSO instances on both my zerk and pally. My zerk could deal with spike damage better through adrenaline and temps better when mobs were not doing that healers found it much easier to keep my pally at full health. I've also tanked everything on my pally that our MT (guard) has in our raid progression and again the healers found it easier to heal the pally than the guard plus the pally held agro better. The one major thing i noticed with my Pally when he went from SK and over and even comapring him to my zerk is his power. Pallies are power hungary and you need to have the gear as well as groups to deal with that. When he was an SK he never really had any power issues and tbh my zerk's power is generally pretty good unless i'm using adrenaline a lot. When SF came out i started lvling my Zerk but due to me putting so much time into playing my pally at the end of tso i have switched back to him as i enjoy what my pally can do. Thats in pve as well as pvp, the major difference is damage output. My Zerk out dps's my pally on single target as well multiple targets but my pally at lvl 80 could solo to the queen in Chardock killing several named on the way as well as farm Chelsith for wooden chests. In a million years my Zerk would not have that capability and would have to take a healer along. Hell as a 5man group without a healer my pally was able to go and kill all but Pythoness (didn't try her mind you) in Evernight Abbey. As far as Pally's go in pvp i would say they are harder to kill than sk's as long as the pally has a decent amount of power regen. I leveled my Pally as an SK to 80 but due to the guild lacking any lvl 80 Pally's i decided to betray him and see how it went. Shortly after i got my epic weapon on my pally i was running through SS and i had another lvl 80 SK run over and engage me. I was suprised that my Pally kiled this sk as fast as he did, especialy seeing as a lot of my jewlery was still geared for the SK. When i looked the SK up on eq2players we were both in very similar gear so i can only assume that they were not a good sk. If your looking for a fighter to pvp with then SK's are by far the easiest to use. They have insane damage prevention temps compared to the other fighter classes and with all the life tapping abilities, which can now be enhanced in SF, they have an incredible amount of self healing power. An Sk's damage output is also incredible if against single people or groups. As for Zerks well my own feeling is that due to us lacking any real healing power (yet to try the new SF aa's) we have to blow stuff up fast. We have our temp mit and avoidance buffs as well as adrenaline so against many classes that will see us through, as long as we can out dps our opponent and prey its not a healer that will just sit and heal through all the incoming whilst slowly taking your life down. The other probably major thing at the moment is that resists in pvp are all over the place at the moment and i'm not sure if they are workin as intended, but is giving SK's a slightly bigger advantage due to them having mostly spells with a few melee, where as Pally is mainly melee with a few spells and zerk is all melee for damage. Something else i'm not sure if anyone has covered yet is your health. Having a shed load of mit and avoidance is one thing but if you only have 10k health you'll still have some issues. On both of my fighters i pve 1st and pvp 2nd so i try to gear them for that. Genearlly its getting as much STR, STA and AGI on the gear as well as + parry, defence and all the other blue stats on gear as high as possible. In the past i have generally geared my zerk slightly more defensive than my pally so i have the ability to tank whilst DW for longer amounts of time. It may sound a bit daft but my off hand weapon generates a lot more hate so if the healers can take the extra work i go for the additional dps and hate. My pally on the other hand i have geared more offensively. His hate holding abilities and ability to self heal, plus the fact he always has the best shield i can get him equiped means i can afford to try and cranck up his dps to help the group kill stuff quicker. As for the choice's i made well my Zerk was/is my main, he is after all the one flagged as the guild leader but due to us trying to dable with raiding etc i have found my pally to be a very viable alternative. I find the pally also brings a little more utility to the raids than what the zerk does. I will admit i hate healing on my pally unless it's to keep me alive or my healer's but i do have that capability as well as being able to rez people with full health, increase non fighters mitigation and increase the raids proficiency. When i compare that to what my zerk brings then unless i am in a group with all melee classes his raid wide buff only benefits other tanks, although if he's dpsing rather than tanking he does kick out some nice dps. I kinda feel bad about posting all this in the Zerk forums as it looks like i'm bragging about how OP my Pally is compared to the zerk but thats not my intentions. Everything i've stated are my own experiences and feelings on it but everyone experiences and enjoys different aspects of their toons. For me at this moment Pally is the tank i enjoy and i bring my Zerk out for the fun of rounding up entire rooms and topping the dps parse. Due to me enjoying the Pally more at the moment i'm probably being a little biased in his favour so take everything i say as a person playing both but enjoying one more than the other
