[Norfleet]

Originally posted by JDScherrey:
I noticed that you pick apart the assassin and then stated that there is a better setup for the Lord of Night. Now the question is - What is the better setup?!?

Well, the assassin is perfectly viable. It's just a little slower. Certain concerns are no longer of importance if you assassinate everyone, as you don't need a full battle tweak to slaughter single people with a few guards.

You stately very clearly how you would set the rest of it up and gave reasons why. Basically, what are the optimized paths for battle performance when using Lord of Night?

Well, concerns of battle performance are the same as always: You want to stack as many defensive buffs as you can on your pretender as possible.

However, battle optimization is expensive, and will definitely not be done well with your present set of scales: You're going to have to take a hit. What you probably want: Earth 2(Ironskin, Earthpower+Invuln), Water 2(Quickness+BoW), Air 4(Mirror/Mist - Mirror gets better results with more air), and Death 3(Soul Vortex).

Wedge what you can into this, then spend the dangling points as you will on dominion and scales: I'd suggest a dominion of no less than 6, and you may have to just accept a hit from Luck to Misfortune-2 and not expect to see your national heroes - your pretender fills in the magic holes tolerably anyway.

The Lord of the Night is a particularly sweet chassis by midgame, particularly if you slap him a Wraith/Hell Sword or Thorn. His fatigue rating is quite good also, and you'll get some better starting dominion out of him. The assassination is fun, too. Whack somebody's pretender in a duel. Laugh at him.

However, in your original build, your LotN gave you some small low-level 4-blesses. You may still want to keep that, which is why I didn't immediately rip that apart, but merely pointed out that it wasn't really battle-tweaked....and doing this can be very expensive, so you may not want to. Although what you did looks expensive, too. Plus you took Turmoil. Yeck.