How To Bnuuy: Gameplay Basics and Rotation Guide

Looking to kickstart your trip into the Moonlit Kingdom? This guide gives primers on each class's playstyle and item builds, as well as some general advice on how to be a better bunny raider.

Foreword

Welcome to this guide to Rabbit And Steel! I wrote this information into a Google Doc initially during the demo period as a way to help get newer rabbits up to speed with some basic tips. With the full release upon us, now, I've transferred these notes to a more readily accessible Steam Guide, so I can share the knowledge I gathered with you.

Do note that the guide is still somewhat work-in-progress. While not much has changed regarding the core cast since the demo days - meaning the information here should all still be relatively accurate - I do plan to spend some time with the current build to get updated screenshots and unlock and test the new classes. Also, I'm still working out exactly how I want to format much of this information; expect this document to go through a few polish passes as I try to figure out ways to make all of this more palatable, whether you've never played an MMO before or have been raiding for years.

I hope you find this information useful! Hopefully, I'll see you all out on the battlefield!

General Gameplay Tips

• Every pattern in the game (with one notable exception) is designed to be avoided or prevented with zero invulnerability. Keep calm, analyze the situation, then make your move. That being said, don't be afraid to activate your Defensive to correct yourself if you bungle your positioning, even on a class that uses theirs aggressively; a mistimed buff is a small price to pay to avoid taking a needless hit.
  
  
• When starting out, focus on surviving the fight over trying to optimize your damage. Rotations assume ideal circumstances, and sometimes situations simply aren't ideal. Once you learn how to dodge attacks, you can start practicing how your character can dodge attacks and maintain their rotation at the same time; just knowing the rotation doesn't help much if you're knocked out and can't do anything!
  
  
• Remember your ABC's: Always Be Casting! Your Primary and Secondary, and often your Special, have a global cooldown which you should do your best to keep constantly moving. Even if the button you hit is suboptimal for the situation, try to press something whenever you can; any time spent with GCDs unpushed is damage lost, and on higher difficulties that extra DPS will make a world of difference.
  
  
• Remember that items and particularly gemstones can drastically change how your abilities work, so be don't take the default rotation as gospel. If an item adds a massive damage bonus to one of your abilities, try weaving it into your rotation to maximize that output!
  
  
• Practice, practice, practice! You won't get every boss on the first go, so learn to dust yourself off after each loss and give it another shot. In the MMO raiding community, they call it progression ("prog" for short); fight the boss, study what they do, theorize how to counter it, then go again and see if your strategies work.

Wizard

Style: Build And Spend/Proc
Rotation: 4 > 2 > 3 > 2 > [1...]; 3 > 2 on cooldown

Taking more than a few cues from XIV's Black Mage, Wizard is about finding a good camping spot and optimizing your movement - or, perhaps more accurately, your lack thereof. Your best filler ability, Dimi Moonblast, nearly locks you in place while casting, and Astral Seal only buffs you while you're standing in it, meaning that your best option in a given fight is generally to find the safest place to hunker down and spend 7-odd seconds bombarding the boss from out of harm's way - and then inevitably cry inside when you get forced out of your seal by something silly. If the boss needs you to move, consider using your Secondary; it may not deal as much damage, but it won't slow you down, so you can use it without sacrificing your mobility and - potentially - your hide.

Charged Astral Swirl has an effective potency of 420, one of the highest single hits in the entire game. Build accordingly; cooldown reduction and Haste for more reset procs are your friend (especially Haste-B, which stacks with Astral Seal), as well as Special Damage multipliers and, to a lesser extent, Primary Damage. You don't care too much about movement speed as you'll be ideally spending most fights twiddling your thumbs, but do be careful about dumping it too hard as Astral Seal doesn't provide any protection past the initial burst. On the subject of Astral Seal, Size and Duration are helpful in letting you maintain your Haste-A as much as possible, so keep an eye out for those.

Assassin

Style: Proc/Positional
Rotation: 4 > 3 > [1 > 1 > 1 > 1 > 1 > 2 > 4 > 3…] (Length may change based on GCD modifiers.); 4 > 3 on 4’s cooldown, 3 if you have 2 Charges.

Assassin is a high risk, high reward character, trying her hardest to stick as close to the boss as possible. She can play hit-and-run if needed (150 Potency on her Secondary is nothing to sneeze at) but what she really wants to be doing is swinging her knife, leaping behind the boss, and decimating their spine with Assassinate. Use Shadowstep to find a safe spot just behind the boss, then let it rip with everything you've got until you're forced to move.

