Best Combat Skills For Highwayman?

[Ashy]

He's my favorite character but I'm not sure what goes good together besides Duelist's Advance and Point Blank Shot. But what other combat skills are extremly helpful? Like should I use Open Vein or should I use Wicked Slice?

[Sir Francis]

open vein in weald and warrens, in ruins and cove you get slice.
usually i like to run tracking shot because it buffs the riposte too and to finish off a low hp enemy. For that you could use grape shot too but thats down to personal preference.
he is pretty balanced, meaning: Nothing is EXTREMELY helpful compared to the rest.

[NK SemTex]

All-around Highwayman build for my games: Point Blank Shot - Duelist's Advance - Pistol Shot (Dmg+ with Marked targets) - Wicked Slice/Open Vein.

1. Tracking Shot is near useless, except to reveal stealth, you rather use pistol shot to kill/soften the targets first than use tracking shot.

2. Grapeshot also near useless, the only situation it might be good is vs spiders and kill 2-3 spiders in one shot (spiders have high dodge), but spiders encounters are uncommon, but they do show up. I'd rather have speedy heroes to gang up on one spider and remove them than rely on grapeshot to take them out. Focus fire is always the key to win encounters.

3. Wicked Slice for Ruins and Cove, and switch to Open Vein when in Warrens and Weald for the tanky enemy frontliners.

Summary: The first 3 skills are almost obligatory in any build to target all ranks, and the ability to move up if you get shuffled around, and Duelist's Advance for AOE damage encounters and Collector encounters. You only switch between Open Vein or Wicked Slice depending on different dungeons.

[Misfit]

tracking shot is not so useless, it buff your dmg,crit and acc. it'll help against bosses

[LaserGuy]

Originally posted by Misfit:

tracking shot is not so useless, it buff your dmg,crit and acc. it'll help against bosses

As with most buffs in this game, it doesn't buff it enough to make up for the fact that you're spending a turn not attacking.

[Ashy]

Originally posted by LaserGuy:

Originally posted by Misfit:

tracking shot is not so useless, it buff your dmg,crit and acc. it'll help against bosses

As with most buffs in this game, it doesn't buff it enough to make up for the fact that you're spending a turn not attacking.

Still good for destealthing enemies

[Butt Goblin]

Wicked Slice is a good frontliner-killer, having almost the same damage as Crusader's Smite.

Pistol Shot is okay if you need to get a backliner killed and you can't use Advance for some reason. It also has very good critrate, so if you need to finish off an enemy you might get a bit more stress healed from it. The damage is quite lacking and the bonus against marked is negligible.

PBS is okay. It deals high damage to a rank you don't care about and it requires you to be in a rank that doesn't give you a lot of versatility (if you need HWM to finish off a backliner, he won't be able to target them if you set him up for PBS).

Grapeshot is great for finishing off an enemy while getting gravy damage on other enemies, but it's quite terrible as an actual DPS skill and has poor ACC.

Duelist's Advance is extremely good and is the bread-and-butter of his skillset. It deals decent damage, activates Riposte for more damage, and moves the Highwayman forward. That last bit is what makes Highwayman shine, since it allows him to function very well in dance comps; you can, for example, run HWM in rank 3 and Crusader in rank 2 so that your Crusader can target backliners when HWM pushes him into rank 3.

Open Vein is decent in low-level bleed-weak dungeons where Highwayman's level is above the level of the dungeon and bad in later dungeons. Early on, its high ACC and greater damage per turn than Wicked Slice makes it useful, but enemies gain a ton of bleed resistance later on and you'll have plenty of ways to improve the accuracy of Slice. Even enemies in bleed-weak dungeons will resist Open Vein's mediocre bleed too often for it to be reliable, and spending an entire trinket slot on a single skill is wasteful (unlike a bleed chance trinket, damage trinkets benefit every skill of his and provide a greater benefit to Slice than to Open Vein). DoTs in general are worse than up-front damage since they leave the target alive longer, so take Slice instead or use a different hero if you need to pierce PROT (Houndmaster being the best at it).

Tracking Shot is okay against bosses and a waste of a turn otherwise. Keep it upgraded if you plan on bringing HWM to bosses, but only switch to it when you reach the boss. Only use it in regular dungeons if you're worried about stealthed enemies and have no other means of de-stealthing or targeting stealthed enemies (naturally that means it should be ignored entirely in Apprentice dungeons).

For frontline HWM, I tend to use Slice-Advance-PBS-Pistol. For midranks (which I prefer for Crusader synergy), I go with Slice-Advance-Pistol-Grapeshot.

[Sir Francis]

pistol shot is an instant pass: duellists advance is almost always better and makes it redundant. it isnt worth marking if you only get 25% damage, its always better to take either grapeshot or tracking for situational use.