blademaster?

Wow, where to begin.

BMs are good, but they can be really tricky. A guildee once referred to them as "the thinking man's barbarian".

You can't just sit there and spam skills like a wizard or venomancer. You gotta think fast. They have 4 different categories of skills, one for polearms, one for axes/hammers, one for fists/claws, and one for swords. And at high levels it becomes important to be able to switch from one weapon to the other to PvP to take advantage of the variety.

List of things a BM can do:

Damage, slow, stun, bleed, run super fast, leap forward, leap backward, slow enemy channeling, reduce opponent's firepower, amplify damage, lower opponent's defenses, damage multiple opponents at once, increase their own attack rate, add fire damage to their attack, hit from a distance, cancel enemy attacks, heal, seal, increase aggro, increase magic defense at the cost of physical, increase physical defense at the cost of magical, increase party's physical defense, become immune to stuns, and increase critical hit rate...

Don't get too excited, since this takes a while you won't be able to do all these right away. But once you can the strategies are endless.

Combos:

The basic strategy in PvP is to stunlock. BMs have 2 skills that are sure to stun, one that seals, and one with a 50% chance to stun. Use them properly and you can stop your opponent from doing a thing for a while.

With the help of a genie, you can become immune to magic damage for about 8 seconds. Use alter marrow physical, a genie skill called Balance (when maxed it raises your lowest defense to the same level as your highest defense, which with BMs usually means increasing magic defense to the same level as physical defense), and then use alter marrow magical. Even the stongest magic attacks will only do about 20 damage, which is negligible.


You can get by on just one weapon path (axes are the most common initial path) but you're really missing out unless you use at least two. To take advantage of that list I mentioned, you gotta use them all, and it's gonna take time. But it can be a lot of fun, too.

So yah, BMs take a lot of hard work to become good at, but they are definitely good.

Michael_dark - Lost City wrote: »

Umm... no. Any half-decent caster that sees you hit balance is going to distance shrink and flee. And unless you're paying close attention, that will leave you completely vulnerable to magic once balance wears off and your genie recharging. You're much safer hitting mmarrow and spamming TE for the shield and/or mdef charms.

Just because the caster flees because you use balance, doesn't mean you cant chase after it or stun-lock the caster.
If you let a caster flee in the first place, might as well delete your bm.b:bye

Also note that TE is a very good defensive skill, I would easily take it over balance. TE uses all your current energy, if you use occult ice/whirlwind/tangling mire/domain or some combination that puts your current genie's energy low you should probably use TE as a defensive measure. A ~3250+ defensive shield for ~11+ seconds is really good when you only use ~10 energy and 1231 stamina.