1.6 Shadowblade: Matrix Style (insane)

[whitelion]

The most recent Shadowblade build on here is a 1.5 build from Cathbald, can be seen herehttp://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=48764. Lots of good stuff in there, so definitely worth checking out if you're unfamiliar with Shadowblade. However, 1.6 brought some notable changes. First, Expose Weakness is no longer ridiculously broken, and second, the addition of the Ethereal Form prodigy and changes to some of the Shadowblade skills mean that stacking defense is a very viable strategy. Hence the "Matrix Style" Shadowblade. You can't die if you don't get hit, right?

Char sheet can be found here: https://te4.org/characters/229407/tome/ ... 48b0fb30ac. I beat insane with no deaths, and as you can see, I was walking around at 130 defense in the endgame, and that's before using evasion or my OOP bonus, so it's possible to get it even higher when needed. The point is, very few weapon users can touch you (more on this later) and this means that you almost always have the 25% absolute damage reduction to help with non-weapon attacks, in addition to your normal resistances.

I don't think the general strengths and weaknesses of the class have changed fundamentally since Cath's guide, which I pretty much agree with on these, but I'll summarize them again below.
Pros
-great mobility
-lots of disables
-good burst damage
-lots of defenses

Cons
-easy to run out of resources, especially early
-damage comes from lots of hits, so less effective against enemies with lots of flat DR
-lots to manage, many defenses are active rather than passive

Race
Lots of reasonable choices: Cornac for the extra inscription early and cat point since you have good unlocks, Shalore for Grace (to save on Blinding Speed or for twice the uptime) and Timeless, Halfling for more evasion, hp, and cleanse, Doomelf for instant teleport. I haven't tried Ogre 2h+dagger but I trust Cath that it's good. Drem seems good too. Frenzy lets you double up on your burst skills, confusion immunity is always nice, and From Below can help you escape or distract crowds, since you don't have a ton of crowd clear. My character was Cornac.

Here's the build at a glance. + indicates what I think are good places to spend extra points. The most useful luxuries depend on what gear you find and the particulars of your build. For example, I didn't bother with Lunge because I took Windblade and so with that and Shadow Grasp I didn't feel like I needed another disarm. There are lots of useful skills and you don't have enough points for everything.

Class Talents

Combat techniques - 1+/1/2/5
Combat veteran - don't
Shadow magic - 1/1/5/4
Stealth - 1/1+/3/1
Temporal - 1/1+/1/5
Duelist - 2+/1+/0+/0+
Phantasm - 1/1+/1/0
Dual Techniques - 4/1/1+/1+
Dirty Fighting - 1/5/0+/0+
Ambush - 1/1+/5/0

Generic Talents

Combat training - 3+/1/3+/2/0/5
Survival - 1/1+/1/0
Mobility - 1/3+/2+/5
Conveyance - 5/1/0+/0
Lethality - 1+/1+/5/2+
Divination - leave locked
Your racials

Stats - Dex > Cun = Mag. It's reasonable to put a few points in Will early if you need more mana for your sustains.

Prodigies
25 - Ethereal Form: This is key to the high defense of this build. The 25% absolute resist and 25% all respen are also great for defense against non-weapon attacks and for killing stuff respectively, and we are good at holding on to these bonuses.
42 - I think there are a number of good choices. I took Windblade because I wanted more crowd clear, and that's something Shadowblade doesn't have a lot of. Flexible Combat is good too, because lots of attacks = lots of glove procs. Arcane Might gives more damage, but I don't think I would take it over the previous two. The good defensive prodigies are nice too, though I think Armor of Shadows is probably overkill in this case. The plan is not to get hit.

Categories
If Cornac - inscription, Temporal, Ambush, Combat Techniques, Inscription
Otherwise - Temporal, Ambush, Combat Techniques, Inscription

Inscriptions
You definitely want a heal, movement, either shatter afflictions or mental/phys wild, and the rune of dissipation. Last slot (if Cornac) can be whatever you find that seems good.

