Duskblade

The Duskblade is one of the two classes of the Nightshade, next to the Stormbringer. It is an unusual melee class: it throws out strong crowd-control area attacks at high speed, links its attacks into combos and teleports across the battlefield, which makes it useful in both PvE and PvP.

Its transformation turns it into a Reaper: it attacks faster, takes less damage and some skills recover sooner. In Reaper form a Duskblade is gray-black, wrapped in a black-and-white aura, with glowing white eyes and white markings.

• Strong: many combos, each with its own effects.
• Strong: many powerful stuns that can keep a target locked in place.
• Strong: a teleport whose cooldown resets when the target dies, and a reflection skill that copies slightly weaker versions of other classes' skills.
• Weak: no very strong single- or multi-target debuff.
• Weak: in light armor it is fragile at low and middle levels, and at high levels too if careless.

The Duskblade can only equip sabers, which have lower to medium damage and fast attack speed. Because Dexterity is its main attribute, light armor is the normal choice; mixing belts and necklaces between physical and elemental resistance often helps. A few players use heavy armor for more protection, but the Strength it needs costs Dexterity and therefore damage.

In one-on-one PvP the Duskblade is hard to face without skills that remove debuffs, because of its many stuns and paralyzes, such as the charged Dragon Trap and Shadow Prey, which pulls a target in and stuns it. Against tough heavy-armor classes like Barbarians and Seekers, stun-heavy play loses damage, so it should mix Reaper combos with stuns.

In mass fights and Territory Wars its job is crowd control. In Reaper form it unleashes a quick flurry of mostly area combos that stun and debuff. Slash of Pride disarms enemies in an area without disarming the Duskblade, Moon Chant cannot be purged and lowers critical damage taken, and it is good at pulling catapult carriers away. It must stay in melee range, though, and unlike the Assassin it cannot dodge a fatal blow.

In PvE, solo or in a squad, the Duskblade leans on Reaper form, which it unlocks early. While transformed, most area combos (starting with Galemark) have almost no cooldown and can be used again and again until the form ends. The danger is aggro: this burst can pull monsters even off Barbarians.

The Duskblade and the Stormbringer arrived with Eclipse, the eighth expansion of Perfect World International, released on December 16, 2014 together with the Nightshade race. The patch notes describe the Duskblade as a fast melee class that strings combos together and the Stormbringer as a caster who calls down the fury of nature. Eclipse also brought the Celestial Vale starting zone. The Riptide content update of August 2015 gave the Nightshade classes primal skills and adjusted some of their existing skills.