The Moon released it’s gifts for the Trovians to take advantage of, the biggest one received being the new class, the Lunar Lancer! Control your enemies with knockups and stuns, and turn into a fierce Lunar Knight to augment your abilities further.
Advantages
- Good utility for both allies and enemies
- A lot of its damage is AoE
- Good survivability from ultimate and passive
- Effective in groups
Disadvantages
- Low base stats
- Both forms of utility have moderate to high energy costs
- One nearly completely useless abiltiy
- Kit is kind of scattered in defined role
The Lancer’s Place
The Lunar Lancer is a support/bruiser, having enough health to take a hit or two, with a little damage behind it, and building support where it’s able to so the players allies are able to deal more damage. Your ultimate gives your allies movement speed, health, and energy regeneration, so extended fights will thrive on you pressing the 2 button.
Solo Lancer
A solo Lancer is simply just using your 1 to manage enemies, keeping them locked down while you poke them to death. If and when you transform, use your ultimate for the extra damage from your meteors (explained below). Keep a good watch on your energy, since using your 1 will cost a good bit, and add up very quickly over time.
Skill Analysis
Its passive is the Lunar Knight, which triggers after a number of basic attacks, signified by the three moons floating around your character. When this is full, you will transform, gaining a 25% movement speed boost, a 50% damage reduction buff, as well as 50% bonus damage. This is a very momentous ability in the kit, and is what puts a lot of the classes capability on the table.
The M2 ability is a two-part ability. This throws a spear, dealing damage to everything in the area around it, and can be reactivated to pull you to where your spear is. It’s rather unclear what this does in Lunar Knight form, since sometimes I get a grapple/teleport thing, and sometimes I keep throwing spears like an Olympic competitor. This is, without question, the most useless ability on the class, and hopefully will be tuned or reworked to function better in the class as a whole. The damage is extremely low, and the time it takes to grapple you to the place you’re going could have been attained just as quickly, if not faster, with a mount, wings, or simply walking. This ability would have fit much better into the Boomerranger’s kit, where all of its abilities are centered around utility (M2 for cooldown reduction and CC, 1 for terrain destruction, 2 for party support)
The 1 ability is a combo. This ability swings twice, stunning on the second one, and knocking up in addition to the stun if you’re in your Lunar Knight form. This is a helpful ability for the class, providing both large amounts of area damage in an arc, and CC for the backliners, such as the Fae or Bow-merranger. There isn’t much to be said about this ability, as it is fairly straight forward, and compares well with other classes in utility value.
The ultimate ability is very similar to the Candy Barbarian’s ultimate, dropping a larger version of the spear that you’re wielding, and providing an energy regen, health regen, and movement speed buff to your allies in the nearby area. If you’re in Lunar Knight form at the time you cast it, for the duration of the ultimate, this will also drop meteors, dealing damage to everything in the circle of the meteor. The meteor locations are very unclear, though they deal significant damage, it would be a nice quality of life change to add some clarity to where the meteors are falling. This ability, though, provides excellent utility to your team in a different flavor from the Barbarian (pun intended), allowing your teammates to move around faster and gather their strength without dipping out of combat. The momentum carried in this ability extends even further when you’re in Lunar Knight form, as it also provides more damage than the initial drop of the spear with the meteors.
Gear
Helm:
- Max HP
- Attack Speed or Health Regen
- %Max HP
- Attack Speed or Health Regen
Face:
- Max HP
- Health Regen or Jump
- Physical Damage
- Health Regen or Attack Speed
Weapon:
- Physical Damage
- Attack Speed
- Health Regen or Jump
- Energy Regen
Ring:
- Physical Damage
- Energy Regen or Health Regen
Flask:
- Balanced Elysian Flask or Elysian Bandolier
Emblems:
- Martial or Vampiric, and Energizing Rain or Soothing Rain
Pet:
- Rapt Berserker or Feisty Flamedancer
This stat layout will give you tankiness to take a couple hits, as well as giving you offensive capabilities in stacking some attack speed, while splashing physical damage. I put a lower priority on damage than speed because the passive gives a 50% damage boost, and your spear scales incredibly well on Attack Speed. I chose the flask and emblems that I did because this enables you to provide even further support to your allies, and still allows for self-healing if you run Vampiric. Regarding the pets, Flamedancer may be kind of an odd choice, but this is for the more support oriented builds – giving you more energy, at a quicker rate, means you can spend more time controlling the enemy than you have to worry about getting that energy back.
Basic Combat Guide
Whether solo or in a group, it is usually wise to open up with your 1. This allows players time to reposition if necessary, as well as give you free hits for stacking your passive. Using your ultimate takes some decision making – whether its more worth it to drop it immediately for the bonus stats or to hold off for your Lunar Knight form and get the damage boost from the ultimate’s meteors.
While you don’t want to be the person that is taking all the damage, you do want to be smack-dab in the middle of them, using your 1 to help the person that is taking all the damage to mitigate what damage they are taking. This is one situation where dropping your ultimate immediately would be optimal.
Conclusion
The class is a bit underwhelming for what seemed to be expected of it, but that does not mean it doesn’t have its own special place in the game. The class, as of right now, does require quite a bit of tuning if the dev team has any plans of making it more than just another class for Mastery points. The class requires good decision making and positioning to be effective right now, though that may change in the near future.