Definitive Guide to Swordsman
By Shaggy
I want to begin by saying most of this guide will focus on the free to play aspects. It won’t be until the late game portion that i mention anything about paid accessories. That being said the first week of the game is kind of important for people who intend to pay for content. There is a progressive paying event that starts with the legendary Crit/Stun gear and the stuff there is comparatively cheap to the rest of the packages in the game and the 49.99 package contains the eggplant pal which is a crucial pay-only pal for DPS builds. Can you do stuff without it? Of course! It just makes life 100x easier to have eggplant, especially early on.
Preface
I have spent much of time working on swordsman and necromancer because they are the most interesting, underused and undervalued classes in the game. I want to begin by saying most of this guide will focus on the free to play aspects.
It won’t be until the late game portion that i mention anything about paid accessories. That being said the first week of the game is kind of important for people who intend to pay for content. There is a progressive paying event that starts with the legendary Crit/Stun gear and the stuff there is comparatively cheap to the rest of the packages in the game and the 49.99 package contains the eggplant pal which is a crucial pay-only pal for DPS builds. Can you do stuff without it? Of course! It just makes life 100x easier to have eggplant, especially early on.
In the Beginning
Welcome to shroom land! You’re journey to be the best swordsman ever starts out with some hard work pushing the story line! You will need lamps to wish for better gear from the genie! With any luck they will grant you the gear you need to win!
Focus: idle fighting bosses on adventure and using lamp spins to gain exp. At this stage just keep whatever gear has the highest atk stat for each slot. sell the rest for exp and coins. Save all your red gems for buying gold to upgrade your lamp. You will want to buy gold and upgrade your lamp until you unlock supreme gear. until that time just focus on wearing the highest atk gear and keep pushing the story bosses. As you journey along you will unlock content such as Pals/Skills/Relics/Mounts/Artifacts/Back accessories/Talents/Avians and more. so let’s go over your focus for each of these.
Pals: So in the beginning you will only have low rarity pals. You will want to use the gacha machine to roll better ones. the following are ideal:
Purple rarity Toothpaste: Increases your counter rate. A swordsman will have 30% counter automatically just by being a warrior. This helps increase that more. It is your primary stat for dealing large pools of damage early on.
Highest rarity deer: This pal reduces all damage taken. Ideal for a class that relies on taking hits to deal damage.
Highest rarity bird: Birds increase your attack speed which affects not only how fast your basic attacks hit but the animation speed for casting skills.
Highest rarity chicken: Increases your basic attack damage. This is not used much after the early game but it helps boost your non-counter attack damage which is the bulk of your damage until you get more compounded improvements to damage stats for counter.
Highest rarity cactus: Another pal only useful to swordsman early on. like the chicken it just helps increase your basic attack damage.
Highest rarity hydrosprite: These guys increase the rate in which skills recharge. Helpful in longer battles. Use this in place of chicken or cactus if your fights are timing out to try and get an extra skill cast cycle in.
Highest rarity panda: This is situational. When rolling gear you might roll regeneration which heals you every second that percent of your max HP in pve (it’s 30% of that percent in pvp). Panda will boost your regeneration by 1.4x. So only useful if you have regeneration. Which is one of the core build paths we will talk about later.
Highest rarity dragon: You get an orange level 1 dragon really early on in the mail system. They are only useful if you have crit rate. If you bought the 3 legendary items in week 1 you will have 30% crit and this dragon will increase the damage of those crits. Use it if this is the case. replace the cactus with it.
Camel: Another mail system pal. This reduces the enemies basic attack damage stat. all pve content is this type of damage or skill damage. so use it in tandem with deer if you are struggling to survive.
Skills
Like with pals, in the beginning you will unlock low rarity skills to use. The following skills are the most useful ones below red or legendary rarity.
Lead the Charge or Coin Bomb: increases basic attack damage for a short time. helps with non-counter damage.
Speed Surge: increases attack speed for a short time
Nature’s Renewal: Heals a large amount of your HP over 5 seconds. Heal type is considered regeneration and is nerfed to 30% efficacy in pvp.
