Deathblow Striker Build Guide for Lost Ark

The Striker was originally introduced as the male class counterpart to Wardancer. With that, you will find many similarities in their playstyles. They share a handful of skills and their Identity bar or Elemental Orbs. What sets them apart is their engravings and Esoteric skills. In this guide, we will be focusing on builds using the Deathblow engraving. With this build, you will be far more burst damage oriented than other Striker builds.

Investing in the Deathblow engraving slows down the playstyle a bit, opting into a more burst-oriented damage profile. This can be extremely valuable against bosses that move frequently or have mechanics that create forced downtime. The effect increases the maximum Elemental Orbs available by one (so four total) while also causing your Esoteric Skills to consume ALL available orbs on use. Additionally, the damage of these skills is increased by 17%/26%/35% per Elemental Orb consumed. This results in using fewer Esoteric Skills in your build than the other Striker builds (two vs. typically three to four), but the impact of these skills is MUCH higher.

When facing a new boss, it is a good idea to at first take the time to figure out how the boss moves around. Some bosses stand still a lot and are easy to position around, but others move quite a bit. This build heavily rewards knowing the details of every encounter so you can time your burst windows effectively. Additionally, all of your skills are Back Attacks, incentivizing you to find correct positioning behind the boss at all times. This is further emphasized when running the Master of Ambush engraving, which will be discussed more in the Engravings section of this guide. Unlike other MMOs, the amount of healing you can receive is extremely limited in Lost Ark, so it is important to do damage while taking as little in return as possible. In endgame content, even the number of healing potions that you can use is limited per encounter, so you cannot count on healing yourself with potions.

In this Striker build, you will not need any other supportive buffs in your group to function. With that said, you do fit very nicely as a part of any Burst Synergy groups due to Lightning Whisper and the Fatal Lightning tripod.

Every class has a wide variety of skills to chose from with Tripods that can change how each skill performs. The Striker is able to select eight skills to be on their action bar alongside their Awakening skill. The Striker's Identity skill is the Elemental meter. These are the Elemental Orbs you will be building and spending to execute your damage. Remember with this build that every Esoteric skill will consume ALL of your available Orbs, no matter what its original cost is. Below, we will discuss our picks for skills for general purposes and single target fights.

For most content, you are going to want to bring massive area of effect damage to help you clear out groups of enemies, as well as good mobility to help move around quickly. This build is a pretty standard two-spender build that can be used with either class engraving effectively.

1. 252 Skill Point Tree;
2. 268 Skill Point Tree;
3. 284 Skill Point Tree;
4. 296 Skill Point Tree;
5. 312 Skill Point Tree.

This build of Striker centers most around your big two Esoteric Skills, Esoteric Skill: Call of the Wind God, Esoteric Skill: Blast Formation. Both of these have immense clearing power with quite good area coverage. You can simply use them on cooldown regardless of how many Orbs you currently have. Particularly in Chaos Dungeons, you will be able to fire these off very frequently using the reset orbs and make quick work of any mobs in your path.

Moon Flash Kick and Vicious Tiger Dance are your bread and butter builders. Their damage and coverage is very strong in their own right, but the true strength of these skills is the Identity Gain they provide. This is especially true if you can snag a Wealth Skill Rune to buff either or both of these skills. The more Orbs you can generate, the more damage your Spenders will be doing!

Berserk Circle and Lightning Whisper round out the rest of your clearing skills. These actually come close to rivaling the strength of your Esoteric Skills. Both of these will help clear screens of mobs while waiting on your other cooldowns. The Fatal Lightning Tripod on Lightning Whisper in particular is also a huge help when you encounter bosses or elites, increasing their chance to be crit by an additional 10% on top of the base 8%.

Swift Wind Kick is slotted in for a nice grouping skill. Most of the enemies you spin through with this will not be completely eliminated, but it does a great job of holding everything still for you to follow up with one of your big damage skills!

Finally, we top off our set of skills with Storm Dragon Kick for some mobility. This slot is often a personal preference between this and Sky Shattering Blow, the latter having the added benefit of being a counter attack if you need it.

For single target focused content such as Guardian Raids, you will want to bring a skill set that is focused on dealing the maximum damage to a boss. For the Striker, you can use the same build for both class engravings, rather it is the playstyle that varies.

