Neo Steam Online Strider Guide

Neo Steam Online Strider Guide by Gamevet

To start off, let me make this clear that everything here is just my opinion and advice from what I’ve gathered as playing as a Strider. My main character, Hawkeye, is a Strider, and I’ve played as a Strider since golden ticket beta. I hope you fill find this helpful if you are choosing whether to be a Strider or not, or if you’ve already made one but need some direction in playing style and so forth. I’ll gladly answer any questions that I might have not answered. Well let’s begin shall we.

Recommended Races for Striders.

1. Human/Taxn
2. Rogwel Pom/Elerd Elf (-2 Str, -2 Con)
3. Tarune/Lupine/Lyell (-2 Str, -4 Con)
4. Elerd Pom/Rogwel Elf (-5 Str, -2 Con)

Thanks here to the neosteamwiki and neosteamwiki himself.

First off, a Striders are mainly a bow users. Meaning that most if not all of their attacks are ranged, thus you’ll want to make sure you use the distance of your attacks to your advantage to keep you out of harm’s way. Reason for this is because Striders have lower stats in the Hit Point and Defense area than most other classes. I’m not sure where they fall on with their defense, but I’m very sure it’s in 4th place out of the eight jobs for natural Defense. So don’t be figuring that as a Strider you can go around and tank everything you see. You may be able to handle 2-3 monsters at a time if properly buffed, but once you get 4+ you’ll need to get the heck out of there or you’re screwed. This also means you cannot solo bosses by yourself unless you’re highly leveled above said boss. As for PvP, Striders specialize in single target damage and can roll out some high damage very quickly, but if you can’t take out you’re enemy in the first combo, you’re going to have a very hard time winning or getting the kill before they do. Next, on to the skills

Again, this is my recommend skill set up that you should have if you’re going to be a Strider (especially if you’re interested in PvPing). This is also assuming you are you are going to go with the build of spending 100 SP on maxing 10 skills, 5 SP on the elemental skill, 30 SP on master skills and 10 SP for the weapon master. This will leave you with 5 left over SP to put into another skill of your choice.

Being a Strider means specializing with a bow, so you should obviously have all the bow skills you can get. A Strider has 5 bows skills upon class specializing: Dual Shot, Concealed Blade, Crippling Arrow, Dragon Fang, and Hydra Needle. I recommend that you keep these skills maxed as best you can if you’re planning on PvPing, or just soloing as any extra damage you can deal the better. Now for the order of importance for maxing these skills.

1. Crippling Arrow: Highly, highly important skill to have maxed at all times. Why you may ask? Because this skill can stun you enemy for 7 seconds. Since the success rate of the stun is very dependent on your character’s level and the level of the skill, keep it maxed if you want it to work every time.

2. Concealed Blade: Another important skill that has a nice effect to it. If success, it will attach a defense debuff on your opponent. Now I’m not sure how much Defense this skill lowers, but hey, making your enemy all the more squishy the better.  This skill also depends on your character’s level and the skill’s level.

3. Hydra Needle: I have a hard time still deciding whether this skill or Concealed Blade one is more important here so it’s up to you as the user to decide for yourself. For me they could really go either way in importance. Hydra Needle goes very nicely with Crippling Arrow for one reason, and that is because once the stun has wore off your opponent, they enter a status of immunity. That is when Hydra Needle is very effective as it will do double, that’s right DOUBLE, the damage to an enemy in an immune state. However the Cool Down is rather long and it will eat up an insane amount of Stamina.

4. Dragon Fang: This is a useful skill for grabbing bosses and other monsters. Why? Because this skill will draw only the attention of the monster you hit it with. So you know all those bosses that if you attack, you’ll get a huge swarm of other unwanted monsters. This skill solves that by bring out only the boss itself (that is assuming you hit the boss with this skill and it succeeded). Again this skill’s success rate is dependent on your character’s level and the skill’s level. I also want to mention that this skill has the highest base power out the bow skills (not counting Hydra Needle when the condition is met) so this skill will pack a punch, and it has a tad longer range than the other skills as well.