Shroom Shield: Creates a temporary health shield around you to absorb damage until it is exhausted or runs out of time. Shields of all kinds are nerfed in pvp to 40% efficacy.
Easy Breezy: Reduces the enemies atk value for a short duration
The last 3 skills are often used late game as well but the attack speed and basic attack damage buffs are not very useful once your character reaches 70% or higher counter rate and you have red or pink skills unlocked.
There are other skills that are effective early on as well but since they aren’t typical or sustainable by following the swordsman path I won’t mention them. feel free to experiment if you are stuck waiting on better gear rolls.
Relics
Early game relics are kind of a pain. Do not level any relic above level 1 until all relics are unlocked. Yes, I yelled that at you. Unlocking relics is completely random but has a set cost. You get relic forks from rush event round rewards, lucky spinners, pay events and the ancient ruins dungeon. do all of your ancient ruins every day and the ad ones. Do not slack on this. Relics provide massive bonuses to skills and pals. Here are the staple relics you will want to unlock for the various builds:
- Green: Bonded Mask, Ironclad Mask
- Blue: Thundercaller Kite
- Purple: Magic Box, Metamorphic crystal
- Yellow: all of them but stonewrite tome and Beasthide book are most useful early on.
- Orange: Cage statue, time statue
- Red: Storm necklace
Souls
Souls unlock shortly after relics and come with a soul tower and gacha machine for pulling them. Don’t worry too much about these things for obtaining souls. up until red just equip the best soul rarity for each slot. You can obtain red soul 1 from the gacha randomly but your best source for these will be brawl ticket turn ins and cross server event shop.
Do not worry about red soul selection 2 at first. If you are paying for them in the lucky spinner you will want the regeneration red soul 2, healing red soul 2 and boss damage resist red soul 2 first. They can fuse with the red soul 1 counterparts needed to make a pink soul. These are Atk, Def and HP souls. They are the only 3 pink souls that drastically increase their values when made pink. all other pink souls just combine the effects of the 2 red souls used to make them.
You gain Soul essence from salvaging extra souls, doing dailies, lucky spinner, and soul tower. This is used to upgrade your souls. Soul EXP transfers when a soul is fused to make a pink NOT their levels. So if you have 2 level 20s you wont get a level 40. it will just give the exp of both 20s. That said, don’t level red soul 2s. You will want to level up your souls with a 2:1 ratio doing Atk/hp/counter damage as the 2 and Def/Crit damage/Basic attack damage as the 1.
Don’t touch the combo soul or the crit resistance soul. you wont need those this early. Basically focus on leveling up the stuff where your damage is more than the stuff where your damage isnt and defensive stuff. Damage is king early game
Back Accessory Stuff
Back accessories unlock at the same time as dark trials. dark trials are the bane of warrior existence. You WILL get stuck. Don’t worry about this until you are geared up for it though. I would say once you hit level 105 and progress to the next section of the guide you can worry about pushing dark trials. So i will post that stuff there.
Dark trials do give you talent and wing upgrade points though. You will want to level your wings up with a bigger focus on atk and hp. every 11th level the stats get better. So level them all up “on the 1s” in atk->hp->def order. for example you will have 31 atk, 31 hp, 21 def and then get def to 31 and level atk to 41. then hp to 41. then def to 41. just keep that method going FOREVER.
Talents
Don’t worry too much about these in the early game. just get as many atk/def/hp nodes to 10 in as many trees as you can at first. if they all reach 10 in all 4 trees then focus on upgrading counter damage in fury to 10. You can reset these trees for free.
So if you need to do something different there’s no downside to experimenting. When you have 6000 points you will have enough to reach one of the end nodes in a tree. then you would need to reset and get the fury “ascension” end node and keep the same level up every trees atk/def/hp nodes to 10 then 20 again. every 6000 points you reset and get a new end node.
Follow this method pretty much until you have 15,000+ then you can worry about specializing your tree. More detailed tree pathways will be discussed later in the guide.
What to save for: As the game progresses you will be bombarded with pay to win features like mounts, artifacts and back accessories morphing skins. These skins offer major buffs to the character and a stylish skin. But there are some free to obtain ones if you plan properly. Here I will discuss saving strategies and what to shoot for.
