Skirmish is the Only Way

For any Shadow Warrior out there that runs with a good premade, you must be almost full Skirmish spec. Notice the use of the word "must". It is a requirement. A few of you out there might disagree, but if you think it over you will see that I am right.

Here is why.

As a Skirmish Shadow Warrior you want to fight within 65 feet primarily and close in to 45 feet or occasionally melee range when needed to boost damage with expert skirmisher. Apply all yours damage over time abilities at 65 feet and then close in for some burst.

You need to always be kiting and moving around to maintain optimal position (which I will explain in detail at a later date). All of your main abilities are usable on the move and you should take advantage of this. Kiting takes a while to master in Warhammer Online, but once you have it down you can keep the DPS coming even while running away. The Q and E diagonal movement keys are what you use to kite due to how the engine works.

The Skirmish damage over time abilities are perfect for an assist train with Shadow Sting, Broadhead Arrow, Eye Shot, and Takedown all being invaluable in focusing down targets with a MDPS buddy. Spiral Fletched Arrow is also fires quickly and travels directly at the target to get quick hits (and killing blows).

The problem with Scout is that you are more focused on staying in the back, not keeping the melee busy by chasing you in circles, not able to support as well with your debuffs as you are more focused on eagle eye spam and festering arrow, and MOST IMPORTANTLY YOUR ABILITIES TRAVEL TO THE MOON AND BACK BEFORE HITTING YOUR TARGET. In a proper premade, an assisted target will be dead long before any three second cast ability (like Festering Arrow) can be built up and launched. Add in that 2 second flight time and you are basically unable to assist with that awesome ability. The same is true of Eagle eye which hogs way to much AP for its damage and has a ridiculous flight time. Eagle eye requires multiple AP tactics to sustain any kind of DPS and it is not worth the hassle.

Assault isn't even worth it until ranger crit converts to melee crit and the armor debuff bug is fixed. Personally, I do not think that ranged power should convert to melee power as Shadow Warriors are fully capable of stacking 300 melee power and therefore have to make a choice between ranged or melee power. Melee crit has to convert though since no Shadow Warrior armor pieces have melee crit.

So go respec Skirmish, Shadow Warriors. You can thank me later.

The Tale of Shadowfast

For those of you who do not know, Shadowfast is a RR68 Shadow Warrior on the Gorfang server. He used to be a member of the guild Fight on the Flag, but they basically asked him to leave simply because he was a shadow warrior and "not a good fit".

Now, this really made me upset. Shadowfast was one of the few decent upcoming Shadow Warriors on the server. He does way better in scenarios then any of Fight on the Flag's dime a dozen fail Bright Wizards that no one has ever heard of or been killed by enough to care.

So basically Fight on the Flag kicked one of their few players with actual skill and signs of growing into a great player just because of his class. Now they can get more of their poorly performing warrior priests and bright wizards into groups.

I am sure Fight on the Flag has some weaksauce excuse, but really it all comes down to this: Fight on the Flag kicked a good player on an underpowered class to give preference to horrible players on overpowered classes.

So Fight on the Flag, here is why you are wrong in 5 easy steps:

1) Shadow Warriors have the best group tactic in the game (leading shots gives +15% crit to the Shadow Warrior's whole group).

2) Shadow Warriors have a spammable ranged heal debuff that reduces healing on a target by 50% for 9 seconds. This basically means that DPS is almost guaranteed to overwhelm healing with focus fire and that target WILL die unless the debuff is cleansed.

Did I mention is can be fired on the move from 72 feet away and stacks with other healing debuffs? Speaking of other healing debuffs, Shadow Warriors can spec into a second ranged 50% healing debuff in the scout tree which stacks with the fist. 100% heal debuff = target will DIEEEE.

3) Shadow Warriors require less healing and upkeep overall then a Bright Wizard and put out much more useful damage when played correctly.

4) Shadow Warriors can hit for 5,400 damage with one attack. Can your fail Bright Wizards do that kind of burst? Shadow Warriors also have the only remaining five second knockdown in the game.

5) Shadow Warriors can debuff a target's armor by over 1900 pretty regularly with acid arrow and the proc attack on the Shadowblade sword. This means melee and the Shadow Warrior can hit with almost no mitigation on medium or lightly armored tagets (like DOKS!!!??)

So there you have it Fight on the Flag.

Oh Hai

Well I have decided it is about time I got a blog. I have a lot of thoughts on Warhammer and the Shadow Warrior class in general, and the forums really dont give me enough of a chance to express this. Whenever I post on the forums I always end up just flaming idiotic people, so I figure a blog might be a better idea. Unless, of course, the idiots come here and then I have to flame them here as well on the forums.

Anyways, I am going to try to keep my posts short, frequent, and related to the Shadow Warrior class to start off.