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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Jul 3, 2017 14:08:34 GMT
to be honest the biggest strength of Darius is out of activation attacks for warjacks, you need to play it to fully appreciate the tactical flexibility it gives you
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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Jul 3, 2017 14:09:29 GMT
scrub double post, please ignore
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Post by Sarcastastic on Jul 3, 2017 14:21:21 GMT
I'll admit that I haven't actually used him yet as I'm just starting into Cygnar, but he's always been a caster I've been interested in. Especially for the "what" factor as most people in my meta regularly forget he exists. I actually really like that way of looking at the feat though.
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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Jul 3, 2017 14:25:35 GMT
feel like I should add a quick disclaimer to my comments, I am not saying Darius is the best thing since sliced bread, and he will not be toppling Haley 2 or our other 'power' casters, but he is fun and better than a lot of people give him credit for
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Post by droopingpuppy on Jul 3, 2017 15:46:40 GMT
to be honest the biggest strength of Darius is out of activation attacks for warjacks, you need to play it to fully appreciate the tactical flexibility it gives you Yes, no one doubt the usefuless of Jackhammer. The problem is, he needs more to be competitive with the other casters....
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Post by 36cygnar24guy36 on Jul 3, 2017 15:55:42 GMT
to be honest the biggest strength of Darius is out of activation attacks for warjacks, you need to play it to fully appreciate the tactical flexibility it gives you Yes, no one doubt the usefuless of Jackhammer. The problem is, he needs more to be competitive with the other casters.... Not everyone can be as good as our best casters, however I think Darius is unique enough to take when combined with ADR, which he is on again next season.
Caine 3 and Darius all the way!
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Post by sludgeogre on Jul 3, 2017 17:01:02 GMT
I just got into the game a couple weeks ago and have only played 5 games, but I bought Haley 2 and Darius to have one caster that is on top of the pile and plays a control style game, plus one caster that just looked like a ton of fun and is jack oriented. I wanted to play Heavy Metal because I love the steampunk warjacks of Cygnar, so Darius just seemed like an obvious choice. 4 of my games have been with Darius and 1 with Haley 2.
I have had a ton of fun putting up Full Throttle and going to town with my jacks. The boosted attack rolls have helped me get through some high DEF stuff without having to boost, freeing up a lot of attacks. I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that spell yet. Jackhammer is great and everything, but if you can position an alpha strike well you'll end up getting a lot more value out of Full Throttle. The only unfortunate part is that if you're going with Full Throttle, because you need to activate Darius first, you can't do any jackhammers unless something is already engaged, but it gives you more flexibility in later turns having both options.
I know I'm really knew, but I had one turn where I healed a Firefly that was on 1 Cortex box, a Stormclad for about 10 points, and another Stormclad for about half, all fully on my feat turn. I was going to lose that game otherwise, but it basically made it a new turn 1 for me and I won very easily. Obviously against new players this is all worthless to people playing competitively, but for a new player it is a hell of a lot of fun to play and definitely helped get me addicted to this game right off the bat.
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Post by droopingpuppy on Jul 3, 2017 17:04:21 GMT
I just got into the game a couple weeks ago and have only played 5 games, but I bought Haley 2 and Darius to have one caster that is on top of the pile and plays a control style game, plus one caster that just looked like a ton of fun and is jack oriented. I wanted to play Heavy Metal because I love the steampunk warjacks of Cygnar, so Darius just seemed like an obvious choice. 4 of my games have been with Darius and 1 with Haley 2. I have had a ton of fun putting up Full Throttle and going to town with my jacks. The boosted attack rolls have helped me get through some high DEF stuff without having to boost, freeing up a lot of attacks. I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that spell yet. Jackhammer is great and everything, but if you can position an alpha strike well you'll end up getting a lot more value out of Full Throttle. The only unfortunate part is that if you're going with Full Throttle, because you need to activate Darius first, you can't do any jackhammers unless something is already engaged, but it gives you more flexibility in later turns having both options. I know I'm really knew, but I had one turn where I healed a Firefly that was on 1 Cortex box, a Stormclad for about 10 points, and another Stormclad for about half, all fully on my feat turn. I was going to lose that game otherwise, but it basically made it a new turn 1 for me and I won very easily. Obviously against new players this is all worthless to people playing competitively, but for a new player it is a hell of a lot of fun to play and definitely helped get me addicted to this game right off the bat. Full Throttle is not mentioned because you will not use it often, and it sucks up a lots of focus of Darius. Our MAT 7 warjacks are able to hits most things without a boost so usually boosted melee attack roll is not required at all unless you want to repeating Jackhammer on the enemy warcaster/warlock, who usually have decent to very impressive amount of DEF. I don't think that Darius is a good warcaster for the beginner either; He doesn't supports the units, and he don't have much focus, and he is only good at hand to hand combat of warjacks.