Class talent discussion

Combat techniques - 1+/1/2/5
Rush - you know it, you love it, we now use it to close gaps. More points for more range is nice, but not a priority since we have other gap closers.
Precise Strikes - You could invest and turn it on for the crit, but I found it unnecessary
Perfect Strikes - 3 turns to hit invisible stuff for Dreadmasters and the like
Blinding Speed - With this plus Essence of Speed, Shadow Feed, and Blade Flurry, you can easily get up to something like 170% global and 150% attack speed, which means you are attacking more than twice as fast as most enemies.

Combat veteran - don't

Shadow Magic - 1/1/5/4+
Shadow Combat - Actually not bad now that it doesn't cost mana. Good for dealing damage in the early game. The scaling isn't amazing though, and there are lots of places to spend points.
Shadow Cunning - A little spellpower, which is nice, but doesn't scale well.
Shadow Feed - We want the attack and spell speed, and the mana regen means we can ditch that manasurge rune.
Shadowstep - Amazing engage, great range, hits hard, dazes, and activates OOP bonus. Not a priority to max early, but I like getting to range 10 so you can reach casters shooting you from the edges of their ranges.

Stealth - 1/1+/3/1
Stealth - There's probably a good stealth Shadowblade build along the lines of what Gray did with Rogue, but we aren't going for that. We mainly want stealth so we can use the bonuses we get for leaving it. No need for more points and put on auto-cast when available.
Shadow Strike - Gives some crit mult upon leaving stealth, which is nice, but not a major priority.
Soothing Darkness - 3 points gets a 4th turn of 25% all res after leaving stealth from Shadowguard.
Shadow Dance - Get back into stealth while cooling down or in view. We don't want to stay in stealth, so more points aren't needed.

Temporal - 1/1+/1/5
Congeal Time - I never used this.
Time Shield - Competitive with shield runes early with just 1 point, but falls of later. Can add more points later if you want more shield power and have nothing more pressing.
Time Prison - Can be useful for stopping escorts from suiciding, but costs a lot of mana, which we don't have.
Essence of Speed - The 25% global speed is great of course, but this costs 180 mana to sustain, so don't bother investing until you can afford to turn it on.

Duelist - 2+/1+/0+/0+
Duel Weapon Mastery - Improves offhand damage, and the parry is nice early, but later on the plan will be to not git hit at all.
Tempo - Should proc all the time, but the stamina and turn gain don't scale very well.
Feint - Pin and daze is nice but we don't benefit much from the improved parry.
Lunge - Solid attack and disarm is a useful status, but given that almost everyone will be missing us and we have other disarms, other stuff may be more important.

Phantasm - 1/1+/1/0
Illuminate - Can be useful for those darkness demons, but we have infravision anyway
Blur Sight - Defense that scales with spellpower, and we want as much defense as possible. How many points you put here will depend on what gear you find and how much defense you think you need.
Phantasmal Shield - 1 point gets us 10% evasion, but it doesn't improve with further points and we don't care about the damage.
Invisibility - don't bother.

Dual Techniques - 4/1/1+/1+
Dual Strike - stun powered by accuracy, which we will have lots of. 4 points gives duration = cd.
Flurry - main burst damage skill. More points gives more damage, but I didn't feel like I had trouble dealing damage.
Heartseeker - nice short-range mobility attack, more points for more range
Whirlwind - our only active crowd clear skill (unless you take Windblade), more points for more range.

Dual Techniques - 1/5/0+/0+
Dirty Fighting - nice way to get past status immunities on enemies.
Backstab - we attack very fast and have a lot of disables, so this is more damage and disables. Not a priority but worth some points IMO.
Blinding Powder - another fun disable, if you can spare the points.
Whirlwind - nice way to extend disables, if you can spare the points. I felt like I was reapplying them so fast it wasn't necessary though.

