Surge Zero Deathblade Guide for Lost Ark

If you're looking for further information on the Surge Zero build for Deathblade, the following links will provide that for you.

Strengths

• Flexible and high burst damage with Surge
• Cost effective in the early game on gems and tripods
• Fast paced, high APM gameplay

Weaknesses

• Heavily reliant on Back Attacks, more than 3/4ths of your damage are positionals
• Missing Surge means losing essentially half of your damage
• Rather high skill ceiling with several ways to flex around specific encounters that can seem daunting to some

Surge Zero has unique elements to it that can seem daunting at first but are highly rewarding once you become more familiar with them. Being able to cast Surge Zero bewtween 12-20 stacks allows you to play around boss patterns, mechanics and downtime. Requiring practice that can often be done through progression, this leans less into the cyclical rotatation that you'll find with Remaining Energy and more of a case-by-case priority system. There's also a fixed 0.4 second delay between accumlating stacks. You can use auto attacks to ensure Surge Zero hits at the desired stack count, though eventually it will be easier to snapshot exactly where you want it. With this in mind, there are several rotations you can practice depending on how many stacks you want to press Surge Zero at. The rotations follow a simple opener that can be adjustment a little for reasons below.

• Precast Wind Cut
• Press Z: Death Trance
• Spincutter
• Wind Cut

This takes advantage of Wind Cut's lingering hitbox to build stacks during Death Trance's animation. You could also adjust this to use Maelstrom instead as a precast. Omitting the precast and just going into trance allows for another Wind Cut later when closer to 16+ stacks. With how fast the skill and its lingering hitbox, you'll be able to use Surge Zero at an earlier point and snapshot the 20 stack buff. There are several rotation variants that all have different uses and niches to them. Higher stacks refunds more Death Orbs, while lower stack ones can win out when confronted with limited burst windows or impeding mechanics.

This is a really easy rotation to use and build off of and refunds three Death Orbs upon Surge Zero. It can be a general use-case rotation that can be altered into lower stack rotations with ease. It won't push the most damage out of Blitz Rush & Soul Absorber as they are used with early stacks. The rotation is as follows:

• Precast Wind Cut Opener (See Above)
• Blitz Rush after the Wind Cut OR slot in Earth Cleaver - Blitz Rush.
• Press Soul Absorber. Maelstrom can be used between Blitz Rush & Soul Absorber, or after both of these skills.
• Spincutter to build more stacks and reapply debuff Synergy.
• Void Strike into Wind Cut for your last remaining stacks up to 20.
• Press Z Surge Zero.

Slightly altering the 20-stack base rotation, this opts out both the Void Strike & Wind Cut and uses Surge Zero at 16 stacks. The goal here is to be able to use Void Strike to refill the remaining Death Orbs. At 16 stacks you'll get just under two orbs; using Maelstrom a bit later will catch Void Strike and further increase how much meter is gained. A good spot to use it would be either before Spincutter or after Surge Zero.