MRD Builds

[Lienn]

It is correct. DEX actually is more of a defensive attrubute right now, increasing your parry and evade rate alongside with critical hits. About increasing accuracy, its relative...because it increases accuracy "only", which will make you have less "misses", but it does not affect the amount of "evades" the monster do since its related to them...i once had 120 DEX for tests...once your DEX reaches crazy values you will notice you barely miss...but at same time the monster will start evading much more often since evade can only be triggered when you actually hit it...so there will be no real increase accuracy wise...would be much better leave accuracy to food and actions and thinking that DEX is purely defensive.

But as defensive attribute DEX rocks...when i played MRD as DD i always liked much more using light armor (cloth/leather) instead of heavy armor...with high eva and decent DEX nothing can touch you. Very often, if monsters were good enough to make fight last until steadfast trigger, it was over. While in light armor i have over 180 eva (because for some reason SE still didn't add r40+ versions of some of my armor pieces...or i'd be beating 200 eva already), with steadfast i have also the defensiveside covered for when monsters actually hit. Its very hard i take a full damage attack in this setup, which also means i have optimal TP usage since i can beat the dude basically with only retaliation WSs while storing TP for maim.

Hell...this is why i'm so pissed/annoyed/frustrated with 1.18 >< i already feel like Yahiko taking about how Kenshin fight when i talk about old and new MRD. :/

[VydarrTyr]

My current build is balanced. There's not much demand for Marauders, and my other two rank 50 classes are Conj/Thm. If I want to participate in a dungeon, I've got to be able to quickly switch to Conj/Thm.

That means I can't stack points into physical attributes. So I keep everything relatively balanced, use traits to swing my attributes, and use food to supplement. That means I can't min-max anything. Which is a bummer. But that's what I get for leveling Conj/Thm and not Arc.

It is correct. DEX actually is more of a defensive attrubute right now, increasing your parry and evade rate alongside with critical hits. About increasing accuracy, its relative...because it increases accuracy "only", which will make you have less "misses", but it does not affect the amount of "evades" the monster do since its related to them...i once had 120 DEX for tests...once your DEX reaches crazy values you will notice you barely miss...but at same time the monster will start evading much more often since evade can only be triggered when you actually hit it...so there will be no real increase accuracy wise...would be much better leave accuracy to food and actions and thinking that DEX is purely defensive.

But as defensive attribute DEX rocks...when i played MRD as DD i always liked much more using light armor (cloth/leather) instead of heavy armor...with high eva and decent DEX nothing can touch you. Very often, if monsters were good enough to make fight last until steadfast trigger, it was over.

This.

Dex seems to help a little with hit rate, but not nearly as much as getting an HQ Engraved Bhuj. But as you increase Dex, there seems to be a noticeable difference in evasion/parrying.

When I had my Dex at 110, I was a parry-->Fracture machine. I even started putting Haymaker/Jarring Strike on my bar.

The problem for Marauder, of course, is getting Steadfast to pop. You've basically got to make a choice. You can hold still to get Steadfast to pop, or you can re-position yourself to take advantage of Marauder's conal AoE, like Broad Swing, which creates an awesome amount of TP. But you can't do both.

But with Dex that high, I didn't need Steadfast to parry. If it did pop, it was usually an instant parry. But if it didn't, I still parried like crazy (even while wearing a hauby). And I also got to move around and build TP.

People seem to think of Marauder as a fat dude with lots of HP who hits hard. But a high Dex Marauder is a completely different animal. You're not going to get as much damage mitigation as a Glad using a shield, but you're going to do more DPS, and your innate counters will stop the mob from using its WS. If Marauder had a Heavy Shot type attack that depleted the mob's TP, we'd be an anti-WS tank.