Rapier PvP Guide

Evade

Evade is the Grace tree’s bread and butter ability. With a short cooldown, high burst damage, and the capacity to dodge enemy abilities and attacks, Evade is an incredibly powerful ability that has a very high skill ceiling. This entire build is built around using Evade to advance upon and mix up your opponent. Because the Evade cooldown is so short (6 seconds), and each of the four passives under Evade bring so much value to the table, Evade becomes a powerful tool. Crescendo is by far the best passive under Evade, cutting the already low cooldown of 6 seconds into a fraction of that.

Passives

• Breathe In
  • Gain 20 stamina immediately on use.
• Allegro
  • Gain 20% movement speed for 3 seconds on use.
• Adagio
  • Evading forward gains 15% increased damage on your next light attack. Ends on hit or after 1 second.
• Crescendo
  • Individual successful light attacks reduce the cooldown of this ability by 30% each.

Riposte

Riposte is a mandatory pick up for the Rapier in most PvP builds. When an attack is blocked with Riposte, the rapier player takes none of the damage from the attack, becomes invulnerable for a short period, and follows up the counter with a 2 second stun (after taking the passive Lasting Consequence). Pro Tip: This 2 second stun is just enough time to quickly dodge behind your opponent and perform a heavy attack strike with backstab damage. Riposte will be used by high level players to avoid hard cc and high damaging abilities.

Passives

• Insult to Injury
  • If the Riposte is triggered successfully, all your attacks become uninterruptible for 3 seconds.
• Priority
  • Reduce the cooldown of other Rapier abilities by 20% when landing a Riposte stun.
• Lasting Consequence
  • Increase the stun from Riposte to 2 seconds.

Fleche

Since the Rapier is a melee weapon and may have some troubles staying within reach of opponents, Fleche is a fantastic catch up tool that also happens to do a significant amount of damage. High level Rapier players will be looking to use Fleche to purposefully end up directly behind their opponent, opening up the possibilities for some serious backstab damage.

Passives

Because the Quick Lunge passive is so undesirable, it disincentivizes us to place any points into Fleche passives. Using Fleche purely for the utility that it brings as a gap closer is more than enough to make this ability viable.

In PvP, the Grace tree brings some extremely high value abilities in the form of Evade, Riposte, and Fleche, which is why all three are taken in this particular build. In order to be a successful Rapier player in PvP, understanding advanced mobility mechanics is imperative. The high power level of the Rapier comes in the form of staying up close and personal with the opponent while using Evade to mix up and dish out massive damage. Rapier players should not mistake Evade for a spammable ability. Evade should be used to not only get behind the opponent, but also be saved to dodge crucial abilities. Since Crescendo and other cooldown reduction passives help to bring Evade off of cooldown relatively quickly, players will need to manage and critically think about what their opponents are bringing to the engagement in order to decide how they are using the Evade in certain situations.

The reason why the Rapier has such a high skill cap is because of the difficult but valuable nature of both Evade and Riposte. At face value, Riposte is simply a stun that is activated from an opposing player attacking the Rapier player. However, the most important reason why Riposte is such an important skill to have in PvP is because it fully negates the damage from any attack or ability when used successfully. This allows highly skilled Rapier players to save and hold Riposte if they know that their opponent has a high impact ability off of cooldown. Riposte can also come in handy when their foes use certain space creating, or gap closing abilities like Burn Out or Fleche which their opponents will be using through them to create space and damage at the same time. Riposte can be used in these situations to stop players from using these abilities in their tracks, while at the same time, negating the damage, and stunning the opponent, making sure that the Rapier player stays within close proximity to the opponent.

Fleche is an amazing gap closer that can be used in many different ways. Skilled Rapier players will practice using Fleche as a means to not only gap close, but to also end up directly behind their opponents, increasing the likelihood of getting off multiple backstab amplified light attacks with Evade. Another way that Fleche should be used is to counter space creating abilities like Burn Out, Charge, and Evade Shot. If a Rapier player is facing a Fire Staff user and knows that the player has Burn Out off of cooldown, the Rapier player should hold onto Fleche in order to instantly counter the inevitable attempt of the Fire Staff user to create space. Once the Rapier player has closed the gap by sprinting or dodging, the Fire Staff user will most likely use Burn Out to escape. In this situation, Fleche should be used in the exact same direction in order to stay close to the mage.

Ultimately, Rapier players should have an extremely aggressive playstyle using Evade and Riposte to dodge high impact abilities while staying up close and personal with their opponents, and using Fleche to either get to their opponents backside, or as a counter to space-creating abilities in order to maintain an up close position with their opponent.

The rapier primarily scales off of the Dexterity attribute at 0.9X and secondarily off of the Intelligence attribute at 0.65X. This means that for every point in Dexterity, the rapier will gain 0.9 weapon damage, and for every point in Intelligence, the rapier will gain 0.65 weapon damage.

• 200 Dexterity
• 100 Intelligence
• 200 Constitution

This attribute distribution will give you these attribute bonuses:

Dexterity

1. 50: +5% chance to critical hit
2. 100: +5% thrust damage
3. 150: Dodging cost 10 less stamina
4. 200: +10% bonus backstab and headshot damage

Intelligence

1. 50: +10% damage to light and heavy magic attacks

1. 100: +10% critical hit damage

Constitution

1. 50: All health consumables +20% stronger
2. 100: Increase max health by 10% of physical armor
3. 150: 10% reduction to crit damage taken
4. 200: +20% increase to armor

This attribute allocation takes the best of both the Dexterity and Intelligence attribute bonuses while curbing the negative impact of attribute diminishing returns. Since the rapier does a ton of damage and has the tools to get behind opponents, the 50, 150, and 200 Dexterity attribute bonuses, as well as the 100 Intelligence bonuses will aid in making the rapier a high damage weapon. 200 Constitution will allow the rapier player to acquire a decent health pool while gaining some crucial PvP defensive bonuses like 10% reduction to crit damage taken.

Weapon Ability Perks are generated perks that can be found or applied to:

• Weapons
• Chests
• Helmets
• Gloves
• Pants
• Shoes

These weapon ability perks augment the power level of a weapon ability in a positive way. Currently, each weapon has 6 ability perks available to players, one for each active ability. Below are all of the weapon ability perks currently available to the warhammer and pertain to this build.

Sundering Riposte

Riposte grants Rend, reducing damage absorption of the target by 14% for 10 seconds.

Omnidirectional Evade

Evade’s Adagio upgrade is applied when evading in any direction.

Refreshing Fleche

Hitting a target via a Crit Backstab with Fleche reduces this ability’s cooldown by 19%.

Sundering Riposte and Omnidirectional Evade are fantastic weapon ability perks in certain situations. Sundering Riposte’s 14% Rend for 10 seconds is huge and is more valuable against melee players since the Riposte stun needs to land for the Rend to be applied. Riposte can be used to negate the damage from a ranged attack, however, if the Rapier player is out of range of the ranged opponent, the Riposte stun and Rend can’t be applied.

Since Evade has such a short cooldown, Omnidirectional Evade could be a good weapon ability perk option. The only issue with the base Adagio skill is the fact that the forward Evade is short and that a side Evade is much more valuable in terms of mixing up the opponent and looking for backstab damage. This perk ultimately allows Evade to become much more versatile without losing the very important damage increase from Adagio.

Apart from weapon ability perks, there are an abundance of general perks that players can find or place onto their equipment that will affect their weapons in PvP. For recommendations on which general perks you should use to accompany your weapon ability perks, check out the PvP Perks and Gems Guide.