With items, it's often a good idea to double or triple down on ways to push Assassinate's damage multipliers through the roof. While the exact damage formula is unclear, Vanished Assassinate can hit upwards of 400 effective potency - which quickly becomes even scarier when supplemented with Smite, Curse, Burn, and other means of pushing your numbers up. Also look for ways to reset your Defensive as often as possible; in addition to creating more opportunities for Vanished Assassinates, Shadowstep is an incredible positioning tool that lets you fix errors in your movement before anyone even realizes there's an issue. Haste is a great way to aid with this, as more GCDs means more chances to fish for Swift Cut's proc.

Heavyblade

Style: Build and Spend
Rotation: 2 > 3 > 1 > 2 > 3 > [1...]; 2 > 3 > 1 on 3’s cooldown

Probably the most basic of the rabbits, Heavyblade Rabbit is here to hit things and not pull any fancy tricks. Honestly, your rotation isn't super important; you can get along relatively well by just slamming your fingers on the Primary button until something forces you to step out of range. On the defensive side of things, your Shadow Barrier doesn't directly affect your damage output, which means you can safely stockpile it and find the best opportunity to use it at your leisure - and those two seconds of damage immunity are an incredibly potent power to keep tucked in your back pocket. Combine this with Spinning Leap having a brief invulnerability window, and you have a rabbit that is easy to use, tough to kill, and can honestly feel a little unfair at times. The only real downside is that her DPS is a bit below average, but does that really matter when you're this tough of a customer?

When getting items, prioritize things that improve Primary and Special, especially the former. Your Secondary damage is abysmally low, and can be safely ignored in favor of pushing your other numbers to the moon. You don't care quite as much about movement speed as other rabbits, given that Shadow Barrier is just incredibly strong; while it doesn't hurt to have, let other rabbits prioritize it, since they'll likely have more of a need for it.

Dancer

Style: Proc/Support
Rotation: 4 > 3 > [2 > 1 > 1…]; 3 on cooldown

Fans of Bard or Dancer from FFXIV will find this iteration of musical murder relatively familiar. There really isn't much to say about Dancer's rotation; Twirling Rose is your bread-and-butter, with Falling Petal serving as a solid fallback if you need to reposition. Try to line up Golden Grace with your allies' big bursts as much as possible for best results, but even lining it up with Lily Blossom or just popping it on cooldown can get you some decent numbers.

As a Dancer, you love any variety of GCD and/or Cooldown Reduction to pump out more Lily Blossoms as quickly as possible. You also love items that trigger on % procs; literally every button you push has a 30% roll built-in, so you will be constantly unloading into your enemies with each press. You don't have any stats that you don't particularly care about, so whatever you can get your hands on will probably help in some way; for the most part, you can let your allies take first pick and scrounge up whatever's left.

Druid

Style: Maintenance
Rotation: 3 > 2 > [1…]; 3 on cooldown, 2 on duration timer

Don't let her cutesy demeanor fool you; Druid is actually of the more difficult classes to play efficiently. Sure, she has wonderful range and really doesn't care much about where on the screen she is, but her combat speed is… sluggish, to say the least, requiring much more setup and planning to get the most out of her rotation. Mobile bosses in particular are the bane of her existence; Lat Life can't be moved once it is placed, so if a boss runs out of the radius you will need to reset it and lose precious time. On the other side of the coin, Nature's Blessing is one of the few Defensives in the game that's strictly… well, defensive, giving you and your team a quick speed boost with no strings attached, meaning you can store it as long as you want and look for the best ways to avoid sticky situations. Try using it during complex mechanics to help your team reposition themselves on the double.

While Lat Life and Summon Spirit can be a bit unwieldy depending on the fight, their total potencies are absurd, clocking in at 680 for Summon Spirit and 720 for Lat Life. Secondary Damage, Special Damage, and Special Cooldown are your friends. Meanwhile, GCD upgrades can be safely skipped; the benefits are minimal to your Primary and actively useless to your secondary, which doesn’t care much at all for how fast your GCD is. Also keep in mind that this potency is distributed over many hits in 12-second intervals; traits like Burn that rely on your base damage won't help nearly as much as they might on other characters, so let classes with bigger bursts take those.