Ambush - 1/1+/5/0
Shadowguard - 1 point gets the 25% all res upon leaving stealth and immunity from status effects for 2 turns when falling below 50% hp, which are the things we really care about. We hope not to spend much time at low hp, so the extra defense and spellpower aren't worth more points.
Shadowgrasp - long range pull+disarm and silence. Great to shut down casters while we burst them down. The damage actually does scale pretty well with more points, but I felt I had enough other sources of damage, and the debuff duration doesn't improve.
Umbral Agility -Accuracy, defense, and darkness respen that scale with spellpower. Better scaling than our other +defense skills with better other effects, so generally best to put points here before Blur Sight for example.
Shadow Veil - very cool skill with great offensive power, but also very dangerous. In roguelikes, not dying > offense so I don't use this.

Generic talent discussion

Combat training - 3+/1/3+/2/0/5
Thick skin is always good, but we don't even need all 5 points to get to the resistance cap. 1 point in heavy armor for gear options, and points in light armor for more defense and hardiness. How many points you want depends on your gear and build. 2 points in Combat Accuracy helps early, but with building Dex and Umbral Agility more is unnecessary. Dagger Mastery is our weapon mastery, so naturally we max it.

Survival - 1/1+/1/0
Track is great as always, and Charm Mastery is great if you find cool stuff to activate.

Mobility - 1/3+/2+/5
Disengage - nice retreat option early, but later we will have so much mobility I don't think we need to put more points here.
Evasion - the evasion doesn't improve much with points, but the defense does. Good button to have for high accuracy enemies or if your defense gets debuffed.
Tumble - Instant movement is always great, more points for more range
Trained Reactions - helps to shrug off some of the damage from those caster nukes we can't dodge. Like Cath said though, don't go too crazy here early or you will kill your stamina bar.

Conveyance - 5/1/0+/0
Dimension Door - teleporting is always good, especially since we want to keep our OOP bonus up. 5 points to choose your (approxmate) destination.
Teleport - good button to have if you really need to cheese it. You could end up somewhere worse though.
Displacement Shield - not that powerful and somewhat random, but long duration is a plus. Not the worst place to spend points.
Probability Travel - we are unlikely to be able to afford the mana sustain cost.

Lethality - 1+/1+/5/2+
Lethality - 1 point right away so daggers scale with Cun. More points give more more crit change and power, but scaling falls off after the second point.
Expose Weakness - no longer broken like in 1.5, but still useful if you need some extra armor pen or respen for a particular enemy.
Blade Flurry - huge attack speed buff, and also gives extra attacks for clearing crowds, which we are good at positioning ourselves to take advantage of. If you're confident you have the stamina, this is pretty much always worth using in tough battles or against crowds.
Snap - can reset many of the skills you want to spam in combat, like Dual Strike and Flurry. More points means you can potentially reset higher tier skills.

You will also have your racial skills if you are non-Cornac, but I think those have been discussed to death elsewhere, and there are no particularly unusual synergies.

Gear

For weapons, I used dual daggers. Cath has a great discussion of other options, so if you're interested I'd recommend taking a look at that guide.

Top priority is defense and OOP buff up to the cap of 40/40%. Good on melee hit procs are also nice since we attack very fast. Other than that, the usual stuff is good for the most part. Don't be afraid to wear robes if you find ones that you think are better than your light armor. Good ones can give huge boost to damage and respen, along with more all res, and if no one hits you, your actual armor score isn't that important anyway. If you have Cults DLC, siding with the asslord is a nice way to customize the high defense gear you find to be more generally useful.

General Strategy

Early game, you won't be able to out-defense enemy accuracy, so you have to play a bit carefully as you will be fragile, especially if you don't find +hp items. Once you get Time Shield and later Umbral Agility, your defenses will be much better. Once you get to 25 and get Ethereal Form, the "matrix" really comes online. I had about 100 defense by Dreadfell about about 130 at the end of the game, and that's without my OOP bonus or using evasion, in practice it could get up over 140 if needed.

Once you're set with a good defense score, it's useful to think about who the threats are when engaging a group of enemies. I liked to engage by using Shadowstep out of stealth, and if you do this (assuming you geared well) you will have 4 turns at the all res cap with defense boosted by OOP before you need to think about re-entering stealth to activate Soothing Darkness again and teleporting to re-up your OOP bonus. Assuming this is a serious fight and you've popped your +speed skills, this means you have something like 8-10 actions depending on what you do.

