Introducing: The slapstick ninja Bladedancer!

Rogue
1

Hello everyone! I’m excited to introduce this build that I have been diligently been working on while on vacation from work! This is also my first time ever posting in a forum so go easy on me. Thanks! :grinning:

Disclaimer:
This build is a template to get you started. Sadly, I do not have the time to test different variations of this build. As time goes on, I will do my best to update this guide based off suggestions from the community. This build is still in progress of being developed.

Lets get to it then!

Introduction

  • This is a bladedancer build that focus’s on surviving while eating as much damage to the face while slapping everything to death with flurry and the occasional lethal mirage to boost screen clear and the amount of bleeds you have active.

pros/cons

  • Pros

    • tanky
    • great damage
    • decent clear speed
    • Wambo combo for boss dmg
    • great survivability

  • Cons

    • lethal strikes has a 10 second cool down
    • AoE/“channeling” abilities by monsters should be avoided
    • farming the uniques could be frustation (unique dependent)

I will add more to this section based on feedback and if I feel something as changed

Active/Passive skills

  • Smoke bomb:
  • Shurikens:
  • Shift:
  • Lethal Mirage
  • Flurry

Required Uniques/Set items


You may be thinking, " Why the hell so many uniques?" Trust me. It all comes together.

Additional gear should be focused on maxing your resists out. Other important suffixs/prefixes include: %# Physical Damage, %# damage over time, +# Dodge rating if hit recently, +# health gained on glancing blow, increased health modifiers, dodge modifiers (+# , #%).

Idols

These are examples of the types of idols you’ll need. I recommend having 2-3 damage over time/physical damager over time idols with armor shred or +# dodge rating if hit recently. The rest of your idols should have + health, vitality, and resists.

Recommended Blessings:

Mechanics (VERY IMPORTANT TO READ)

Defensive

  • Apostacy/Glancing Blow

With this bladedancer talent we will convert all dodge chance into glancing blow chance. Why glancing blow over dodge? The answer is easy: we can easily stack it to 100% giving us 100% uptime of 35% of damage being mitgated at all times. Take a look below:
Unbuffed Glancing blows vs buffed Glancing blows

“buffed” glancing blows meaning as we take hits, we gain stacks of dusk shroud. The more stacks of dusk shroud the better.

  • Block
    Yes, we are using block to further mitigate the damage we take. The corsairs set provides the following bonus:

    This is slightly confused since we are converting dodge over to glancing blow chance so to show you how this works I have provided a few screenshots of my unbuffed blocked chance, and my block chance as I gain more Dusk shroud stacks.
    As we get hit more, gain more dusk shroud stacks it, it makes us tanky AF.


As we mitigate more damage it is important to look for afflixs that give health on glancing blow/ take the thiefguard talent in rogue tree
Additional layers of defense include:

  • endurance and endurance threshold (boosted by monolioths)
  • health on block (boosted by monoliths)

Offensive

Your main damage will be coming from Flurry and your weapon taste of blood

With the disemboweled node, and the taste of blood weapon, you will be applying on the upwards of 6-8 stacks of bleed every 3rd hit along with 2-4 stacks (depending on your bleed chance). This weapon causes the damage to basically burst on enemies with-in a few seconds.

  • Flow, shadows, and lethal strikes

flow explanation coming soon

also note: lethal strikes makes your immune to damage for a short period of time while pumping out a massive amount of damage if timed correctly with your shadows, and the flow buff.

Conclusion

I hope everyone finds this guide informational. I spent a lot of time understanding how these abilities worked while transforming them into what I feel is a viable end game build. There are probably a lot of different ways to rework this build or tailor it stat wise different ways. I look forward to interacting with the community to push this build to its limits. If this build manages to get some steam behind it, I will add in videos, and gifs at a later date. I will also update this guide based off feedback if updating is needed. Right now I just wanted to get this build out there for others to try.

GOOD LUCK!!

Current build progress

-Coming Soon-

Questions? I will do my best to reply to this thread as often as I can.

2

If you could get one, do you think a Bastion of Honour would be better than converting your glancing blow to block?

3

how do you get dusk shrouds from glancing blows? Also how it is even working if you convert 100% of glancing blows to block chance (meaning you have then 0% glancing blows chance)?

4

Given the lack of a build planner, I’m going to go out on a limb & say that he’s getting dusk shrouds from Veil of Night (chance for dusk shroud on melee skill use), Smoke Bomb (from the Rapid Concealment node) &/or a chest prefix (either chance for dusk shroud when hit or on hit).

Dusk Shrouds give you glancing blow, and dodge.

5

For sure. I just swapped it in momentarily and it gave a boost to block chance (obviously), with a slight boost block effectiveness, glancing blows % also increased as well. It all comes down to personal preference at the end of the day, and clearly there is no one way to run these mechanics. Just better or more efficient ways :wink:

6

We generate dusk shroud charges by getting hit constantly by monsters since we will have a 0% dodge chance. Other ways to generate the dusk shroud charges are from smoke bomb, and the prefix on chest " +% chance to gain dusk shroud when you use a melee attack that hits."

7

Ok thanks but what about glancing blows converted to block chance? Doesn’t that mean that after the conversion we would have 0% glancing blows?

8

It would, yes.

9

and no dodge because it was converted to glancing blows. So… what’s the purpose for Dusk Shrouds?

10

Correct, I have no idea why the dodge to glancing blows conversion, it seems overkill to me. IMO.

11

screenshots from using the items shown in the guide suggest it doesnt unless it’s a calculation error. with the corsairs set equipped glowing blow is still going over 100% with dusk shroud stacks, while block chance continues to rise too. I am reworking the build to use Bastion of Honour as you suggested.

edit: after testing a few things, the passive node in the blade dancer tree “apostacy” converts dodge into glancing blow chance which in return has nothing to do with the conversion the corsairs set gives of 100% glancing blow chance converted to block chance. Coincidentally, when we gain dusk shroud stacks, our glancing blows chance increases, and our block chance increases. I dont know if this is the intended mechanic but thats what the in game calculations are showing at this time.

12

Looking like a bug to me. Too many defense layers capped for free without any drawback?

13

Possibly. I will email the devs to find out. Unless I am missing something somewhere that says glancing blow is procing, I have no way of knowing if it is the intended mechanic.

14

Apostacy converts Dodge rating into Glancing Blow and Corsair’s Set converts Glancing Blow into Block chance, this is a double conversion. Our design at this time doesn’t support double conversions.

15

so which of the two is not converted in this scenario? Or both?

16

If you take Apostacy in Bladedancer it would convert your Dodge Rating to Glancing Blow but the Glancing Blow you gained from this conversion would not be converted to Block Chance if you have Corsair’s set on. Corsair’s set would however, work in every other scenario such as converting the flat Glancing Blow you gain from Rogue/Bladedancer and also other places like Dusk Shroud procs.

Edit: After testing the above is correct.

2 Likes
17

Does this also apply to damage conversions?
And what would happen with the following item pairings that somehow go in circles?

Orian’s Eye → Kilning Adorned Idol of something → Ravenous Void → Orian’s Eye → and so on

18

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