This guide is intended to assist in making character development decisions. This is my opinion, and I don't claim that this is the only viable build. However, I do claim that this build is extremely effective and can easily defeat every enemy in the game.
Before I begin reviewing skills individually, a statement of design philosophy and some perspective.
My goal is to beat the game efficiently. This build is designed to win fights quickly and easily, not to do so with any particular style in mind. The things I value are power and consistency. Power means big numbers. Consistency means there's nothing your enemy can do to prevent you from using your strategy.
With that in mind, I will make the case that the Electric path is by far the best approach to building this character. Specifically that Shock Therapy is the best attack available to this character.
Finally, keep in mind the role of your team-mates. Roald is useless and the best job he can do is distract the enemy. Sometimes he grows a brain and uses a well timed stun or silence, and these are wonderful abilities if only he would use them at the right time more reliably. His damage will never be better than mediocre. Veradux on the other hand is a key player. His healing is the main thing that keeps you alive and you should keep him on defensive or phalanx stance at all times and work primarily on boosting his healing powers (it seems to scale primarily with Strength).
Here is the detailed review of each skill:
Starting Skills
Dark Infusion - This is extremely bad. You may need to use it at the beginning of the came to regen some focus (before you have access to Electric Storm). The damage is totally mediocre and having to deal with giving your enemy free focus is annoying. Using it on yourself is unacceptable except when you have no choice.
Corruption - this actually does very good damage during the early game, before you've developed a better attack. Its not unreasonable to set it up with a Dark Echoes or something. It does however, eat up Focus very quickly and should be dropped when better alternatives are available.
Dark Echoes - This is a reasonable attack but its damage never gets to be particularly good. The best thing about it is the low focus cost and the low cooldown, its a good set-up for stronger Shadow damage abilities. Ultimately you'll stop using this at some point in zone 2 when you switch to full electric and no longer use Shadow attacks.
Placebo - useless. low damage, weak debuff, nothing to see here.
Nerve Shock - same as Placebo. skip it.
Terrify - the damage is mediocre but the heal-over-time is moderately useful. However...Veradux is your healer, you shouldn't need any other healing if you're doing it right.
Free Will - One of the best abilities for the class. Recommend maxing this one. The dispelling abilities are critically useful and the damage shield will bail you out on a regular basis since sometimes Veradux falls a little bit behind. The heal-over-time is just bonus, it isn't the real reason you use this ability but its still nice.
Traumatize- Another extremely good ability and a low point commitment to max it as well, so its quite good. This is good for stalling for time to put hard hitting enemies out of the fight while Veradux catches up on healing. This is also very useful for managing cooldowns and ability durations. For example, you can stun enemies with short duration buffs on them so they miss their window of opportunity. The focus drain component is just gravy, though it is critically useful in the Baron fight.
Destruction - this can only be used on allies, not yourself. neither of your allies has good damage, not even Roald wearing full Strength gear. you're the damage dealer of the party. skip this one.
Betrayal - pure garbage. This only works when its set up ahead of time with Retrograde. If something goes wrong you either wasted two turns or perhaps you even just nailed one of your allies for a large amount. Way too tricky. Way too inconsistent. Leave it alone.
Retrograde - also garbage. way too inconsistent. yes i know this has funny combos with Nightmare and Betrayal and whatever else you can think of. Thats all tricky non-sense and you don't need to waste your time doing that. at 2 points you can also use this on enemies. there are no fights in the game that require you to do so though so you can safely ignore that tactic.
Confinement - this is actually quite useful against enemies that heal alot. however...you can view healing prevented as some form of damage dealt, in the end they're totally equivalent. if you can use the skill points (and slots on your ability wheel) to do more damage than the equivalent healing prevented than you should. i was always able to find a more effective damage increase compared to the healing decrease. damage increase is also generically useful against all enemies, even one that don't heal.
Shock Therapy - This is the best attack the class has. Max this, put 3 copies of it on your ability wheel, zap the crap out of every enemy you see. the 330% instinct co-efficient is superb, basically unmatched. the fact that this is ALSO a buff dispelling ability makes this unparalleled in its level of utility. Simply the best thing going and the focal point of this build.
Salvation - this is an extremely worthwhile buff. once you max this, you should find that Veradux no longer has any problems keeping pace with incoming damage. It also keeps him alive longer and boosts his focus regen. Really you couldn't ask for anything better. This is mandatory and the reason why you can trust Veradux to do all of your healing.
Insecurity - this would be an important skill if we were attempting to use Shadow damage. We're not though, so you can ignore it completely.
Overdrive - this is broken and bugged and totally malfunctioning. don't waste your time. even if it worked as advertise, you simply don't need to accept a life-loss penalty to get good damage. this is never a good trade-off. the risk/reward calculus fails on this one.
High Voltage - less damage than Shock Therapy without the dispel, and in fact it buffs your enemy. Super Awful. 1 point for pre-requisite advancement but never use this.
Tenacity - its very powerful but its usefulness is totally related to whether or not you're actually dying. You can use this as a place to dump extra skill points but if you're doing things correctly you'll kill so fast that the extra survivability of this ability isn't especially important. I usually just put 1 point in here.
