PvE Stamina Nightblade Dungeons/Trials

Armor Types

Gear and Item Set Info

Mechanical Acuity - craftable (6 traits) in Clockwork City.

Spriggan's Thorns - overland drop from Bangkorai and can be purchased at guild traders.

Maelstrom Bow - a unique reward dropped occasionally upon completion of Veteran Maelstrom Arena.

Velidreth - a monster set obtainable from Veteran Cradle of Shadows / undaunted chests.

Stormfist - a monster set obtainable from Veteran Tempest Island / undaunted chests.

Kra'gh - a monster set obtainable from Veteran Fungal Grotto I / undaunted chests.

Until you can obtain monster sets, just run any stamina 2-piece in your head/shoulder slots.

Mechanical Acuity - craftable (6 traits) in Clockwork City.

War Machine - drop from Halls of Fabrication (normal or veteran). If you can't run war machine, I would recommend Automaton (drop from Darkshade Caverns I & II) as an alternative.

Maelstrom Bow - a unique reward dropped occasionally upon completion of Veteran Maelstrom Arena.

Velidreth - a monster set obtainable from Veteran Cradle of Shadows / undaunted chests.

Debuff sets: in trials, Nightblades occasionally run stamina debuff sets in order to ensure all possible debuffs are applied to the boss. Usually, Nightblades will only need to run Night Mother's Gaze (craftable, 6 traits) and Mechanical Acuity is swapped out for it. Nightblades DO NOT run Sunderflame, because they don't heavy attack as part of their standard rotation.

Bow Traits - why are there two options?

• It is higher DPS (by approximately 1k) to run a Nirnhoned bow in conjunction with Damage Health Poison IX instead of an enchant. These poisons are craftable and the cheapest combination (at least on PC-EU) is Fleshfly Larva, Nightshade and Nirnroot.
• If you cannot afford to run poisons, then Infused is slightly better than Nirnhoned, in conjunction with a Disease Damage enchant.
• You can still use Nirnhoned without poisons, but this is the lowest DPS out of all three options.

5/1/1, 6/1/0 or 7/0/0?

• I wouldn't recommend 5/1/1, the difference in stamina cost of abilities and resource management is noticeable and the gain provided by 2% extra stats has to be justified by trading off extra weapon crit as well.
• I personally run 6/1/0, with a heavy piece of chest armor to give slightly more resistances. This is ideal if you feel comfortable with resource management.
• 7/0/0 is the ideal setup for a beginner, giving you the best trade-off between resource management and damage.

General Info

Rotation

The Stamina Nightblade rotation (like most other classes) revolves around keeping Damage over Time (DoT) effects active with as much uptime as possible, however, this class in particular is extremely complex to master primarily due to the Relentless Focus buff mechanic.

You should start a fight after casting Leeching Strikes, Deadly Cloak and Relentless Focus with:

Endless Hail > Light Attack (LA) > Rearming Trap > LA > Caltrops > LA > Poison Injection > LA > Incap Strike > barswap > LA > Assassin's Scourge.

Assassin's Scourge is the active ability that your Relentless Focus buff transforms into once you have used 5 LA's or HA's. Then swap back to your bow bar as soon as Endless Hail has expired.

The front bar rotation is difficult to standardise because it depends completely on how good you are at animation cancelling. After all your back bar DoTs are applied, the 6-8 seconds you have to spend on your front bar should follow the priority order below:

1. Cast Assassin's Scourge (active effect of Relentless Focus).
2. Refresh the Relentless Focus buff (if it has expired, or if it is about to expire when you need to bar swap)
3. Refresh the Leeching Strikes buff (even if it means you have to swap to your back bar for only 1 ability)
4. Keep up Rending Slashes's bleed effect.
5. Keep up Deadly Cloak.
6. Surprise Attack.

If you want to see a video of this in action (I know it's hard when reading a wall of text) message me in-game or find me on Discord.

When you get good at the rotation, you'll be able to cast an Assassin's Scourge immediately after you finish applying your back bar DoTs and also BEFORE you go back to reapply your DoTs again. This requires almost perfect animation cancelling. Otherwise, just prioritise keeping your DoTs up.

If you want to get good, practice on a dummy multiple times per day. Once it is built into muscle memory, then you can focus on executing boss fight mechanics.

A note on Mechanical Acuity

Running Mechanical Acuity (MA) is by far the greatest DPS increase for a Stamina Nightblade. We intentionally run MA weapons on the front bar and no MA weapons on the back-bar so that we have more control over when the procs happen. By only allowing MA to activate when we are on our front bar, all of our damage over time effects get buffed by the 100% crit proc. Our rotation revolves around keeping our DoTs active anyway.

If MA procs when you are about to bar swap to re-apply your DoTs, it doesn't matter. It is a DPS loss to continue using front bar skills instead of reapplying DoTs, UNLESS the enemy is in execute range. If the enemy is in execute range, continue spamming LA > Killer's Blade until the proc finishes.

If you have difficulty with MA procs and you're not sure what to do, I'd recommend you try Night Mother's Gaze instead and see which gives you better results. Just keep in mind, NMG gives penetration so a solo dummy test might not be the best environment to judge which is best for you. If you do decide to start running NMG, make sure Automaton or War Machine is your other set - don't run 2 penetration sets!

Potions

A meta Nightblade build doesn't have any sources of Major Brutality or Major Savagery, so you need to run Weapon Power potions (increase weapon power, increase weapon crit, restore stamina). Not doing so is a loss of more than 20% of your overall DPS. You make these potions by combining Blessed Thistle, Dragonthorn and Wormwood.

Food

You need to run blue Max Health + Max Stamina food, which gives you the most damage, but also keeps your Health around 17k with all passives. Running Dubious Camoran Throne might be a nice idea if you're struggling with sustain, but you lose far too much Health and changing your enchants / attributes would cost too much DPS. The best way to sustain is to keep 100% uptime on Leeching Strikes - if you have resource management issues then this is most likely what you need to work on.

Mundus

The Warrior for trials and organised groups. The Lover for pugs / random dungeons / solo content. Simple.

Champion Point Tips

Not all people have max CP (myself included) and CP allocation should change based on what content you are running and what your gear / group setup is.

For green CPs, I would recommend you put 75% into Mooncalf and 25% into Tenacity. Once you have 75 points in Mooncalf, focus on getting 75 into Tenacity. The rest don't really matter.

For red CPs, split 50% of your CP's equally to mitigate all types of damage, and then apply further damage mitigation based on what damage type is most likely to kill you. 

For blue CPs:

• I would recommend the Constellation addon in conjunction with Combat Metrics to tell you exactly which CP setup works best for you and your rotation.
• Failing that, split your CP's roughly equally between Thaumaturge, Master-at-Arms, Mighty and Precise Strikes WHILE ALSO keeping 30-36 points in Piercing.
• If you are running Mechanical Acuity, sacrifice points in Thaumaturge, Master-at-Arms or Mighty to get 1-2% extra critical damage bonus from Precise Strikes.

Build Rating