A complete guide to decapitating your enemies in a single blow.
How to Decapitating Your Enemies in a Single Blow
Introduction
Welcome to Stoneshard Two-handed Sword Highlander Guide. A complete guide to quickly decapitating all your enemies. If you are looking for a quick build you should head over to the Sample Builds section of this guide.
Starting Options
Until custom character creation is avaliable our first choice is picking one of the pregenerated characters. Since we are gonna be focusing on melee combat our choice is pretty much narrowed down to characters with a higher than average STR score and a useful trait.
Jorgrim, the Reaver
- Affinity: Axes, Swords, Maces, Shields.
- Unique trait: Berserker Frenzy (increased Weapon Damage and Crit Efficiency for 10 turns after every kill).
Stat allocation for Jorgrim is almost perfect. Strength is going to be our main focus on this build and having some extra vitality is always useful. What really makes Jorgrim shine is his trait. As soon as you drop your first enemy your damage will ramp up which will allow you to clean enemies even faster. We will be attempting to one hit KO our enemies with this build and this trait will definetively help us achieve this.
The only downside is that Jorgrim does not start the game with any greatsword skills avaliable to learn. This means we are gonna have to hunt for a Greatsword book in order to really get started. You can always reload the save game or rest until the shopkeeper has one for sale.
Custom Character (Not avaliable)
Creating a custom character is not possible right now. When it does become avaliable we can safely assume that we will be able to customize our starting attributes and select a starting trait from a broader list.
Skill Branches
We will be focusing our build on a single skill branch: Greatswords.
Our main priority will be picking up heroic charge, feast of steel and Arc Cleave. After that we should try to get as many passives as possible since they contribute greatly to our damage and resource management.
Feint Swing lets you trick an enemy with high Block or Dodge, delivering a guaranteed strike with slightly lower damage. This will mostly be used against bandits that use Raise Shield or Fencer's Stance. We wont see much use of this skill and sadly it is a prequisite for our main skill.
Heroic Charge allows you to instantly close the distance to an enemy, dealing bonus damage and increasing our crit chance for each tile traveled. It will be our main skill and is greatly improved by Courage passive. Automatically refreshing the cooldown of Heroic Charge on kill.
Feast of Steel lowers you damage but increases your Crit Chance by 100%. This combined with a high base crit chance and the bonus from Heroic Charge means we will be criting on almost all our attacks.
Parry increases Block Chance and Block Power with each blocked attack. It also allows you to perform a guaranteed Counter on block. We will be saving this skill for tough enemies that wont die with a 1 or 2 hit combo. Revanche passive gives us 25% cooldoiwn reduction when Parry is active and we manage to block a skill. It can be useful if we manage to get ourselves in a situation where Heroic Charge and Arc Cleave are on cooldown but honestly this shouldn't be happening.
And finally, Arc Cleave strikes up to five adjacent enemies with high Bleed Chance and a wooping +92% damage. If anyone managed to survive heroic charge this will definetively kill them.
Fight to de Death allows us to cycle through heroic charge and arc cleave constantly and provides us with a nice passive bonus to accuracy.
Recklessness provides us with bonus crit chance and counter chance per adjacent enemy. This build will focus on 1HKO our enemies so we wont get to abuse this passive that much. It will still come in handy when heroic charge fails to deliver a fatal blow and we have to rely on Arc Cleave.
Taste of Victory is our final passive and the one that makes energy management a non-issue on this build. +7.5% Energy restored per kill.
Equipment
Whenever we get a critical hit with a greatsword the damage will be done in an arc to all the enemies adjacement to our target instead of being single target. Because of this we will be focusing on getting our critical strike as high as possible in order to reset heroic charge and guarantee we can 1HKO our enemies. Energy will also be important since Taste of Victory gives us back 7.5% energy back per kill and we want to get enough energy back to be able to constatnly cycle through Heroic Charge and Arc Cleave.
The Mail Cof provides good protection without incurring almost any penalties. We do not want to accrue too many Energy penalties since Taste of Victory passive will be giving us back percentage energy on kill.
