Post by AKFrost on Feb 24, 2015 4:21:38 GMT -5
Foreword
I haven't written guides for a while now, and the reason is most of it is very subjective and most of the time the details don't matter, however, current DOMO is unique in that people feel an urgency to catch up with this supposed trove of veterans that are kicking down doors and taking names while they still slum away in the old Inn Basement, and a lot of weird rumors have arisen (both the living and the dead) to fill the void of knowledge that people desperately need. Thus, I feel compelled to come out of retirement and set some records straight.
This guide will help you formulate your own strategy regarding your DOMO life by giving you the tools you need to make an informed opinion.
Overview
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles"
-Sun Tsu: The Art of War
Ultimately, The only one that cares about your character is you. At all times, you should be aware of what is feasible for you and your character and what isn't. No guide can mass-produce identical player clones.
Cargo-Culting
"There is no substitute for knowledge."
-Dr. W. Edwards Deming
There are Islands in the Pacific that exhibit complete gravel runways with fruits in place of signal lights and islanders wearing branches instead of headphones on their heads speaking into a mud control keyboard. Why does this exist? The reason is these islanders saw airplanes land on other islands, laden with items of value that they want called "cargo." They don't know why the planes land on other islands but not theirs, other than that those islands have actual airports. So in their desire to attract the magic cargo-laden birds to grace their island, they have faithfully emulated what they saw appeared to have made them land. This is what's known as a cargo-cult, which does things that appears to work but has not the faintest clue why.
In gaming and in life, this is something you want to avoid.
Mechanics
For those of you who scream "exploits", I am not going to dignify that with a response.
The Only Hit Point that Matters is the last one
It is easy to grow too attached to HP because of humanity's natural aversion to risk, but HP and HP Regeneration are resources to be leveraged. Unnecessary heals eat up resources such as MP and cast time that could be better spent killing, and the skillful player should know what the operating "Safe" HP level is.
Often times, this is determined by experimentation and reaction ability. The faster you can react to danger, the less operational HP you need.
Cast Time, Cast Animation and Slidecasting
Everything in DOMO has cast time, and it cannot be reduced beyond 30%. More on this later.
When you cast, a bar will appear and gradually fill up. Moving will generally cancel the cast, but when you start moving about 50% done, then the cast time bar will complete even as you move. This is known as slidecasting, and is a basic skill.
However, when the bar completes, you will perform an animation during which you cannot move or attack. This usually lasts 1 second and cannot be reduced. Note the spell effect happens before you do the animation.
Your normal attack timer will also be reset, and you need to wait the full time interval between attacks after the animation before meleeing. This usually means after casting something like a Fencer nuke, you will wait almost 2 seconds before your character would start meleeing.
Buffering
Knowing the above, the next logical thing to do would be to start casting while enemies are chasing you, and let them walk into your target area at the time you finish chanting. To do this successfully, you need a good estimation of the enemy's velocity as well as your own cast time.
Kiting
"How quick they wheeled, and flying behind them shot
Sharp sleet of arrowy showers against the face
Of their pursuers, and overcame by flight. (3.323-5)"
-John Milton, Paradise Regained
Known as a Parthian Shot in military history, kiting is where you exploit a speed differential between you and your target to strike him while running away. There are differences here however: Nomad horses would continue galloping while their riders took shots, but your character will stand still while taking a shot. The nomads had all of Eurasia to run to and past, often times you just have a small room to maneuver in.
To overcome the standing problem, you can use buffering, or in the case of single targets, just using them at maximum range. To overcome the limited space, however, you can take advantage of the mob's goldfish memories and run in a circle, called circle kiting.
But from elementary school geometry, we know that the chords of a circle is always shorter than the arc, so how is this a good strategy?
Well, unless you can also run in a perfect circle, you'd most likely be running in some many-sided polygon, and the key here is to only turn when the monster has nearly caught up to you.
By having a speed advantage (you do have a speed advantage, don't you?), you can always stay away from the monster, but unless your plan is for him to die of old age, you also need to do something against him, so you should take the time when he's running towards you to perform your actions, and when he gets close, run in a different direction that won't form an acute angle with your old trajectory.
Turing Tarpit
"54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."
—Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
"Experience by itself teaches nothing."
-Dr. W. Edwards Deming
In a way, DOMO is a Turing tarpit. There's nothing stopping you from meleeing mobs with wands or healing on mercenary. If you put full pow on a dancer and sub bow to kill things, more power to you. However, it will just be a lot slower than the battle-tested builds and methodologies that people have come up with over the years in DOMO, and since DOMO is a "Party Game" like so many tend to scream out. If you don't want to solo (which, admittedly, I don't mind doing all the time), then it will serve your future teammates better to utilize something that has been proven to work so you don't drag down their exp rate.
