Swashbuckler solo/leveling AA?

I wanted to try out the Swashbuckler and I began looking for an AA build.
Is there a build that will allow me to solo effectively while still being able to put out some pretty good damage with the groups I join for dungeons?
Also, what are our main stats that I should be focusing on (PvE Server)?
Please be careful with any acronyms as I've literally been playing this for maybe 3 weeks, and I wanted to try out a melee DPS character.

Here is my theory after trying out many different AP combinations while leveling up a swashy a few months ago. You can do all kinds of different builds, but I found that the combination of fast leveling, and limited group play makes certain AP abilities more useful than others.

I recommend to place the points in the following order:
(1) 1 point in pick pocket
(5) 4 points in agility
(6) 1 point in walk the plank
(10) 4 points in strength
(14) 4 points in torporous strike
(22) 8 points in blackguard's defense
(26) 4 more points in torporous strike
(30) 4 points in blackguard's luck

At this point respec, and allocate this way, and switch to using one-handed style:
(1) 1 point in pick pocket
(5) 4 points in agility
(6) 1 point in walk the plank
(10) 4 points in wisdom
(14) 4 points in lunge reversal
(20) 6 points in freehand reversal
(28) 8 points in unencumberance
(30) 2 coule

Adding points again:
(34) 4 points in strength
(38) 4 points in torporous strike
(42) 4 points in blackguard's defense
(50) 8 points in blackguard's luck

When you hit level 70:
(57) 7 more points in walk the plank
(61) 4 points in agl run speed thing
(67) 6 points in avast ye
(69) 2 points in sailwind
(70) 1 point in one of the existing


Doing it this way has a few advantages due to the way you will be leveling up.

• Get walk the plank (WTP) early. This turns the mob around, and lets you get in 2 back attacks with only 1 point spent on it. You will not get your third back attack until level 57, so one point is good enough till then. The mob also will not be hitting you with melee while turned.
• Start down the strength line after WTP, to gain a new attack (button to click), then defense. These two both directly affect soloing ability early on more so than run speed or auto-proc damage from wisdom line. You also gain the advantage of dual wielding for a while.
• When you reach 30 AP's, swap out 24 points in strength to go all the way down the wisdom line, and begin using a single one-handed weapon. Coule is really powerful adding a bunch of defensive and offensive skills. And a single master crafted weapon with wisdom will do about the same damage as a strength-line dual wielder, but with higher defense, parry, and added damage proc. You should hit 30 AP's around level 30-35.
• Go back through the strength line adding the extra attack, defense, and melee crit until you reach 50 AP points, which should be around level 40-45. You will stick with this setup until you hit 70, at which point you may decide to respec everything, or to add-in the agility line.
• The other option is to do the agility line after respecing in wisdom. I would not recomend this since one of the abilities is run-speed, wasted points overall. The next is a from-behind proc, wasted fighting solo where you will be facing the front most of the time. But the final agility power 19 points later (keep the five points for WTP, no matter what!) is very nice for solo'ing, since it lets you get in all your attacks faster. I think strength is a better choice for the solo-oriented swashy leveling up.
• Many have prefered not to use the wisdom line since you must single-weild. A few advantages are and auto-damage proc, only having to buy one nice master crafted weapon per tier, and the higher defense you get from wisdom. Until you equip two really nice duel-wield weapons and with the 70+ equipment, procs, etc., wisdom-single-wield does as good damge as dual wield.

I hope these suggestions help out and good luck to you!

The poster above me makes some good points, but for me personally once I reached 30 AAs I decided to respec down the INT line to get Feign. Have 100% feign death makes adventuring SO much easier. Most of the mobs I fight are easy to kill, but when that random quest requires me to kill a group of Heroics being able to pick each one off one by one makes it a lot easier. Your DPS will suffer, however.

The INT line also has advantages in groups. You will garner a lot less hate due to all the Hate Mods and when you DO gain aggro, just Feign Death and start over.

Everything else the guy mentioned is good advice. I'm just giving you an alternate route if you want increase survivability.

So when you say 1h playstyle are you talking like a high damage sword and a shield?

Currently right now my characters AAs are all the way down in Strength and then I am working on agility atm.

So would I be better off repeccing as you say in the post?

One handed means a single-handed weapon equiped in the primary weapon slot, with nothing in the secondary slot.

The wisdom line require the offhand to be empty in order for the effects to apply. Those effects add enough double-attack to bring damage back up to the level dual weiding would give you, assuming equally good weapons. Using a shield would take away the damage from the second weapon, but you would not gain the effects from the wisdom line since your offhand has something in it (a shield). The high-level equipment changes things. But until you get to level 70+, wisdom with offhand empty is an effective way to go.

