lol, fantastic. Never read that one. Here's a good one I came across one time. The post may be getting a little off topic but I think one more will be ok.. Player: I open the door to the next room. GM: you see a large Orc with a battle axe guarding a chest. Player: I enter into a frank and meaningful dialogue with the Orc, validating his right to guard chests, but not pigeon-holing into a stereotype in hopes of restructuring the traditional adventurer/monster antagonistic relationship into something more positive and mutually beneficial. GM: Roll 1d20 on your charisma to pass Player: I succeed. GM: the Orc is moved by your rhetoric. He casts his battle axe aside, sits down on the chest and invites you to sit with him in a brainstorming session to revitalize the decaying subterranean infrastructure and society of the dungeon, perhaps with a- Player: While he's distracted, I stab him with my sword.
Same experience here. The fact is you have done 50% the job already, if you have a good ping. In this melee system timing matters, if you have high latency then you're screwed.
I have to say, I have only recently started using my Scorpion and Banshee, am a long suffering Shuriken Cannon Reaper lover and Dire Avenger. Also play support Warlock. I did enjoy the sneakiness of the Scorpion, at the best times most people have no spacial awareness, they miss visible people all the time, too busy tunnelling, so sneaking around and stabbing them in the back is a piece of cake and rewarding from a fun perspective, but, I tried out a Banshee over the weekend, having never used it before to all intent and purpose, and I have a say, what hilarious fun it is. People just cannot cope with the stamina regened speed we have, dancing around them, watching their swings go wildly wide is brilliant. I have never been a kill chasing type of player, I play the objectives and support, but playing a Banshee left me topping melee kill charts a couple of times, which I have never done, nor really have interest in doing. But it shows 2 things, Firstly, Banshees are not really in that bad of a spot if a noob Banshee can find it so much fun and pretty easy, and secondly, that people really struggle with their speed and find them unplayable.
Anything with speed can be found difficult...but that's less because players can't aim and more because the performance of this game is always iffy. Especially when fighting Eldar (for me), it's like they have some invisible FPS dropping presence in the warp in all their matches. Speed plus technical inconsistencies leads to headaches on both sides of the equation. I promise you, if this game had a more solid and consistent performance...anything speed related (Eldar, MoS, Jump Packs) would get their ass handed to them much much more often.
I find I can achieve this level of success if you along with your team are engaged with the enemy, or you are facing noobs. A banshee waking into a room alone vs three experienced enemies is a sure way to get torn to pieces. You may take one down, but vs experienced enemies, especially dedicated assault classes, one will engage, one will flank, and another will shoot with their side pistol. However, a banshee being backed up with a dark reaper or warlock, even dire avenger, completely changes the outcome. In the middle of a team battle I've gotten 5-6 kills. People panic when the reaper or dire avenger fires on them, makes them roll, jump away, even change targets sometimes. They try to take down the soft squishy target first, leaving you do run rampant after you down them. This is a problem vs entire teams of melee users (which seems to be the vast majority of players these days anyway). But banshees I find excell as a clean up crew more than anything else. As everyone on this thread has stated, banshees don't have any survivability of other races, and work better ambushing, flanking and choosing their encounters. Example- my revered banshee load out duelled a normal Orc slugga with shield and klub last Night. We were evenly matched, and we probably fought for 30 seconds at least. I must have hit him 7-8 times and he still had 1/4 hp left. Duel ended with a reaper shooting a starshot and killing us both....thanks. But that can put into perspective what happens when you meet a foe with decent skill in melee. We both countered each other's moves and it took waaaaay too long. Not to mention eldar just don't do much damage unless they are surprising the enemy, whiz ideally they should be. When I see an assault with shield and power fist now, I try to find a different target. If I clash 2 times my weapon is prob gonna break, and even if I clash and it doesn't break I still get stunned from the impact from the tier 4 fist. Let dark reaper and avengers shoot them down. What I try to do now is engage, roll past them and have them turn their backs to my team and get shot down from behind. Hard to pull off if there's more than one, but it still works ok!
I do agree, as I said, I am a dedicated melee noob really, other than my Embolden Warlock, no doubt benefiting from the weekend LSM influx. I think we would be lucky to find any class who can wander solo into a room with 3 skilled defenders and do well, and I say that thankfully, we should not be able to lone wolf the world. I like your idea of Reaper support, it does tend to be what I do, I follow the action, definitely on my revered rather just sit sniping, that's dull. It's surprising how accurate firing into melee can be for a SC, it is very rare I TK, whether that's down to the paltry damage per projectile I don't know, I would have to aim at you consciously, to TK you. I run a couple of Warlock builds, a melee support with Embolden (brilliant for running around with Banshees) and a support using Renew and Jinx, the only setup I find it's worth taking the named Witch Blade from the 30k boxes I cannot recall the name of, lets you keep up pretty much constant healing, but pretty useless at melee. That said, dedicated healing requires protection from those around, which very often is lacking, even when hanging right back and snaking the renew through the mayhem.