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Post by snarlyyow on Jul 30, 2017 3:23:57 GMT
I know this is nearly a dead thread but I have to chime in here. I've played Darius in MKiii a lot, with a lot of success. And I think a lot of Swans still think of him in MKii terms because, aside from Refuge, he's essentially the same. The big thing with Darius is simply knowing what you can and cannot drop him into. Luckily, this list is easy to digest: Minions: Hard hitting beasts can round 1 stormwalls pretty easy. Casters like Rask and Arkadius and Carver are all problematic and are all in the Minions tournament scene. Skorne: Hard hitting beasts with lots of attacks and damage buffs. Ret: If they have Thyron, Helynna, or Ossyan. Luckily only Helynna is making the tournament scene and Darius into these casters is not an auto-loss. This is good news indeed because Haley2 handles all of these matchups, aside from Ret, with aplomb. That means Darius is a great off-list for a Haley2 player. The big change with Darius in Mark3 is powerup. Almost no one abuses Powerup with minimal jacks like Darius does. Being able to get free runs then use your stack for Jackhammer means a great Darius player will never allocate focus for melee attacks. I want to talk about the OP's list. I think you're right on the money, but you want to trade the Firefly for a Sentinel. It's really difficult to remove a Stormwall at range if you have a single shield guard, even into the best gunlines like Sloan. Your list should be at least 1 Hurricane, then a second colossal, two chargers, then a Sentinel. That's the whole of your Heavy Metal list. Into the mirror he's fantastic. Stuff like Stormknights can't 1 round colossals. Haley 2 can't do it either. If she sends in a Stormclad, then TK's it out and feats, you just walk forward and jackhammer it. The Hurricane can Knockdown Thorn and you can shoot him down from there. 36Cygnar24Guy36 said it best, Darius makes your opponent make desperate decisions. Just yesterday I was playing Darius into Thyron and my opponent had a choice into how to kill a Stormwall. His best choice was to charge Thyron in but if he did the Hurricane prolly kills Thyron the next turn. Instead he chose a safer option, not charging Thyron in, and left the Stormwall on five boxes; I feated and the game was won. This is the sort of bad decision that Darius poses to opponents. Succeed and lose or fail and lose anyway. This is really typical of good Darius matchups. The rules with premeasuring also help Darius immensely. You can frequently put your heavies/colossals in a position to only take a single charge from one other heavy, not two or three. And you never worry about failing a charge, which is great because Darius has a massive quantity of attacks problems when facing down a lot of targets, but he's got a lot of attacks for a single target; so you can easily 1 round opposing heavies. If you want to play Darius you need good target prioritization, you need to know what can kill your models and how far they come from. Typically you'll focus down no more than one or two targets per turn, giving you massive clock advantage. Darius is great. He has detractors because they don't know what they're doing or they only know him from his Mark2 days and haven't picked him up again. Those people are all wrong when discussing Darius' competitive potential. Darius is one of our top casters when considering an off-list for Haley2 or in the Champions/Specialists format. He's also pretty easy to learn but a lot different from other casters so your skill set with, say, Stryker1 or Maddox is totally different from the skill set to play Darius. Give it five to ten games so you can learn his extra special level of power-jank. You can also listen to The Storm CHamber's excellent episode on Darius, it was done before the Themes but remains mostly relevant. museonminis.com/storm-chamber-episode-10-darisode/
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