Blademaster
The Templar Blademaster class focuses on weapon skills and offensive attacks. The Blademaster can dual wield swords with the Matched Blades skill, and possesses a wide array of combat abilities suitable for dispatching great numbers of foes.
Swords are the Blademaster's weapon of choice, whether single, dual-wielded, or even used as a throwing weapon. The class is limited in its use of other weapon types -- Blademasters can not use heavy firearms like the Hunters, just melee weapons and pistols. They can use shields, but have no special skills to augment their effectiveness like the Guardian class. Blademasters are killing machines, loaded with damage-boosting skills and abilities that make the class one of the most damaging in Hellgate: London. The balance is that Blademasters have few defensive skills and can not safely take on mobs of monsters. They must play with precision and intelligence, and use crowd control to thin out mobs and slaughter one or two monsters at a time, rather than trying to "tank" a dozen at once.
The danger with all of these skills is that the Blademaster is vulnerable while using them, and without life leech to keep refilling his health, he's got to balance killing speed with how much damage he's taking at the same time. Just how well the Surges can be used to heal and protect him while he's attacking remains to be seen, and will require experimentation. At low levels though, the Blademaster is vulnerable and less effective than the Guardian. Players trying out Blademasters were often using a shield and a sword early on, since even though he has no shield skills, he needed the added protection to keep from having to heal constantly. How big a problem this will be long term remains to be seen, but unless the Surges are potentially far more powerful than I expect, it seems unlikely that a Blademaster will ever want to just wade into a huge mob and try tanking it. He'll likely be more about movement and crowd control, and positioning the demons so he can take on a handful at a time and decimate them with his devastating "glass cannon" attacks.
--Flux, Mega Community Day Report, May 2007.
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Facts
Faction: Templar
Screenshots
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