[Guide] PvE Swordmage/玉虚 Guide

[Mion]

GUIDE OUTDATED CHECK OTHER THREAD FOR UPDATED GUIDE






Some brief intro info:
All these values were used on my Swordmage in the current NA version. There were no hard number crunching, I don't specialise in that field. Instead, I self-experiment the numbers. I play with 170+ms, with the highest being at 180+ms. I've suggested the same stat build to newbies in new servers on public chat back in CN, and so far there is a general consensus among CN Swordmages:

Strength: Please don't add.
Dexterity: ~70, nothing less than that.
Physique: ~20-40, but you will not be almighty invincible. Just enough for you to survive in case you mess up or lag. 30 should be fine.
Spirit: ~30 or 40. Nothing more than 40.
Intelligence: The rest

Why Dexterity at 70 and not lower: As Swordmage, your highest damaging skills are Lightning-type skills which are short DoTs. Their total damage is far higher than Fire-type skills (which is just a 1 damage-1 hit thing), and the damage is dealt per 0.5s. With high Dexterity, it ensures that each damage per 0.5s is a crit. Some CN players add it till 80, but 70 is enough for me.

PROPER SKILL USAGE:

Intro:

I have seen many Swordmages being played inefficiently, losing a ton of DPS in the process. People who continued Swordmages might have wisened up and played it correctly now, but most who just started might not be aware of something important: Swordmages stance change skill does not have a cooldown.

Swordmage difficulty is rated at 4. Why? That's because Swordmages have to constantly change stances between Fire, Ice and Lightning in order to deal as much damage as possible.

As a beginner Swordmage, you will get access to 1 skill of each element at first. Using one of these skills of a certain element, in the correct stance, will allow you to follow up with a 2nd hit if you press the skill button again. Therefore, high ping players might face difficulty in following up; there's a very short window to press the 2nd hit.

Example: Using Angelfire skill in Fire stance grants you one extra instant shot Angelfire. Using Lightning Orb skill in Lightning stance changes your Lightning Orb to become a stationary, high damage-over-time AoE on hitting an enemy.

How Swordmages should work with elemental skills:

Skill rotations in this game are not static, since situations might change depending on dungeon. But rule of thumb is to always prioritise Lightning-specced skills first, since their damage-over-time skills can deal more damage in total than just a simple Fire-specced skill. As stated in the example before, the Lightning Orb is a high damage-over-time skill.

Elemental priority (including first and 3* Unparalleled skill): Lightning>Fire

Ice is only used as a filler to earn back Elements as its follow-up deals extremely little damage. It's a waste of Elements.

The difficulty for Swordmages comes in when you need to constantly switch stances on the fly. For classes like Gunslingers, they can just permanently stay in Rifle stance and use their skills, but if a Swordmage decides to stay in Lightning stance forever, their damage will be affected. I would recommend to place the stance skills for Lightning and Fire stance into somewhere easy to reach. For me, Lightning is on RB and Fire is on R key. But it's up to you, especially those who have a programmable macro mouse.

During the time when I was playing, I constantly hit 1 aggro position lower than the tank/healer. Swordmages can be a high-damaging and AoE glass cannon class when played right.

For more info: http://play.163.com/15/0127/10/AGV98NIT00314TM8.html

[Mion]

If you've already tried Swordmage, you will realise one of the unique Swordmage resource: Elements. Certain skills use all 5, certain skills use only one. So how should you generate them?

At the start, you have 5. Use it on the skill that eats up all of it (lightning version of course). For your basic elemental skills like Fireball and Lightning Orb, the first hit generates 1 stack, and the second hit eats up 1 stack.

Elements regenerate over the fight even if you constantly use the second hit of the skills. There will be times when you are just short of 1 stack for that lightning DoT AoE, or just being empty of stacks and unable to cast F1 Unparalleled. Later on, you can spec Elemental Rhythm to speed up the regeneration of Elements.

In that case, that's where the very first ice skill you get comes into handy. Ice skills are genrally weak in damage, so it's fine if you don't use the second part of it. It has relatively low CD, so just use it when you are just lacking one Elemental stack~

[Mion]

Some Swordmage dungeon runs

[Mion]

Rotation list after hitting level 45 and getting the last attack skill:

Be in Lightning Stance before fight starts.
1. Star Sword
2. Searing Wake (in Lightning stance)
3. Lightning Orb, 1 Lambent Bolt, Lightning Orb follow up
4. Switch to Fire
5. Angelfire, Lambent Bolt(s), Angelfire follow up
6. Cold Shackles (no need to change stance)
7. Frigid Aura, use if mobs are near to you (AoE freeze skill)
8. Lambent Step, use if mobs are near to you, and use Frigid Aura first before Lambent.
Note: If you don't need to use Lambent or Frigid, you can use normal LB attack till Angelfire is ready again.
9. Repeat 5.
10. Switch to Lightning
11. Repeat 3.