Basic Planning Strategy
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
-General George S. Patton
Ultimately, DOMO is a simple game. You point your weapons at your enemies and hope they die and you don't. There's two components here, making your enemies die, and staying alive. Let's further divide this down:
Solo Strategy: Killing
There's again, two aspects at this. Doing damage is obviously the main one, but the second one of moving from monster to monster is just as important. Whether you accomplish this by ranged nukes, claw bugs, or just the good-old movement speed buff is up to you.
Solo Strategy: Staying Alive
"There are five strategies in war, attack, if that fails, defend, if that fails, flee, if that fails, then you surrender or die."
-Grand Commandant Sima Yi
Of course, in DOMO there's no such thing as a "defense mode" for most soloists.
"Of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, Fleeing is the Best."
-General Wang Jingze
Your next best option would be to run, and this is actually a lot easier than most people make it out to be. There's many preventable deaths because people have panicked and chose a less efficient route for getting out of the fire.
Simply turn your viewpoint towards the closest portal, and hold down W. Ignore everything else.
The reason for this is actually simple. The shortest distance between two points is the line segment that contains both. The shorter time you spend out in the field, the less monsters you aggro, and the less window of opportunity you have of getting hit.
Also, remember the adage that "The only HP point that matters is your last one." Do not panic. If you're not dead, you can keep running.
What about the monsters in the way?
If it's one of those monsters that will aggro when you run precisely through them, then there will be a significant delay between you walking past it and it actually aggroing. Thus, paradoxically, it's better to run right through a monster than to try avoiding its aggro than trying to run around it.
What about crowd control and healing?
Keep in mind that you can't use slidecast to avoid the ~1 sec cast animation for spells and 2-3 for items. Those will require you to stand still, during which you'll be more vulnerable to enemy melees and possible stuns. If you can pull it off without getting killed, go ahead.
What about movement speed bonuses?
There isn't a single movement speed bonus that will net you a gain after taking the cast animation into consideration, so once you start running, it's already too late. The wise soloist will sense danger and buffer them first.
Party Strategy: Killing
In a party, you have to kill many times faster to make it worth your time to party, and in the killing department that means effective usage of buffs and damage skills to maximize output, as well as taking advantage of parallelism to reduce the time it takes to move from mob to mob.
Or more simply, you need a good DPS and a good puller. Ideally, the puller should be gathering up new monsters before the old ones are killed completely so that there's no need to stop the DPS.
It should be known that buffs are not all equally effective on every DPS configuration. Some benefit tremendously from them, while for others it will only make the marginally harder hitting. It is the DPS's job to figure this out.
Party Strategy: Staying Alive
With more party members, the monsters have more of a choice on who to attack. The game gives us tools to influence that decision for them, which means we would prefer them to attack the party member with the highest defensive capabilities to minimize the overall damage the party receives. There's few ways in the game to make enemies attack other people, so it follows that it is the tank's job to make sure every monster is attacking him/her.
For this, there's also the consideration that healing generates considerable aggro, so unless the tank can heal him/herself, it is in the tank's interest to minimize the healing needed to avoid dividing up aggro to the healer.
On the healer's part, it must be recognized that in order to not direct aggro, the healer must minimize the healing he/she performs to the absolute necessary. Again, Only the last hit point matters. Excessive healing will also mask up important indicators of the party's overall health, such as the DPS receiving aggro. Spamming Greater Healing may mean you won't die immediately, but it will also not tell the tank that the DPS is hitting too hard or the DPS that the tank can't keep up, and eventually you may find that the monsters are attacking everyone but the tank, and then you will wipe.
Party Strategy:Formations
I don't mean the mercenary buffs, I mean the positions you actually stand in.
It would be tempting to stand in a tight group, but this is not optimal. Some monsters also possess AoE attacks (which you'll encounter as early as level 30 in Neptune) and if you stand together, you all get hit when it's avoidable.
So, a more efficient approach is to try to notice the radius of the tank's aggro skills, and stay as far away from the tank as possible while staying within it. This way, any newly spawned monsters can still be taunted towards the tank should they aggro you.
Resource Management
The basic strategy of resource management is finding the most precious resource and make the most out of it. In DOMO, there's a few such stats with nearly no way of increasing besides a few choices.
There are stats which are affected by only one factor:
The first is Cool-down reduction and the related Cast Time Reduction, available only from AGI. The experimental cap for cast-time reduction is 58, and the cool-down cap is 102. (Cargo-Cult Warning 1) This amounts to a 30% Reduction in CD and cast time.
Why is this stat important? Gaining a 30% CD reduction amounts to about 50% in bonus damage for a skill-based damage strategy. For buffs which the duration is not as long as the CD, having 102 AGI reduces the downtime between casts.
(CC1: The reason most people tell you 103 AGI is because back when the 103 AGI guides were written people believed 103 makes for an even number when it comes to evasion and magic evasion tested by somebody back in 2008 and probably cargo-culted from IC DOMO a year before that. Of course evasion gains are not uniform across all jobs, so 103 AGI is just a number, and not a particularly sensible one at that.