Many weapon users who would be very dangerous to other builds will have little to no chance to hit you, and so should not be your first priority. You have the 25% absolute res and Trained Reactions to protect you from being nuked by spellcasters in addition to your regular resistance, but in many cases they will still be the biggest threats. Archmages, Necromancers, and Anothorils all have strong nuke spells and can potentially pack a lot of respen, while others like Corruptors and Cultists of Entropy are dangerous because they can hit you with a huge amount of debuff and damage over time. With many ways to move yourself and enemies around the battlefield, you should focus on bursting these guys down (or if not possible debuffing them with your slows and silence/stun) during the opening rounds while your defenses are up. Of course, there are still some cases where you can be hit by weapons, and it is extremely important to avoid this as much as possible, since it will take down your 25% absolute resistance and make you more vulnerable to getting killed by non-weapon attacks. If you start losing your Ethereal Form bonuses, you should do whatever you can to make sure that stops as quickly as possible. This bring me to...

Ways you can still get hit

Even with very high defense, you can still get hit in some circumstances. The most straightforward are by high level randbosses using Perfect Strikes and by stuff summoned by enemies with super high stats/TL. Summons tend not to have that many abilities beyond basic moves and attacks, so you can use your high level of mobility to avoid them in many cases, and in my experience randbosses who could get their accuracy high enough to hit me were actually quite rate.

I found the far bigger danger was effects that debuffed my defense. This is not an exhaustive list, but some notable ones are
-Daze halves your raw defense
-being encased in an iceblock sets your defense to 0
-the Counterstrike debuff decreases your defense, though I'm not sure exactly what the mechanics of this are, and in most cases it is less severe than the two above
-Curse of Defenselessness, as the name suggests

It's important to watch out for these and react as appropriate when you see them. Clearing statuses is the best way, but cleanse is not an unlimited resource, and Shadowblades don't have any help in that regard from their talents. If your defense is debuffed some but still reasonably high, using Evasion may be enough to tide you over, or if it's not, to give you another chance to avoid hits. And if things get really bad, don't be afraid to make a strategic retreat and regroup before engaging again.

Thanks for reading. Would love to hear any comments or suggestions below.

[LordKarasuman]

Would you run Cornac again or would you run a different race on the next go around?

[whitelion]

Would you run Cornac again or would you run a different race on the next go around?

The main benefit of Cornac is that it makes the early game significantly easier, since you get an extra inscription right away and level fast. The early game is when you need the most help too. Late game it's probably not the most powerful race, as a synergistic set of racial skills will outpower an inscription late once you have access to the skills and points to invest. The extra talent points for Cornac do mean you can be a little more laid back about talent planning and luxuries though.

I think if I tried again I'd go Drem. High speed means you can fit more actions in Frenzy. Late game you should pretty much be able to pop off all your good skills (Shadowstep, Flurry, Shadowgrasp, etc.) once without having to put any of them on cooldown. The downside is you might quickly run out of stamina spamming everything, so I would probably take that into account with gear and around the edges of the build. Drem also gets a lot of value without needing to invest many points; 1/1/1/1 will serve your great, though more points in Faceless and From Below are useful too.

[Fela]

What about stuff like nightmare horror? I'd assume sleep should strip defenses.

Have you considered dwarf? The +50 on saves seems somewhat useful for a build that doesn't like negative stat effects.

[whitelion]

What about stuff like nightmare horror? I'd assume sleep should strip defenses.

Have you considered dwarf? The +50 on saves seems somewhat useful for a build that doesn't like negative stat effects.

Does sleep set your defense to 0? I don't remember. That would make sense, but you can also block with your shield while inside an iceblock, so there's no guarantee that making sense=game mechanics. Sleep was much less notable than the others I listed in my experience. And Inner Demons is less deadly than usual when you can't hit yourself anyway because your defenses are too high.

The other dwarf racials are armor focused and don't give you that much, since your goal is not to get hit in melee. If you're worried about debuffs, Cornac = extra inscription, which you could use on a shatter afflictions rune or wild infusion. I'd do that before being a dwarf personally.