While the typical assassin prefers to stalk its prey from the shadows, the battlefield offers enough distractions to allow Dual Blades to take down an unsuspected target. If you prefer the challenge of using guile before strength and can position yourself to make the most of brief opportunities, these weapons and skills will serve you well.

Attributes

Dual Blades are all about speed. They allow a hero to move quickly, attack quickly, kill quickly and run away quickly. And if something doesn’t go to plan, they have a tendency to get you killed quickly, too. However, rather than offset your hero’s poor health and light armour by investing points in Toughness or Armour, you’ll want to pour everything you can into your attacking Attributes, so you can get the most from every blow you land before you either win the bout or are forced to return to the shadows.

As for whether to favour Strength or Agility, the prevailing wisdom suggests either going all-in with Strength, which allows you to maximise raw Slashing damage, or to invest some of your attribute points into Agility, which will ease some of that raw power through heavier armour - of course, at the cost of there being less of the former.

Weapon Skills

More than with any other weapon, the Dual Bladist must learn to be self-sufficient. While you may need louder, lumbering heroes to come to your aid (so your enemies will be distracted enough that you can slink back to the shadows), you will want to seek out targets on your own and eliminate them quickly. Often, you will want to deploy units that you can also leave to their own devices - which means avoiding enemy units where possible. You are a hero killing machine, with the skills to match. Arguing with enlisted troops, even lowly militias, could get you killed more often than not.

  • Bo-Shurikens: A devastating ranged attack with a great cooldown, that delivers Piercing Damage rather than the overwhelming class favourite, Slashing.
  • Skylark: If you have the element of surprise and are attacking from behind (as you always should with Dual Blades), this skill is an effective opener.
  • Butterfly: Not as immediately effective as Skylark, Butterfly has the added effect of delivering extra damage over time and slowing your enemy’s movement and attacks.
  • Infiltrator: Become invisible, while still able to use your other skills. Taking or causing damage will cause you to become visible again, by which time it should already be too late for your victim.
  • Alchemical Vapours: A simple but effective parlour trick, that will cause you to disappear in a puff of smoke, hopefully leaving your opponent dazed and confused.
  • Great Thunderbolt: The medieval precursor to the flashbang grenade, with less flash offset by a potentially damaging bang.

Ultimate Skills

High damage and long cooldown times are what Ultimate abilities are all about, which is also what Dual Blades characters live for. When the moment to deliver the killing blow comes, make sure you’re ready!

  • The Dance of Death: A The skill that transforms the Dual Blades character from an annoying wasp into a hive of angry bees. Not literally, of course, but the damage this skill unloads is immense.
  • Marked for Death: Not quite as lethal as the Dance of Death, but more assured and likely to land successfully against an agile opponent who knows what they’re up against.

Armour

There are two armour sets to consider with Dual Blades in hand. The first is the Rogue’s Armour set, which with two items equipped increases Piercing and Slashing damage, and with four increases critical hit values. Rather than hitting harder, if you wish to evade longer, the Skirmisher’s Armour Set improves the duration of Alchemical Vapours (two pieces) or reduces Infiltrator cooldown (four pieces).