You may also see 68 AGI from certain Chinese guides, this is purely an aesthetic choice of 20% CD reduction and has nothing to do with cast time.)
The second is Healing Potency, which is only from WIS (and a few class buffs that are negligible in effectiveness). Ex-Aeria GS Mythyc had tested the AGI vs WIS argument extensively, and found that for the most part, it doesn't matter in terms of effectiveness over time. The loss of potency from not taking WIS can be nearly perfectly offset by reduced CD. Link Here
The third is Standing Regeneration, which is from WIS for MP and PHY for HP. You might find that there's a lot of other skills that do that, but the stacking mechanics work differently, which is that the multiplier is applied to base standing regeneration first before any fixed bonuses are applied. This unfortunately means the percentage-based onyxes will not be effective on any buffs, but rather your natural regeneration afforded by PHY and WIS.
There are a few stats that are difficult to buff:
The first is Magic Damage, the reason for this is because of the Damage Formula, where every magic nuke has a fixed base damage that cannot be increased further. Aside from the Wizard and Sorcerer Passives, the rest are item mall.
The second is Normal Attack Damage, which is only affected by the Blademaster buff Dragon's Call, the Witch Doctor buff Martial Hex, and some cash shop items/gold weapon bonuses. Aspiring attack speed players should look into getting all of them.
The third is Critical Hit and Block, which are increased by DEX and PHY respectively. CRIT is a chance to hit for 2x damage normal attacking, and block is a chance to make the enemy hit half damage normal attacking. This is actually one of the simplest stats, because it is capped at 33, and the Hunter Skill Weak Spotter plus Dragon's Call will sum to 36 already. Block is not even a displayed stat, so while the effect is useful, there's not enough information to judge.
The fourth is Magic Evasion which is basically only from gear (dancewear, instruments, magic gold shoes, onyx of equality). This is usually not important outside of PvP.)
The fifth is Magic Accuracy.
The Sixth is Attack Speed.
The Seventh is Skill Points.
On Magic Accuracy:
Magic Accuracy is one of the most misunderstood stats, and it is confusing. With its brother Magic Evasion, these two govern the hit and miss of all skills. Accuracy and evasion only affect normal attacks.
However, for the most part, it doesn't actually matter for single-target nukes. With the exception of a few skills such as Assassin's Arrow and Two Birds with One Stone, skills have enough innate accuracy to not miss on most non-dancer monsters.
For AoEing this gets a bit more interesting. Back in the ancient days when AoEing was popular in the lower areas, it was found that magic accuracy actually hard limits you on how many monsters you can hit at once with one AoE spell. In muse parties with the full Song of Concentration and Hymn to the Goddess stack, this didn't really matter, but for solo AoEs, this is a gotcha for fencer and dancer, whose weaponry doesn't normally give MACC like wands do.
As an aside: your initial accuracy will be slightly too low for comfort starting at level 15 or so, but accuracy is one of the easier to buff stats so would you really divert points to DEX for it? (Cargo-Cult Warning 2)
Anyway, back to Magic Accuracy. The reason this stat is important is because of one hunter skill, Concentrated Fury, which trades 88 MACC for an 150% increase in attack. If one were to be able to overcome the MACC penalty, then this massive increase in attack will translate into a massive increase in physical skill DPS.
Buffing magic accuracy into the hundreds is not an easy task, but here's a few things that can help:
Stat point: DEX: diminishing, usually 33 at level 70 assuming 102 AGIi.
Armor: Gold MDEF Wrist Guard: + 10
Onyxes: Onyx of Righteousness: + 5x2 = 10
Onyxes: Onyx of Territory: +10 at 70
High Level Alchemy - Tool: Magic Accuracy Pill: +20
Musician: Song of Concentration + Hymn to the Goddess: +35
Blademaster: Concentration: +20 (20/45 Duration/CD)
Arena: Little Eye Eggsploiter: +20
(CC2: And from here, I can bust another myth of 28 DEX. The reason this mantra was repeated was because of the mistaken notion that for all classes, 4 DEX = 1 MACC and 7 DEX = CRIT, so 28 was the "natural" LCM choice. In reality, people added DEX to make up for the initial difficulty in hitting monsters, and they just needed to stop somewhere.
One should also note a common theme here: A lot of these "magic numbers" are based on a wrong assumption that classes have uniform growth for each stat point assigned, they usually don't.)
On Attack Speed
Attack speed is a diminishing returns deal - the more you have, the less effective the next point becomes.
Because of the aforementioned Dragon's Call and the Blademaster skill Howling Wolf granting a 50% increase in attacking speed, the most interesting weapon for this task is the saber as these two buffs require it to be equipped. There will be a reason to use daggers later because of its innate 4 attack speed, but as of now that reason remains a test toy.
