Shadowblade/notes
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Notes
The Shadowblade is fast, stealthy, mobile, and deadly. He is a Rogue who has learned rudimentary magic, much to the chagrin of his opponents.
While Shadowblade is a class that relies on magic, they have fairly minimal scaling with Magic and Spellpower, their spells mostly being utility or weapon damage based. As such, their primary stats are Dexterity and Cunning over Magic, though Magic is worth pumping in the end if you plan on taking the Arcane Might prodigy and for your shields.
The Shadowblade uses daggers, one in each hand, for his offense. Leading with a Dual Strike or some good old-fashioned Dirty Fighting to stun, and then following up with a Flurry or a Sweep to kill, leaves a path of carnage.
They are highly mobile, with access to the full suite of Conveyance talents, as well as Shadowstep, a devastating talent when combined with Track or any other ESP source. They also get Rush -- both of these trees are unlocked at birth.
Shadowblades do not get any healing talents either, nor do they have any major sources of damage mitigation, but they do start with access to Displacement Shield and have Time Shield in a locked category. Shadowblades may find it helpful to pick up the Light tree from an Anorithil escort quest, for the Healing Light, Bathe in Light and Providence talents.
In terms of trees to unlock, Shadowblades have a few options:
- Temporal: This is a balanced tree, giving you a very strong defensive shield in Time Shield and the overwhelming speed of Essence of Speed, once you can afford to sustain it in the late game. Combining Essence of Speed with the speed boosts of Shadow Feed, Blinding Speed, and Momentum can allow you to cut down your foes before they can even act.
- Ambush: This is also a balanced tree, giving you utility and offensive skill. Shadow Leash allows you to disarm weapon damage foes, while Shadow Ambush allows you to silence caster threats, though foes that focus on summons and mental talents can circumvent these methods of threat mitigation. The real shining star of this tree, however, is using Ambuscade to create a shadow clone of yourself, then using Shadow veil to use it to destroy your foes, while you wait in a safe place. Do ensure that your main body are in a safe place (and maybe stealthed or invisible), as it can be damaged while you don't have control of it.
- Stealth: This is a tree focused completely on offense, to the detriment of your defense, as you must eschew the vastly superior protection of Heavy and Massive armor to use it. However, the damage you can output from stealth via Shadowstrike can allow you to kill your foes before they have the chance to counter-attack. Be wary of assuming that stealth is an effective defensive mechanic, however, as even if a foe has only caught a slight glimpse of you, they'll use AoE talents in your general direction.