To Be Continued...

And with that, you should have the knowledge to start your journey into the Moonlit Kingdom. Now get out there and show those mystical miscreants who's boss!

I'm still working on unlocking the other classes; once I get a chance to play around with them, I'll add them to this guide. Stay tuned!

[Samantha Prezombie]

Getting an item that resets special cooldown is huge, if you focus on primarily building towards the special damage instead of spreading out your dps and get a compatible gem. Avoid getting more than one special resetter, a second one will result in a lot of wasted resets.

Items that count hits are much stronger on Spellsword than most classes, most classes hit less than 1 time a second, while she starts close to 2 hits/sec and that can go up easily.

Spellsword and Sniper are the only classes that start out with a way to inflict a debuff, but note that Hex doesn't do damage directly and won't benefit from "debuffs do extra damage" items.

[Samantha Prezombie]

Her defensive skill is a minor offensive boost, great for popping when you feel safe and can burst with all your special charges (or even better, pop it when special has 2 charges, 3 seconds remaining, and 5+ DS charge for a maximum burst). But it's only 10% boost, there's no harm in sacrificing the dps to stay safe. Don't bother buying Opal or Garnet defensive in single player, but aim for them in MP.


She's very versatile in possible builds, it's easier to list the things that she should avoid. Old Bonnet (skills that hit once do 250 damage) will *never* proc, even if you fight without DS (exception: Emerald Secondary) . Burn usually isn't worth considering due to her many small hits, with the niche exception of Ruby Secondary/Special. Similarly, the Ghostflame for less damage on a skill item are simply awful on most rotations.

[Samantha Prezombie]

basic Spellsword guide for you to work with:

Style: Build And Spend/Positional
starting Rota: open with 2 3 2 3 3, repeat 1. Use 2 when <5 darkspell remains, use first 3 off cooldown but delay the followup casts if you're low on darkspell/badly positioned.

Her secondary grants Darkspell, which is absolutely vital to have charged on every cast. If your DS is at 1, use the secondary to fill up because DS affects even this spell, and dropping to zero is a massive dps loss. When out of position, don't hesitate to spam this spell whenever the slow doesn't put you in danger.

Her special is only marginally stronger than her primary at the start, because in 10 seconds you can cast 3 special + 6 primary hits for a base 1800, or 9 primary hits for 1620, so a 20% buff to your primary is enough to make special not worth casting for optimal dps (minus boons and special procs)

[Tupuchan]

Extremely well written guide ! thanks !

[Potato™]

@umbral_ivory thank you so much, this was general helpful

[Tsunayoshi2001]

Tysm for this guide

[Sdobitoo]

Umbral
Regarding that 4th secondary
I would put it after skill 3
2>2>4>2>1>1>1>3>2>1>1>2>4>2>use 1 as filler until anything else comes off of cd>then 2 if 3 is on cd
also i would recomend saving charges untill there less than cooldown reduced and boss isnt moving
For exsample
You have 2 seconds on your special and you just got if off cooldown
Wait for 2 seconds and cast it after you used your special cause then you will loose cooldown reduction

[xColdxFusionx]

Defender's rotation is... complicated to put on paper. Weirdly so, given how simple it is in theory. The main issue is defining exactly what "optimal" is when any combination of five 1's followed by five charged 2's is going to give you the same total result. Not to mention the question of whether or not you want to weave a 4 in there somewhere, since it does technically affect your DPS indirectly...

Ultimately, a lot of Rabbit & Steel's rotations require you to make in-the-moment judgment calls to get your full effectiveness, so while knowing the flow is important, sometimes it's just as important to know when not to follow the flow and to hold cooldowns or adapt routes to put yourself in a better position, particularly if you can avoid sacrificing too much damage. Probably something I want to address in a future revision of this guide...

[TheGrayCount]

You can get a higher dps on defender by doing a 1>1>1>2>2>3>3>repeat and build your charges on 2 for when you need to move away. Personally I've only been able to do good dps while spamming 1 was with a sapphire 1 and/or brightstorm spear

[Nyquil on the rocks]

I've mostly been building for Special damage on Sniper and it does wholly too much damage. Emerald Special+Emerald secondary is really good, and if you can get FLASH-INT or FLOW-INT it gets even better.

Some 2-target fights stay close enough together that you can hold your target swap button and hit both. With this combo, I have been able to 1 or 2-shot them (~6500 dps)