Shadow Warrior
When Nagarythe was riven by civil war, most of the Elves there sided with the Witch King, later becoming Dark Elves. Those faithful to the Phoenix King swore to fight Malekith and his treacherous forces. These ill-fated Elves became the Shadow Warriors. The darkest, most sinister and brutal of all the High Elves. The Shadow Warriors are masters of ambush and guerrilla warfare. They strike swiftly and noiselessly with deadly accurate volleys from their longbows, before charging forth to slay any survivors with a flurry of blades.
Mechanics:
Shadow Warriors are High Elves, and as we all know High Elves are a little bit… Different. In that sense, Shadow Warrior’s don’t disappoint as they’ve apparently spent their entire lives training three separate styles of fighting. Any other race would’ve called them “stances,” but Shadow Warriors call them “strategic maneuvers.” See what I mean by different? All three stances are available right off the bat and include Scout Stance, Assault Stance and Skirmish Stance. Each stance has its own unique style and corresponding abilities that may be used with it. For example, the Festering Arrow ability can only be used in Scout Stance, while Takedown, a ranged snare ability, can be used in both Scout Stance and Skirmish Stance, but not Assault Stance. You can only be in one Stance at a time, or no Stance at all, but you can “stance dance” as has been made popular in other games. If you want to use an ability that’s only available in another Stance, simply switch the appropriate Stance and fire away. There is a short cooldown period, about 5 seconds, associated with the Stances so it’s not all great news, but it’s definitely worth it for the increased flexibility. So, as you can see, choosing which “strategic maneuver” you wish to employ is an important decision that will greatly impact your play-style.
In addition to their Stances, Shadow Warriors have a myriad of ranged-oriented attacks and abilities. Some abilities, like Distracting Shot, provide utility, which in this case is a detaunt and damage debuffer. Most of their other abilities though focus on dealing as much damage as possible. Abilities like Festering Arrow spoken about above are the Shadow Warrior’s main source of damage output.
The three mastery lines for Shadow Warriors are, unsurprisingly, The Scout, Assault and The Skirmisher. The Scout focuses on longer range and powerful attacks, Assault focuses on melee DPS and defense and The Skirmisher focuses on mobility and critical hits.
A Shadow Warrior’s job is, as you might expect, to stand back and let others take the damage while they dish out the pain from afar. With potent single-target and area-effect ranged abilities, there’s generally very little reason to be up on the front lines. However, if a player chooses to go down the Assault career mastery, their game-play experience may change quite a bit. In that mastery line there are definite advantages to being in the fray as the class plays much more like a hybrid between a ranged DPS class and your typical melee DPS class. No matter how you choose to play a Shadow Warrior though, you can be certain that you’ll make those nasty Destruction healers work quite a bit harder.
Shadow Warriors wear light armor and use single-handed weapons and bows.