General Shadowknight GuideFollow

Shadowknights. If there is another class that has as much confusion on how to play it than shadowknights, I do not want to know about it, I get enough head aches as it is from this one.

With the memory of those headaches in mind I decided to write up another guide, one that dealt with a specific class, while still being a general guild at the same time. What that means is I’m not going to go over different specks for SK’s wanting to play in specific ways. What it means is I am going to give you enough basic knowledge that you can make a few of these choices for yourself and maybe make playing a little easier for you.

Part 1 : Stats.
Part 2 : Equipment
Part 3 : Combat arts and Spells
Part 4 : Tactics
Part 5 : AA’s of note
Part 6 : Solo
Part 7 : Groups

Part 1 : Stats

Shadowknights have two primary stats, strength for melee damage and Intelligence for spell damage. Being primary stats you will want to keep both of these high, SK damage is roughly split between the two.

However try to avoid max’ing these two out at the cost of your other stats. You are going to need a good stamina in order to have a decent pool of hit points and wisdom increases your base saves against magical damage. Even Agility is useful enough to not be forgotten about, a higher stat here will increase your chances of avoiding a hit all together.

Part 2 : Equipment

Once you get high enough in level where it becomes an option, you basic set of armor should be Devout. It gives a boost to your strength, stamina and your intelligence, three important stats for a Shadowknight, and of course it is plate armor, which you should be wearing all the time anyway. I do not care how good the stat bonuses are for that piece of chain armor, or that leather, you should be wearing plate armor.

For your weapon I would recommend something that boosts both your strength and your intelligence over one that would boost those two and a third stat, however this is a personal choice. Now when it comes to weapon speed, that’s even more of a player choice. Your auto attack timer continues while you are using your combat arts and your spells so it is not that critical

I use a weapon with a 5 second delay, this lets me easily get off an ability, or even two very fast ones, between my swings with little trouble. Now if you use a faster weapon, your auto attack will trigger faster so if you interrupt a swing, you will not have to wait very long for the next one to come around.

When it comes to your shield you have two crafted options, a kite shield and a tower shield. Both shields now give the same armor bonus making them both useable now. Crafted kite shields give boosts to both strength and intelligence while the tower shield dose Strength and stamina. Either shield is a good choice for a shadowknight, it all depends upon how you are building it.

For your other gear, such as your waist slot, rings and so forth I would suggest that about half of it boost your primary two stats and that the rest of it boost the remaining stats due to the benefits you can get from them. There are a lot of options, many of them made by players, so it should be easy for you to get what you want and need.

Part 3 : Combat arts and Spells

As shadowknights we get access to both spells and combat arts. No I am not about to list off each of them, tell you what level you get them at, their damages with what stats and what version.

What I am going to do is give you a good idea of what you should use in what order and why.

Infernal Blessing, every time I have the chance I cast this first, it has a short duration and can only be triggered a few times before needing a recast but hey, it heals me and hurts my attacker.

Right after this I begin casting my debuff abilities. Draw strength, decree, cleave flesh. This lowers their strength and intelligence (while raising my own) reduces their ability to resist disease (which is the damage type for shadowknight spells) and lowers their wisdom [reducing all of their magic resist stats) along with giving them a solid hit

Next I stack on the damage over time spells and abilities. Offensive Presence, Grim coil, Painful swing, these may only last a few seconds, but the damages stack and they are good for bleeding a target out. I refresh these as often as I can, along with my debuffs and have won fights with mobs easily not going past this point.

If I should need to I go onto this next group of my spells and abilities. Stuns and Life taps. I trigger off either my Shield slam or my Boot and follow it up with either Consume Vitae or Fetid Strike. The stun keeps the mob from doing much to me while I cast and the life tap heals me. Obviously.

All shadowknights get a large direct damage spell, not counting their harm touch. Condemning Smite is the name of the line. I honestly do not use it too much, not because I think it is a useless spell, but because my target is usually dead by then. When I do use it however I make sure my decree and sorrow debuffs are applied on the mob I am going to hit. Makes the damage oh so much higher.

Another one I do not use to often is, ironically, harm touch. A shadowknights signature ability. It’s for the same reason that I don’t use the Condemning Smite line much, they are usually dead, or close to it.

Now I DO use it, I just save it for when I’m in trouble. Like when that wondering heroic named decides he wants to play with me too, but the reuse timer really keeps me from using it on every green blue or white mob out there, even most yellow con solo’s don’t rate getting it unless it’s a group of them.

Now let me back up a little bit and go back to something you should have done before you get into a fight, your buffs. You should be running around with all of them on all the time.

Ahh, but what about offensive and defensive stances?

