Tarisland Shadow Swordsman Cunning build – talents, rotation, and stats

The Cunning Shadow Swordsman is a class archetype focused on ramping up poison on your target, allowing you to deal incredibly high consistent damage on a single target. The cunning spec is, therefore, all about going hard on bosses, where you can consistently apply your poison and top your team’s DPS meters. If you’re looking for a very strong and raid-ready playstyle, then our Tarisland Cunning build is for you. Expect to read more about rotations, talents, stat priority, and Inscribed Stone runes we recommend you take.

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Tarisland Shadow Swordsman’s Cunning build and skills explained

The Shadow Swordsman’s Cunning skills are all about adding poison to your target, offering you a more consistent damage profile on boss threats. You’ll largely be applying your poison via your first skill, “Poison Strike,” which does damage and adds a level of poison. As for your second skill, you get two options. The base is “Phantom Slashes,” which adds damage and poison to the target. Alternatively, there’s a build which swaps it into Wind-blade Slash, which is the build we will run later on. This allows this skill to do more damage and have huge damage modifiers when paired with your fourth skill, along with more damage to poisoned foes. It enables your damage to be much more flexible for small HP enemies like mob packs, alongside more burst to bosses too.

As for your third skill, “Poison Sting,” you consume a stack of poison to deal some upfront burst damage. If you let the poison reach five stacks, you’ll be able to spend it all to place the Poison damage over time effect on the boss and hit the target multiple times for a sizeable amount of damage.

Moving into your cooldown spells, you have the fourth skill, “Fatal Strike,” which gives you attack damage modifiers and boosts the damage an enemy takes from your skills for 4 seconds. On the other hand, your sixth skill, “Vulnerate,” offers more attack damage and a pursuit buff that gives you extra damage on your skills hitting poisoned targets. Finally, your Inscribed Skill allows you to cast Poison Strike without it costing Energy, and you get to add up the timer on already applied poisons to the target you’re hitting. During the duration of the effect, you cannot apply any more sources of poison from your third skill.

As for the AOE, you have Spinning Blades. This is your standard AOE skill: the more targets you hit, the less the cooldown is. You’ll be able to spam it on 5 enemies, and a slight delay on 4 enemies.

Tarisland’s Cunning build rotations

For the most part, the rotation for a Cunning Shadow Swordsman is fairly simple:

Poison Build-up Rotation:

1. Twin Blade opener
2. Spam Poison Blade three times
3. Poison Sting on 5 stacks of Poison
4. Cast Fatal Strike
5. Twin Blade Slash
6. Poison Sting
7. Spam Poison Sting and filler with Twin Blade for 5 stacks of poison
8. Poison Sting
9. Repeat spam Poison Sting and Twin Blade until you can press Fatal Strike with full Energy after the Poison Sting cast

This rotation is the way it is for two major talent reasons. The first is the Twin Blade talent, Poisoned Twin Blades, which guarantees 4 stacks of poison from that talent. Twin Blade Slash also allows you to cast the skill as an opener, and then it should be up again for when your Poison Sting and Fatal Strike. You deal 20% more damage to poisoned foes, so when you press it with the Fatal Strike DMG buffs and bonus attack power, this spell will hit incredibly hard.

With that said, you only want to use Fatal Strike right before you can press Twin Blade Slash.

When you don’t benefit from the 4 stacks of poison, you need to spam Poison Blade some more. It means for the most efficient rotation to work, you will need at least 16 talents. Therefore, this build will spike when you’re around level 30 with a few of the bonus talent point unlocks from elite dungeons. More on this in just a moment. Once you get the core build unlocked via talents, this can become an incredibly strong raid DPS, as reflected in our end-game Tarisland Tier List.

While you don’t have Twin Blade unlocked, your rotation will typically be:

1. Phantom Slashes
2. Poison Sting x2
3. Fatal Strike – When you have 3 talent points in Weakened Strike talent. (Requires 9 talent points total to reach it)
4. Poison Blade spam
5. Phantom Slashes
6. Poison Sting
7. Poison Blade and Slashes spam
8. Repeat

If you have Vulnerate up, press Phantom Slashes, Poison Sting, and then Poison Sting. Vulnerate combined with Phantom Slashes grants 4 poison stacks, since you attack 4 times with the skill.