Thank you for taking the time to type out all this Bazill, great insight! I think whats going on is I am now transitioning to the same page you'er on. Yes after 5-6 years of my life of nurturing, growing and maturing this Character I really love my Zerker. But after getting Obliterated by my cousins SK and now all the feed back on the forums confirming that that my experience was the norm and thats just how one sided fights are between Warriors and Crusaders...........Well I believe im just in denial thinking there must be something im missing that will level the playing field. Alas it would seem that is just not the case and i really need to WAKE UP and smell the coffee; Norrath is not a perfect world and all things are not created equally. As a "Fighter" Crusaders are better fighers as heals and taps overtake temp buffs As a "tank" Crusaders are better Tanks as their self heals make life easier on healers and since "DPS+Heals" generate more hate than "DPS" alone, it makes easier on the rest of the group as the tank can more effectively do his job. (Halo of G4 touched on that with the tells he frequently recieves "Sorry our group decided it would be better for an SK to tank") I really don't see any advantage the Zerk has over Crusaders I hate to say it but it looks I just need to get over it and switch my main. And thank you Kimber for all your valuable input, it is very encouraging to hear your reports in pvp, but it would seem your skill-set is above average being the exception rather than the rule, And I think my skills are more "rule" than "exception".
Just a little update i decided to take my Zerk into BG's last night and see how he does. Taking on blubie players who have 0 or very little toughness was probably not the fairest way of testing it but with a load of sorceres and enchanters running around i managed to top the damage output for the zone. We lacked a healer and had someone drop whe the fights started so after seeing how quick the zerk was tearing through scouts, mages and then the opositions tank i dropped the shield and just went DW. The other team had a healer and he was from naggy. He also had the irritating ring of constant fearing but was also really squishy if i got to him. I was the only person on my group from a pvp server as was the healer on the other team so all in all it was a pretty even fight. It was a lot of fun and i can see i will probably keep my zerk for the BG's at the moment and use the Pally for PVE content. Playing a zerk in pvp is a challange but at the same time a lot of fun. Crusaders tend to get a little boring and usually results in people running rather than fighting in open pvp. I think for me the next stage will to take my zerk in to a BG with a premade guild group and see how he fairs. If it goes well again then he'll definatly be my non op pvp toon
Let me tell ya Bazill it gladdens my heart to hear you topped the damage chart for the zone, I was really beginning to wonder there was a reason for my zerker taking a up character slot, so i read your results and decided to do a little parsing, now im sure there is a way to post results but couldnt figure it out, so i'll just tell you. I got my SK to 56 now, and my wife got her zerker that she plays with my sk to 56, now i had a 55 bruiser that i quickly lvled to 56 for this test. I took an unscientific but consistent approach to this test, I set up the Dummy parsed all three Toon from a full tank of power to empty, then quit parse. All three toons are full mastercraft in offensive stance, these were the results Bruiser: str 819, crit maxed 27% through aa's, DW weapons: Fight duration: 2:36 Outgoing Damage: 88425 DPS: 566.83 Shadow Knight: str 797, DA maxed 23% through aa's, Sword and Shield Fight duration: 2:22 Outgoing Damage: 81657 DPS: 575.05 Shadow Knight: str 793, DA maxed 23% through aa's, Two handed Sword Fight duration: 2:22 Outgoing Damage: 86980 DPS: 612.54 Berzerker: Str 746, DA maxed 23% through aa's, DW weapons Fight duration: 2:14 Outgoing Damage: 92506 DPS: 690.34 These results tend to reflect your results in BG's, Zerkers are destructive force pump'n machines However that said, in order to see how those numbers translate in to real experience i did one further test. I took all three (one at a time) to SS and found some lvl 56^^^heroic "Sabretooth Stalkers" my same exact lvl. Took my bruiser first and found that he could he could take it down without self heal, but he was in the red when he killed it. Berzerker up next, with all buffs and temp buffs up I was able to kill it, but barely with about 2 percent health at the end, it really could have gone either way, if i did it 10 times i probably would have won 5 times and lost 5 times. SK up last, but this one got interesting. I started the fight and things were going well, i usually lifetap for the extra damage the spells provide if not to heal, but this time i got a little daring and refrained from using any taps at all, and yes the big triple heroic cat went down with about 5% health to spare (about the same as bruiser) Now this is where it gets interesting, I thought to myself all this killing power and with lifetaps to spare? So i got really brave and pulled 2 of the triple heroic cats and this time i used the all the taps and without even a challenge, quickly dispatched them both in less than a min with 50% health after hitting "Tap Viens"! For lvl 56 I was absolutely floored, i didnt think such a thing was possible, these SK's are Way OP, but for now i think Im liken it and im in for the Full Ride.