That’s easy, unless you have specked your character out otherwise, you should always be in defensive stance. It improves your wisdom, intelligence, armor rating defense and aggression ratings. Yes the intelligence bonus from offensive is higher and it gives you a bonus to your melee skills, but it’s a minor gain in my opinion to the increased survivability.

Part 4 : Tactics

For tactics, well you should look back up over the previous section actually for some of it. For other things. You should always give an area a look over when you get to it. See if you can spot any wondering mobs in a section and then try to stay away from it, adds kill. Don’t do adds.

Now when you actually get into combat, don’t try to spam off every combat art and spell you have as fast as you can, your just going to drain your power. Give your auto attack a chance to go off between attacks. If you have a weapon that has a proc on it you really need to let your auto attack come into play so it will trigger.

I’ve done a little comparison between taking my time, letting my auto attack come into play vs. just going in and spamming everything off as fast as possible. While my fights lasted longer I ended them with more power remaining and could get into another fight sooner because of it.

Part 5 : AA’s of note

Again, no, I’m not about to give you any kind of detailed list of things. I’m going to point out a few things that you may want to keep in mind, and maybe even avoid as well.

First let me hit the crusader line of Achievements for two things. One is a do and one is a don’t.

The first one.

Do. Do go down the intelligence line and max out the ability that increases your spell crit chance. This will make it more likely that your spells hit for massive damage. Our life taps are also based off our spell crit chance.

The next one.

Don’t. Don’t go down the intelligence line with the intent of maxing out the heal crit chance. Our life taps do not use this when figuring crits, our life taps use our spell crit chance.

Next is our class tree, the shadowknight achievements.

Everyone should get Reaver, it is just that useful. It increases spell damage by 5% and when we succesfully cast a hostile spell, we are healed for 2% of our max health.

Other abilities in there that you should keep an eye on are ones that either increase the amount of our healing abilities or add life taps to them.

Now the shadows line. I’m sorry to say I do not know enough about this tree at this time to give you any kind of help or advice.

But on the other side I can tell you that with all the AA that can be earned you can come VERY close to maxing out the Shadowknight tree.

Part 6 : Solo

If you have read everything up to this point then you should be fairly well set for solo’ing as a shadowknight. However there are two more things you should do.

Make sure to cancel draw strength between fights, this way you can recast it on the next mob and debuff it, while rebuffing yourself at the same time.

Also recast infernal Blessing as soon as it cools down. Rarely have I had a case where I still had a few triggers of the ability left at that point, rarely will you have that as well.

Part 7 : Groups

Ok, everything I have said up to this point applies to groups as well.

However that is not all of it.

The first thing you want to do, regardless if your going to be the main tank or not, is cast Evasive Tactics on some one. This little ability gives your target a chance of avoiding a melee attack, using your avoidance and increases your parry skill at the same time.

If you’re the main tank, cast it on a caster. If not, go ahead and put it on the main tank.

If you are not the main tank you should make sure to use Offering of Armament on the main tank. It may strip you of some physical protection, but it adds that protection to your target, making them that much harder to hurt and kill.

The next one is Intervene, and depending on your place in a group you will cast it on different people. This ability lets you take some of the damage meant for some one else. If they are under 50% health, you take it all the damage for them

If you are the main tank you will either cast it on the groups main healer or not at all.

If you are not the group’s main tank you will probably want to cast it on the groups main tank, or the main healer.

Now then, what do you do if a group member gets so much agro that you can’t get the mob off them with your taunts?

Shadowknights have two abilities to use in this situation. Rescue and Graven Embrace.

Rescue lives up to its name, not only dose it give a massive amount of agro at the target it adds to this by moving your priority to the target up several positions, once you use this, its going to be hard for anyone to get agro off you again.

Graven Embrace is what you will likely use more often, mainly because of the shorter reuse timer. It makes your target Feign Death, which if successful will result in them loosing all their agro. Success is not always a guarantee however so have rescue ready if you can.

Grouping also means that you are probably fighting more than one mob at a time, this brings our selection of area of effect spells into play. Like most AoE’s these will hit everything in range, not just the group of mobs your fighting, so using them carelessly is a good way to get adds on your group. And adds kill. AoE’s when used carefully are a good way to keep agro on you if you’re the main tank and to soften up targets. At later levels we also get an AoE life tap, which is also VERY useful in groups as it takes more strain of the healer.

One more thing you should keep in mind while grouping, and this is likely the cause of so many headaches I’ve had in the past. If you are not the main tank, make sure to cast Infernal Blessing on the main tank. The damage it causes is flag on him and it will of course heal him on each trigger of it. This ability is likely one of the sources that have resulted in many people thinking a shadowknight is just an evil paladin, thus able to heal people.