- Recommended Enchantment: Healthy +7, Energy +8
The Royal Ranger Gambeson provides adequate protection and some incredible resistances. It gives us 10% Nature resistance. This is 10% reduced damage from Fire, Frost, Shock, Poison & Caustic damage. It doesnt penalize our Energy too much and it keeps our noise level on acceptable levels.. Normally we wouldn't care about noise level but since we want to engage our enemies from 5 tiles away we do not want them popping up right next to us when we open dungeon doors.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +7, Energy +11
The Knightly Girdle is the only belt in the game with protection. It helps us increase our counter chance and helps us offset our Greatsword's fumble chance a tiny amount. Worth mentioning is the 3% Physical Resistance. This is 3% damage reduced from Slashing, Piercing, Crushing and Rending damage.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +5, Energy +10
The Split Vambraces are one of the few glove items that dont provide energy penalties while still retaining some protection and basic resistances. The main reason we are going for these though is the increased accuracy and lower fumble chance. Greatswords tend to accrue high fumble chance so we will be attempting to lower it when possible.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +6, Energy +10
We will be picking up some better protection on our boots to compensate our lower than average protection. The Sergeant Greaves helps us achieve this and also increases our resistances.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +6, Energy +9
Not exactly the best name for a greatsword. The Longsword provides adequate damage, a good block chance, block power and a nice accuracy boost. The kicker here is the +3% Crit Chance that gets doubled when we buff with Feast of Steel. We will be enchanting this with extra Crit Chance of course. As you can probably tell by now our Protection is not very high. However, our constantly high burst damage combined with a Life Drain enchantment means we will be always in top shape.
- Recommended Enchantments: Life Drain +9%, Crit Chance +3%
Early on you might want to pick up a Backpack for the extra inventory space. But once gold stops being a problem you will want to go back to your trusty Worn Cloak. Besides providing a small bonus to Physical Resistance it has an extra benefit that the backpack cannot provide. It can be further enchanted.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +4,Energy +6
If you've been playing as Jorgrim you will get some milleage out of his starting amulet. But eventually you are gonna want to head over to the Witch's hut and get yourself a Fang Amulet. Appart from providing us 2% to Physical, Nature & Magic resistances (Basically all the damage types in the game) it gives us 2% extra Crit Chance which gets doubled by Feast of Steel.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +5, Energy +8
Up until now we have managed to keep all our resistances in the green except for one. Shock Resistance. We will be using 2x Silver Aquamarine Rings to offset our fear of lightning. These rings are the only ones in the game so far that provide a bonus to 5 different secondary stats making them a Best in slot for a handful of builds.
- Recommended Enchantment: Health +6, Energy +11
Cursed Items give you a curse in exchange for a positive effect on the item. Under normal circumstances cursed items are too detrimental and cannot be used without eventually dying. Mostly because they cannot be unequipped unless you use a disenchantment scroll (Which wipes your cursed item completely of both the negative and the positive effects). There is a cursed item that gives us +15% Crit chance. I will be updating the guide as soon as I can get my hands on one of these fabled rings.
Combat
Combat with the Highlander style is pretty straight forward. As soon as we spot an enemy we should get almost at charging range and buff with Feast of Steel followed by a Heroic Charge to the face. 90% of the time we can safely shout off with his head and get our energy back.. Notice how Feast of Steel gets its duration extended by 2 rounds and our Weapon Damage and Crit efficency increases thanks to Jorgrims passive. This bonus stacks with itself and lasts 10 rounds so performing multiple kills in a 10 round window will give us an amazing damage increase.
Here is a quick example of how most fights turn out:
The fun thing begins when we get ambushed by bandits or other enemies that like to spread themselves appart. Since Heroic Charge damage scales with distance we get to ping pong between them and watch our damage go completely bonkers. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between different targets always go for the ones farthest away. Since you can always bounce back from them into a different target after killing them. Rabbits and other neutral animals can be used for this purpose as well. If you somehow mess up or you are RNG cursed you can always Arc Cleave your enemies into oblivion.
Sample Builds
Highlander
This is our main build. It will allow us to quickly dispatch enemies in a 1 or 2 hit combo at most. Resetting our cooldowns and givies us our energy back on kills. Life Drain will keep our HP topped out and our focus on Energy enchantments means we will always have enough energy to heroicly charge our way through.
- Character: Jorgrim
- Ability Points: All into Strength
- Greatsword Skills: Feint Swing, Heroic Charge, Courage, Feast of Steel, Arc Cleave, Taste of Victory, Fight to de Death.
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Gameplay Tips