As far as wether you are better off respeccing... I am suggesting this as a way to go and listed observed benefits. But only you can tell from parsing your fights what the effects are with your playstyle and equipment. With mine, wisdom outdamaged strength until I hit 70 and I only had to buy one master crafted weapon per tier instead of two.

I have read this carefully as I am a solo style player and have been wondering about the best setup for my style of play. I will try this tonight and will respec and follow your line of progression.
One question comes to mind, what type of 1H do you recommend? Slash or pierce ? As you said, going with one weapon will save you from having to buy two weapons every teir but if I go with one type then my skill in the other will be lacking when I switch back to dual wield.
Thank you.

You want to get your skills up in both piercing and slashing, so alternate each tier which type of master crafted weapon you buy. You only need to use the old-tier weapon for 10 kills or so a level to raise the skill. You use the new current tier weapon for the other fights and for fighting the named mobs, etc.

Prior to being able to fully spec down the wisdom line with walk-the-plank (need 30 APs) you should be dual-wielding.

Also what about the Swashbuckler Tree? I was thinking of putting points in Style in order to get the AOE Avoid ability at the bottom, which I understand is good for raiding.

As far as the skills not being leveled adequately -- once you get up to level 67 or so you can attack the training wall with a level 1 tin dirk or shortsword and go /afk overnight to bring your skill from 5 to 350. The AE Block at the end of the potency line is among the best in game, because it doesn't dispel when your group members take damage. The duration is short but has a myriad of uses for both named content and any raid content that has an annoying or deadly AoE (trash and named alike).

Ribleteto, thanks for the awesome suggestions, and taking the time to spell out the reasons for your suggested path. I am thinking of trying this path on my new swashy, but I am concerned about the fencer dps drop (if any). Do the bonuses really add up (I don't mind taking a bit of a dps hit, but not a huge one) when you consider gleaming strike x2 and vampiric handles x2? Does the fencer line make up for losing 2 procs?

Swashbuckler tree:

• Reach is the most useful for soloing, since it allows a new way to kite. Reach is also awsome for groups, so that you can hit everything all the time.
• Style is easy to argue for with the really nice reuse timer reduction for two of your key abilities. The AOE avoid is situational, but has been incredibly useful once in a great while. On raids, it's use comes up much more often. But if if you are raiding, you will have three full lines anyways...
• The others are less useful, though when solo the debuffing probably helps.

I personally recomend Reach first for the all-around usefulness. Style second to get the reuse timer reductions. That is worth a ton of DPS! By the time you are worried about a third line, you should already have a good idea what you want to do.

Another thing I recomend is that when you hit level 70, you should respec your swashy line to steal 20 points to put into the Rogue AP lines. All the Rouge abilities IMO are more important than any of the swashy lines. By level 70 you should have 50 points into swashy, so shifting 20 of them is not that big of a deal.

Does the wisdom line do as good of damage as the dual-weild style? Below level 70 it does. The 68% doubleattack does more damage than a secondary weapon, and the auto-damage from the first wisdom power does more damage than weapon procs. I found even at level 80 with Master Crafted weapons, and quested gear (no instance gear) that dual-weild only did marginally better damage in the right group setup, and did somewhat better in Raids. After I started getting the "good stuff" I switched to a dedicated DPS setup for dualweild. Solo, wisdom is the way to go until you get level 80 instance/raid gear and good weapons.

Here is the biggest reason of all why it does not matter before end-game equipment:

• Most solo fights last only as long as it takes to click half of your CA's. You only get a few auto-attack hits during that whole time, and they are only going to be 20% or less of your damage. Until you start fighting things that live longer, autoattack is just not that important.

I have been following Ribleteto's set-up since lvl 36 and I am sold on it. I had my doubts too and also wondered how a single weapon could be better than dual wield, but now I see the big difference. The double attack hits so often that it looks like it's constant and the added defense has helped me survive fights I shouldn't have. Yellow con's are much easier than before. I havn't put any points into the Swashbuckler line yet. Please let me know when to invest in those.
I am at lvl 41 and have 42 AA's and I'm tearing up Steamfont. Am I behind on AA's for my level ? I wonder because I don't kill any real named mobs and don't do heroic quests, so to me it seems that I'm behind.
Thank you Ribleteto for your great AA set-up.