Well, I hope that this guide will be useful all those shadowknight players out there, and even to those people out there who don’t play them as it should give them a better idea of what shadowknights can do.

Because I swear, if I hear one more person complain to me about not healing them I will go postal.


Edited, May 2nd 2009 2:32pm by Pagengamer

Edited, May 2nd 2009 2:34pm by Pagengamer

A crafting supply mechant in Paineel perhaps?

Also involved with the Fell Blade Gauntlets

Hmm fairly well thought out for a short background. Gives a good spin on an otherwise overdone "undead" approch to a charecter.

So do I, however the ability that they gave us in exchange more than makes up for its loss in many ways. It has made shadowknights a great deal more viable as a tank class, in addition to the other changes made.

That said, I wish we could still have a pet of sorts, for old time sakes, and not just the "fun" spell that gives us a squire.

I dont even use that because my charecter would not have a human squire, more so one that just stands around.

Perhaps they can look at doing it the way they did in EQ1, where we had a pet that was simply a necromancer pet, but of lower level.

But then that would call for a great deal of changes to the class to balance it back out.

Yeah, that would be nice at a minimum.

Give us an option to make the squire look like some kind of undead.
Or atleast make it so it look like the same race as the person who summoned it.

I like this. You cover the basics well for new SKs. Good work. Only a few points which I've noted above that I think you may want to reconsider.

* Weapon speed is an important consideration in that there really is a minimum effective delay for SK DPS. Through our buffs, certain AA, and as wel level through and begin dealing with more and more procs, auto attacks become a bigger part of our overall damage, survivability, and hate generation. For example, right now my primary 1H weapon, on any given swing, can do it's base damage, an AOE damage proc, a DD proc with lifetap, a hate proc, and two other buff based damage procs (which can also heal based on AA). Over the course of a fight it isn't uncommon to see melee swings hitting for more damage than any spell except Harm Touch. So you need to make sure that you can get off your spells and CA between swings (spells *will* interrupt a combat round) so as to not lose melee rounds. I would say that anything less than a 4 second delay /minimum/ on a one-hander and you are losing effectiveness.

* Condemning smite is an every fight kind of spell. Solo'ing or grouping, it's fast cast and snare component are huge. The best initial pull spell we have. Drop it on a mob for the pull and the snare allows you to drop a couple of your debuffs or taunts on it, before the mob even gets to you. This is huge when your healer is primarily a warding style healer (like say a defiler) that can frequently draw initial aggro or you have one of those annoying early nukers in your group. You can have hate on a mob locked down before the first melee round is engaged. It's early use as a puller also has it refreshing in time for near every fight and it's near instant cast (0.5) makes it a great high damage spell to wedge in between auto attack rounds on those longer fights.

* Don't hold back Harm Touch. Every second that it is up is wasted damage that you aren't doing. Harm Touch really stops being an "Oh s***!" button in the neighborhood of L40. And you level on, more and more you will be dealing with mobs (even single, solo con mobs) that boast HP in the many tens of thousands and up. Past 50 if you aren't able to really kill something without HT, you aren't killing it with HT either. Through AA, the recast time on HT becomes only a few minutes, so since it isn't saving your butt anymore, let that puppy fly. Drop your debuffs, hit Death March and see what kind of crits you can score (I think my best is somewhere in the neighborhood of 22,000..and I've seen way better from others).

* On the last point here, that of always being in defensive stance, you might want to reconsider this position. Really, the opposite is true. An efficient SK will find himself in offensive stance near 80% of the time. SK solo'ing is rooted in the philosophy that a dead mob can't do damage. Damage not taken is always preferable to damage mitigated. Therefor the faster a mob drops, the better off you are. If offensive stance your melee is more effective, bigger procs result, your spells hit more and crit more (resulting also in the more efficient lifetapping that you mention) and mobs start going down faster than a Jersey girl with self esteem issues. Damage not dealt to you in the first place is damage that doesn't have to be mitigated. This holds true with grouping as well. If I have either a single, competent healer or two middlin' healers, I'll tank heroic dungeons and instances in offensive stance all day. Dead mobs don't do damage and both healing and mitigation don't need to be sustained at a high level if mobs are dropping in significantly fewer combat rounds. The only time one really finds themself in defensive stance is in raid tank situations or in group scenarios where either your healer is shaky or you are dealing with high spike damage mobs.

Again, good work. Just think more about the smite line (criminally underrated) and how you are using it, and also do some more testing with offensive stance for efficiency. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

*smacks forehead* Ha. You're completely right, I mixed up the smite and wrath lines. Absolutely right. Good catch.

As for the stances, I still recommend you do some independent testing. Dig around on the official board and flames, and join the server-wide SK channel in-game (guk.sk). You'll find that in most common situations, OffStance is widely preferred.