This post is also available in:
This guide explains a combo in The Blood of Dawnwalker built around Cycle of Ruin, allowing you to maintain both damage over time and continuous Health recovery almost indefinitely.
What This Combo Does
- Requires you to be playing during the day, when Witchcraft is available
- Allows you to continuously deal extremely high DoT damage while recovering Health, potentially keeping both effects going almost indefinitely until the enemy dies
- With Burning Blood at Level 3 or higher, it becomes realistically possible to keep the DoT effect going until every enemy in the fight is dead
- Frankly, the sustained damage is so high that you can reach a point where you barely need to use Swordmastery Abilities during the day at all
Required Skills
Essential Skills
- Cycle of Ruin — The core mechanic that makes the entire combo work. One of its biggest advantages is that Level 1 is already enough to make the combo fully functional
- Burning Blood — A Witchcraft Ability that deals an almost absurd amount of damage over time
- Soul Reaping — Continuously drains Health from an enemy, dealing damage while restoring your own Health
- Forbidden Sigils — This setup requires at least three Witchcraft Ability slots, so you will need to increase your available slots
Recommended Skills
- Burning Blood (Level 3 or higher) — When an affected enemy dies, Burning Blood can spread to another enemy, making it possible to keep the effect going throughout an entire battle without repeatedly recasting it
- Other Witchcraft Abilities — Cycle of Ruin can extend their duration as well, although adding even more effects may honestly be overkill
How the Combo Works
The combo starts by applying Burning Blood and Soul Reaping to your target.
From that point on, all you really need to do is block as necessary and land one or two attacks whenever it is safe.
Cycle of Ruin extends the duration of your currently active Witchcraft Abilities whenever you land an attack or successfully block an incoming attack.
In other words, as long as you keep landing attacks or blocking instead of relying entirely on dodging, the remaining duration of your Witchcraft Abilities keeps getting extended over and over again.
This means that once your Witchcraft effects are active, you do not even need to stay aggressively on the offensive. You can simply defend yourself while the damage-over-time effects gradually tear the enemy apart for you.
With Soul Reaping, you also continuously recover Health while the enemy is being drained, giving you both sustained damage and sustained healing at the same time.
The combined damage from Burning Blood and Soul Reaping is enormous. Against bosses, you can quite literally play defensively and watch their Health disappear without even using Swordmastery Abilities.
Things get even more ridiculous once Burning Blood reaches Level 3. Its effect can spread from a defeated enemy to another target, meaning that a single initial cast can, without exaggeration, wipe out an entire group of weaker enemies while you simply keep the effect alive with Cycle of Ruin.
Best of all, Cycle of Ruin—the core mechanic that makes the entire combo possible—already works more than well enough at Level 1.
That keeps the required Skill Points, training time, and Denarii investment remarkably low, making this an extremely cost-efficient combo for how powerful it is.
Skill Guides
Skill Trees, Progression & Builds Guide – Kaburanai Games
Witchcraft Skills List | Effects & Unlock Requirements – Kaburanai Games