Howling Wolf vs Dragon's Call
There's another often-cited number of 13.8 attack speed being the maximum attack speed for which wolf will beat dragon. I will demonstrate why that number is actually wrong. (Cargo-Cult Warning 3)
Since Dragon is a 33% damage increase, we need to find the point which increasing to 20 attack speed represents a 33% increase in the number of attacks.
At 20 attack speed, you attack 10/3 attacks a second, 1 / ((10/3) / 1.33) = 1.33 / (10/3) = 1.33 * 3 / 10 = 0.399 seconds.
0.399 = 24 / (aspd * 3 + 20)
aspd = (24/0.399-20) / 3 = 13.38.
(CCW3: As you can notice, this is cargo-culting as a telephone game already, one 3 was dropped so it became 13.8 in folklore.)
Now I will show you why this number is actually wrong.
In a perfect world, we can take everything in a vacuum, but Dragon's Call has partners in the form of Martial Hex and tiger and dragon slaying as stated before. At a maximum, you have 60% from Hex and 12% from Tiger and dragon slaying, which translates to 72%, which means your base evaluation for dragon's call is actually 172%, not 100%.
Stacking Dragon's 33% on top of that means that the actual effectiveness is (1.72+0.33)/1.72 = 1.19 = 19%. Let's plug that into our calculation.
((1.72+0.33)/1.72) * 3 / 10 = 24 / (aspd * 3 + 20)
aspd = (24/(((1.72+0.33)/1.72) * 3 / 10 )-20) / 3 = 15.7
So, assuming you've decked out in other normal attack boost stuff, you'll need a higher attack speed to justify using dragon instead of wolf.
On Magic Damage
You're screwed, don't bother.
But in all seriousness, until Softstar figures out a way to rework magic damage, the math completely screws the would-be caster at higher levels of play. Although, given magic design tendencies of late, this seems to be a theme.
On Skill Points
Skill points are a precious resource, even though it is theoretically infinite. This is because the difficulty of acquiring them rises sharply after a certain point.
One common myth of Skill points is that there are some skills which you must max for the sake of maxing. Aside from the question of level prerequisites, This is not true. Any skill you max would be because the rewards of each level is greater than having invested it elsewhere.
A frequent example given would be Lash Out, which people claim it must be taken to level 7 to match the duration with the CD. However, what if you left it at level 6? Then you have a 5-second differential out of 115, or a little more than 4%. To reduce CD to compensate, you'd need about 9 AGI points, which is a sacrifice of 27 base attack power.
Is that a lot? That's up to you. If you can spend that 2 skill points on something else that benefits you more, then you came out ahead with Level 6 Lash Out.
Job Strategy
The basics of job strategy requires one to note that job penalties cannot be alleviated, and that weapon equips cost 15 points and further points are needed to alleviate weapon proficiency attack penalty. This means, contrary to most expectations, domo's job system is not really free if you want to be effective. Not many jobs can shrug off a 20% reduction in damage output, after all, and removing 50% of the weapon's effective attack is nothing to sneeze at either.
That being said, because domo's skill subbing is done with trees as a unit, it is more useful to analyze the trees as a whole, although sometimes a single skill can define a tree.
Unless you are willing to level 70 bars hundreds of times, you will not be able to afford to max both trees, sometimes not even one tree. This means you have to make sacrifices of playstyles, especially on very dimorphic jobs.
An example of a dimorphized job would be the Musician, and it's obvious why. One branch will only help people, and the other will only help pets. When skilling a musician, the obvious choice is one or the other instead of a mix of both, because then you won't be able to do either well. Another consequence is that musician is often played as an additional support sub, because the other two jobs in that group (doctor, dancer) can muse with equip instrument with little difference from an actual musician, and there's plenty of people who used pet musician on every job to level.
An example of a synergized job would be the Blademaster, the interesting thing is that blademaster has two roles - PvP and attack speed DPS, but instead of having two trees that focuses on each one, BM instead has some of both in both trees. A PvP blademaster would need for example the ranged stun of Roaring Lion from Beastial Attacks and Concentration from Maniac Attacks, whereas an attack speed blademaster would be interested in Dragon's Call from Beastial and All-out Assault from Maniac Attacks. On top of that, blademaster's passive, Tiger and Dragon Slaying, is only significant on blademaster - it is halved on other jobs like every other job passive, making blademaster attack speed only really usable on blademaster.
Thus, it would be wise to spend time evaluating the job you like as well as what you actually want to do with it. If you like one tree of a dimorphized job, it is also worth your time to explore the other two jobs in the group - the ones with 0% penalty with it - to see if you can main the other job and use your original as a single-tree sub. There's a dimorphized job and a syngerized job in each group, and the synergized jobs are much better as a main, especially if you can avoid having to spend 15 points into that job's equip skill, as synergized jobs tend to be much more SP hungry.
