He got voted to have a video last because he's so easy to slap on any team and win. (Not shitting on anyone using him, genuinely just saying that he is incredibly versatile)
It's almost comically annoying how versatile and strong MAA is. Every time I'm stuck at the cross roads trying to come up with a new team comp and I struggle to fill the last slot, 95% of the time MAA fills it perfectly if I didn't have him on the team already.
That's what makes me afraid of when/if they add Crusader. They either need to nerf Man-At-Arms or they need to greatly change Crusader almost to the level of how they changed Flagellant.
Crush used to have 1 extra point of damage and did give you block on combo. Because back then combo was only properly used on Occultist, MaA and HWM, people spam it with riposte to have constant defense.
The think with MaA is that in this game, everyone has around: 1 really good or busted move, 1-3 good moves, and the rest are bad or very situational, meanwhile MaA has like 3 (or even 4) straight up busted moves, 4 good moves, 2 situational but good moves and then courageous abandon
MaA and HWM and solid S tier picks for this game. Insane damage backed by insane defense. If you have both of them in one team, you can steamroll anything.
The fun part about this game is slacking off at work you get to academically study the mechanics and you actually get better that way than by playing the game sometimes.
I think Price of Pride has the blind to give it notable anti-synergy with Strategic Withdrawal: with PoP, you can’t just rotate crush/withdrawal as easily since there’s a chance you’ll miss it due to the speed token. Still very strong though!
Bulwark in particular saved my ass with the updated Obsession boss, as with Bulwark you can essentially loop taunt indefinitely with Retri/Stand Fast. I did have a backup Hellion to use Toe to Toe in case he couldn't do one for some reason or all of his taunt tokens were likely to be consumed, but this path basically "solved" the Obsession update for me.
You speak very highly of defender and i agree that its a great move but i literally never use it. Just goes to show how incredibly strong this dude is.
Bellow is my favourite MAA skill. Yell at things, especially when it adds debuffs or DOTs. And killing crits and riposte is awesome when needed. Old man yells at bad guys
Thank you for the guides! They have really helped me step up my game, though I am still stuck on Act 3 boss for like two weeks now. Getting closer each time though...
How to use courageous abandon: Don't Jokes aside if you actually want to do a courageous abandon build you'll want to run vanguard (for damage during cooldown) stand fast *unupgraded*, and go to the tangle to get the stone mount trinket. This allows you to stand fast turn 1 for block that gets upgraded at turn end and then generate regular block next turn start for a max damage abandon on turn 2. A second tank is ideal but not neccesary since you can afford to have MAA get hit once after using stand fast.
I think CA has gotten better as the game has gotten more content and more ways to easily gain Block. Ex: having full armor on your coach means you start combat with a block token, making CA do decent dmg on turn 1. Consecration of Fortitude is also fantastic with CA. I still think its one of MAA's weaker abilities, but Courageous Abandon has some fun synergies and can be really good if you build into it
this left me wanting more. you said in a previous video that understanding MaA is key to beating the game but i dont feel like i gained a better understanding of who he really pairs well with in what path. i guess im saying i wish the teammate section was longer
I apologize for that. Part of the reason I kept it short is because he does well with anyone because defender and bolster are really good for every team. After that, the skills, paths, and team more depend on the confession or what bosses you want to fight than MAA himself.
@@ShuffleFMyeah maybe it cannibalizes your streamed content but maybe walking through building a party around MaA would be useful. do you pick a path for him first, and design around that, or you have 3 characters and slot him in with the correct path? i think the decision making would be interesting
I think people probably didn't ask for a MAA guide because he's obviously S++ God Super Saiyan 4 tier in any rank performing any role for any confession.
Y’know the he’s not immortal weakness kinda hit me hard I just lost a very jolly MAA from a unlucky bleed on deaths door he was one turn away from being healed but died with no - death blow resist, rip out to him he just wanted to hum tunes and make friends with the entire team
Can’t recall the name of the trinket but the shambler one woth the eyes on it is amazing with bellow. The trinket applies 5 blight, burn, and bleed if u have 5 stress. Bellow procs this as an aoe with insane damage output. Using bolster to stay around 5 stress auto wins fights. And use the stress healing potion too if needed
I'm surprised Calibrating Censer was not mentioned. Which paired with Stone Mount make a sick combo. Also, Stone mount improves Retribution as well as the standard saving mastery tokens.
MAA is the character you pick if you want to win some of the most brutal/unfair fights in the game. (Stares at act 3 mountain boss) But thanks for another great guide vid shuff, now I can make the most busted hero even MORE BROKEN thanks to the knowledge you imparted on us.
If you ask me, the only weeknes he has is that Retribution has a cooldown XD MAA would be op even if he only had Upgraded Retribution in his kit and no other move in my opinion. XD Personally thou, I don't see why defender is better in general than retribution. Defender doesn't do damage or interact with tokens like Retribution does, Retribution also generates block tokens which is good enough, and with Defender, you have to be able to predict where the enemy will attack and defend the right target, and then if the enemy decides to hit someone else, that's bad, Retribution will blanket defend the whole party pretty much on top of the damage and things (also, just like a DOT, retribution checks death door, finished a lot of enemies with it). The only two times I would press defender over retribution is when. A: A big telegraphed attack is coming that can't be redirected with taunt or B: Someone is on death door in my team besides MAA so I wanna save their ass (which won't happen often since I'm already pressing Retribution every time I can so MAA is taking most of the damage anyway and then defender won't help the other character against cleaves regardless which is when others are most likely to go low)
While the token interaction/action economy from riposte does put retribution a little bit above defender in my book, the way that travelling heal and the game's stress mechanics work, having hits spread around rather than piled on one character can be a little bit easier to recover from. Like shuff said, if your team has lots of characters with middle-high health, Defender gets more value by guarding your specific squishies for longer.