Rush Events
Your #1 rush even mount goal should be pyreboard. It is outstanding for pve content and can be used with stall tactic pvp builds as well to gain dps mid fight. There are always gonna be whales spending a ton and topping leaderboards in rush events and it might seem impossible to reach the top. so your goal in rush events early on is to save.
Do only enough to finish all 4 rounds if you can do so while still saving the bulk of your materials. If you can’t do that and still save resources you will sadly have to skip rush events and focus on saving or work out a system in your server where people agree to let lower powered people rank higher in rush events.
A single first place finish will get you a mount from the rush shop. you eventually want all of them but you should get pyreboard first, adaptoslime second.
Lucky Spinner: The lucky spinner is another free to play source of mounts and also wings. so since you can get mounts from rush events you want to focus wings here. You will see Lustrous Plumage early on in the rush shop and it’s probably one of the better swordsman options for wings due to its versatility with multiple build paths. Blade pursuit is probably the best overall for damage builds though. You can save up your lucky spinner coins and they carry over between lucky spinner events. so just focus on completing tasks to gain coins. you can save up 500 coins and be guaranteed wings or a mount after 13 events. It’s a long time. and you will likely wait even longer for your selection to come back around. The ox mount, mini motorcycle, flying carpet and white tiger are decent mounts too.
Avians: Almost forgot to mention avians. This is going to be either your favorite or least favorite thing. You will want a honeypot, penguin, cloud or anubis with reflect counter, rage bonus, super reflect counter and barrel dodge eventually. You can breed avians together that have one or more of these affixes to try and mesh them together. You also want a Honeypot with Lightning conductor, no speeding, counter punch and any of the 4 mentioned previously. You could also use purple affixes but purple is harder to transfer than rare. So i wouldn’t worry too much about that.
Beginner Conclusion: This should be your focus in the beginning levels of the game (player level 1-105). Upgrading your lamp until you hit supreme gear, keeping the higher atk gears, saving for mounts and wings, doing all of your dungeons and dailies, unlocking all relics before leveling any of them, and unlocking and leveling things like souls, wings and wing talents in the appropriate order. Just remember this is an idle game and things aren’t meant to happen instantly without spending money. Take it slow, do the work and eventually you will get there.
The Adventure Continues
So you have hit level 105 and started unlocking additional gear sets. You also have at least unlocked supreme gear and can now prepare better for your future and focus on collecting specific gear. So what do you go for? You need at least 3 gear sets. Below I will describe each and why it is needed:
Counter/crit: This gear set will be your primary source of damage in the game. It is the core set. With it you will be able to eventually get 65-70% in both crit and counter just from gear and as such have 100 counter/70 crit without anything other your gear and class bonuses. This will open your mask relic slot to be able to use crit instead of counter and allow you to have both 100 counter and 100 crit after pyreboard gets max stack or ascension triggers. Making both pve and pvp easier.
Counter/Regen: This is a phenominal late game gear set and is used in PvP to make stall builds. Stall build have the sole intention of making the fight last until the time runs out. This build achieves 2 things. You wont be able to lose on defense in the arena and you can do co-op dungeons like ruins and cloud dungeon with a DPS partner and provide support as a tank rather than dealing damage. and even though this build lacks crit, you can get a lot of crit from using pyreboard, ascension talent, crit mask, benny pal, eggplant pal and even some premium items like panda bow. meaning you can still be tanky and cheese your way into a counter/crit build as well.
Skill crit/any OR combo/Crit: Sadly we can’t do all content as warrior. We will occassionally have to swap to mage or archer for a short time to push dark trials. Since it is the most substantial source for wing materials and talent points you really want to push this as soon as possible. Prophet would be my first choice since you can complete the dark trials with just skill crit gear and don’t need a second substat focus. You should always have at least one set for another class just in case.
Mid-game Pals: In the mid-game you start unlocking red and pink pals. It can take some time. Usually you need level 15 gacha machine before you even get a pink on average. So it takes a lot of pulls. But once they are unlocked you can add a few pals to your preferred pals list:
Mecha Dog: Increases counter damage but also provides a heal that is very effective at low HP. people often call warriors who use mecha dogs “black bar kings” because when they have almost no HP left they just heal like crazy when using it.