Cunning talents build

In terms of the Talents you need, we recommend the following talents in this order:

1. Poison Sting+ x3 – DMG of Poison Sting is increased by 20%. Upon hitting a target, there is a 100% chance to obtain 2 Energy.
2. Toxic Amplify x2 – Each time you cast Poison, it increases the DMG you deal in the next 6 seconds by 10%.
3. Cunning Master x1 – 1% Combo.
4. Weakness Strike x3 – Fatal Strike deals 24% more DMG. When you cast the Fatal Strike skill, you have a 100% chance to gain 1 level of Poison.
5. Twin Blade Slash – Turn Phantom Slashes into Twin Blade Slash.
6. Cunning Master x2 – Bonus talent combo goes to 3%.
7. Twin-Blade Ambush x3 – Twin Blade has a 27% chance to make your next Poison Blade cost 0 energy. If the target has less than 25% HP, that chance becomes 100%.
8. Poisoned Twin Blades x2 – When Twin Blades hits after Fatal Strike, you have a 100% chance to gain an additional two levels of Poison.
9. Twin-blade Slash+ x3 – Twin-blade deals 20% more damage and another 20% more damage if they are affected with Poison.
10. Poison+ x2 – Poison deals 15% more DoT and has a 25% chance to recover 2 energy.
11. Fatal Strike+ x2 – The DMG of Fatal Strike is increased by 25% and its DMG boost is increased by 4%.
12. Poison Accumulation x1 – Each time your Poison Sting, Poison or Vulnerate deals DMG, it will inflict 1 stack of poison on the target. At 25 stacks, your next basic attack will deal additional damage equal to 50% of your ATK one time and reset the counter.
13. Vulnerate+ x2 – Vulnerate lasts 4 seconds longer and you deal 10% more damage during the duration.
14. Infinite Energy x2 – Every time Vulnerate triggers Pursuit DMG, there is a 100% chance for you to recover 2 energy.
15. Toxin Test x3 – Casting Poison will randomly prolong your Vulnerate effect by 0-4 seconds.

As you can see, you need a lot of talents to get the build working. The build is very talent point-reliant, requiring at least 16 before the rotation starts making sense and your burst and consistent damage start appearing. But once you get there, you’ll find the damage of your skills will improve dramatically, while Fatal Strike and its combos with your skills make it even better. Furthermore, you have a late game to play with your sixth skill, further compounding the need to manage your rotation properly. Get all of these talents and gear, so you can continue to throw tonnes of poisons out and deal tons of damage.

Cunning build’s stat priority

The core stat priority for Cunning Rogue builds are as follows:

1. Combo
2. Omni
3. Cooldown
4. Stamina
5. Hit
6. Dex

Combo is the main stat, which will help your damage ramp. It synergises with your core passive talent, Energy Control, which grants energy return when your Poison Blade lands a combo. This is important as this spec is very much starved for energy a lot of the time. The more you combo with your basic spam skill, the more often you get to press the rest of your buttons. When you get 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% Combo rating, you’ll gain 5 max energy per bracket, alongside more increase the damage your DoT builds. So, it’s proof that combo matters the most.

Next up is the Omni stat. When you cast Poison Sting, you have an Omni percentage chance to get an extra poison level on Poison Sting. This makes your spam a lot smaller and allows you to land your main Poison Sting skill more often. The more Omni you get for the core passive talent, the more damage your Poison Sting will do to enemies that are affected by your Poison stacks. So, it further improves your consistent single target damage on a foe for raiding and boss killing. Aim for 16.4% for the cap of that stat.

Cooldown is another important stat as it connects with the core passive, Energy Absorption. When you press Fatal Strike, you have the chance to regain energy based on cooldown percentage. Moreover, at 10%, 16%, and 26% CD, you get longer effects of Fatal Strike, which is nice for a longer damage bonus boost.

Next up is Stamina and Hit. Stamina is nice for the Shadow Swordsman’s defensiveness as they take a lot of damage from melee mechanics in combat. More stamina equals a better time. Hit is also important so you can actually land your spells. Check the raid and dungeon you are doing in the instance menu and click the attributes button for the hit target you need to meet. Typically, you’ll find hit on Gauntlet item pieces and yellow gem slots.

Dexterity is a passive attack power boost and comes with all gear pieces. More is nice, but make sure you hit the three main stats first as they offer more for making your rotation more active, which is where your damage comes from the most.

When it comes to the Inscribed Stone, we highly recommend that you take the recommended pathway, as it will find you the routes for combo, omni, and cooldown. When you get to place runes in the slots, you should look for:

1. Intertwined Fates – ATK and Def increase by 7.2%, rotating between the two stats in combat.
2. Drive – 6.5% chance to deal 222% attack power to the target.
3. Burst – Each time you deal direct damage, you apply a stack that when it hits 23, it explodes, dealing 280% ATK.
4. Sprawl – Applies a DoT that stacks up to 5 times, dealing 15.4% of your ATK power per second.
5. High Energy Potion – Increases DMG, Healing, or Damage immunity by 5%, cycling between them every 30 seconds. The buff lasts for 15 seconds each.

The runes here are largely to add bonus spikes in your damage. The other two are to grant some flat bonuses for the other runes to scale off of to improve your main skill damage. They also increase your defensiveness, which we mentioned is important for Cunning Rogues who need to be in boss range all the time.