The only AA's you need for soloing anything are Boot Dagger and Walk the Plank. Then set up a hotbar with your skills laid out in order so you can spin your target around, Boot Dagger to go invis and then use your invisible attack to stun him, cheap shot to stun some more, and then your aoe stun. Mix in backstabs and heavy attacks between those skills and most targets should die before they come out of stun. They'll never land a single hit on you. For named or anything else that gives you trouble, just snare and use ranged attacks until your skills reset. If all goes well, and it usually does, each target should die in under 12 seconds making for vert fast effective soloing.
Put the rest of your points into crits or whatever will increase general dps. Str/Agi lines are generally favored by most swashies. In the other tree poisons or debuffs. Personally I am fond of inspiration AA, but with most swashies using slower weapons these days many of us are finding Inspiration less and less effective.

I found your suggestions helpful, Ribleteto, and I even went further. I switched to the wisdom path at 25 AA's rather than 30, finding the resulting bonuses worth giving up walk the plank.

I had a question; you said walk the plank lets you get in 2 back attacks, and I wondered what you meant. I only seem to get in one back attack with it, and I'm wondering if you were saying one for that and one for your iniitial attack from stealth and then one with walk the plank? Or am I doing something wrong. I can get in two back attacks using cheap shot and running behind the mob.

At this point, I've just gotten 30 AA's, and I'm considering forgoing walk the plank altogether, so i can fill out the strength tree faster. Walk the plank is fun, but it doesn't always work. In a group it's not necessary, soloing cheap shot works except against heroics, and against those, well, there are plenty of other good attacks to use from the front.

Thanks for your original illuminaing post.

I am glad the achievement progression suggestion helped out.

Not sure why you are having trouble getting two non-frontal attacks before the mob turns back around with WTP at level 1. Are you queuing up your first attack while WTP is casting? And queing the second while the first is casting? Both of the early-level positionals are fast casting, with the 1/2 second delay between casts being more important than cast time. Level 1 WTP gives you 2 seconds before the mob turns back around. Later, when you have 8 points in WTP (3 seconds) and the final agility line ability you can get three positionals in before the mob turns back.

You should be able to cast WTP / Rear attack + agi debuff / Flank or rear attack + mitigation debuff

Thanks for your help. I do queue up spells. Perhaps I've been doing the two back attacks in the wrong order? I've been trying:

WTP / Flank or rear attack + mitigation debuff / Rear attack + agi debuff

When I get a chance, I'll respec to get WTP back and experiment with it. I'm still tempted to try a pure Str/Wis build, as I can get in back shots using cheap shot (albeit not against heroic mobs).

I have been finding the walk the plank does nothing about 40% of the time currently (level 20) well it does do the little bit of damage, but it does not turn the mob.

As for timing, if I get it to turn I have found that cheapshot is the simplest to make sure I get all three positionals in (2 back, 1 flanking). But the failure rate seems pretty horrible

Walk the Plank can be buggy at times, it will hit but the mob does not apper to turn but you can still get off you back attacks. Now with my Swash at lvl 80 and 8 points into WtP I get resisted very rarely and more times than not the mob does not appear to turn but I can stull run a full gambit of back attacks on it.

Chune wrote:

Chune,
Take another look at your abilities. At level 20 you only have two abilities requiring either back or flank to use. First use Viscerate (10) from the back, then use Gut Slice (19) from the back or side. You will not get another from-the-back attack until you hit level 57 for Lung Puncture. What is the other attack you thought was required to be from the back or flank?

Another point is that using WTP, then immediately using cheap shot is a waste. WTP keeps the mob from melee'ing against you for 2-3 seconds (depends on how many points in WTP), and cheap shot keeps the mob stuned for another 2.5+ seconds. Never waste this by having both in effect at the same time. You can also time the attacks so that you use tham right before the mob auto-attacks for a small extra boost.

A third point is that when solo'ing you are often killing mobs faster than your abilities refresh. Not all refresh at the same rate, so you will develop patterns to use in a creature rich area. The from stealth attack, WTP, back attack, double attack, cold throw, torporous strike, and at level 28 triple attack are all on 30 second timers. The frontal attack Poke (15) is on a 20 second timer. Cheap shot, Edged Swipe (15), flank/back attack Gut Slice (19), and snare attack Undercut (22) are on 10 second timers. For maximum sustained DPS over an extended period in a creature rich area, you need to get in more Gut Slice attacks, which also debuffs the mob's mitigation. You have three ways to temporarily get behind or flank the mob for the attack.

Thanks ribleteto,
For giving me a guidline on what seems to be an overlooked class.

I have a 66 Fury on Oasis, and I have not been to happy with the character. I have went through almost all classes in alts not really exceeding 40. Untill I created a simple SWash to waste some time. Now after reading this tread I wish I had started a swash as my main.
(by overlooked, I mean there is not one main in our guild)

I will create a new character and see how far it will go.

thanks for the great advice Ribleteto!
Fokul 66 Fury