Remember shadow blade? a spell many of us wanted to be good but simply could was not? If this is you, you might be an optimizer, and if you’re not aware, shadow blade is considered one of the worst spells in the game by most, only having a few niche uses. I used it before in a build, and i’m about to blow those builds out of the water, because, with a few simple tricks, shadow blade is, in terms of damage, the best melee weapon in the game.

There are three major parts to making Death Zero deal as much damage as it does:

1. Magic items re-size to fit the user.
2. Weapon size categories
3. Shadow blade itself is a magic weapon

With these combined, we can re-size shadow blade into a large, huge, or gargantuan weapon simply by being that size ourselves after we first cast shadow blade at a medium size.

We nystuls and wishbind shadow blades at high level, then silver them for use with bladetrips, and we can pump serious damage, for even more we can planar bind a draconic shard and have it inhabit the blade, for an extra 1d8 psychic damage.

A large size 7th level shadow blade deals 10d8 damage per attack
A huge size 7th level shadowblade deals 15d8 damage per attack
A gargantuan size 7th level shadowblade deals 20d8 damage per attack

if you are large or larger, shadow blade suddenly becomes the highest damage weapon you could possibly use. A gargantuan creature with nothing else going for it can slap an enemy with this blade and deal 90 damage before modifiers.

Want to help your martial friend even more while they’re in a planetaur? give them a medium shadow blade and they will deal deal 15d8 + 7 per hit.

Lets apply this tech to some of our other builds:

With this in mind, Sickening Radiance’s damage shoots up to over 450 dpr at-will. However, GITM gains such a massive boost to damage it makes Sickening Radiance almost irrelevant. (which it already basically did anyway, but now it’s even closer). With some way of having 2 attacks (dual-weilding, or having bladesinger multi attack, or tashas guise, whatever works) GITM throws out 6 attacks that have +17 to-hit, for 77.5 damage a piece, (or around 80 if we include crit chance). This results in 72.7875 damage per attack, with 6 attacks, this is 436.725 DPR. adding the d8 from a planar bound draconic shard brings us to 462.24DPR, and adding another attack with dual wielding, not using the feat because that’s lame, we get 539.28 DPR. with bladesinger 3 of those could have an additional 3d8, for another 40.5 damage (roughly).

For a rough estimation of what a martial build using this tech looks like: magic jar a martial into a warforge colossus. Echo11 / gloom 3 / ass 3 build will, on average, deal around a 1520 nova.

In short, shadow blade does fuckloads of damage for the lost cost of a couple slots from 4 months ago, so many fuckloads that even the best magic weapons in the game can’t even do half as much (besides magic weapons that let us cast big AOE spells).