PSA: How to fight Sand Golem

[mikkelet]

So just a minute ago we were fighting a Sand Golem at the temple, and I think I'm gonna explain how to fight this big guy properly.

I'm gonna go into detail, but the summary is: use the wooden hammer.

Know your enemy
The SG is pretty tough opponent. It takes roughly 30 players half an hour to 40 mins to take down of these. Its attack has long range, loads of damage and great knockback. Now most enemies' attack can be interrupted by knockback all the time, but not the SG. Once its attack animation reaches half its frames, it will be uninterruptable. However since its attack is slow, it's fairly easy to interrupt.

So if these 30 players are all using hammers, the SG will pretty much be permanently stunned - never finishing an attack, thus securing safety for the players hammering it - it's a win-win situation.

Why the hammer?
Not only does the hammer interrupt, but it also has the best damage output in the entire !@#$ing game (that isn't a gm weapon). Let me show you the stats compared to the great sword:

weapon	GS	WH	Kat
Damage	40	31	15
Stamina	29	12	9
Dmg/stam	1.3	2.5	1.7

As you see the damage per spent stamina is almost double as the Great Sword. This means that if you unload all your stamina, you will have done more damage with the hammer than with the GS (and that's not even accounting for stam regen while fighting, which only favors the hammers since you will stay in battle longer). And not only that, but the hammer has shorter cool down before use, so you can use it more often.

So why doesn't people use the hammer more often you might ask?
The major draw about the hammer is its slow attack animation and offset hit box, making it relatively hard to hit with. Fighting Dark Sages, rock beasts and Bandit Assassins you need fast, secure hits with lots of damage - for this the GS is perfect. However since the SG has hitbox larger that yer mum, this is not a problem when using the hammer... and especially not when being tossed around by 30 hammer-wielding players.

Variation and placements
SG spawns at the temple and at the Wall. Both of these places are crawling with normal monsters such as Cacti and skeles. These can become quite the problem. Using weapons with target hits (IS and Sand Sword), can be very effective - and if you are so lucky to own one, it would help a great deal if you were to use it against lesser monsters. Sand Sword also have the added knockback, which is great.

Now to where to fight. If the SG spawns at temple, keep it in the middle, where players have easy access to safety. The wall can be a bit tricky though, since no access to absolute safety is available. I suggest keeping it at the tents to the right of the wall. This way people can stay safe from the lesser monsters by staying on on the wall, and the SG has to jump over a bumb in the ground, which should give enough warning for resting players to get away.

The SG needs to stay in one place because, if distance between a monster and a players get greater than 1.5 (or 2.5, idc) of the window size, the player will lose all damage progress done on the monster. Less damage = less gold and drops.

Bullet-point summary

• Hammer is better than GS against the SG, because large hit box make for easy hits
• Hammer stuns the SG. 30 players of this will make the SG a useless monster
• Use IS/SS if lesser monsters become a problem

please forgive my spelling mistakes, and I will probably write more. Please do ask questions! :)
all stats taken from: http://v2info.stick-league.com/index.php



//MIKKELET

[Torch]

If you're low on hp, high on stamina, use katana. It is close range, letting you avoid the SGs attacks easier, it does much higher danage per second than hammer (even though hammer has higher damage per stamina), and it lets you burn your stamina so that you can regen all your hp and stamina at the same time.

Katana is also better for if you're worried that the SG will die before you hit the damage threshhold and just want to get as close to the threshhold as possible before it dies.