I haven't written guides for a while now, and the reason is most of it is very subjective and most of the time the details don't matter, however, current DOMO is unique in that people feel an urgency to catch up with this supposed trove of veterans that are kicking down doors and taking names while they still slum away in the old Inn Basement, and a lot of weird rumors have arisen (both the living and the dead) to fill the void of knowledge that people desperately need. Thus, I feel compelled to come out of retirement and set some records straight.
This guide will help you formulate your own strategy regarding your DOMO life by giving you the tools you need to make an informed opinion.
Overview
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles"
-Sun Tsu: The Art of War
Ultimately, The only one that cares about your character is you. At all times, you should be aware of what is feasible for you and your character and what isn't. No guide can mass-produce identical player clones.
Cargo-Culting
"There is no substitute for knowledge."
-Dr. W. Edwards Deming
There are Islands in the Pacific that exhibit complete gravel runways with fruits in place of signal lights and islanders wearing branches instead of headphones on their heads speaking into a mud control keyboard. Why does this exist? The reason is these islanders saw airplanes land on other islands, laden with items of value that they want called "cargo." They don't know why the planes land on other islands but not theirs, other than that those islands have actual airports. So in their desire to attract the magic cargo-laden birds to grace their island, they have faithfully emulated what they saw appeared to have made them land. This is what's known as a cargo-cult, which does things that appears to work but has not the faintest clue why.
In gaming and in life, this is something you want to avoid.
Mechanics
For those of you who scream "exploits", I am not going to dignify that with a response.
The Only Hit Point that Matters is the last one
It is easy to grow too attached to HP because of humanity's natural aversion to risk, but HP and HP Regeneration are resources to be leveraged. Unnecessary heals eat up resources such as MP and cast time that could be better spent killing, and the skillful player should know what the operating "Safe" HP level is.
Often times, this is determined by experimentation and reaction ability. The faster you can react to danger, the less operational HP you need.
Cast Time, Cast Animation and Slidecasting
Everything in DOMO has cast time, and it cannot be reduced beyond 30%. More on this later.
When you cast, a bar will appear and gradually fill up. Moving will generally cancel the cast, but when you start moving about 50% done, then the cast time bar will complete even as you move. This is known as slidecasting, and is a basic skill.
However, when the bar completes, you will perform an animation during which you cannot move or attack. This usually lasts 1 second and cannot be reduced. Note the spell effect happens before you do the animation.
Your normal attack timer will also be reset, and you need to wait the full time interval between attacks after the animation before meleeing. This usually means after casting something like a Fencer nuke, you will wait almost 2 seconds before your character would start meleeing.
Buffering
Knowing the above, the next logical thing to do would be to start casting while enemies are chasing you, and let them walk into your target area at the time you finish chanting. To do this successfully, you need a good estimation of the enemy's velocity as well as your own cast time.
Kiting
"How quick they wheeled, and flying behind them shot
Sharp sleet of arrowy showers against the face
Of their pursuers, and overcame by flight. (3.323-5)"
-John Milton, Paradise Regained
Known as a Parthian Shot in military history, kiting is where you exploit a speed differential between you and your target to strike him while running away. There are differences here however: Nomad horses would continue galloping while their riders took shots, but your character will stand still while taking a shot. The nomads had all of Eurasia to run to and past, often times you just have a small room to maneuver in.
To overcome the standing problem, you can use buffering, or in the case of single targets, just using them at maximum range. To overcome the limited space, however, you can take advantage of the mob's goldfish memories and run in a circle, called circle kiting.
But from elementary school geometry, we know that the chords of a circle is always shorter than the arc, so how is this a good strategy?
Well, unless you can also run in a perfect circle, you'd most likely be running in some many-sided polygon, and the key here is to only turn when the monster has nearly caught up to you.
By having a speed advantage (you do have a speed advantage, don't you?), you can always stay away from the monster, but unless your plan is for him to die of old age, you also need to do something against him, so you should take the time when he's running towards you to perform your actions, and when he gets close, run in a different direction that won't form an acute angle with your old trajectory.
Turing Tarpit
"54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."
—Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming
"Experience by itself teaches nothing."
-Dr. W. Edwards Deming
In a way, DOMO is a Turing tarpit. There's nothing stopping you from meleeing mobs with wands or healing on mercenary. If you put full pow on a dancer and sub bow to kill things, more power to you. However, it will just be a lot slower than the battle-tested builds and methodologies that people have come up with over the years in DOMO, and since DOMO is a "Party Game" like so many tend to scream out. If you don't want to solo (which, admittedly, I don't mind doing all the time), then it will serve your future teammates better to utilize something that has been proven to work so you don't drag down their exp rate.
