6 Darkrunner Tips
1. Darkrunner's biggest strength is in bursting someone down 1v1 and gets beaten down badly in group combat
Since I hit lvl 50, I have been enjoying Open World PVP during wars and also when helping my fellow guildmates out. Honestly, there is nothing more satisfying then 3-hit combo-ing my enemies into the dirt, but when it comes to going up against more than 1 person I get crushed everytime. 'Melee glass cannon'
2. Darkrunner's sole goal is to reach an opponent and bash his head in.
Teleport, Drop Back (spin camera to reverse direction), slow and stun break (Bondbreaker and Shrug It Off), multiple closers (Charge, Overwhelm, soon Behind Enemy Lines), multiple pulls that are generally not used (Vicious Implosion, Lasso), and offense from every source. All of these are great mobility tools to get yourself into position to absolute mash the crap out of whoever your single target is.
Stealth to get in position, burst down to seal the deal. It's a top-tier ganker in my opinion for that reason, and very popular in the arena. At the same time, it's a melee class with mediocre defenses and mediocre CC. You get in, you kill someone, and you get out. If an enemy is in a pile of others, you don't have many options, and while you can kill them if your team manages to spread them out and isolate someone, you're not going to be the one to do it.
3. Darkrunner Style? Get to know which style you are going to be playing. 2handed or Dual wield
End game dualwield is just better in my opinion, especially when you consider the hasla weapons because swords give a chance when you get hit to parry the next attack. The 2h axe is just a bleed, which is nice but you don't have near as much survivability. Plus the dual wield passive in battlerage will count for parrying ranged attacks which will help you kill primevals, your worst enemy, a lot easier.
I have heard a good suggestion of running a 2handed nodachi or a 2handed spear (more RNG crits, spears have a chance to ignore all defense and buffs)
As for gear, almost always leather. Leather set bonus is really good. Plate works ok sometimes but leaves you very weak against mages.
4. The Darkrunner ROTATION
Your opener it should always be stalkers mark, the 20% dmg bonus is ridiculous.
As for your rotation, there are a couple very good combos. One of the one-trick ponies is:
Shadowtep, Leech (sleep ability from auramancy), pop PVP-nodachi (I'll explain this later), dropback, charge, triple slash(only one hit),sunder earth,whirlwind slash,overwhelm, shadowsmite, precision strike.
Now this is a very long rotation, but during the entirity of this rotation any enemy who doesn't have auramancy or a pvp cloak will be stunlocked.
There are all kinds of variations to that rotation, but this chain is like a one-trick-pony thing. You can just overwhelm->shadowsmite->precisionstrike if you want a quick amount of damage in.
This is the basic stuff that I have been using myself, and should help you get started... but not to say there aren't better combos out there.
5. Darkrunner Nodachi
The pvp-nodachi is very powerfull, you can buy it at the honor point trader, and you can swap mid-combat to it. I suggest swapping to it to pop the use, then swapping back to your main hand. You can keybind your weapons on your hotbar to do this efficiently.
6. More Rotation Info
Lasso is a situational skill, I love it to pull enemies who flee back to me. You can replace this with either terryfying roar or thwart as you see fit.
Now for the last part, your buffs, freerunner is a no-brainer, insane mobility + tons of agility. Battlefocus is vital in any engagement to get the extra parry (which can pop the passive from battlerage to get your CD's back). YOUR STRONGEST BUFF IS BY FAR FRENZY. ANY DARKRUNNER SHOULD USE THIS!
Frenzy is insanely powerfull against archers. against anyone really. It can stack up to 10 times, at 10 stacks, you will hit 6k precision strikes even with terrible gear. Some people say it's broken, I think it is as well situationally. It comes with a stun after 35 seconds which is a downside, but in those 35 seconds if you couldn't kill your enemy, you deserve to die really.
Things have been quite crazy with the server issues and also trying to get to 50 so that I can stream some solid content and make some great videos for the Darkrunner class. I will be working on getting a regular schedule going soon!
Until then, cheers, and thanks for reading!
