qoxolg and Arksenth's Guide on How to Melee TE!

[Arksenth]

If you currently have a partial EWH, I'd just go ahead and max out the skill - it's an all-or-nothing skill, and you're obviously going to be making sacrifices elsewhere on your skill tree to make up for having EWH.

Techer is kind of expensive to play compared to other classes no matter how you slice it. Even if you're not element matching wand elements, you'll still want to tote around a few specialized wands even if you're on the teching side due to the diversified latents of wands. Combine that with the pricey affixes you'll want to be rolling as a hybrid, and it's going to suck up quite a bit of your meseta. It's not really a class someone plays on a budget is what I'm saying.

[MetalDude]

The base wand prices are pretty lenient outside of Laconium (I'm figuring the Valentine's EQ will help so I'm waiting), but most of the cost is going to be in getting Lv.3 which I'll probably just wait on the boost week for that because I hate grinding with a passion regardless of how much money I'm sitting on.

[qoxolg]

I just want to stop by and advocate for TE/BR, which I find to be a very compelling combination. It's got similar power to TE/FI but with an omni-directional stance (although the missing Chase Advance Plus is a fairly large downside).

What really adds to the class are the snatch step and just reverse cover skills, which augment the Wand Lovers step and lack of hyper/super armor into having additional flinch and recovery. The two skills are certainly more useful for TE than other classes.

My build is far from complete (I still have yet to get a fast charge recipe for Nafoie, which is going to make a big difference), and I'm only using a 24 light Elysion so the results may be skewed, but the bonus damage on the explosion with a tech mag against darkers, weak points, and boost points is pretty notable and against groups of darkers seems to more than make up for the lack of bonus damage to the direct wand strike.

I find it to be pretty fun.

TE/BR is having my interest as well. My BR on my Techer is only lv45, which I initially leveled to try out with my FO, so it's currently focused on Weak stance.

Also, what about Zondeel + Shunkan? Or wands for mobbing and katana's for bosses?

Make sure to share your TE/BR findings, so I can add it to the guide.

Alright, just wanted to understand how important it was to make use of EWH. I was already a little bit in progress but didn't want to dump too much money before making any mistakes.

EWH is a full 20% boost for techs, which is equal to a full mastery on every single element, as long as you match the element, so for TE/FI, I'd always pick it, since TE/FI is a bit more tech oriented.

The base wand prices are pretty lenient outside of Laconium (I'm figuring the Valentine's EQ will help so I'm waiting), but most of the cost is going to be in getting Lv.3 which I'll probably just wait on the boost week for that because I hate grinding with a passion regardless of how much money I'm sitting on.

Well, grinding 7 stars is relatively easy and if you can wait for the 10% boost, it won't be very expensive. You can pretty much get every single grind boost item by doing some smart FUN scratches. From my experience, FUN scratches either give you insane luck and you get grind protect -1 on one of the squares on more then halve of your tries, or you get only one in 10 tries. Usually if I don't get two grind protects in 3 or 4 tries, I stop scratching and try again later, for when the god of RNG shines his light upon me.

From there on, +10 grinding 10*'s averages out around 200k with protects on the last 3 grinds and a 5% boost on the last grind. I haven't grinded a 10* for some time though, so I dunno if SEGA nerved the grinding in the meantime.


And just like Arksenth pointed:
If you want to play melee Techer to it's fullest, you need to invest a lot of meseta into it and it might be a good idea to at least get premium once, so you can stack 10* exchange passes (assuming you can use them when premium has worn off). Also, follow Arksenths little guide for poor people to rack up meseta real quick.

Not particularly recommended as the inherently large charge times and lower variety of Light doesn't make it particularly well suited to specialization. Additionally, this build doesn't have as many PP management tools as the previous specialist builds. However, Technic customization has given Grants PP efficiency, and Ragrants and Gigrants charge reduction times, so a light specialization may still be partially viable for those who prefer to have flashy light techs.

I played quite a bit FO/TE before melee teching was really a thing and I also had a light tree. I have to say I always picked light over fire or lightning on darkers. Gigrants' range is huge and best of all it also has a pretty large vertical range, making it easy to hit weak spots on Micda's or flying enemies like Dagash. Also light techs have the best stun of all techs.

and yes! pretty lights!

[Arksenth]

EWH is a full 20% boost for techs, which is equal to a full mastery on every single element, as long as you match the element, so for TE/FI, I'd always pick it, since TE/FI is a bit more tech oriented.

I think it depends; currently, the absolute best multi-purpose tech out there is Sazan, and TE/FI is in a great position to abuse it since it can turbo-charge Wind with dual masteries on top of Fighter stances - plus it also means a boost to the all-mighty Zan, which is pretty much the TE staple. But the downside of Wind is that it doesn't have really wide coverage in terms of elemental weaknesses with only Forest Natives and Bird Darkers being weak, so EWH isn't strictly necessary if you're specializing in Wind.