@@MMurine I'd rather have all the stress pile onto MAA too, especially cause of how stess healing works. If you spread it, everyone gets to 4 and it sucks while if it's just on one guy, they get to over 5, and then pop the stress heal on em and it's all good. Especially cause I tend to run Jester too with MMA, and generally my main focus in any run is to get positive relations goin as soon as possible, stress is kind of a non issue usually. Then again, I don't run things liek Stygina, but alas.
I love your content as I am learning this game. One suggestion though, I watched your hero guides and it’s a bit frustrating because your builds are all predicated on having literally EVERYTHING unlocked (all skills, paths, trinkets, etc). It would be really helpful to have some guides on how to work through the game when you only have base skills (at least not operating under the assumption that you have everything unlocked). I’ve got a pretty good pile of hours in so far and while earning candles to unlock paths and class trinkets isnt hard, I only have 2 heroes who I’ve unlocked all skills for (Plague Doctor and Highwayman). It’s hard implementing some of your guides/advice when I literally dont have access to most of the skills and/or items. This is just a suggestion for possible additional videos/guides. As I said I LOVE your content and am learning a lot, it’s just that I can’t implement a lot of the strategies/synergies since I dont have most of the skills/items unlocked/available. Thanks!
Really shuff i didnt think you're favourite path for Maa would be sergeant! Why is that? i'm genuinely curious. Subjectively i think that vanguard is the best if you use him as a medium tank/medium dps, but bulwark is better as a pure tank, and also his damage, while reduced is not that bad. The only think sergeant has is move res which is good against leviathan amd ambition and thats it i think, so other than act 4 i wouldnt use sergeant, he just frees a slot from a moving ability and uses stand fast as a fifth ability, which again bulwark does better. I dont know it seems that the other 2 paths beat sergeant in every aspect except against 2 bosses
MAA and Seraph is ridiculous imo. Whatever path you pick for MAA, Seraph will fill in the blank with HP heal, more dmg, more defense or DoT removal. Obviously you then add some reach and its as close to gg as possible.
Can you do a cultist trinket guide. Like everytime i have no idea where to put them in my team and ill just throw the +hp and have one guy outlive everyone or throw on the dmg one and have that person only get 3 turns and die
With redoubt he invalidates the act 5 boss completely because he can guard the person in the one v one but the redoubt damage still triggers. Definitely the most op character in the game by far.
I do feel like Man-at-Arms has another actual, notable weakness to a greater extent than other heroes have- debuffs. To elaborate: Man At Arms has the default, kinda bad Debuff Resist that eats every Debuff ever. Other heroes either have Dodge/Dodge+ Access in their base kits (most dodge-y heroes, your Jesters and Grave Robbers and Highwaymen and such), higher Debuff Resist (Occultist), or otherwise ways in their base kit to just get around Debuffs/access to Debuff-resistant paths (Runaway with Hearthlight+, Leper with Reflection and Tempest Path, etc.) To contrast Man-At-Arms just sits there behind a mountain of Block tokens like you say and just takes it. Depending on the match-up, he might just get screwed out of his main strategy entirely by Atrophic Cut, or endlessly stunlocked eating meat and tanking relationships in the Harvest Child fight because he can't avoid or resist the debuff to save his life, etc. It's not usually a big deal and it's got a lot of play-around with combat items but it feels enough of a thing to warrant mention.
Why do you often suggest getting stress heal mastery early? I feel like quickly killing backline or something that'll let you kill a boss early is preferable.
Stress can be difficult to manage early and your 2nd point can go into damage. Only need to double up on early damage if you're going to do a lair region 1, which still requires the right items to appear to let you do it with reduced risk.
I tend to focus on upgrading heals/stress heals to increase my team's survivability and reduce my odds of getting stuck in a downward spiral, since lots of teams can survive any early battle unupgraded but repeated fights and random stress gain can prove problematic long-term.
If you're running a jester, hellion or maybe leper with a MAA or buy a lot of stress healing items you can get away with a non-upgraded bolster. However the value of upgrading bolster is so strong: -1 to -2 stress heal on two heroes and a block increasing to a block+. Note a stress heal of 2 is important for keeping stress below 4, and nullifying negative banter between characters and other bad rng mechanics which trigger with significant stress. It's not just about preventing meltdowns.
Are we gonna ignore the fact that the most broken character in the game has only 2 bad skills and they are unlocked at the very end and together? Definetely no bias there
Maybe Man At Arms had the least amount of votes because he doesn't need a guide. He's one of few characters where it is fairly obvious what he should do, and he is easy to play well.
Courageous Abandon is awful. I tried it. It's not worth all the setup and drawback. You're better off just smashing and riposting with regular moves. This move is way, way undertuned in all possible directions. I even used it with a trinket that buffs it, still not worth it in the slightest.
I think that man at arms isn’t really op. He has a lot of ways to counter what bosses and enemies do, but that shouldn’t be so rare to make the one that can seem op in comparison. The thing that DD2 lacks for me is more token interaction, it feels like the token system is done with that in mind but they forgot to do movements that do so.