Turtle: Not a top tier pal for PvP due to the shield effect only getting one trigger and it being nerfed to 12% in pvp. But in PvE this proves you essentially a 30% permanent HP increase whenever your HP gets low. This pairs well with the boat mount and is actually quite strong because as soon as the shield activates your boats effects double and you have a burst of enhanced damage resistance.
Pink Dragon: does not stack with orange dragon but provides a lot more boost to crit damage.
Red Toothpaste: you get it from a paid event and can get it for as little as 10 USD. It is 10 counter chance and 100% counter damage. pretty much a staple for warriors.
Mid-Game Skills
In the mid-game you will start unlocking red and pink skills and likely be able to buy skills from the brawl and cross server shops. Here is what to focus on:
Blitz assault: Staple for every single class. Prevents burst damage during PvP buff period at the start of battle, can be delayed in pve to provide 3 seconds of dps without taking damage. if paired with the immunity book and new cheetah mount you can get 9 seconds of immortality during pve boss fights.
Smoke Bomb: Great for reducing enemies resistance to your damage. This can make damage resistance go negative. This means all damage they take is increased, not just one type. So unlike the class skill debuff which only affects their counter resistance this will boost your damage with basics, crits and skills as well
Clone Strike: This creates a duplicate of you with all of your stats and substats. It only retains 30% of your HP and cannot benefit from your accessories (mount, artifact, wing) or skill buffs. It is only your base stats. but it also deals more than double your damage when it hits with an attack. Leveling this skill up increases the multiplier for its damage. Core skill for most PvE content and is strong in PvP against everything but other warriors.
Hundred slashes: Core skill for high HP builds. It convers 0.5% of your HP at the time it is activated to extra ATK. The skill has diminished effect when hp gets lower so it’s really only useful in healing or quick kill builds for PvP but it also increases your basic attack resistance by 20% which lowers all damage taken in PvE by 20%.
Worldly Snare: Obtained from the cross server shop. This skill temporarily increases your crit rate but while the bonus is in effect it gives extra crit damage for the duration. Top tier skill for the counter/crit build.
Wild Gust and blade pierce: These typically wouldnt be used by swordsman but there is a build with counter/regen where you use these to gain extra heal with the relic: Scarlet Necklace. These would for example be used on stuff like grumpy family boss to gain extra survivability while used with nature’s renewal.
Dragonic Resonance and Blade Pierce: These are also typically not used but there is another counter/regen build that uses massive healing and hp based damage skills and abilities to deal damage without relying on atk stats.
Prayers: I decided to wait til this section to touch on prayer statue. It is pretty straight forward. You want a statue with 5x global counter damage for the crit/counter build, 5x hp statue for the full tank stall build and a 5x crit resist statue early on that will gradually become a 5x defense statue. The crit res/def statue is initially for countering archers and axe warriors but in the late game the gains from cres on statue are too little to be impactful so you swap it to global defense which helps against mages who become problematic late game.
Mid-game Talents: At this stage you’ve likely gotten your first 6000 or so talent points and can get an end node talent in one of the talent trees. The most useful talent to get is ascension. It gives a decent bump to crit rate and atk but you have to let it build up so in quick fights you’re going to want something else usually. So instead of going for ascension we are going to go for the blue fury end talent instead, rampage.
The reason we go here first is because even though it is situational and only activates at low hp, the blue side of the fury tree doesn’t have any useless nodes for the dps build. So you can grab that end node then start working on getting counter damage on the yellow side. Alternatively if you are using the tanky build you can grab the red fury end node which will land you a ton of survival as well from all the resistance nodes and then go towards the regen node in the yellow fury tree and the regen node in the yellow tamer tree to up your regen values by 2-3 gear pieces worth. At the end of the guide I will show sample builds with these trees for both crit/counter warrior and counter/regen warrior.
Pink souls: Once you reach mid-game you will likely have your first 1-3 pink souls. As stated above you should focus on getting atk/healing, HP/regen and def/boss resist pink souls first. These souls go from being additional atk/def/hp when red to being global atk/def/hp when pink and increase those stats dramatically. You will also have more counter/crit chance now so you can rework how you do your souls.
