🦁Dueling

What is the duel?

The duel in DRS is a special one-on-one encounter that has several gotcha mechanics that kill you immediately if failed. When cleared, it grants the duelist a buff that doubles all stats, including HP, healing, and most importantly damage. As it's such an important role, most hosts ask that you study the fight before attempting to do it. Below are resources to ensure your success both during and after the duel.

Duel Guides

Text Duel Guide by O’palt Jhaid - includes a duel timeline & explanations of each mechanic as well as holsters & tips to best make use of the buff

Video Duel Guide by blahpy - a video guide covering the mechanics of the duel.

Reference Images - a helpful set of images you can reference before or during the duel.

Skipping Entrapment 1 as a DPS

In the duel, the Entrapment 1 mechanics forces a long period of downtime and requires a bit of knowledge of the possible patterns to do efficiently. Because of this, many people choose to bring Lost Excellence in order to use its invulnerability effect and skip it instead of doing the mechanic with Lost Perception. But, what are the pros and cons to this Entrapment 1 skip?

• There are two main reasons to skip Entrapment 1; First of all, the damage bonus of Lost Excellence as well as the extra uptime means you'll be killing earlier than if you did the mechanic normally. This means you may skip an extra mechanic or more, and is especially helpful if doing the duel on a lower-damage job like Dancer or Bard. Secondly, it obviously makes the duel easier. While Entrapment 1 isn't exactly a difficult mechanic failing to do it means instant death, so if you're dueling for the first time it can be a big help. If you're new it may even help you kill before Entrapment 2, which can also be a pretty difficult mechanic the first time you see it.

• There's only one big downside to bringing Excellence, but it's pretty major: you lose a significant amount of space in your holster. Because you're having to hold on to Excellence until Entrapment 1, you typically will need to bring a Dispel and an extra Perception in your holster. While 7 weight of actions may not seem like much, all the most powerful holsters you can bring as a duelist require at least 96 space. If you want to bring as much damage as possible, you simply cannot do the Excellence skip.

If you want to see this skip in action, there are PoVs as Melee and Caster.

Duel PoVs

This playlist contains PoVs of nearly everything, from all mechanics on melee to Irregular tank to healer. If you want to see what the duel looks like on your role, check it out!

After the duel

Once you’ve cleared the duel, it’s your job to make use of the fact you do twice as much damage. To do this, make sure you’ve read up on ways to increase your damage output like Mimic chaining, Blood Rage, and any other relevant information in the DPS or tank sections. Cam's holsters also have holsters specifically for dueling, though these have no space for Reraisers.