Monday, April 27, 2009

Argent Tournament: Jousting Strategy Complete

So, I've had a number of comments on my original post about jousting. I really intended that more of a post on both NPC's and PC's. And that strategy pretty much works. If you get ahead of a PC at the beginning of a duel, you're guaranteed a win if you just stick by him and keep your shields up. But the NPC's do a few things slightly different than another player would. I figured I'd give a more complete guide to jousting and completing the daily quests.

First the skills during the duel:
1: Thrust
2: Shield-Breaker
3: Charge
4: Defend
By default, these are bound to the number keys as listed. You also have a heal (5) that will heal you to full out of combat only, and, in the tournament area, a duel (6).

Here's the steps:
  1. Stack the Defend until you have 3 stacks, and it is no longer on cooldown. (Remember, this buff has a 60-second duration, so you must recast it within 60 seconds even if you haven't lost a stack.
  2. Talk to the NPC to start the fight.
  3. He'll start to walk away, so with him targeted, you start spamming your Charge attack (3).
  4. Your momentum will usually carry you through the enemy, so you can make a circle to turn around and walk back to your opponent.
  5. Now here's the trick that I haven't seen mentioned other places: as you are turning around, spam the Shield-Breaker (2) ability as you walk back to your opponent. It doesn't usually get to cast (due to shared cool-down with Charge and/or range), but in some instances it will. If it goes off, great! You've knocked him down another shield. If not, no big deal. Either way, make sure you close the gap to get in range of your Thrust.
  6. At this point, you should be back next to your opponent and using the Thrust (1) ability. Spam the Thrust until your opponent starts walking away.
  7. If during that foray, you lost a shield, make sure you cast Defend, to bring it back up to 3 stacks (while spamming Thrust).
  8. When he starts walking away, stay in place. Now go back to step 3 (spamming your Charge ability) and go through all the steps again until your opponent is vanquished.
There's probably faster ways to do this, but I'm guessing they're riskier. If I'm paying attention (and not responding to tells), I'm generally at about 50% health when finished. The races that like to back off more often (Blood Elf and Gnome come to mind first), I'm usually left at about 70%.

And there you have it: Quick, easy, and reliable wins against the other tournament participants.

4 comments:

Elinor said...

The NPCs die so much faster without shield up that, I have found a tactic that is fairly easy to keep their shields down.

1. The second way is to run sideways until the shieldbreaker is out of min range. Throw and immediately run back close. The NPCs are slow, and usually don't throw back. I use this strategy combined with your other ones to speed things along.

Anonymous said...

Hilariously, your strategy is almost exactly the same as mine which I just posted yesterday :) I also hit them with a free melee thrust right at the start since it's free, but other than that I do the "charge + wheel around tightly with mouse while spamming shield-breaker" move. Most of the time it goes off even when you think it shouldn't due to latency, I've had it fire off point-blank before.

I second this strategy, using it lets me defeat champions with >40k hp remaining :)

Leiandra said...

I wonder if that relies on a decent latency, Elinor. I'm usually at about 100, so I'm fine, but I wonder if the "slow reaction times" from the NPC's was a decision Blizzard made for that reason. Just a thought. And excellent addition.

@ Pockie: I guess great minds think alike. lol. I've had it go off at point blank range like that too. And I'll have to start checking our your blog as well.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tactics, i just pointed anyone reading about this on my blog to come here -- this strat is excellent, and just like Colt45, it works everytime!