How to deal BIG damage

My Friend Alric RavenSinger was nice enough to give me a shout out on his blog, The Raven’s Vault.  Thanks Alric, love ya dear heart!  He mentioned Mercenaries for Hire, and the fact that was I honored enough to be asked to become a member.  He also mentioned tips and tricks

and I believe one that he might be referring to is how to set up for one hit kills, which are SO SO much fun for the “hammer”,  and just as much for the “buffer”!  You can always tell when someone is new to a one hit kill.  You usually get a WOW as the first thing they say when it happens.

Most of us know that using our school blade and trap makes for a bigger hit, and if you used any TP (Training Points) at Niles the Balance Tree for tri-blades and traps, and use those also you get an even bigger boost.  And don't forget your "bubble", or global, or Aura or whatever you may want to call it!  For us pyromaniacs it's called Wyldfire.

If you have a Death wiz (or Necromancer) with you they can boost your hits with a couple of cards also, that work for any school's damage spells.  They are traps, so they go on your target.  The first one is called "Curse", it adds 20% more damage to your hit.  The other card that the death school can use is "Feint".  Now when I first heard about this card I thought it was a HORRIBLE card!  It puts a trap that adds 70% damage to the target, BUT it also puts a 30% damage trap on YOU!.  I thought why the heck would I want to damage myself?  BUT if you time the placement of this trap just right you can take no damage, because the enemy has not had to chance to hit it, or very low damage because they use a low damage spell.  So NOW I see the sheer beauty of this spell.  A 70% boost ... lets see if a card hits for 625 points, with no other buffs ... a feint adds 437 points of damage ... to make one hit 1062 points, enough to take out MOST mobs, even in DragonSpyre.

The "classic" buffer in game is a Sorcerer, or Balance wiz.  Those tri blades and traps you used a TP on? They get for free, after all they are balance school spells.  Their "school" blades, Balance blade and Blade Storm, can boost any schools hit.  They have a +30% trap, called "Hex", this is a trap that all schools can use.

So imagine this, you are a fire wiz, getting ready to use Helephant, which has a base damage of 625.  You have the following blades on you -- school blade for 35% boost, tri blade for a 35% boost, balance blade for a 25% boost, bladestorm for a 20% boost -- all of those "stack", meaning they all will fire when you use your spell, provided you don't fizzle ;)  So that means that 625 hit point Helephant now does 1708 damage.  And this calculation does NOT take into effect any gear boost you may have.  For example my Pyro gets a gear boost of 37%, and that would be the first calculation, mathematically speaking, so I would hit for 2306 damage, BEFORE any traps are added.  And none of these are using a bubble to boost the hit. :D  So you can see how just using blades alone can boost a hit.

Now for the traps ... and how they go off all depends on how they were laid down in the first place ... LIFO style (Last In, First Out) ... so we have the following set on the enemy -- in order -- Hex, Feint, Curse, Tri Trap, and school trap.  So our damage gets boosted to 9555 for one hit.  Still no bubble or any treasure cards.

So you can see, that with the right set up MASSIVE amounts of damage can be done.

Like this :

And yes thats 116K of damage. WOOT!

Soon we will talk about small decks and some other tips and tricks I have up my sleeves.

Until then ...

See ya 'round the Spiral