The skill allocation is only for what I saw as strictly necessary, leaving a lot of points in each class for personal taste and whatnot.
Background/Lore:
The Mongol Empire spanned all of the Eurasian continent for well over a hundred years.
They came to power and reined, purely through use of military force.
Tales of their exploits on the battlefield quickly turned to legend and struck fear into the hearts of all who dared opposed them.
The tales spoke of endless swarms of savage warriors adorned in a patchwork armors, fighting with a strange yet undeniable style. Masters of both mounted and unmounted combat, their command of the spear still stands unrivaled until modern times.
Though each of these Mongol warriors was a master in his own right, standing at the head of the vast horde of Mongol calvary stood, The Keshik. Or, “The Blessed”, by the Khan they swore their lives to, and time after time on the battlefield, to whom they proved their worth in combat.
Hurling their spears from afar; confusing and dismantling their foes in melee, The Keshik were as feared and powerful, as they were relied on by their Khans.
Devotion to the craft of war and an uncanny natural gift with the spear, the mount, and their many forms is what sets The Keshik aside from your typical swordsman.
The Actual Build Mechanics/ Stats, Skills, and Why/ How it works
This is a very hard class in terms of the learning curve and skill necessary to regulate weapon swaps, poitioning, gear, buffs and debuffs, but can out DPS any other class in the game.
Like any good solo build, this one is built on top of a mechanic that not many people are aware of.
This build actually takes advantage of quite a few, so we will go over them as simply as possible.
The Core of the Keshik, is a pure STR swordie. While, Tree of Savior really punishes you for going pure any stat, I have found that this build is the most viable for all forms of gameplay, while soling all content as a DPS swordie.
Let me also explicitly now give the disclaimer, that like any swordie, The Keshik is gear-dependent. Especially when it comes to soloing high-level magic casting monsters. Mdef = $$$
That aside, feel free to allocate a few points of stats to DEX for accuracy, CON for HP and HP REGEN, and SPR for SP REGEN and MDEF (The gains with mdef on spr are so minimal that it is better for you to focus on buffering damage with more HP from con. Look at the MDEF as a nice bonus for regulating your SP consumption with SPR stat points).
But yes, you want to be putting something like 90% of your stat points into STR, and honestly, I didnt even really feel the need to get more hp/mdef until I was farming Red Dawn Maidens for Dawn Crystal Fragments @ around level ~250-260.
As far as your skills go, you want to be focusing on the use of combo-ing the effect of Cross Guard - Stagger Effect, any additional debuffs, and your hard hitting piercing skills, like Spear Throw, Kunai, Joust, or Crush/Quintain combo.
We want to make sure to emphasize including debuff skills because this combo means weapon swap between 2h- Sword, and spears. Which also means that you will be losing buffs like finestra or concentrate in the process.
Cross Guard - Stagger Effect, is essentially when you use Cross Guard to block, you debuff the enemy and give it a stagger debuff. The Keshik has a great block success rate because Cross Guard scales with STR. So you get ridiculous +block numbers at high levels like +2500 block or something.
While the Cross Guard - Stagger effect debuff lasts, all of your piercing damage is given two instances rather than one, or essentially doubled.
This means that skills like Kunai, which have 5 seperate “hits” or damage instances, are doubled, and counted as 10 seperate hits.
Added with the Spear Lunge Debuff (+40% piercing damage to afflicted targets), this turns a lot of your skills into nukes.
Aside from Kunai some notable hard hitting piercing nukes are:
1.) Spear throw “hits” 3 times, or has 3 separate damage instances. The skill is slightly annoying because of the screen shake and repetitive crashing sound, but Jee Bus this skill hits like a truck. With Stagger Effect, you dont actually see the 6 seperate damage instances, but you can tell that your damage has almost exactly doubled.
This hop3 skill takes the #1 spot despite all the shinobi and lancer skills because of the 0 cd, and the deceptively wide aoe targeting.
2.) Joust “hits” 3 times as well, and has 2 overheats. As a nice bonus, the skill lunges you and your mount forward and destroys any magic circles it touches in the process. Joust also afflicts silence on enemies it hits, making you one of the best “Anti-Mage” classes pvp. Good thing too, since as a PURE STR you can’t hit other melee classes and archers for the life of you.
Joust requires you to be mounted, which brings us to the mounted/unmounted gameplay of The Keshik. I will go over this more in-depth and give a few tips a bit later.
3.) Kunai hits 5 times. It was written above, but it deserves mention here on this list again just to give its actual ranking among the nukes. Kunai is a tough one, because it really shines when paired with finestra, having 5 separate chances to crit. However, it is still a great nuke with 10 seperate damage instances when paired with the cross guard stagger.
