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There are two kinds of weapon attack feats: primary and secondary. Primary - their icons have a light border and they are slotted in the lower left three boxes of the bar in UI. Secondary - their icons have a dark border and they are slotted in the lower right three boxes of the bar in UI Dev Points (my term) You "pay" for a feat with the stamina cost and time spent activating it, and for that "purchase" you get a mix of damage factor and effects (which the developers have a bunch of math for to keep every feat balanced in cost and effect so I call the currency of paying and purchasing Dev Points). Logically, the more effects a feat provides the less Dev Points are left to provide damage factor and vice versa. Feats that cost more stamina and time get more Dev Points so they can afford to purchase more effects and higher damage factors. A few important points: -Some weapon attacks are so fast they are uninterruptible, while others are slower and rather susceptible to being interrupted. The more vulnerable to being interrupted a feat is, that is balanced out by receiving more Dev Points to do damage or apply stacks of debuff etc. A slow 1.6 second cd feat will have proportionally more damage and tricks going on than if it were scaled down to an uninterruptible .8 cd feat (unless it gets interrupted and nothing happens). -Some effects are conditional on a specific circumstance like the target having a certain state or yourself having a certain buff; if that condition isn't met then the effect doesn't happen and the Dev Points used to provide that conditional effect are essentially wasted for that attack. -A developer has said that conditional effects on a feat cost only half as many Dev Points as if they were guaranteed every hit. You get twice the kick for going to the trouble to meet that condition. Using Primaries Primary attacks cost less stamina then secondaries. If you know anyone that discovered long swords and Whirlwind you might have seen them not want to use any other attack at all, ever. But Whirlwind is a secondary attack that costs 62 stamina so after a use or two they have to stand there taking a lot of damage and wait for stamina regen to be able Whirlwind one more time, then wait again... Using less stamina means primary attacks are more easily used one after another with much less inactive time between attacks. Many primary attacks also have a chance to apply a state to the target, or a buff to you. This can often be a link in a combination chain where later conditional effects play off of previously applied circumstances. The buffs to you can also be quite useful on their own. Using Secondaries Most of the conditional effects I mentioned earlier are on secondary attacks. Remember, you had to pay stamina and time attacking to get the chance at activating that conditional. So if you're not going to get the conditional effect, it's very often not worth the stamina/time expense of activating that secondary attack. That's a generalization, it's up to you. It doesn't matter how the conditional circumstance happens or where it came from, only that it happens. For example if you have an effect that says "40 Bleeding if target has Distressed" and someone else applies Distressed on your target with one of their abilities, that's great you're ready to go and your conditional effect WILL be activated. If you have a primary that applies Favored to yourself and a secondary that says "...to target if you have Favored" you will be used to a primary-secondary chain applying Favored then using the secondary. If someone else casts Bless that will apply Favored to you and your secondaries' conditions are met and will activate even though you didn't apply Favored to yourself. You can combo with circumstances applied by feats from your own weapon, or your weapon swap, or another character. Any secondary feat who's conditions are currently met will light up green in the UI bar, EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE ENOUGH STAMINA TO ACTIVATE IT. If you're planning to use a combo, it's handy to wait until you have just about enough stamina to cast both before you start it. If you have just barely enough stamina to activate the primary, and the secondary costs even more stamina than that, you'll be waiting for stamina while the condition is ticking down to fall off. There is a chance if you start from nearly empty stamina the circumstance from the primary might fall off before you regen enough stamina to finish the combo. Putting It Together You only get six weapon attacks slotted at a time, three primary and three secondary, so you want them working together as much as possible. The feats for your combos and chains (some combos include three feats and chains can get five or six attacks long). Defensively your weapon attacks can apply defensive buffs to you or debuffs to your target. It's great if some attacks can be enhanced by others, like following a Razed attack (which reduces resistance) with an extra big feat that has higher than normal damage factor to maximize the damage it can do. The specifics about that are as varied as all the feats for all the different weapons, but using the information in this first installment of Head to Feats should help you start weighing which ones give the most bang for your Dev Points with your other abilities or those of your party mates.- 3 replies
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