For your First question, Bowling Bash is indeed the best Knight Skill, but for it to be more viable you need SP recovering items and a good weapon. If you gather the materials, there are forging Blacksmiths that wild gladly make the weapon for you for free. You need at least an Ice and wind weapons for leveling purposes. Also try to get slotted claymore/flamberge with hydras or zipper bear as they are good multi-purpose weapons.
For your second question, there are some things to take in consideration when making a build. I´ll write a quick guide for you expecting it to be helpful.
-Step 1: Build for your playstyle
First, you gotta have a clear idea of what kind of Character you want to create. Im not only talking about deciding between complete opposite routes like Agi and SVD, but also after making that choice you still need to figure out what is your character´s final purpose. For example, let´s say you want an SVD knight, so you know you need to invest in STR, VIT, And DEX, but the final build will depend on what you want to acomplish: more Str and Atka and maybe some agi if you want to maximize your damage, or more vit and defensive gear if you want to be tankier and so on.
-Step 2: Equipment and Other Bonuses
I strongly recommend before start allocating stat points, to project your ideal equipment and and bonuses. Always make your builds at 99/50 in the calculator, as doing builds for lower levels can be very misleading. Remember that a lot of gears and cards offer you stat bonuses that should be taken in consideration, like Matyr´s card AGI+1 or Gungnir HIT+30. Also, I´d like to make a distinction between two kind of gears:
-Permanent gears: Equip that you will always wear or will switch only on pretty rare occasions, like an immune muffler, iron cain or a ring of mustle. These gears are great for every occasion or are the best option for that specific slot. You can count the stat points given by these gears when making your builds.
-Dynamic gears: Equipments that you´ll most likely switch depending on the ocassion, like elemental weapons, headgears or enchanted armors like pasana or bathory. Status points given by this kind of gears should not be taken into consideration and only be treated as temporal bonuses. Doing the opposite will most likely result in your build harmony being broken when switching gears
Also, when deciding upon your gear you have to investigate about the current state of the server. Not all the options depicted in the calculators are available in Re:Start. An example of this are the Robo-Eyes that until a few weeks ago were just a dream for wizards, that usually use them in their builds.
If the last point is not that all clear, let me make an example of your case:
You right now you are wearing a pair of boots, but lets say that your projected gear for that slot are a +7 green greaves(matyr). Lets say you decide to not changing them anytime soon and right now in the server there are not many options that can overcome greaves defense wise. That will make your greaves a permanent gear that gives you Agi+1, so your final bonus will be AGI+3. With 54+6 dex you need 29+3 agi to reach 180 ASPD when using THQ and Bersek. If you changed your boots to let´s say +9 shoes with firelock soldier, you will lose that +1 agi meaning you cant get the 180 aspd either and you´ll be down to either stay with 179 aspd or invest another point agi, which can´t be done at lvl 99 unless you spend 100 silvervine in a reset.
This works both ways, another example would be, sticking with your case , lets say you replace your fin helm with robo eyes, wich give Dex+1 so you are now 1 point above the cap fpr the atk bonus, so you have two options, leaving it as it is or reseting to get dex at 53 and spend the remaining points in str , vit or luck.
This leads to the final point:
3. Do NOT waste points
For people coming from pre-renewal like myself, this was rather difficult. Many of the perks you got via your stats were completely revamped in renewal. We ended up with Min-maxed builds that are no longer optimized for the current play. The most notable cases were the Weapon attack being more prominent now in damage calculation and the usefulness of the LUK stat. You can check the renewal Stat effects here: http://irowiki.org/wiki/Stats
Following with the last example, to reach 180 aspd with 54+6 dex a total of 32 (30+2 or 29+3 dependng on your gear) points of agi are needed. Spending more points in agi would be a waste, even if it gives you flee or mdef, unless your aim is to get 181 aspd wich is reached with 39 agi. In the same fashion, spending points to reach STR 90 is a waste because you get about the same attack and many other things leaving your STR at 80 and investing some points in LUK.
So, how can one be sure the status points are not being wasted?
With the use of calculators. Even if there is not a Re:Start specific calculator, we can still use the IroWiki ones, just having in mind that some stuff are not accurate, like the battle simulation.
Calculators
http://calc.irowiki.org/
This one is the most accurate to the server status and equipment wise, also has some shortcut options and its very user-freindly. The damage calculation in the battle simulation and the ASPD calculation are NOT accurate tough.
http://calc.irowiki.org/newcalc/
This other calc is somewhat new and has accurate ASPD calculation, but lacks a lot of options that the other ona has, like the equip/card database, so you have to enter the bonuses manually. I use it only for the ASPD.
Edited by Lan2007, 03 October 2017 - 05:57 PM.
