Hello! My name is Reformed Donut, welcome to my Bladedancer guide for 0.8.1c. I stream semi-regularly on Twitch at Twitch. Bladedancer is by far my favorite class because of its raw damage output, survivability, and mobility. I strongly believe that Bladedancer is one of the easiest classes to play for any new player, and a class that anyone can have fun with. Below I will outline the build that I used to reach rank 3 on the HC Solo ladder this patch, since the death of that character it has dropped to rank 5 at the time of writing.
OVERVIEW
This build takes Shadow Cascade and Bladedancer turning them into a hardcore viable critical strike machine that can clear wave 200+ in arena with gear close to the endgame setup below. Further into the guide you can find completed skill trees, passive trees, and links to 4 different LE planners to help gear your character and level your skills correctly as you go.
SKILLS
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Decoy
Decoy acts as one of our largest sources of defense, while also supplying us with utility in the form of haste, and damage in the form of critical strike multiplier when it explodes. This skill makes bossing a cakewalk as you have 6.6 seconds of free taunt on any boss. -
Smoke Bomb
Smoke Bomb serves a similar purpose to decoy, damage and utility, this skill also provides haste, but it also serves as a generator for Dusk Shrouds, which give us glancing blow chance along with dodge chance, shadow generation, as well as a physical damage steroid, and DOT protection. If you have the buff from synchronized strike up when this skill is up, which you always should, this skill will heal you for 290hp every second, through the shadow heal on creation. -
Shift
Shift is by far one of the best skills in this build. A 3.3 second CD dash which can be untargeted. Through our tree we also gain a debuff cleanse. Meaning we remove all stacks of negative ailments, slow, chill, ignite, etc… Every time we dash, while also having this skill be a 15% hp execute on any enemy. -
Synchronized Strike
We have 2 different trees for Synchronized Strike, this is because our endgame gear has the helmet mod +2 to level of Synchronized Strike, the first tree is the level 20 version, the second is the level 22. This skill serves as our main damage enabler, while also providing us with 200 bonus health every time we make a shadow within 4 seconds of using the skill. This skill also allows us to apply a debuff to enemies that drastically increases our chance to crit them while also shredding their armor.
Shadow Cascade is the bread and butter of this build, with every other skill being built around enhancing its affects. Using this skill, either manually or through using Shift, will cause all of your shadows to repeat the skill, enabling you to hit extremely hard, extremely quickly, with Smoke Bomb and Synchronized Strike being used, you will be able to consistently one shot echo bosses, and dismantle timeline bosses in a matter of minutes. Our Shadow Cascade tree sacrifices attack speed for raw damage scaling, and crit chance/multi enabling us to hit over 50k crits without perfect gear.
- Shurikens?
As popularized in my eyes by the Boardman21 dancing strikes build, Shurikens has become a very popular defensive choice for Rouge’s through the blade shield part of the Shuriken tree. When compared to my Decoy tree I find that it has less defensive value, however it has 100% up time through a modified Shift tree that I have attached above. As for damage, Shurikens gives you physical resistance shred when in melee range, whereas decoy provides haste and crit multi. In my eyes if you decide that you want Shurikens over Decoy you should still not be barring the skill, meaning giving it a keybind to manually cast. The shift passive node sleight of hand will maintain 100% uptime of your blade shield and the extra slot on your hotbar allows you to use an unspecialized Decoy that will provide a 3 second boss taunt at the cost of more mana.
PASSIVES
Without going extremely in depth about the passive trees, we prioritize grabbing all of the Glancing blow chance available to us. Along with shadow damage, crit, and dodge rating that we need to scale our defense and offense through the roof.
GAMEPLAY
Unfortunately I do not have recorded videos or a YouTube video to attach to this post, I can say that 99% of gameplay is just shifting toward your echo objective and using synchronized strike with a manual shadow cascade or another shift activation whenever something crosses your path. This build feels really fluid and very tanky once you have your necessary damage and glancing blow chance, dodge rating will only further increase your survival and through the passive tree you will gain massive damage bonuses while on full life.
LE PLANNER LINKS
Level ~20
Bladedancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1c) - Last Epoch Build Planner
level ~40
Bladedancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1c) - Last Epoch Build Planner
level ~60
Bladedancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1c) - Last Epoch Build Planner
level ~80
Bladedancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1c) - Last Epoch Build Planner
~min max
These five links will provide skill and passive trees, along with some optional gear recommendations for each link. Use and edit these as you see fit.
Loot Filter
message (2).txt (9.7 KB)
This is a 10kb txt file which has the editable loot filter for this build. Enjoy!
TLDR
- Bladedancer
- Shadow Cascade
- Physical Damage Crit
- HC Viable at Arena 200+
Ending Note
Thank you to anyone who made it this far, I am aware that this post is poorly formatted when compared to others on this site, and has a lot of text bricks. This was thrown together very abruptly at the request of some viewers from stream. I plan on making more guides in the future, that are hopefully better put together than this one. If you have questions about the build either reply to this post, drop a question in my twitch chat, or in the discord at Discord. (discord can also be gotten through twitch). Thank you again for checking out my build guide, I stream at Twitch thanks for the support!