Basic Planning Strategy
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
-General George S. Patton
Ultimately, DOMO is a simple game. You point your weapons at your enemies and hope they die and you don't. There's two components here, making your enemies die, and staying alive. Let's further divide this down:
Solo Strategy: Killing
There's again, two aspects at this. Doing damage is obviously the main one, but the second one of moving from monster to monster is just as important. Whether you accomplish this by ranged nukes, claw bugs, or just the good-old movement speed buff is up to you.
Solo Strategy: Staying Alive
"There are five strategies in war, attack, if that fails, defend, if that fails, flee, if that fails, then you surrender or die."
-Grand Commandant Sima Yi
Of course, in DOMO there's no such thing as a "defense mode" for most soloists.
"Of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, Fleeing is the Best."
-General Wang Jingze
Your next best option would be to run, and this is actually a lot easier than most people make it out to be. There's many preventable deaths because people have panicked and chose a less efficient route for getting out of the fire.
Simply turn your viewpoint towards the closest portal, and hold down W. Ignore everything else.
The reason for this is actually simple. The shortest distance between two points is the line segment that contains both. The shorter time you spend out in the field, the less monsters you aggro, and the less window of opportunity you have of getting hit.
Also, remember the adage that "The only HP point that matters is your last one." Do not panic. If you're not dead, you can keep running.
What about the monsters in the way?
If it's one of those monsters that will aggro when you run precisely through them, then there will be a significant delay between you walking past it and it actually aggroing. Thus, paradoxically, it's better to run right through a monster than to try avoiding its aggro than trying to run around it.
What about crowd control and healing?
Keep in mind that you can't use slidecast to avoid the ~1 sec cast animation for spells and 2-3 for items. Those will require you to stand still, during which you'll be more vulnerable to enemy melees and possible stuns. If you can pull it off without getting killed, go ahead.
What about movement speed bonuses?
There isn't a single movement speed bonus that will net you a gain after taking the cast animation into consideration, so once you start running, it's already too late. The wise soloist will sense danger and buffer them first.
Party Strategy: Killing
In a party, you have to kill many times faster to make it worth your time to party, and in the killing department that means effective usage of buffs and damage skills to maximize output, as well as taking advantage of parallelism to reduce the time it takes to move from mob to mob.
Or more simply, you need a good DPS and a good puller. Ideally, the puller should be gathering up new monsters before the old ones are killed completely so that there's no need to stop the DPS.
It should be known that buffs are not all equally effective on every DPS configuration. Some benefit tremendously from them, while for others it will only make the marginally harder hitting. It is the DPS's job to figure this out.
Party Strategy: Staying Alive
With more party members, the monsters have more of a choice on who to attack. The game gives us tools to influence that decision for them, which means we would prefer them to attack the party member with the highest defensive capabilities to minimize the overall damage the party receives. There's few ways in the game to make enemies attack other people, so it follows that it is the tank's job to make sure every monster is attacking him/her.
For this, there's also the consideration that healing generates considerable aggro, so unless the tank can heal him/herself, it is in the tank's interest to minimize the healing needed to avoid dividing up aggro to the healer.
On the healer's part, it must be recognized that in order to not direct aggro, the healer must minimize the healing he/she performs to the absolute necessary. Again, Only the last hit point matters. Excessive healing will also mask up important indicators of the party's overall health, such as the DPS receiving aggro. Spamming Greater Healing may mean you won't die immediately, but it will also not tell the tank that the DPS is hitting too hard or the DPS that the tank can't keep up, and eventually you may find that the monsters are attacking everyone but the tank, and then you will wipe.
Party Strategy:Formations
I don't mean the mercenary buffs, I mean the positions you actually stand in.
It would be tempting to stand in a tight group, but this is not optimal. Some monsters also possess AoE attacks (which you'll encounter as early as level 30 in Neptune) and if you stand together, you all get hit when it's avoidable.
So, a more efficient approach is to try to notice the radius of the tank's aggro skills, and stay as far away from the tank as possible while staying within it. This way, any newly spawned monsters can still be taunted towards the tank should they aggro you.
Resource Management
The basic strategy of resource management is finding the most precious resource and make the most out of it. In DOMO, there's a few such stats with nearly no way of increasing besides a few choices.
There are stats which are affected by only one factor:
The first is Cool-down reduction and the related Cast Time Reduction, available only from AGI. The experimental cap for cast-time reduction is 58, and the cool-down cap is 102. (Cargo-Cult Warning 1) This amounts to a 30% Reduction in CD and cast time.
Why is this stat important? Gaining a 30% CD reduction amounts to about 50% in bonus damage for a skill-based damage strategy. For buffs which the duration is not as long as the CD, having 102 AGI reduces the downtime between casts.
(CC1: The reason most people tell you 103 AGI is because back when the 103 AGI guides were written people believed 103 makes for an even number when it comes to evasion and magic evasion tested by somebody back in 2008 and probably cargo-culted from IC DOMO a year before that. Of course evasion gains are not uniform across all jobs, so 103 AGI is just a number, and not a particularly sensible one at that.