Counter/Crit damage/atk/hp should be higher than cres/def but you want to have a somewhat balanced spread. try to keep them all within 12 levels of each other for the counter/crit build with counter and crit damage being a bit on the higher side. For the stall build you only need Hp/Def/Cres. I typically used a 6/5/4 ratio of HP/Cres/Def when doing the stall build in the mid-game. If you were lucky enough to get a 4th soul selection go for combo/boss damage. it will help tremendously with pve content.
Runes
By now you have also unlocked artifact runes and are starting to save up some runes. What you need to focus on at first is just getting the set bonus and at least orange colored runes for every slot. You want to be more selective with pinks when you level them since exp doesn’t transfer 100% when you get a better one. So level up orange – red first while trying to hunt the perfect or near perfect pinks. What to look for:
Rune 1-3 atk/def/hp: these runes never have different primary stats. so just look for a crit resist rune for these 3 slots preferably with counter damage sub stats or resistance to combo, skill or basic attack damage. Ideally for pink you want all 3 to be a crit resist set type with counter damage, combo resist, skill resist and the 4th substat would be a god roll but counter or basic attack resist would be perfect. so just go for 2-3 of the core substats.
Rune 5: Crit resist set type, Combo damage main stat. same substats as above. You could also grab a basic resist main stat type for pve swapping.
Rune 4 Counter damage main stat: You can use crit damage or counter damage set type but I personally like counter damage for the set type because you wont need to get an extra rune set when swapping between counter/regen and counter/crit. Same substats as above but it is worth noting the 5% crit damage from set is gonna offer more bonus that the 5% counter damage. It’s just more versatile and a preference that I prefer counter damage set type.
Rune 6 same set type as rune 4: You are going to need 2 runes for this slot. One rune for crit resist and one rune for skill resist. The substats same as above. Sadly you need to swap them out when you fight archer/warrior vs when you fight mages in the mid-game. Late game you can get away with using only the skill resist one but it is still nice to hang on to the crit resist one.
So that means you will end up having 4 set in stone rune slots with 1-3 and 5. They wont change unless you decided to use a swap out option for basic res for pve. Then your rune 4 and 6 slots will be interchangeable with other classes. You could also save skill damage set/skill damage rune 4 and skill damage/boss damage rune 6 for when you do the swap for dark trials or have a combo damage/combo damage rune 4 and combo damage/boss damage rune 6 if you decide to do archer instead.
But they work better with 4 crit/2combo set pieces rather than cres/combo or cres/crit. But alas this is a swordsman guide. This message is only here to help you with planning your dungeons.
Transitioning to late-game: What is important to know about this stage of the game is that you need to work towards making a great late game for yourself. So at this time you need to be pushing dungeons, getting a good gear foundation and not caring too much about being totally perfect while working towards it. So here are a few things to remember:
Keep rubbing them lamps out. You need to keep leveling up and getting exp and progressing your lamp. Late game starts when eternal gear unlocks. You want to be fully decked out in aurous when you get there with all double lined gear. Be very stubborn about this. Do not settle for single liners. You will regret it.
Save save save. Save any gear that might be useful for another class as long as you have the gear pages for it. Counter/crit, counter/regen, skill crit/stun, combo/crit, pal combo/pal crit, pal combo/regen are the big ones. if you have even more gear slots some popular ones that aren’t common are pal crit/regen, skill crit/regen, skill crit/crit, crit/stun and evasion/regen.
Save save save. Save all of your pink runes. even if you may not have a use for them initially you may decide later you are getting bored and wanna branch out to a different class. Saving those runes will be useful at that time. but do not break down main build runes ever. Lock them, throw away the key. It is better to have low level runes in a class you’re just playing with than to lose your main builds runes entirely. You can always fall back on your main build if you don’t like what you have going after swapping…unless you break the things that made it work.
Awakening Scrolls: Awakening your character is the #1 sign your close to the end-game. during the awakening process you will gradually unlock awakening stats. focus most of your scrolls on crit damage and counter damage. with a little in crit resist and atk/def/hp. basically treat this like you do your souls.
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