Deathblade Guide for Lost Ark

Deathblade is a high APM class offering a "build-spend" gameplay loop revolving around her Death Orbs and the Death Trance Identity. The class has a versatile tool-kit consisting of movement, strong DPS skills and highly valued Synergy. Her Death Orbs are built by landing her skills and scale with Specialization. Once at least one is full you can press Z to enter Death Trance which increases your Attack Power, Speed and MP Recovery. These buffs scale with the amount of orbs you have and so do their durations, a minimum of 10s to a maximum of 30s. Along with this, upon entering trance all of your remaining cooldowns are reduced by 10/30/50%. Within Death Trance you'll have access to a finisher Surge; a line AOE with damage scaling per Orb remaining upon use.

Shared across engravings, Maelstrom and Spincutter provide crucial buffs to both yourself and your party. The former increases Attack and Movement Speed; Spincutter is highly valuable applying Open Weakness. This makes the afflicted target take +3% more damage and an additional 9% from positional attacks, total of 12% for Front and Back Attacks. These also come with additional uses that influence her rotation, making them crucial to take regardless of build.

With Surge Zero, your Surge changes to Surge Zero, which deals flat damage regardless of the amount of Death Orbs. Instead, attacks within Death Trance grant Surge Enhancement stacks (maximum 20) that increase the skill's damage and your Attack Power. Upon ending trance, you're refunded up to 100% of your Death Orbs depending on how many enhancement stacks you have. At 20 stacks, you'll regain all three orbs. At its core it's almost like a double "build-spend" gameplay loop. Building orbs initially, entering Death Trance and building stacks and using Surge Zero as your finisher while being refunded some Death Orbs to make subsequent damage cycles faster. Add in the reduced cooldowns for entering Death Trance, Surge Zero offers a high tempo class, little downtime and rewarding spikes in damage through Surge Zero.

Remaining Energy grants additional buffs that scale with how many orbs are leftover when using Surge. Providing Attack Power and Speed buffs on top of Maelstrom's extra speed, Remaining Energy has a very fast rotation of building orbs and unleashing Surge. On top of the buffs, you'll have two seconds where your Death Orbs are not depleted while inside trance. The extra time does helps with landing Surge with as has orb amount as possible. The buff from Remaining Energy are maxed as long as Surge is cast with at least two full Death Orbs. However, your Death Trance buff requires three orbs upon cast to obtain the full buffs and CDR. With this in mind, you'll always want three orbs for trance and at least two for Surge's cast to ensure maximum buffs.