Artery Strike Swordmastery Coen Build

The Blood of Dawnwalker isn’t the most convoluted role-playing game in terms of pure mechanics that we’ve played, but there are extenuating circumstances that add a sneaky amount of complexity to its core gameplay loop, namely the time cost of purchasing skills the requirement of skill manuals and corruption to unlock certain skills and the lack of any respec options. Yes, you will win every fight if you’re simply good enough to perfect parry and dodge all enemies attacks, but since most of us are less than perfect, a good build can weigh the odds more in your favor, and given the aforementioned pitfalls, players may be understandably anxious when it comes to investing their precious money, skill points and time on a build. To that end, this page will detail the Artery Strike-focused build we tested and used to complete The Blood of Dawnwalker!

Page Breakdown¶

Artery Strike Build Overview¶

This build is, as you’ve probably astutely deduced given the page name - revolves around the Artery Strike ability in the Swordmastery tree, and it shouldn’t be hard to see why. At rank four, the ability deals 800% weapon damage and has a 50% to decapitate non-boss foes, killing them outright. We’ve seen damage numbers of 15,000+ with this build (over 25,000~ if you’re willing to risk using the Last Stand ultimate in the Swordsmanship tree). It’s awful hard to lose fights if you’re out-damaging foes to such a silly degree!

In addition to arguably having the best damage-dealing ability in the game, the Swordmastery tree has other mainstays, like max Health, Stamina and Activation Charges and Activation Charge regeneration, which keep you alive longer, allows you to block, dodge and attack more and lets you spam abilities, respectively. Because what’s just as good as doing more damage per hit? Landing those big swings more often!

Even if the damage wasn’t enough of a selling point, the fact that swords (and all Swordmastery skills, really) can be used day and night makes this build extra appealing. In fact, Swordmastery perks and abilities applying at all times makes it an obvious focus for investment, with the Witchcraft and Vampirism trees taking more of a support role.

While the Swordmastery tree takes the starring role, Witchcraft and Vampirism both have useful healing abilities, debuffing abilities and passives that increase your damage output, making them useful compliments These trees may not be as important as Swordsmastery and, by comparison, get much less investment, but that doesn’t mean the skill points we spend in them are consolation prizes - they greatly contribute to the overall build, even if you only get to enjoy their benefits half the time.

How the Artery Strike Build Works¶

Artery Strike is the marquee skill because it deals all the sexy damage and makes the eye-catching screenshots with all the numbers, but it needs a lot of help to reach its full potential. Charge and Adrenaline Rush are both used as supplemental abilities, the former being cheap (one Activation Charge) and it inflicts bleed, which doubles the decapitation chance of Artery Strike. Also, using a cheap ability will proc Adrenaline Rush, increasing your damage and Activation Charge massively for a few seconds, so ideally you’ll get three Activation Charges built up before using Charge + Artery Strike in quick succession. Any ability use procs Adrenaline Rush, by the way, both day and night, so your healing/debuff abilities will also set up Artery Strike’s peak damage (although not its decapitation).

The unsung hero of this build is Walking Fortress, which, when maxed, will restore Activation Charge regeneration and cooldowns by a significant amount - perfect blocks are better, and really it’s a mechanic you’re going to need to be passable at to succeed at higher difficulties in general - you can’t whiff on a half-dozen attacks and expect to come out pretty, but as long as you can get some perfect parries, Walking Fortress (along with perks like Renewed Focus and Restless Blade and passives like Adrenaline Rush.

Charge + Adrenaline Rush with Swordmastery perks and passives is a solid foundation, but the build really takes off when you invest in Vampirism and Witchcraft skills. During the day you’ll have access to your Witchcraft skills, and in both these trees you’ll largely stick to buying whatever perks unlocks more Witchcraft Ability Slots (Forbidden Sigils) or Vampire Ability Slots (Vrakhiri Might). After that, you’ll grab your pick of four abilities.

For Witchcraft you’ll want Soul Stigma as your primary debuff, massively inflating your critical hit chance and moderately improving critical hit damage while also inflicting stun once ranked up. You’ll want to start fights out with this, as it vastly increases your damage output, and with the Unholy Vittality passive you’ll heal 40% of the damage you deal on critical hits, which with the right gear and perks will be pretty much every hit. The Cycle of Ruin passive ability will extend the durations of your Witchcraft skills by 1-3 seconds per hit, and up to 4-5 seconds on a critical hit, meaning you don’t have to worry about Soul Stigma after that first cast. Plus while you have a Witchcraft ability active (which, again, will be all the time), the Unnatural Resilience perk will increase your armor by 25%-50%. With one hex, the ol’ Charge + Artery Strike combo becomes much more potent and Coen gains massive life steal and armor boosts. What’s not to like?

Vampirism works in a similar manner, save that we have three passive abilities bolstering us. Piercing Shriek is our go-to debuff, causing you to deal 15% - 30% more damage to enemies and making them deal less damage to the same degree. Add in a short stun duration and relatively low cooldown and you’ve got a decent AoE debuff (manually target enemies further way to afflict closer targets, too!). Scarlet Shield causes us to heal every time we block, with perfect blocks giving guaranteed health and directional blocks and omniblocks having a chance to proc. Crimson Rush gives us more Active Ability Damage the higher our health is (this means stronger Artery Strike!), and Shred gives us passive bleed chance on every sword and claw attack, giving us more flexibility when to deploy Artery Strike.