Kunai lands 3rd on my list of nukes here because of how quickly the damage is dealt. It feels very fast, and when you get at just the exact range and land all 5/10 kunai, it feels very good.
An interesting point of Kunai, is that when used mounted, it automatically “unmounts” you. Being mounted does not interupt use of Kunai in any way, other than manually having to dismiss you companion, or “re-mount”.
4.) Crush / Quintain Combo
Numerically, these are the highest damage skills / combo you have in your arsenal. When you hit the enemy with Crush, you give it a debuff that reduces phys atak and magic atak (again, ur natural mage killer). While the Crush debuff is active, if you hit the enemy with Quintain, your damage is nearly doubled.
The amount of damage that results from Quintain hitting enemies that are afflicted with the Crush debuff, is supposed to mirror Dethrone.
Crush has 2 overheat charges, as does Quintain. There is only one damage instance on each of these skills, so with stagger you merely see it turn to two separate instances.
This tick-tock sort of combo actually gives the Lanacer the edge on paper in terms of DPS (I have a DRG 2, sorry its true). However, This r8 skill combo lands last on my list of high-powered pure STR nukes because in practice the skills feel almost awkward.
Also, as with all the Lancer skills, you must be mounted to perform this combo.
5.) Crown - While not really a nuke, it is worth mentioning as when paired with the full attributes, heavily reduces int and spr, further cementing your role as a mage hunter in PVP.
Outside of the stagger effect/piercing damage combo, you are still a gigantic DPS monster in parties/Bosses/Solo with your standard finestra + aforementioned nuke skills.
Finestra level 15 gives you +150 crit rate and +3 aoe attack. The +3 aoe attack makes you amazing for AOE damage in parties. With Zega spear, you can get +170 crit rate. This helps your full STR-ness crits to hit more often. Honestly, late game this starts to fall off, since you need really big crit rate numbers, but again thats not until level 300+ really, and at that point everything is more of a gear check.
The damage of the STR swordie is really underestimated, to the point that I have run into a lot of people in straight up denail.
But starting from your first real Party exp at Almeth, all the way through Earth Tower and Timmery, you will really see the damage of your piercing damage shine with spear throw and all the skills on the list.
The only real seperation between you and the meme DPS classes is gear. The skills that I mentioned above are really frightening, if you can admit that dethrone damage is insane, then well… numbers don’t lie.
Gear Suggestion
2h-Spear attribute from Cataphract gives you a pretty huge block pen boost.
1h Spear attribute from Hoplite gives you an equally huge damage boost to med-sized monsters.
2h-Swords have a lot of varients out there with MDEF stats or some great DEF stats that might help while your proc’ing that block.
I went full plate with Vubbe Fighter gloves until like, late 200’s and never saw my damage go below any SR I partied with.
Mount/Dismount tips, suggestions, notes
At first glance, this might seem like more of a disadvantage.
The truth is, the mount aspect with this build adds a lot of skill ceiling to the playstyle when paired with skills like Long stride, and the invis from your shinobi skills.
In a tricky situation, you can cast Katon no Jutsu, and go invis. When you are in a party, this literally instantly dumps all the aggro you have onto the next party member.
When you are solo, the monsters just sort of instantly spread back out as if they don’t even remember their aggro. Having a the mount is nice in these situations, as the mobs will focus their attention on the mount, instantly, keeping a large group gathered for your nukes.
In pvp, your mount will start running toward the nearest enemy, usually the one you are attacking, which typically confuses them, causing opponents to use skills and focus their attention on the riderless mount.
Since your invis does not break when you use a skill, you can literally start beating on unsuspecting foes from behind as they focus on your mount.
Two things will dispel invis, which is re-mounting, and taking damage.
This becomes tricky when you are in the thick of things, because both the invis skill animations take a while, so plan accordingly.
A key note, there is about a 0.2 second window, right after you unmount, where if you tap the “mount companion” shortcut, you will instantly re-mount.
After this window, you are liable to get stuck with your companion’s attack animation, or getting damaged/stunned. So keep this in mind when partying or bossing and working the skills into your damage rotation.
Finally, un-mounting and re-mounting does not affect your buffs, or the debuffs of enemies, so it literally just adds a bunch of key strokes for you to maintain your rhythm to. If APM is not your thing, and you want a really lazy approach, just spam spear throw buddy.
Conclusion
I will update this little build in response to the feedback I get, so feel free to say if you liked it, or something you want to add.
Signing off for now, and all for the glory of the Golden Horde.
