**Disclaimer: I do not recommend you work on secondary skill nodes if you haven't maxed crescent divide/moon dancer/styx/celestial dance/rift of damnation yet (or get them at least past level 20). It will be a waste to not max those skills first, so raise them first before continuing on with raising secondary skills. This post is merely an attempt to help other dawn warriors out there how to optimize their overall dpm for bossing and efficient training. Even if it may seem minimal, it does provide some benefit**
Since there are hardly any dawn warrior posts out there, I'd like to share my insights for the optimization of Dawn Warriors. While I agree that the perfect primary trio for a skill node is to focus Crescent Divide/Moon Dancer/Styx. I personally prefer having secondary skills raised; which is all preference really, but this is my take, to make my training/bossing much more efficient. This is what my V Matrix looks like with just the pertinent skills for dawn warriors:
https://puu.sh/x716g/a2a5e0b747.png.
I believe I read in some reddit post somewhere that it is recommended to take Cross/Flicker/Impaling rays as a secondary trio, I personally think that raising impaling rays is a waste of a slot and I would much rather raise equinox slash.
Why do you I prefer Equinox Slash over impaling rays?
The answer is simple, leveling up impaling rays does not warrant a consistent increase in dpm and has a long cool down.
**For Training**
Equinox slash has a much shorter cool down when compared to impaling rays, can be used to train efficiently when raised, and this is the dawn warrior's bread and butter skill for mobility. When you have a high enough range to confidently one shot monsters in arcane river, efficiency is key to decreasing the time it takes to gain experience and one way to speed things up for Dawn Warriors is to raise Sun/Moon Cross, Equinox Slash, and Flicker in the V Matrix. When training, the animation for crescent divide/solar pierce is slower when compared to using Sun/Moon Cross. Using Sun/Moon Cross to train in arcane river makes clearing a whole lot more fluid and it has a decent horizontal/vertical reach in certain maps and if you are able to one shot using Flicker as well, your overall rotation around the map is a lot faster. After using jump/jump up/rope lift, you can use equinox slash to kill off the mobs and keep your rotation going around the map. I mainly use crescent divide/solar pierce when I use celestial dance because that provides major aoe coverage especially in Arcana but, after the buff wears off, the skill itself feels a lot slower and drags down my movement so I end up switching back to using sun/cross.
Here is an example of how I train/farm in Arcana:
Sadly I don't have enough Arcane Force to get bonus damage on these monsters yet, so I can't one shot with flicker when I am using drop gear, however in Lachelein at chicken festival 2, I used flicker/cross/equinox slash to rotate across the map very quickly.
**For Maximizing DPM**
The other benefit of maxing these three skill nodes is that it will overall increase your dpm when you are bossing. I always find myself using flicker/buster and equinox slash as these are our only source of iframe for dodging and movement for mobility. Having these skills raised will allow you to dish out extra damage when you are moving out of the way when you can't spam speeding sunset/moon dancer. **You can also do an animation cancel when you use crescent divide/solar pierce and equinox slash at the same.**
For reference here's the difference in damage for these skills when the V Matrix skills are level 0, 25, 50.
*Sun/Moon Cross* Every level Increases the final damage of this skill by 3% (max 150% at level 50)
https://puu.sh/x72Bi/409133f9c9.png --> Level 0
https://puu.sh/x72EB/fce58e6982.png --> Level 25
https://puu.sh/x72Ic/2aa133eb5e.png --> Level 50
*Equinox Slash* Every level increases the final damage of this skill by 2% (max 100% at level 50)
https://puu.sh/x72KZ/4084b7a788.png --> Level 0
https://puu.sh/x72NW/abf5d708c6.png --> Level 25
https://puu.sh/x72Tp/9477cf7619.png --> Level 50
*Flicker/Buster* Every level increases the final damage of this skill by 5% (max 250% at level 50)
https://puu.sh/x72Wi/a13dc9dd41.png --> Level 0
https://puu.sh/x730K/b630964d84.png --> Level 25
https://puu.sh/x733E/f7b89ccb13.png --> Level 50
**If you are not high leveled enough to have enough node slots to keep your secondary skills, that's fine, stick to using the usual bossing special nodes (Boss Slayer II etc.) In my case, since I just hit level 235 I am able to have all of my primary/secondary skills at level 50 as well as a special node for bossing (before I kept my secondary skills at level 25).**
That's pretty much it for dawn warriors as far as optimization goes, short and simple. I believe these three skills work brilliantly when training and bossing and I hope this post helps other dawn warriors out there (if there's any >.<). Please comment and let me know if you have any other questions or thoughts pertaining to dawn warriors!
tl;dr:
If you have your primary skills (celestial dance/RoD/Styx/Crescent/Moon dancer) maxed, consider flicker/cross/equinox slash as a secondary set of skill nodes to raise for faster training and an extra boost in dpm when bossing. Your overall training should speed up (less casting animation with these three skills when compared to crescent divide) and overall more fluid.