All in all, the combat loop is much the same, night and day - use your debuff (Soul Stigma or Piercing Shriek) then get into combat and use Charge + Artery Strike when you’ve built up Activation Charges. You’ll be more durable during the day and will land critical hits much more often thanks to Soul Stigma and Unnatural Resilience, but at night you can always heal with Voracious Bite, and with passable blocking Scarlet Shield is a good source of passive healing.

Build Pros and Cons¶

With this Artery Strike build, you will hit hard, and with supplemental perks, you will regenerate Activation Charges rapidly, meaning you’ll be able to spam them often. While offensively useful, you can’t be hit while using abilities, and any time you find yourself compromised you can just toss out any ability off cooldown to “nope” your way out of enemy attacks. You’ll still need to perfect parry to avoid losing Stamina too fast, and because it’ll vastly increase your Activation Charge generation, so it’s not a completely mindless build, and if you don’t get enough gear that boosts Vampirism health, you may find yourself somewhat squishy against endgame foes on Challenging or Duelist difficulty. Still, there are ways to heal or negate damage, and if you’re not quite as durable as you wish, you can level up past the projected Lv40 goal for this build and invest in perks that’ll help keep you alive… or try to fight more during the day, where you’ll almost certainly prove to be more durable.

Swordmastery Suggested Perks and Abilities¶

Your bread-and-butter skill tree, Swordsmanship will see the majority of your skill point investment. Increasing weapon damage, critical hit chance, Stamina, Health, Activation Charges and regeneration and Swordsmanship ability slots are all just no-brainers for this build.

As a general rule, you’ll want to focus on unlocking skills before worrying about buying later ranks of skills, which are often more expensive and yield comparatively diminishing returns - having all your target skills at rank 1-2 is better than having one or two at ranks 3-4. Some exceptions include Sustained Focus and Master Fencer, which should be prioritized whenever possible. Also Walking Fortress is essential - the sooner you’re at rank 4, the better. The build works fine with Adrenaline Rush, Charge and Artery Strike at lower ranks, with more investment adding more damage, rather than fundamentally changing how the build works.

Witchcraft Suggested Perks and Abilities¶

Pretty standard fare here - focus on Forbidden Sigils as your priority (getting an obligatory rank of Unnatural Resilience along the way) and put at least one rank into each of your abilities so they’re doing something. Getting Soul Stigma, Unholy Vitality and Cycle of Ruin up to rank three ASAP will really help this build, as these three abilities become much stronger at this point.

Vampirism Suggested Perks and Abilities¶

Vampirism is an odd one. You always have access to Voracious Bite and it doesn’t cost you anything - it doesn’t even count as one of your four equipped abilities, it’s just something Coen can do at night, like Shapeshift. Don’t look a gift vrakhiri in the fangs. That being the case, you can have it and Piercing Shriek hotkeyed, allowing us to focus on three passives… which we do.

As usual, you’ll want to prioritize Vrakhiri Might to unlock all four potential Vampiric Ability Slots, just keep in mind that progression in the Vampire tree isn’t gated by skill books, but rather by corruption. One way to boost corruption is by just using Voracioust Bite - the target or setting doesn’t really matter. Eat people. Eat enemies. Eat harmless wildlife. Doesn’t matter. It’ll build corruption. Unlock abilities is also different - again, no skill books, but you do need to find specific sources of Vrakhiri Blood to unlock skills like Piercing Shriek and Scarlet Shield. Check out the linked page for info on where to find this blood and note that while you can technically get it any time past the prologue, some of it may be gated by quest progression or enemy difficulty. On the plus side, getting this Vrakhiri blood gives you one rank in said ability for free, after which the standard corruption mechanic gates the higher ranks.

Piercing Shriek will do everything we need it to with just one rank invested (which, again, will be free), allowing you to focus on Scarlet Shield, Crimson Rush and Shred, the latter of which is fine with just a single rank. Scarlet Shield gets better at healing the more points you spend on it, and Crimson Rush causes you to deal more damage, but just unlocking them should be a substantial enough boost to the build’s combat efficacy at night, so you don’t have to drop a whole lot of Skill Points into them until other trees are taken care of and you’ve got Skill Points and time to burn.

Suggested Gear¶

At the beginning of the game, gear is mostly going to be a matter of whatever you can get your hands on - bigger damage and armour numbers are what matters, especially since you’ll mostly be getting superior (green) and master (blue) drops. Once you do start getting epic (purple) and legendary (gold) drops, you’ll find that they have three or four properties each, respectively, and this is where you need to start getting picky about your gear beyond just damage/armour. Here are the mods you should try to get on your gear as much as possible (in no particular order):

• Swordmastery Ability Cooldown
• Activation Charge Restoration (any)
• Maximum Human Health
• Maximum Vampire Health
• Weapon Damage
• Critical Hit Chance
• Critical Hit Damage

These are the primary mods you want on your weapons, but you likely won’t get all 3-4 mod slots to have these on every bit of gear. Failing that, Maximum Stamina, Supernatural Damage, and Damage Reduction are all nice. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good - anything that boosts your damage output, lowers cooldowns, recovers Activation Charges or boosts your Health and Stamina are pretty decent.