Tip: If you use Star Sword, there is a slightly delay before the sword lands on the enemy. Use the time to change stance, rather than changing stance before Star Sword.

I understand that to min-max, people will use Angelfire in Lightning stance before changing to Fire for the follow-up. Unfortunately, doing that is risky with my ping, so I only use AF when in Fire.

Skill Priority (excluding Special Skills)

1. Star Sword
2. Searing Wake
3. Lightning Orb
4. Angelfire
5. Cold Shackles
6. Frigid Aura/Lambent Step

Special Skill Priority (mass aoe):


Elemental Fury (Skip for later if not enough stacks/resource) (LIGHTNING VERSION like Starsword Judgement)

Starsword Judgement in Lightning stance
Cosmic Void
Cosmic Ripple

For single target:

Cosmic Void (Lowers enemy's MDEF) (Skip for later if not enough resource)

Sword Salvo

Starsword Judgement (Lightning)

Cosmic Ripple


TLDR for mass aoe, forgo Salvo.
For single target, forgo Elemental Fury.
Note that the two above is overwritten if you are trying to level said skills rather than pushing for a raid clear.

[Mion]

Minor "theorycrafting" for speccing into Unparalleled "tree" as well as priority sequence:

Note: 3* unparalleled require different items to power it up. So you can power it alongside your 1* and 2*.

Sword Salvo: Your single target burst. Spec for resource (brown) and damage (red). Strictly used for bossing because -single target-. In actual raid runs, don't use it on trash. But for easy runs where you need it to kill some trash to level, just use it.
Changes: Originally specced for cooldown. Somehow, the resource generation is slow in CBT as compared to CN.

Starsword Judgement: Red red red red. Its unparalleled resource use and cooldown is really manageable, so spam those damage increments. After that, add the cooldown.

Dagger Flurry: Useless skill imo. I didn't touch it.

Dragon (red bar) 3* Unparalleled: Skyfire: Definitely spec it to use lesser resource (brown) and lesser elements (green). I would recommend to add more in the elements since you have other skills that use up elements.
Add at least full damage (red) as well, since this is an extremely high damage skill. Right now it can deal a whopping total of 31k damage in Lightning stance. Useful for mobbing the crap out of trash mobs. Before speccing into it, you might want to use other "cheaper" skills like Salvo and Judgement. This skill is usually the one gotten from the 7th day reward. For bossing, forgo this for Salvo. It is likely that you won't use much of this in bossing.

Cosmic Void: Enemy mdef decrease (green) and resource (brown). There is lesser skills that generate Phoenix resource, so you have to add it to use less. Maybe mix a few with cooldown (blue).

Cosmic Ripple: Add damage (red) and cooldown (blue). I put this behind because Cosmic Void is more important. Tbh, add everything in Dragon first before working on this.

Ride the Wind: Didn't touch this. Tbh I almost puked while using this.

Phoenix (blue bar) 3* Unparalleled: Dark Moon: Strictly PvP skill, weakens enemies, but unfortunately not useful in PvE since most mobs have immunity to it. Info from here: http://ty.netease.com/thread-193103-1-1.html
Not recommended to spec into for PvE players. If you don't PvP, you can even forgo unlocking it completely.



Sample unlock:

1. 10 Sidus Dao for Salvo resource reduction
2. 10 Sidus Dao for Salvo cooldown reduction
3. 10 Sidus Dao for Cosmic Void resource reduction
4. 10 Sidus Dao for Cosmic Void cooldown reduction
5. 3 Sidus Dao for Starsword Judgement damage
(to be continued)

[Mion]

Brief plan on talenting skills

First 10 points:
1 in Lambent Bolt for resource generation
3 in Angelfire for resource generation
3 in Elemental Rhythm to regain Elements quickly.
3 in Star Sword to regain Phoenix resource quickly.

Changes: Remove lightning orb speed. Not highly necessary to have it, I would prefer more resource generation to use Salvo ASAP.

I have since given up on using the skill calculator as there are a lot of mistranslated tooltips or missing ones.

Talents can be reset for free, so all these are not final.