If you're diversifying a little bit more, it would make sense to grab EWH especially since you're also liable to get FI's Chase Advance Plus bonus making it stronger than BR's Weak Stance bonuses, but sometimes it doesn't make sense to do so given the insane damage, sustainability, and utility of Wind. Like for instance, you're never going to really be using Lightning outside of Zondeel as a TE/FI. Fire is rather lack-luster without Fire S Charge; and Ice, Light and Dark don't really have full coverage of all of the utility points you'd want for all situations.

So it's really down to personal preference, I'd say. You're absolutely fine as a TE/FI sticking to Wind all the time because it's the best current element for DPS whether close-range or long-range and utility, but if you prefer to be capable of pulling out heavy-hitting Ramegid or Ragrants casts for the borderline situations where they are better, you can grab EWH at the expense of other perks.

[Omega-z]

Wand Explosions work really, really weird. It uses your T-ATK, but counts as a "Striking Elemental Attack" and thus is granted the (weapon elemental attribute/100) bonus - but despite this, it's still non-elemental damage. All striking multipliers will impact Wand Explosions in general. Also, even if you JA your smack, the Wand Explosion itself will not be JAed, and thus cannot benefit from the 30% JA multiplier or any class-related JA skills.

Definition

Wand Gear: Uses your T-atk as an "Extra Normal Non - Elemental Striking Attack Explosion that gains Attribute from the Element of the Wand".

Because of this Wand Gear is boosted by T-atk boosts, Elemental boosts, Striking boosts, Status Boosts and Universal boosts. But is not affected by JA boosts, Tech Boosts, Charge Boosts, Critical Boosts and Weak Stance*

*note this is most likely a mistake and may be fixed.


OH, on the chart for Carino Colau and the other versions it's 25% reduction not 20%.

[ZombieFighter9000]

Could you explain to me when exactly a wind-specialist TE/FI should be using Zan or other techniques instead of Sazan? I've noticed that I don't really have any trouble keeping my gear charged by just using Wand Lovers, and occasionally topping it up with a charged Sazan on a cluster of enemies. Sazan always seems to be the most damaging to me, but from the posts I've been reading here it sounds like Zan is actually supposed to be better in certain situations? What situations? I've tried using it point blank on bosses, but I wasn't really impressed...

The only problem I've noticed with Sazan is that it has a habit of moving enemies around depending on what part I have targeted - this can be a problem with boss killing, since they get moved closer and closer to me until they go past me and I lose my Brave Stance bonus. What am I supposed to do about that?

[Arksenth]

Could you explain to me when exactly a wind-specialist TE/FI should be using Zan or other techniques instead of Sazan? I've noticed that I don't really have any trouble keeping my gear charged by just using Wand Lovers, and occasionally topping it up with a charged Sazan on a cluster of enemies. Sazan always seems to be the most damaging to me, but from the posts I've been reading here it sounds like Zan is actually supposed to be better in certain situations? What situations? I've tried using it point blank on bosses, but I wasn't really impressed...

The only problem I've noticed with Sazan is that it has a habit of moving enemies around depending on what part I have targeted - this can be a problem with boss killing, since they get moved closer and closer to me until they go past me and I lose my Brave Stance bonus. What am I supposed to do about that?

If you only manage to hit three times with the initial burst of Zan, Sazan is by all means stronger, but the unique property of Zan is that it boomerangs back to you for more hits, for as much as 14 times - the sickles cancel when they collect back at you, but they also spin around you for a few additional hits, so you can either dodge them for more boomerangs or take advantage of the return to create a small but concentrated point-blanc AoE. Furthermore, each projectile can hit multiple hitboxes on its way out, so with these two properties combined, you can greatly outclass the damage of Sazan by several times. It's one of those techs that TE is in a better position to take advantage of than casting FO - for maximum impact, you need to hug the target of interest, but you're doing that anyway for wand smacks.

Therefore, use Zan angled up on large targets at point-blanc while moving/jumping to best collect/dodge the Zan sickles as needed. It works best in larger areas where you won't hit obstacles with Zan on the way out, but on sufficiently large bosses like Dark Ragne, you won't even need boomerangs to out-DPS Sazan.

And Sazan has a suction range that you can't do anything about - either target it at the center of your mob, or use Zan instead in point-blanc. I don't know why you're using Sazan when you're right up against the mob anyway...

[Dhylec]

Interesting guide - I could use this for personal reference once I get to build my melee Te.

[gigawuts]

Wand Lovers really seals the class's feel. I just wish there was a permanently enabled, passive Wand Step skill. I could live without the bonus damage on Wand Lovers full time, but having step is such a deal-maker.

[RedRaz0r]

Here's a better guide in 3 words:
Don't do it.