The Strategic Sword is by far one of the more popular weapons in Where Winds Meet, with its stylish bleed and burst playstyle, creating a rather engaging playstyle. The weapon centers around building bleeds, with its special attack popping bleeds for burst damage on their foes. Throw in a secondary weapon to support it, and it gets rather interesting rotationally speaking, perhaps becoming one of the more complex yet fun playstyles in Where Winds Meet. This guide will take a look at the Strategic Sword Builds in Where Winds Meet to assist you with your rotation, gearing and inner way passives.
Here is a look at the Strategic Sword Build in Where Winds Meet. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.
Strategic Sword Build¶
In general, the game does a lot of the heavy lifting for you with its built-in gear focus system. If you go to the develop screen and select improvement guide, you can focus on obtaining the gear sets for the Strategic Sword to prioritize what Inner Way skills you want, secondary weapons, and other gear sets to acquire. Simply press the apply path on the DPS Melee Combat, Bellstrike Umbra option and you will hone in on the recommended PvE build for the Strategic Sword. Make sure to grab the Strategic Sword unlock too from the Skill Theft mission.
In general, your core build will want the following:
Gear Sets: Hawking Set and the Eaglerise Set
Eaglerise grants the player physical defence and a percentage damage mitigation buff when dealing damage. Considering you do bleeds, you will easily stack up the Eaglerise stacks to get a strong damage mitigation buff on your character very consistently.
You can find the Hawking Set on Weapons in the Still Shore Campaign. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.
Meanwhile, you want the Hawking set because its 4 set grants Affinity bonuses. Affinity is very important, thanks to you getting a chance to hit again for 20% of your damage. This is key, since more attacks grant extra buffs from your Heavenly Spear Wolfchase’s Art for example, or from the Sober Sorrow buffs in general. You can also get multi hits on your repeated attacks from your Inner Track Slash second attack combo from it too.
Another reason why you want Affinity is because of the Bitter Seasons inner way. This applies a poison to your target whenever they take damage, which stacks and reduces physical damage resistance. This is good with affinity multi-attack hits further reducing that physical damage by applying more stacks more frequently. It then scales with your bleed popping, as you can then do even bigger burst damage from your 5 bleed stacks from your Strategic Sword. It’s also useful for getting more bleed stacks on a target via the Fivefold Bleed inner way skill too.
Rotation and Inner Track Slash¶
Dont foget to keep a super dmage buff active from your Sober Sorrow attack on the Spear for major DPS buffs. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.
Inner Track Slash is very important for stacking two bleeds on a target. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.
Your rotation is fairly important for the Strategic Sword build. You will need to start combat doing the following:
- Sober Sorrow into as many hits as you can get for the different bonuses
- Sweep All for the damage increases, defense debuffs if you get Spring Surge stack and even bleed if you hit River Flow at ten stacks. You’ll need affinity to get the River Flow to ten stacks or hit multiple enemies at the same time to reach that.
- You then weapon switch to Strategic Sword and then press the Inner Balance Strike III, which is the special skill that can either spend your bleed or grant a bleed. You want to do this first to get the bleed stacks rolling.
- Since this move forces you to jump back, you then want to use Second Track Slash, which is your charged attack as that inflicts bleeds and grants immunity while dashing. Since you jump backwards that immune dash is pretty important. And then you now press the double Inner Track Slash to get one bleed, into its combo for a second bleed.
- After this opener you will either have 4-5 stacks of bleeds, depending if the Spear gave you bleed on 10 attacks from Sober Sorrow or not. You now either do the bleed spend if at 5, or use another charged attack to get the 5th stack on the foe before doing the spender.
Depending on what inner ways you have, this rotation changes slightly after your opener.
Fivefold Bleed inner skill grants some of its own bleed stacks, which can retain on the target when consumed. So, if this happens, you may want to rotate quicker between spending bleed on attacks or not. The Sword Morph also grants big buffs to bursting bleeds on enemies too, which helps a lot.
Inner Ways¶
You can get the Wolfchaser’s Inner Way from the Heavenquake spear skill theft dojo where you unlock that weapon. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.
Depending on your playstyle, you may want any of the following four morphs:
- Sword Morph - Legendary quality Strategic Sword Inner Way - Mandatory
- Wolfchaser’s Art - Grants more combo hit counts if the target is bleeding - perfect for second rotation on your Heaven Spear abilities
- Adaptive Steel - Game recommends it for the buff based on equipped weapon
- Insightful Strike - Game recommends it for precision critical damage increases, crit damage or damage mitigation as a defensive tool
- Bitter Seasons - Each hit has a chance to inflict Poison, dealing damage and reducing the target’s physical defense for a short time - We recommend it
- Seasonal Edge - Dual Weapon skill can grant a small buff for a duration of Critical Rate, Affinity Rate, Physical DMG bonus or All Attribute DMG bonuses - It’s fine to do if you fully upgrade it since you weapon swap a lot for the Spear buffs anyway
- Fivefold Bleed - Each hit has a chance to inflict Bleed, dealing damage per second (stacking up to 5). Upon reaching max stack, Bleed is removed and deals instant Piercing Damage
We strongly recommend that you take Sword Morph, Fivefold Bleed, Bitter Seasons and Wolfchaser’s Art for your PvE Offensive Build. If you need more defensives feel free to go for something else. If you want Seasonal Edge, swap out the Bitter Seasons since they are your support stat buffs.
PvP Build¶
If you go into PvP, your weapon profile changes a little. Instead of your support weapon being the spear, you tend to go the healer fan. The sword grants you the damage you want mainly, while the fan gives you some self healing and CC control. There’s also synergy that buffs your physical damage attacks so you get even stronger hits on your Inner Strike hits and bleeds and what not. All in all it’s a fairly self sufficient build.
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