[Mion]

Usually, the cycle of training Unparalleled is like that:

Unparalleled uses too much resource - Need to train unparalleled - Can't train it because mobs die before there's enough resource to get the exp for the skill - Rinse and repeat

So how do you train Unparalleled skills so you can start speccing into it?

Grinding is your answer. The Underground Palace (200 mob grind) is a good place to train Unparalleled skills because you can kill mobs after mobs. Generally, it is easy to grind 2* and below skills.

The actual best place to train Unparalleled no matter how much resource is required (this means 3* as well) is level 25 Spider. During the fight,you'll see that your Unparalleled bars on both sides increases even when out of battle. This means that you can use Unparalleled after Unparalleled, provided it's off cooldown. It's actually the only places where you have the opportunity to use an unspecced 3* Unparalleled. Do this everyday, and you can slowly train it up. Just make sure you're standing beside the skill "pot" near the spawn lanes!

After all, Unparalleled are considered your most powerful skills in your arsenal. If it doesn't require long time to nurture it, I don't think it's really worth to be called most powerful :x

[Mion]

Updated Swordmage rotation demo

[_Kuro]

The actual best place to train Unparalleled no matter how much resource is required (this means 3* as well) is level 25 Spider.

What exactly is the level 25 Spider? Is it Solo/5/10 man? And where is it?

And ofc thanks for the great guide, helped a lot! <3

[Mion]

It's level 35 Misty Hollows in CBT. Not recommended to solo.

[eXzo]

Brief plan on talenting skills

First 10 points:
1 in Lambent Bolt for resource generation
3 in Angelfire for resource generation
3 in Elemental Rhythm to regain Elements quickly.
3 in Star Sword to regain Phoenix resource quickly.

why do u always spec in resource generation and regain Elements

is it really better than

3 in Angel Fire Monster dmg (45% more dmg against monster)
2 in Elemental Stance  Monster dmg (everything deals 10% more dmg vs mosnter)
3 in Elemental Attack in Thunder Stance 15% more dmg
last 2 points in Sudden Thunder for 15% more dmg or in Star Sowrd for 15% more dmg....

so all your skills deal 10% more dmg.... and angelfire even 10% + 45% and Elemantal Attack 10% + 15% and Sudden Thunder or Star Sword also 10% + 15%

do u really think resours are better than all that dmg.... even ur combo skills do 10% more dmg

[Lydhe]

Nice guide for Swordmage, this one seems old but still working effectively.

why do u always spec in resource generation and regain Elements

is it really better than

3 in Angel Fire Monster dmg (45% more dmg against monster)
2 in Elemental Stance  Monster dmg (everything deals 10% more dmg vs mosnter)
3 in Elemental Attack in Thunder Stance 15% more dmg
last 2 points in Sudden Thunder for 15% more dmg or in Star Sword for 15% more dmg....

so all your skills deal 10% more dmg.... and angelfire even 10% + 45% and Elemantal Attack 10% + 15% and Sudden Thunder or Star Sword also 10% + 15%

do u really think resours are better than all that dmg.... even ur combo skills do 10% more dmg

In my opinion, I think because it's better to be able to generate quickly unparalleled skills ressources (Dragon & Phoenix) to use them ASAP when CD is up, instead of waiting to have enough unparalleled skills ressources to use them.

[Mion]

Nice guide for Swordmage, this one seems old but still working effectively.

why do u always spec in resource generation and regain Elements

is it really better than

3 in Angel Fire Monster dmg (45% more dmg against monster)
2 in Elemental Stance  Monster dmg (everything deals 10% more dmg vs mosnter)
3 in Elemental Attack in Thunder Stance 15% more dmg
last 2 points in Sudden Thunder for 15% more dmg or in Star Sword for 15% more dmg....

so all your skills deal 10% more dmg.... and angelfire even 10% + 45% and Elemantal Attack 10% + 15% and Sudden Thunder or Star Sword also 10% + 15%

do u really think resours are better than all that dmg.... even ur combo skills do 10% more dmg

In my opinion, I think because it's better to be able to generate quickly unparalleled skills ressources (Dragon & Phoenix) to use them ASAP when CD is up, instead of waiting to have enough unparalleled skills ressources to use them.

I have since updated my guide, that's why there's a duplicate thread. I forgot to lock this haha.
Anyway, the final Arcane Arts for 49 is modified somewhat, adding in slightly more damage, removed elements generation (provided you don't stance switch since you're high ping player and stuff), etc. Check my newest guide to know more. I'll be locking this thread.