You may also see 68 AGI from certain Chinese guides, this is purely an aesthetic choice of 20% CD reduction and has nothing to do with cast time.)
The second is Healing Potency, which is only from WIS (and a few class buffs that are negligible in effectiveness). Ex-Aeria GS Mythyc had tested the AGI vs WIS argument extensively, and found that for the most part, it doesn't matter in terms of effectiveness over time. The loss of potency from not taking WIS can be nearly perfectly offset by reduced CD. Link Here
The third is Standing Regeneration, which is from WIS for MP and PHY for HP. You might find that there's a lot of other skills that do that, but the stacking mechanics work differently, which is that the multiplier is applied to base standing regeneration first before any fixed bonuses are applied. This unfortunately means the percentage-based onyxes will not be effective on any buffs, but rather your natural regeneration afforded by PHY and WIS.
There are a few stats that are difficult to buff:
The first is Magic Damage, the reason for this is because of the Damage Formula, where every magic nuke has a fixed base damage that cannot be increased further. Aside from the Wizard and Sorcerer Passives, the rest are item mall.
The second is Normal Attack Damage, which is only affected by the Blademaster buff Dragon's Call, the Witch Doctor buff Martial Hex, and some cash shop items/gold weapon bonuses. Aspiring attack speed players should look into getting all of them.
The third is Critical Hit and Block, which are increased by DEX and PHY respectively. CRIT is a chance to hit for 2x damage normal attacking, and block is a chance to make the enemy hit half damage normal attacking. This is actually one of the simplest stats, because it is capped at 33, and the Hunter Skill Weak Spotter plus Dragon's Call will sum to 36 already. Block is not even a displayed stat, so while the effect is useful, there's not enough information to judge.
The fourth is Magic Evasion which is basically only from gear (dancewear, instruments, magic gold shoes, onyx of equality). This is usually not important outside of PvP.)
The fifth is Magic Accuracy.
The Sixth is Attack Speed.
The Seventh is Skill Points.
On Magic Accuracy:
Magic Accuracy is one of the most misunderstood stats, and it is confusing. With its brother Magic Evasion, these two govern the hit and miss of all skills. Accuracy and evasion only affect normal attacks.
However, for the most part, it doesn't actually matter for single-target nukes. With the exception of a few skills such as Assassin's Arrow and Two Birds with One Stone, skills have enough innate accuracy to not miss on most non-dancer monsters.
For AoEing this gets a bit more interesting. Back in the ancient days when AoEing was popular in the lower areas, it was found that magic accuracy actually hard limits you on how many monsters you can hit at once with one AoE spell. In muse parties with the full Song of Concentration and Hymn to the Goddess stack, this didn't really matter, but for solo AoEs, this is a gotcha for fencer and dancer, whose weaponry doesn't normally give MACC like wands do.
As an aside: your initial accuracy will be slightly too low for comfort starting at level 15 or so, but accuracy is one of the easier to buff stats so would you really divert points to DEX for it? (Cargo-Cult Warning 2)
Anyway, back to Magic Accuracy. The reason this stat is important is because of one hunter skill, Concentrated Fury, which trades 88 MACC for an 150% increase in attack. If one were to be able to overcome the MACC penalty, then this massive increase in attack will translate into a massive increase in physical skill DPS.
Buffing magic accuracy into the hundreds is not an easy task, but here's a few things that can help:
Stat point: DEX: diminishing, usually 33 at level 70 assuming 102 AGIi.
Armor: Gold MDEF Wrist Guard: + 10
Onyxes: Onyx of Righteousness: + 5x2 = 10
Onyxes: Onyx of Territory: +10 at 70
High Level Alchemy - Tool: Magic Accuracy Pill: +20
Musician: Song of Concentration + Hymn to the Goddess: +35
Blademaster: Concentration: +20 (20/45 Duration/CD)
Arena: Little Eye Eggsploiter: +20
(CC2: And from here, I can bust another myth of 28 DEX. The reason this mantra was repeated was because of the mistaken notion that for all classes, 4 DEX = 1 MACC and 7 DEX = CRIT, so 28 was the "natural" LCM choice. In reality, people added DEX to make up for the initial difficulty in hitting monsters, and they just needed to stop somewhere.
One should also note a common theme here: A lot of these "magic numbers" are based on a wrong assumption that classes have uniform growth for each stat point assigned, they usually don't.)
On Attack Speed
Attack speed is a diminishing returns deal - the more you have, the less effective the next point becomes.
Because of the aforementioned Dragon's Call and the Blademaster skill Howling Wolf granting a 50% increase in attacking speed, the most interesting weapon for this task is the saber as these two buffs require it to be equipped. There will be a reason to use daggers later because of its innate 4 attack speed, but as of now that reason remains a test toy.
