Warrior Breaking the HT META: A guide to achieving significantly more DPM

Hello friends, today I'm here to bring some fresh thoughts into what Horntail ought to be like and breaking everyone's expectations for what is possible.

When you think of overpowered classes, which ones come to mind? Surely Night Lord is at the top, with Heroes, Bowmasters, Bishops, AM's, Corsairs and the like following close behind. They're all fine and dandy, but they aren't the characters we're using to break HT. For the first part, they make perfect partners, so you can continue to bring them along for the ride. The character I'm referring to is the once humble Paladin, and to use him properly we're going to be multi-clienting.

"Wait, multiclienting? How do I even be useful juggling clients?" is something you may be asking. It's because of the Paladin's most powerful skill, Heaven's Hammer. You don't need to concentrate on both clients, this skill functions on a 10 second cooldown, and hits every mob in the map for 200k damage. So essentially, taking this philosophy at it's roots, you'd be attacking on your main attacker, and using Heaven's Hammer every 10 seconds for a largely boosted DPM.

After the tail is dead is when this method shines the most and you can try to center your paladin. At that point HH will be hitting all three heads, both arms, and the wings. This is 6 targets getting hit for 200k damage every 10 seconds. Cumulatively this is an extra ~7.2mil DPM added on to what your attacker is already doing to a single target.

"But it's still a pain in the ass to fund and level another character to 155, I'd rather continue working on my Night Lord." Oh, but we haven't even gotten to the best part yet. You don't need to worry about getting funded, or getting to level 155, or having enough accuracy, or even HP washing. The only thing we care about is Heaven's Hammer, and Stance if you can be bothered. That means that you can cap out at level 129 or level 139. And because Heaven's Hammer ignores accuracy, you don't need an absurd amount of accuracy gear or dex. And since the damage is fixed you don't care about having strength or decent equips, so just use a level 15 leather purse. Instead around level 60-70 you can start investing all of your AP into HP, so that by the time you're finished you have a nice clean 30k HP that you aren't going to wash out because that's a huge waste of NX. Everything you want to do can be achieved with the bare minimum amount of strength.

Of course if you're gonna invest all your AP into HP you're gonna have to leech your way to level 129/139, but if you actually wanted to do this I assume you're a tryhard and already planned on doing exactly that. To see exactly how much of a time investment this is I did some math.

65-75 = ~7 hours @3mil exp/hr (~49mil bought from someone else)
75-85 = ~6 hours @5.8mil (~48mil buy)
85-90 = ~3.5 hours @7.7mil (~35mil buy)
90-105 = ~10 hours @13.6mil (~130mil buy)
105-129 = ~20 hours @33mil (~400mil buy)
129-139 = ~19 hours @33mil (~380mil buy)

So to go from 65-129 takes ~47 hours of leech, or ~66 hours to get to 139, probably less though because I'm not caught up on new metas. There's also the time it takes to get a character to level 65, which I honestly don't really have a ballpark figure for. 40 hours? 60 hours? Who knows. But if you want to buy your way to 139 it'll be in the ballpark of 1bil, or probably closer to 700mil if you aren't insane enough to buy all that solo leech. You could also kill Crims or 5/6 from 129-139 to save a lot of time or money.

So now I have to pose a question, which method is more efficient at gaining DPM with HT in mind? Training a main or creating a Heaven's Hammer mule? A main could probably get around 4bil exp in 100 hours, while a HH mule could probably be nearly completed by then. To add some perspective 4bil is the exp it takes to go from level 155-169. Or from 165-175. Or from 175-181. At what point is it more beneficial to create a HH mule? 155-169 has a lot of potential for a boost in many classes. But can you say the same for 165-175? There's a certain point where 1 billion mesos only gets you an extra million DPM, possibly even less, so when is a character truly finished? At what point do you cap out and say: "My time and money are more efficiently spent creating HH mules".

Mules? As in multiple? Yes, that is the ultimate conclusion of this philosophy. Currently there is nothing in the game stopping you from creating 5 Heaven's Hammer mules(Honestly, the only limitation is how many clients your computer can handle and how fast you can cycle between them) and bringing all of them to Horntail. Forget about having a main. What this means is that vs. the 6 main parts of HT you'll have a cumulative ~36mil DPM, far exceeding any other player who has ever played MapleLegends. Add in the short stint of tail and legs and you cap at 48mil DPM. It also means you have 6mil single target DPM to help with the preheads and the final stage of HT.

Now imagine if there were 10 clients all spamming HH. They could solo Horntail in about 95 minutes(330mil hp Prehead/12mil dpm = 27.5 minutes + second prehead also 27.5 minutes + 490mil hp Head B/12mil dpm = 40.83 minutes = ~95 minutes. Add a few NLs and a BM and HT will be dead in under an hour.

That's the new meta. Why bring one character when you can bring a second and double your dpm? Why bring the original character if you can break conventional standards and just bring five?

How low can HT books get with 1 hour appleless runs?

Also Kim, please prevent people from multiclienting bosses before someone tries this. HT is easy enough already. You should probably ban me too for abusing game mechanics.

 

So what you're saying is that 5 level 139 paladins can kill HT on their own in 150 minutes with a couple deaths? Honestly that doesn't even sound like criticism to these ears. Forget about potions cost, you'd be making bank off of the skillbooks that you don't have to split with anyone else. Or maybe you hire a bishop for happy little accidents. This is just the beginning of my insane theory-crafting. My 5 man army example is mostly for nutjobs to try out because it's what technically possible, not what is optimal.

If I were to wager a guess, this would ideally be done on a 7 man team. 5 single target DPS and 1 bishop in party 1, 5 paladins and 1 bishop in party 2. Each attacker brings a HH mule, and for ease of use they stick Heaven's Hammer on their alt key so they can quickly press alt-tab twice to quickly shift and attack.(Can Mac users bind anything to "command"?) The Single Target DPS can target whatever is deemed to be the biggest momentary threat while cleaving away at everything else with their HH mules.

Maybe it doesn't shrink the time it takes to kill Horntail, but I'll argue I never crafted this theory for that sake. The point of this theory is that 7 people can do just as efficient of a job as 12 can. With the prices of HT books as they are, it makes a pretty big difference to nearly double people's splits.(Or maybe directly double them because bishops are naughty to not bring HH mules and deserve half-splits)

One thing I don't quite understand is why you mentioned the long cast time of HH. Is it a charged skill like Piercing Arrow, Corkscrew Punch, or Big Bang? If it's not then there's no reason to loaf around and wait for the animation. On to the other client!

I'm also not familiar with the range of Heaven's Hammer. I tried googling it but nothing comes up. If its range is the same as the mage ult spells it should have no problem hitting all major pieces by standing in the center, with the added benefit of Stance too. If it doesn't have that range, well then I'll admit that this has all been a giant farce, rather than the half-farce I currently recognize it as.

I think my biggest question is whether or not the tail will be dead before the arm begins mass sed on my 5 man army. If sed activates before tail dies then HT wins.