1. 252 Skill Point Tree;
2. 268 Skill Point Tree;
3. 284 Skill Point Tree;
4. 300 Skill Point Tree;
5. 312 Skill Point Tree.

In this build, your main focus is to buff your Esoteric Skill as much as you can. This is accomplished by spending as many Orbs as possible per skill, and ensuring to apply Lightning Whisper's crit resistance debuff beforehand. At low levels of Specialization early on in gearing, this is entirely hinged around the cooldown of Lightning Whisper. An example of this burst sequence is very simple.

1. Build to just under 4 Elemental Orbs (3.5 is a good breakpoint).
2. Lightning Whisper
3. Sweeping Kick
4. Esoteric Skill: Lightning Tiger Strike or Esoteric Skill: Tiger Emerges

If Sweeping Kick becomes desynced, it is OK to skip it and simply use it outside the Lightning Whisper debuff whenever it comes off cooldown.

As you reach higher levels of Specialization and obtain some Wealth runes to attach to your builders, you will be able to fit both Esoterics into one Lightning Whisper windows. That ends up looking like this:

1. Build to 3-4 Elemental Orbs
2. Lightning Whisper
3. Esoteric Skill: Lightning Tiger Strike
4. Sweeping Kick to generate some more Identity Meter
5. Esoteric Skill: Tiger Emerges at 2-3 Orbs

You will continue to use Esoteric Skill: Tiger Emerges as often as possible as long as you have 2-3 Elemental Orbs. Because of the increased orb generation from Specialization and Wealth runes, you will end up overcapping your meter if you do not dump some in between Lightning Whispers.

The remaining skills not mentioned yet are used as often as possible to contribute to your Orb generation. Moon Flash Kick is the most important, empowered by the White Flame Kick tripod to generate massive Identity every use.

Be sure to be constantly thinking about your Sky Shattering Blow usage as well. This skill is very powerful for both Identity gain and the party buff provided by Abundant Resources and Blessing of the Wind. However, it is also your counter ability, which can be priceless to the group if timed and executed well.

This build has a heavy reliance on high Specialization, and thus will be your primary focus when gearing. Crit is your best off stat on anything you cannot find Specialization on. After reaching the 800-1200 Specialization range, you will feel the rotation become much more manageable, and you can start adding on a bit more Crit. Most build end up with around a 75/25 split of Specialization/Crit.

There are three major engravings that are extremely valuable to this build, all of which you want to reach Level 3 on as soon as you can. The order of priority is:

1. Deathblow (at least Level 1 is absolutely required for this build)
2. Grudge
3. Master of Ambush

If you are having trouble finding accessories with these Engravings, there are a few other options. Keen Blunt Weapon in particular is quite strong. Even though you are prioritizing Specialization on your gear, Lightning Whisper provides so much baked in Crit that you are able to make great use of this engraving. Cursed Doll and Adrenaline are also nice fillers while you are on the hunt for gear with the big three on them.

Preemptive Strike gets an honorable mention as well. This is normally an overlooked Engraving, as it has essentially no value when fighting bosses, but it performs exceptionally in Chaos Dungeons and world content. Although it may be tempting to pickup a defensive Engraving like Heavy Armor or Fortitude, we highly recommend you avoid using them because Engravings are a large source of increased damage that you would be missing out on otherwise.

Pets can have stats that boost your character and for this build we recommend using a pet that boosts your Specialization and Max life.

There are not any consumables that would be considered "best" for this build. Rather, there are a handful of consumables that are situationally very valuable. Major HP Potion and Panacea are commonly used to help survivability. Clay Grenade (Stagger), Destruction Bomb (Weak Point), and Dark Grenade (Damage) are commonly used to help with their corresponding fight checks if you are having trouble meeting the requirements. Adrophine Potion can also be used for a flat damage increase, but at the cost of some health. Your choices will vary depending on what your specific party or raid needs.

Card Sets are a rather late-game part of Lost Ark and can require significant time and investment in order to reach the leveled-up benefits of any deck. This build does not require any particular deck to be effective but does benefit from any of the damaging increasing decks. Your end game goals for card sets should be either Lostwind Cliff (12) for the Crit Chance, or Light of Salvation (12+) for the Holy damage conversion and buff. Unless you have the aforementioned decks, we recommend using anything that boosts your Max Health such as World Bosses or Armory sets.