Combat:Blademaster

Class Summary

Blademasters are a close-range sword-using, predominately melee class designed to quickly kill single opponents. They are nimble and quick, focused on using with a variety of abilities centered around inflicting bleeding upon their opponents while building up Shin energy through successful strikes, which they then use to power more devastating abilities.

Skills

TwoArts - The dual arts of drawing a blade and striking with it. Shindo - Enhance your physical abilities through the accumulation of Shin energy. Striking - Empty-handed strikes targeting vulnerable pressure points in an enemy.

Basic Combat Strategy

The core combat ability of a Blademaster is separated into three key aspects - slashes, infusions and strikes. Slashes and infusions are found exclusively within the TwoArts skillset and form the bulk of a Blademasters offense, whilst strikes are trained solely within the Striking skill. The art of Shindo offers Blademasters a slew of utility skills which increase their resilience on the battlefield, and allow them to perform superhuman feats such as leaping and bounding across open spaces, and launching themselves high in the sky.

Slashes utilize the Blademaster's sword to inflict limb damage and bleeding on an enemy, with a number of different slashes available for use. These range from the humble Drawslash, to the nimble CompassSlash. These may be enhanced with infusions of Shin energy with only minimal training in Shindo, allowing the Blademaster to infuse his sword with a number of different elements which will afflict enemies upon landing a slash.

Directly after most slashes, a strike may be used. Strikes are quick attacks designed primarily to inflict or hinder opponents, and when under the effects of the ShinTrance found in the Shindo skillset, produce Shin energy, which is used for various Shindo abilities and the infusion abilities found within the TwoArts skillset.

There are many different ways to plan an offense as a Blademaster, as the class has a myriad of options for doling out death at its disposal, ranging from focusing on causing as much bleeding as possible to simply damaging an opponent out with the sheer strength of a Blademaster's slashes, particularly through the formidable multislash.

The most frequently used method is to cause an opponent to bleed enough so as to allow use of the Brokenstar ability, which will instantly kill them. This is usually performed by "preparing" an opponents legs by damaging them until they are just about to break, then doing the same to the opponents torso. The Blademaster then breaks both the target's legs in one legslash and sending them to the floor with a strike to the knees, allowing the Blademaster to impales them upon their blade. While the foe is impaled, the Blademaster may twist their blade within them to cause massive amounts of bleeding, edging the foe closer and closer to death. Particularly resilient opponents may be slashed while impaled upon the blade, inhibiting their ability to reduce their bleeding and making it easier for the Blademaster to cause more internal damage.

Once a Blademaster has discerned that their target is bleeding enough, they may begin the deadly Brokenstar, which will then instantly slay the foe where they stand.