Howling Wolf vs Dragon's Call
There's another often-cited number of 13.8 attack speed being the maximum attack speed for which wolf will beat dragon. I will demonstrate why that number is actually wrong. (Cargo-Cult Warning 3)
Since Dragon is a 33% damage increase, we need to find the point which increasing to 20 attack speed represents a 33% increase in the number of attacks.
At 20 attack speed, you attack 10/3 attacks a second, 1 / ((10/3) / 1.33) = 1.33 / (10/3) = 1.33 * 3 / 10 = 0.399 seconds.
0.399 = 24 / (aspd * 3 + 20)
aspd = (24/0.399-20) / 3 = 13.38.
(CCW3: As you can notice, this is cargo-culting as a telephone game already, one 3 was dropped so it became 13.8 in folklore.)
Now I will show you why this number is actually wrong.
In a perfect world, we can take everything in a vacuum, but Dragon's Call has partners in the form of Martial Hex and tiger and dragon slaying as stated before. At a maximum, you have 60% from Hex and 12% from Tiger and dragon slaying, which translates to 72%, which means your base evaluation for dragon's call is actually 172%, not 100%.
Stacking Dragon's 33% on top of that means that the actual effectiveness is (1.72+0.33)/1.72 = 1.19 = 19%. Let's plug that into our calculation.
((1.72+0.33)/1.72) * 3 / 10 = 24 / (aspd * 3 + 20)
aspd = (24/(((1.72+0.33)/1.72) * 3 / 10 )-20) / 3 = 15.7
So, assuming you've decked out in other normal attack boost stuff, you'll need a higher attack speed to justify using dragon instead of wolf.
On Magic Damage
You're screwed, don't bother.
But in all seriousness, until Softstar figures out a way to rework magic damage, the math completely screws the would-be caster at higher levels of play. Although, given magic design tendencies of late, this seems to be a theme.
On Skill Points
Skill points are a precious resource, even though it is theoretically infinite. This is because the difficulty of acquiring them rises sharply after a certain point.
One common myth of Skill points is that there are some skills which you must max for the sake of maxing. Aside from the question of level prerequisites, This is not true. Any skill you max would be because the rewards of each level is greater than having invested it elsewhere.
A frequent example given would be Lash Out, which people claim it must be taken to level 7 to match the duration with the CD. However, what if you left it at level 6? Then you have a 5-second differential out of 115, or a little more than 4%. To reduce CD to compensate, you'd need about 9 AGI points, which is a sacrifice of 27 base attack power.
Is that a lot? That's up to you. If you can spend that 2 skill points on something else that benefits you more, then you came out ahead with Level 6 Lash Out.
Job Strategy
The basics of job strategy requires one to note that job penalties cannot be alleviated, and that weapon equips cost 15 points and further points are needed to alleviate weapon proficiency attack penalty. This means, contrary to most expectations, domo's job system is not really free if you want to be effective. Not many jobs can shrug off a 20% reduction in damage output, after all, and removing 50% of the weapon's effective attack is nothing to sneeze at either.
That being said, because domo's skill subbing is done with trees as a unit, it is more useful to analyze the trees as a whole, although sometimes a single skill can define a tree.
Unless you are willing to level 70 bars hundreds of times, you will not be able to afford to max both trees, sometimes not even one tree. This means you have to make sacrifices of playstyles, especially on very dimorphic jobs.
An example of a dimorphized job would be the Musician, and it's obvious why. One branch will only help people, and the other will only help pets. When skilling a musician, the obvious choice is one or the other instead of a mix of both, because then you won't be able to do either well. Another consequence is that musician is often played as an additional support sub, because the other two jobs in that group (doctor, dancer) can muse with equip instrument with little difference from an actual musician, and there's plenty of people who used pet musician on every job to level.
An example of a synergized job would be the Blademaster, the interesting thing is that blademaster has two roles - PvP and attack speed DPS, but instead of having two trees that focuses on each one, BM instead has some of both in both trees. A PvP blademaster would need for example the ranged stun of Roaring Lion from Beastial Attacks and Concentration from Maniac Attacks, whereas an attack speed blademaster would be interested in Dragon's Call from Beastial and All-out Assault from Maniac Attacks. On top of that, blademaster's passive, Tiger and Dragon Slaying, is only significant on blademaster - it is halved on other jobs like every other job passive, making blademaster attack speed only really usable on blademaster.
Thus, it would be wise to spend time evaluating the job you like as well as what you actually want to do with it. If you like one tree of a dimorphized job, it is also worth your time to explore the other two jobs in the group - the ones with 0% penalty with it - to see if you can main the other job and use your original as a single-tree sub. There's a dimorphized job and a syngerized job in each group, and the synergized jobs are much better as a main, especially if you can avoid having to spend 15 points into that job's equip skill, as synergized jobs tend to be much more SP hungry.