Wardancer Overview

Wardancer is your female fighting character that brings up Street Fighter vibes to Lost Ark. You’re going to be focusing on packing decent bursts with fast punches and high kicks, but most importantly provide a variety of great synergy buffs to your party, earning you the title of the hidden “aggressive” support class in Lost Ark.

The basic playstyle of the Wardancer is using your skills and high mobility to reposition and easily attack a target from behind as it’s a class focused on back attacks.

While attacking, you can either choose to generate a gauge that looks like chakra and is referred to as your Elemental or Esoteric meter (same as Striker) that will allow you to use strong DPS Esoteric skills, OR you completely choose to disable your entire Esoteric Identity meter to gain immense damage buffs on all your normal skills instead.

To learn about the other Martial Artists, check out our guides on Glaivier, Scrapper, Soulfist, and Striker.

Wardancer, just like Striker, can be a burst oriented class by building up her Esoteric meter to consume all the gained meter while making use of empowered Esoteric attacks.

But as you probably know, the Esoteric playstyle of the Wardancer isn’t played a lot as it’s kinda underperforming right now, which is why you want to play around your second class engraving, that will get rid of the Esoteric skills and meter entirely.

A Wardancer’s core mechanics though are always built around the same 3 skills:

• First, you always want to activate Energy Combustion before any engage, since it lasts for 20 seconds which means you can basically keep it up all the time, but more importantly, the damage reduction from the Combustible Armor Tripod makes us a little bit tankier before we jump right into action.
• The next two skills in Wind’s Whisper and Roar of Courage are meant to be used together to grant attack and movement speed buff to yourself and your party, while also increasing everything Crit. Try to play around these 3 skills as they pretty much sum up the key elements of a Wardancer.

Wardancers have two pretty distinct playstyles and can focus more on a faster and straightforward playstyle with their First Intention build. You can also focus more on AoE with your Esoteric Skill Enhancement playstyle that needs you to position more frequently and time your skills better.

Due to their insane buffing -kit and high mobility, Wardancers lack some DPS, which is why you’ll spend most of your time running around, dishing out some auto-attacks while waiting on your cooldowns and grouping up mobs to make sure you use your few burst skills on the biggest mob-group possible.

As a back attacker, you also want to use your mobility to get behind a single target like a boss and release your harder-hitting skills like Flash Heat Fang from behind.

Moving on to PvP! The Wardancer keeps her role as an aggressive type of support, by engaging enemies first and using skills like Energy Combustion for some sustain and Winds Whisper to immediately buff the entire party.

This is important as it’ll help your team deal the most damage from the get go. You then want to dash out and play around your cooldowns as you want to ensure your safety and that your team is constantly buffed up to the max while skills like Roar of Courage minimizes enemies crit resistances at the same time.