First let me preface this with an explanation of where i'm coming from. I played a berserker on kithicor long before nagafen came online. When nagafen launched I made a shadowknight. I played this shadowknight off and on throughout KoS, I went with brigand after a couple days after nagafen came up because scouts were starting to trickle into commonlands *back then nek forest was hard to get through without stealth* and I wanted to pvp right away. I made a brig because quite honestly nobody I ever knew of played one. They were one of the least played pve classes so I never even encountered one. Now to this day I find my two original characters ended up being Overpowered at some point in time. First my brigand was crazy overpowered with double up... but back then nobody was the wiser. I actually at one point rerolled my tank into a Berserker, because they were superior pve tanks at that time and had a chance to kill quite a few classes. I went so far as to delete my shadowknight completely. EoF came and the AAs were fixed up on the SK so that they would be tolerable tanks. Just something about being a magic spell casting melee hybrid who can do good dps and actually tank stuff. I asked to have him undeleted. I played him when the SK started to come into its own... put the zerker aside. Long story short. In the end I've got an 89 Berserker and an 85 Shadowknight. I battle every day with this concept. Why on earth would i play my Berserker if I have another character who can do everything it can, BETTER plus a whole lot more? I HATE to play the fotm classes. However, I'm on a pvp server. If everyone else is playing that class and owning, the only way to counter it is to play the same class. Still I can't bring myself to do it. The sad reality is that a mediocre SK can beat a well played and geared berserker at its job... the only real reason to go berserker is to try and be different and embrace a challenge. Unfortunately this challenge will result ina lot of frustration as well.
all things being somewhat equal (gear, lvl, aa, etc) you will probably lose to: sk, pally, all healers that don't suck, wiz, warlock (i'm half tempted to put coercer/illy in this group too) you will usually beat: melee scouts, necros the rest are tough to call. based on the individual really
zerkers are fun in PvE, and same in PvP... i dont even know if im going to try pvping with my lock or brig in the near future hehe, they just cant be more fun than berserker ))
certainly no science here, in pvp you occasionally run into a toon that is just damn hard to kill, sometiems it is an SK, sometimes its a wizzy, sometimes its a templar... i have found zerk very enjoyable in BG zones and not particulary underpowered. I actually enjoy slaughtering SK's there, but every once in a while i will run into a toon that is a brick wall, and it isnt always an SK... For reference i do run BG in my raid tanking gear, so i dont put out huge dps numbers, i hold aggro well for my teams, and can take a fair bit of abuse. I just need to figure out how to run FASTER 8)
Xita wrote: zerk is pretty awesome at pvp, but even with 600 toughness, that's the max btw, a good sk will pound you into the ground like a tent peg. pally too.
I think its not what class is best is what u enjoy. If u like beating stuff then be a zerker, if u want an easy mode class that has mega pulls and dmg with a click of 3 buttons then go sk or pally
I have read your posts and see that u are looking at pvp as how good u can kill , but what zerkers can do better than any other tank there is other than a guardian is "lock you down" . What this means is when you taunt a group and they begin the beatdown it is near impossible to to get off them and attack the healer or squishys , allowing them to d their jobs ... damaging . I know how beast zerkers are cause I dont play one and I hate coming up agains them inpvp only a bit less so than I do Sk's who cannot lockdown nor can a pally . Some crusaders my monk cankill solo some he cant . I dont even bother wasting my time on a zerker or guardian especially if he got a healerin tow .... its a wrap . And I watch em hit 30,000 parsing plenty in instances so aggro shouldnt be an issue there . Really a beast class tbh well rounded . Course cant solo like the beast sk's or pallies so trying to decide on which to lvl atm . Thats why I am here browsing your forums. Basically group pvp the best overall cause they can dps better than a guard as well as lock withtheir taunt proc that damages . Guardian better for taking a beating and guaranteed lockdown on wvwry one looks at them to long .
