another look at focused necromancy : wrestling mastery

Rock

Reviewing the various mastery abilities, the Wresting Mastery ones caught my eye.  Normally wrestling damage is virtually insignificant, it being mainly useful for foe interruption and defense.  But necromancy's Horrific Beast (HB) form does decent damage to begin with.  (I believe it is about 4-15 damage for low-end necro char compared to 1-5 otherwise.)  I am building a focused necro character now, which means mainly she can cast as HB.  (It also restricts her template -- no other spell books, no taming, no barding.)

-- HB bonuses: 20% hit point regen, 25% damage bonus

Add Tactics and perhaps Anatomy damage bonuses, and the wrestling damage should approach 12-40.  Admittedly there are three downsides:

1. damage is always of type physical
2. no weapon properties are available
3. the Curse Weapon spell does not work with wrestling, so no extra life drain

Here is where Wrestling Mastery caught my eye.

-- Knockout (passive): While the wrestling mastery is active the wrestler receives a damage bonus to each hit based on mastery level.

-- Rampage: The wrestler attempts to continually hit their opponent where with each successful hit the wrestler receives a bonus to hit point regeneration, stamina regeneration, casting focus, and swing speed increase based on wrestling skill, evaluating intelligence or anatomy skill and mastery level. The effect is lost if the wrestler misses, the wrestler’s opponent parries the attack, or fails to cast a spell. (20 mana)

-- Fists of Fury: The wrestler attempts to land three hits in rapid succession to the next target that damages you within a 2 tile radius. If successful the third hit will deal direct damage based on the wrestler’s mastery level. The duration of this ability is based on wrestling skill and anatomy skill or evaluating intelligence skill. (20 mana)

Her goal template is currently:

120: Necromancy, Spirit Speak

120: Meditation, Resist Spells

120: Wrestling, Tactics

At 69.3 Necro, 83.1 SS, 62.2 Tactics, and 69.9 Anatomy, her HB wrestling damage is currently rated at 7-19.  Note that both active masteries are buffed by Anatomy.  (Eval is neither available nor useful for focused necro.) Her race is human, so that gives her 20 Anatomy via Jack of All Trades, but I don't think that would contribute a lot.  I could manipulate the template to give her decent Anatomy, using skill bonuses to make up the difference.  (Sort of moot right now; she is on low population shard, so she may never see skill levels above 100.  So for the time being she's headed for a 7x build anyway.)

Those who made it this far probably have some interest in the topic.  What do you think of her build and the idea of using Wrestling Masteries to augment her damage?

Rock

I ran some tests on Test Center.  TLDR: Devs really don't like Wrestling.  Wrestling at best is good for  the Disarm special move.  But that is available on some weapons as well.  Mages, take 100 anatomy instead of 120 Wrestling.  You'll have the same defense against non-magical attacks, due to Anatomy's special relationship with Eval Int.  (At the "huge" cost of not being able to Disarm.)  Not only does Wrestling not have any attribute buffs as would be on a weapon, it is cut off from all weapon buffs such as Curse Weapon.

Even wrestling as a Horrific Beast scaled much less well than a weapon.

I created a human necromancer with base stats of:

120: Necro, Spirit Speak

120: Wrestling, Meditation

Then I ran tests with different levels of Tactics and Anatomy, both weaponless (Wrestling) and holding a bone harvester (swords, 12-16 base damage).  Strength was set to 80.0.

tact:anat  Human   HB (25% Damage Increase)
             No Weapon
   0:  0    1-5     5-13
  50:  0    1-6     5-13
 100:  0    2-8     6-18
 100: 50    2-8     7-19
 100:100    2-9     8-23
           Bone Harvester (12-16 base damage)
   0:  0   17-23    20-27
  50:  0   19-26    22-30
 100:  0   24-30    27-36
 100: 50   26-34    29-30
 100:100   29-39    32-43

Conclusion: my new necro character will be taking a weapon skill instead of wrestling.  I might have stuck with it even with the drawbacks I understood.  But since Tactics and Anatomy don't buff Wrestling at the same percentage they buff a weapon, it would be foolish to go further with the experiment.