Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - Enhanced Edition Shadow Blade build?

Anyone get me started with one?

How are they in general?

Suggestions?

Anyone?

Shadowblades like one-handed daggers, Witchcraft, Air, and Scoundrel skills. They like DEX, INT and SPD as their stats.

As with most hybrids, their strength is in their versatility, rather than power. It's probably a good idea to first focus more on INT and disabling spells, and then boost DEX and SPD up a bit to allow you to backstab. Get as many attributes as possible from your items.

Dual wield is bad for them?

I actually dropped Witchcraft because I did not want to spread myself too thin.

You can make a dual-wielder, but I feel that for a shadowblade, dual-wielding is a bit less important than it is for a Rogue, since their role is more than straight-up damage, and dual-wield takes a fair amount of focus to get the AP cost down. Shadowblades also will generally have less Speed, and therefore less AP to spend.

If you have to drop a school, Air is better to drop than Witchcraft I think. Air has less great stuff for a Shadowblade and you can get away with just picking up a couple novice skills like Thunder Jump and Shocking Touch.

What about just making a rogue and using air for teleports and stuff? That a good idea?

The most efficient way to make a Shadowblade, who actually works on Tactician (keep in mind that Tactician isn't nearly as hard as people like to claim. It just requires you to understand basics of the game, namely crafting), seems to be to simply splash 3 Attribute points into Int and a single Ability point into both Aerothurge and Witchcraft. And then just treat the character as a standard Rogue with extra utility from there on.

Aerothurge 1 gives you Thunder Jump, for mobility, Avatar of Storms, for clearing stuns/causing a bit of non-scaling CC/protection, and finally Teleportation, for moving things around the battlefield, with the added benefit that you can safely use it mid- til' late-game on your own guys without causing any real damage, due to your mediocore Int.

Witchcraft is pretty much only picked up for the sake of Oath of Descecration. Altough the Skeleton minion is mighty nifty too. Decaying Touch being a great pick for the third skill, if you keep in mind that it might fail to be applied ever so often, due to said intelligence.

The 8 intelligence is there to prevent spell failure, of course.

A single point can very favorably to donated to the other caster skills aswell. But flavor is a thing and a Shadowblade with Bless and Rain just seems a bit off, being a Shadowblade and all.

Everything else is pretty much the same as with any other Rogue, really. Same talents, same skills and same stat-distribution. Discounting the small handful of attribute and ability points invested into casting, of course.

Also, don't forget to give your Rogue the Pinpoint talent. It's quite possibly the most powerful talent in the game as of now. Seeing how it basically counts as adding an entire school of skills to a character for the price of a single talent point.

The drawback with the Shadowblade, by the way, being that they don't really have the points to invest into Man-at-Arms. Which is a highly recommended splash for Melee Power Stance, Helping Hand, Battering Ram and the Slingshot talent.

But then again, warriors benefit a lot from splashing into Scoundrel as well for Fast Track, Walk in Shadows and Adrenaline, not to mention Pinpoint. So if you go Shadowblade, you can just have your warrior splash into Scoundrel/Marksman (Medic, Doctor, Treat Poisoning. Oh' my!) and get the Slingshot/Pinpoint combo, should you want it.

Which you probably do.

That's a good build, Chumsie, but you could probably even go for Rank 2 in Witchcraft and Aerothurge for an additional 2 Novice and 2 Adept skills and look for some bonuses to INT to make them usable. An extra 4 ability points for 8 more slots of utility sounds like a good deal if you're already heading that way.

[quote=Stabbey]That's a good build, Chumsie, but you could probably even go for Rank 2 in Witchcraft and Aerothurge for an additional 2 Novice and 2 Adept skills and look for some bonuses to INT to make them usable. An extra 4 ability points for 8 more slots of utility sounds like a good deal if you're already heading that way. [/quote]

Thanks.

Honestly I don't see why you'd want to splash that far into either school. Witchcraft Adept only gives you one skill that isn't a debuff, and they need high Int to bypass resistances, and the final spell is a summon, which costs a bit too much AP to be worth using on a non-caster character.

Aerothurge gives you Summon Air Elemental and Invisibility, however. Both of which are great skills to splash for, although the elemental is a bit expensive AP-wise. The problem being that Guerilla no longer triggers the Invisible buff (because a situational +50% damage is apparently overpowered but Rapture isn't, or something like that) and that you already have Invisibility in the form of Walk in Shadows. The Elemental is only really useful because it can cast Feather Drop. But then again, Feather Drop is really-really useful.

Personally I'd just splash a single point into each of the other magic schools, if I were to dabble more into magic. Mostly for the sake of the Avatar spells, which are amazing. A lot of people tend to overlook them, untill they realize that the Avatar spells also clear the named debuff from ones target.

Bless(!), Midnight Oil(!), Fortify, Wildfire, Firefly and Rain(!) being a number of other great options for a Shadowblade. Rain in particular if you decide to go for Blitz-Bolt over Teleportation. Really, anything which dosen't need Ind-based stat-scaling to work.

But it does feel a bit odd for a shadowy assassin to be blessing people with the power of the Seven. Even if the 30% hit chance is awesome. So annoying to have somebody dodge you, just to turn around and face you.

EDIT: Also, I have no idea why my text-codes won't work. That quote should've been a quote, and not just text surrounded by parentheses. :/

So when I create the character how do I want to allocate my points and in the future what witchcraft / Air spells do I want? Also I never played a scoundral.. so what rouge skills? Get 8 intel and then the rest in dex and some speed?

Personally I'd put 3 points into Dex, as it is your main skill and the one you use for damage, and 2 into Int. Then I'd spent my first attribute point from leveling on Int, to get 100% succes rate on my buffs, and invest the rest into Dex, with the occasional dip into Con and Spe.

Keep in mind that the natural stat cap is 15. This only counts for attribute stat points. So gear, buffs and the Know-it-All talent can raise it above 15.

Your stat distribution should look something alike this, at level 20: 5 Str, 13-15 DEX, 8 Int, 6-8 Con, 6-8 Spe and 5 Per.

As for your starter skills I suggest Fast Track, Walk in Shadows and either Thunder Jump or Oath of Descecration.

...

Tell you what. I'm just going to write a build-guide. Then we can have all the bases covered and it'll be a great topic of discussion for everybody. ;)