Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Shade Build Guide (2024)

Kerillian's third unlockable Career in Vermintide 2 is the Shade. This Career is the quintessential assassin class, allowing Kerillian to disappear into the shadows before devastating high-value targets like special and elite enemies.

Related: Warhammer: Vermintide 2 - Ironbreaker Build Guide

This Career is much more difficult to play than Kerillian's first two classes, but the payoff is more than worth the work it takes to learn its intricacies. Below, we'll take a look at everything you need to know about this Career, including its general playstyle, weapons, talents, and some building tips.

Career Overview

General Gameplay

The Shade is one of the best Careers at instantly eliminating key targets like specials and elites. Generally, you will be in charge of killing these enemies while your allies clear hordes. Infiltrate is your greatest tool for safely getting close to specials before backstabbing them.

Additionally, the Shade has extremely high single-target damage, allowing her to deal tons of damage to monsters and bosses when they spawn. By stacking damage through the Hunter or Barrage weapon passives, you can quickly rack up damage before going in for the kill with an Infiltrate-powered critical backstab. This combo of attacks will deal massive damage to any enemy you will encounter.

Weapons

Melee Weapons

The Shade can use the following melee weapons.

• Sword and Dagger
• Dual Daggers
• Dual Swords
• Glaive
• Two-Handed Sword
• Sword
• Elven Spear
• Elven Axe (Back to Ubersreik DLC)

As a melee-oriented Career, your melee weapon choice will slightly change your playstyle. The Sword and Dagger or Dual Daggers are best for what the Shade does best — instantly killing high-health enemies. Other weapons can still do this, but you will generally be clearing more horde enemies before focusing on specials in this case.

Ranged Weapons

The Shade has access to the following ranged weapons.

• Swiftbow
• Longbow
• Hagbane Shortbow
• Volley Crossbow
• Moonfire Bow (Forgotten Relics DLC)
• Briar Javelin (Sister of the Thorn DLC)

The Moonfire Bow is an excellent ranged weapon that has infinite ammo, but is locked behind the Forgotten Relics DLC. If you don't have this content, then Hagbane Shortbow or Longbow are suitable ranged weapons for your needs as a Shade. Generally, you will only by using ranged attacks to either stack power through the Hunter or Barrage passives, or when you can't reach an enemy to melee them.

Talents

An example Shade build for general playstyles.

Level 5 Talents

For the first Talent choice, you will want to decide what type Shade you want to play. If you want to use the Career as a general high-damage wave clearer, Bleak Vigour will provide consistent temporary health to keep you alive during longer encounters against monsters and waves of enemies.

If you want to play the classic assassinate high-health targets Shade, Khaine's Thirst will provide large bursts of temporary health as you kill specials and elites. Due to these enemies' larger health pool, you will gain large amounts of temporary health back after slaying them, allowing you to stay alive until you can kill the next high-health enemy.

Level 10 Talents

Cruelty provides an extremely high damage boost for your highest damaging attacks. This Talent will make the Shade even better at killing high-health enemies, and increases your overall damage more than Exploit Weakness. If you want to play a ranged-focused Shade, Exquisite Huntress can be a good option, especially when paired with the Hunter or Barrage weapon passives.

Level 15 Talents

The Assassin Talent will even further increase the damage of your critical strikes, especially when paired with Cruelty. With these two Talents, your critical strikes against bosses and monsters will deal extremely high damage, making this Talent much more valuable than Smiter or Enhanced Power.

Level 20 Talents

All three of the Shade's level 20 Talents can be viable options, and ultimately depend on the playstyle you are pursuing. With Chain Killer, you can backstab your way through patrols of elite enemies, gaining high damage bonuses for each successive backstab.

Focused Slaying will help keep the cooldown of Infiltrate low as you backstab enemies, and is generally the preferred option between these Talents.

If you're running a ranged-focused build, Bloodfletcher will help keep ammo in stock, but relies on you switching to melee weapons to score backstabs. Don't use this Talent if you're using the Moonfire Bow, as the ammo restored will serve no purpose.

Level 25 Talents

Because the Shade is typically a high-risk, high-reward Career, you will want to play into your strengths and offset your weaknesses. To that end, Blood Drinker can provide a bit of damage mitigation after dealing critical strikes, which you will already be doing a lot of.

Spring-Heeled Assassin will allow you to do better at what you do best — moving around the field quickly to kill high-health enemies. If you can keep the effects of this Talent up when it matters, the bonus is twice as high as Gladerunner, but not as consistent.

Level 30 Talents

For your final Talent, Shimmer Strike and Cloak of Pain are the two best options, and will slightly change your playstyle. With Shimmer Strike, you will be able to keep the stealth bonus of Infiltrate active as long as you can continuously kill elites. When paired with the level 20 Talent Chain Killer, this Talent is perfect for dealing with patrols of elite enemies.

On the other hand, Cloak of Pain allows you to perform a second Infiltration after the first one has ended, letting you take advantage of its bonus damage effects a second time, usually against the same target. This Talent is perfect for killing monsters and bosses.

Hungry Wind provides redundant bonuses due to Spring-Heeled Assassin or Gladerunner, and loses the most important aspect of Infiltrate — the increased damage bonus. Only choose this Talent if you want to move really fast.

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