5. Dual Shot: After spending some more time with this skill, I have found that it has a very nice damage output and is useful for taking off small chunks of HP very quickly with its 6 second cool down. You could really switch this with Dragon Fang if you wished for leveling next, but that all depends on what you plan to do. Plan to grind more, then level this skill fist. If you plan to PvP more, level Dragon Fang first.

That’s it for the bow skills, and if you want to leave it at that that will fine. However, if you really want to become a bit more of a terror in the PvP zone, you’ll want to learn once important sword skill. Thanks to this, this will mean you’ll want to learn how to switch between two different weapons efficiently. I’d recommend a 2 handed sword for this as trying to swap between 2 one handed swords and a bow is cumbersome and annoying.

Howling Curse: This in my opinion is one of the best skills to have next to Crippling Arrow. Not only is this a ranged sword attack, making it perfect for Striders, it also has an awesome effect called a heal lock. That’s right, this puppy can latch on a 5 second heal lock on your target, and do as much damage as you would with Crippling Arrow. So I recommend, nay demand that you have this skill in your set if you’re going to be serious about PvPing. I do want to make one note here to help those understand what this heal lock does. The heal lock does not prevent the target from healing. Yep the target can still heal with this status on. What the heal lock is prevents the target from BEING healed. Which makes this very useful on Evokers’s summons if you can time it correctly.

Ok, with the attack skills out of the way, lets talk about two more skills that you should have. First up is Bark Skin.

Bark Skin: Now some may tell you that defense isn’t all that important in this game, and if you hear someone say that, then please smash his/her head into the nearest wall or something. Defense for a Strider is very important since they lack so much of it naturally and in their armor. This skill is a very nice Defense Buff that adds quite a bit of defense to your Strider and it lasts for a good amount of time. So make sure to throw some SP and TP at this skill when you can.

Tame: Now this is up to you whether you really want to add anything to this skill or not, but since this is one of the unique things about Striders, why not right? Tame works like this. You can only tame monsters that have the work “calm” in their name. That’s right, you’re limited to the monsters you are able to tame which quite frankly sucks, but oh well. Also, this skill is only dependent on its own level, though I do seem to notice that your character’s level seems to have an effect on the overall success rate of the taming. Tame works like this for the levels: Level 1, you can tame level 5 monsters; level 2, you can tame level 15 monsters and below; level 3, you can tame level 25 monsters and below, etc. So pretty much every level you add to tame, that adds 10 levels to the monster level you can tame. I will say that the taming skill is more useful for grinding than PvPing, but they can add that extra bit of damage needed to kill your foe. Fiftynine has made a great taming guide which I’ll link here.

Tame Beast Guide

Well that’s about it. Now I know that was only 8 skills out of 10 that you could max, but I’m leaving the other two skill choices to the player. However I will through in some advice.

Rejuvenate, while great in the beginning, really loses it effectiveness in later levels, but it’s the only skill you can use to help keep your tame alive and you can use on other people.

Natural Remedy in my opinion is a complete waste of SP and TP. However, I haven’t done much with this skill so I’m not sure on how effective it is.

Lookout Expertise is a nice skill to have, but not necessary. What it does is warps your party members to your location, so it helps getting people around. Also higher levels increase the range that you are able to grab people with this skill. However, there are a couple problems with it. First, you can’t choose which members to warp, so make sure you don’t accidentally warp someone who isn’t ready. Second, this skill does not work in Elerd (nor does it in Kerman Factory, but that should be obvious to why) as annoying as that is. This skill does work on Rope Island as well and is very useful in RvR that happens every Saturday at 6:00pm to 8:00pm PST.

Nature Expertise is a useful party skill that lowers the amount of exp lost upon dieing. Though I haven’t gotten this skill past level 1, so again I cannot tell you how effective it is later on.

Survival Expertise lower the amount of Stamina consumed from skills. This skill can only be used in a party, and is very useful to a party. I currently have this skill at level 7 and I’m saving over 20% on the amount of STA used.

Pacify . . . not much to say about this except that I find it about as useful as playing in the dirt in front of an Elerd.(Note: I want to test this skill out sometime, but until then this statement still remains.)

Well that’s it for this guide. I hope this is helpful for some people, and that you’ll enjoy being a Strider if you chose to do so. Also any questions or comments about this guide will be most appreciated as then I can improve and fix parts and pieces that I missed. Thanks again, and have a good day.