hot or not?
which race?

Well if nobody answers I will start as I'm also interested in other opinions.

For group RvR, I think the savage gets closer to Zerkers, but doesn't really get to the same level. The main reason is as before the missing LA mechanism which will still prevent savages from building effective ATs. Also they won't get access to prevent flight, which I think was quite strong in the old days.
Of course there are the pro reasons: no more charge for zerkers, better evade, dualist reflexes, higher swing speed. But in the end all this doesn't help if you are chain blocked by the guard tank.

For solo RvR, cheap IP and purge is nice but there's no rr5-RA. Therefore, all of the buffs will start to kill the savage from the first second of the fight. Pointless situation against any class that can delay the fight in any way.

For the race: Troll if you go for the numbers.

As far as I know savages got "balanced" within patch 1.65 from their "op" form of 1.62. This is straight from the daoc patch notes -


A bug in Savage's chances to triple or quad has been fixed. Savages should now triple more frequently than before, and quad less frequently than before. Due to this, overall savage damage should decrease. - Damage nerf

Savage buffs have been halved in duration, and had their health cost halved. - Losing health more often so 15 second duration instead of 30, and the change two lines down compounds this change

The Savage "Irreverent Gesture" line has been changed from a shout to a 2 second cast time. Wasn't that great before, now its fairly useless unless u know you will get a kill or need to keep a stealther in combat

Savage buffs now subtract a percent of your maximum health, not your estimated health. Since estimated health was lower, this is an increase from what it used to be. Fairly huge nerf... Your buffs cost you even more hp on top of having to be cast twice as often

We've toned down the damage that Savages do while wielding any weapon other than a Hand to Hand weapon (to be equivalent to Hand to Hand weapons). Meh, w.e all about h2h anyways this was to nerf 2H damage I believe...

This was essentially a balancing patch for savages, but they really just got toned down from where they out shined everybody else. After playing a savage on Genesis they are heavily style positional requirement and for RvR you have to essentially always be side/rear on somebody to even think about maximizing damage. As it is now you can destroy anybody 1v1, but with the nerfs to the Savagery line and constantly sucking your own life out of you to be at top performance levels, whereas a Zerker is just there with fairly easy spammable positionals it doesn't seem like there will be a choice for what is "best" in a mid 8 man setup.

Essentially what happened at this point in Mid is a shift from savages to zerkers, and not because of any changes to zerkers but just because Savages got balanced. Do I have this correct or did something happen that pushed zerkers up while toning savages?

the left hand weapon dmg fix was a few patches before this (i think somewhere around 1.58 or so), before this fix zerker did insane dmg, like 2 hit kill a fullbuffed paladin in fg rvr.
Then 2h svg took their place with insane swing speed with 5.6+ 2h weapons and too often quad hits they could sometimes 1 hit kill a fullbuffed paladin...
With 1.65 they both got in line. They both have advantages, just for example the svg being harder to stop or peel with high 360° evade, the zerker dual wield and not blocked so often by guard tanks. I think both classes are viable options in a rvr grp at 1.65, maybe a mix is best.
The enemy guard tank will have either to go for the svg, those the (1 or 2) zerker have unguarded targets, or for the zerker assist, those the svg can deal his high dmg at unguarded targets.

what about 2h savage? 50 sword? you got a nice anytimer with high to hit bonus!
okay you miss the chance of triple and quad hits but the overall dmg should be better due better to hit chance, am i wrong?

On Uthgard 1.0 the 2h savage just sucked, because of the wrong weaponskill implementation as I was told. But even if they get it right for Uthgard 2.0 your weapon skill is still very low because of the low strength (I think). But anyway whether you are 2h or h2h, the damage you deal is not the problem . In both cases the savage is simply lost if there is a shield. As long as you hit a target without guard and shield the savage is doing fine.

Cadam wrote:what about 2h savage? 50 sword? you got a nice anytimer with high to hit bonus!
okay you miss the chance of triple and quad hits but the overall dmg should be better due better to hit chance, am i wrong?

Pretty sure 2H savage will not be a viable option in 1.65. As holsten posted above they could get their swing speed down and get 2H damage with a super fast swing timer, however that was changed in 1.65 to alter 2H damage to be more inline with that of H2H weapons, so really there is no point to use a 2H if the damage is similar to a 1H and you can use two of them. Right?

well 5.5 is not superfast...

Those male troll savages are ugly as hell anyway, I would not invite them!
Dwarf zerker are super hot e.g.!
If you wanna be fotm and roll a savage, at least roll a female troll!

you mean the enemys will run like chickens when they see the big mommy running towards them?

Saddly with all the nerf he got from 1.65 patch savages isnt really the best choice... prevent flight also is really OP in my opinion lol

Also i would point out that all those Dmg changes/patches aren't really effective on the topic... because we will play (hopefully) on a server coming from Uth 1.0 state, not from Live server during 2002... that's mean it will depends on how staff want touch savage damage from what was on Uth 1.0 ...

Splitspec svg is the way to go

If defense penetration is working, savage will be fine, I would say overall better than zerker (you can put a warrior on the train for slam/prevent flight/guard), though zerker has its selling points. 2H will be fine as well, since it means you can spam snare while still doing nice DPS.

if defense penetration isn't working, then you'll need a zerker to hit anything that has a guard.


With working defense penetration though, and OF MOB values, I really don't think guard will be that much of a problem.

Force wrote:

With working defense penetration though, and OF MOB values, I really don't think guard will be that much of a problem.

It doesn't take any mob at all to block 90% of all svg swings

Trick against savage trains was to walk bavkwards with blocker and blocked to avoid backstyle pwnage. Hard to pull of correctly though but if done right no dmg at all