Epiphany - this is an actually good Shadow damage ability but its so far down the tree and requires so many points wasted in other garbage abilities that I can't justify building around this.
Electron Charge - same as High Voltage. less damage and overall just worse than Shock Therapy. don't bother.
Electrical Storm - another core ability of this build. it does respectable damage (though noticeably less than Shock Therapy) but ITS TOTALLY FREE and it regens 40 focus. Max it, love it, lean on it, it drives the build.
Charged Blood - the damage passive that makes this build truly deadly. max it, no explanation should be necessary. this is what makes your crits gigantic.
Wraith Form - this is a very powerful ability but strictly speaking you don't need it. I use it because the Speed increase is gigantic and usually gives you 4 turns in a row of guaranteed massive crits. that kind of burst damage is devastating and most opponents can't withstand it. the focus regen from this is convenient but not that important since you've got Electrical Storm.
Nightmare - more tricky garbage. you can try to use this as a finisher or you can try to combine this with Retrograde and hit yourself with it, but in either case thats an inconsistent situation and you don't ever need this. Skip it.
Haunt - re-spec and get this 2/2 for the Baron fight. thats the only time in the whole game you need this. skip it otherwise.
Psychopath Form - this is exceptionally powerful but requires you to be invested in garbage like Betrayal, Retrograde, and Overdrive. If you could get this without having to take Garbage it would be ridiculously awesome. As is this is like the consolation prize for playing a bad build. It doesn't make up for the weakness of the rest of the Shadow Damage stuff.
Shock Coma - this is cute and mildly useful. Its versatile, as you can use it to crowd control an enemy for a long time or to recover your own stuff. However...you have better options for both crowd control and recover so really this is second rate at either task and thus should not be used.
Ultimatum - pure trash.
Sacrifice - this is funny. sometimes you might REALLY want to just eat Roald. ultimately though you may as well keep him around to absorb hits and save yourself the wasted skill points and ability wheel slot.
Implosion - i've yet to find a situation where this would matter. waste of points/slots. another one of those tricky Shadow abilities that requires way too much set up.
So if you've stayed with me this whole time, thanks for reading. I hope you found this useful. Before I finish I'll leave you with my most typical equipment choices and ability load-outs.
Ability Wheel Load-Out 1. Shock Therapy 2. Shock Therapy 3. Shock Therapy 4. Electric Storm 5. Traumatize 6. Free Will 7. Salvation 8. Wraith Form
Equipment Choices Primary Stats: Instinct and Lightning Piercing Secondary Stats: Vitality and Speed Tertiary Stats: whatever miscellaneous defense you can find
the Electric Armor set from Zone 4 (the Tunnel) is actually extremely useful. You can equip it starting at level 18 and is good enough to last through the end-game. If you're especially lucky you'll find a really good weapon with high Lightning Piercing like Poseidon's Trident (or whatever its called).
With this build its typical to crit for 3500+ with your Shock Therapy. More or less depending on buffs/debuffs and the Lightning Defense level of your opponent.
In Wraith Form you can go on Offensive kill streaks where you unload 4 attacks in a row for a total of about 14,000 damage in 4 turns (3 Shock Therapy crits, and 1 Electric Storm crit). This is enough damage to blow away any regular enemy in the game. Only bosses can survive a round of this. Bosses usually die in the 2nd round of Wraith Form though.
Okay, I need some advice. I want to know if I should invest a lot of my points into vitality, because I'm getting one-shotted in zone 4 and 5. Or am I not getting the correct equipment / abilities?
No, If you really need the hit points, go get "Tenacity" or find an android body piece for +76 vitality. That should do you fine. Remember to set your allies to "halanx" or the left button next to their names before you select your attack.
Alright, well, I havn't used psycho in heroic mode yet, (i finished it with hydro and am currently working on it with bio), but here is my take from finishing it on challenging. If you can't defend yourself even after maxing out tenacity and using free will almost 100% of the time (so that you are always shielded), then is the time to think about getting some vitality equips/distributing some attribute points to vitality.
I have to agree with you. I tried a few fiddly builds like overdrive + epiphany+implosion. But when it comes down to it, you might be able to setup an awesome attack. But if it takes two moves to set it up, you'd darn better do more than 3x the damage than with a normal attack.
Anyone else's opinion on Charged Blood? It's effects don't actually register in the stats. I've been staying away from piercing all together. The numbers are big on the weapons, but the effects themselves are much smaller. I prefer consistency over the occasional gift.
It's pretty consistent, the majority of my hits were criticals at the end of the game. Even in PvP, I frequently hit critical hits. It's not like I had anywhere else to spend the points anyway. Also, if you hover the bar for piercing/defense, it'll give you some stats.
I know hovering the bar gives you stats for piercing and defense. But if you use charged blood which increases your lightning piercing by x precent. this stat increase doesn't appear under the inventory menu for me whether I'm using lightning piercing items or not.
Oh. A point about High Voltage. Yes. It buffs the enemy. However, it says the enemy delivers and RECEIVES 20% more damage. And the effect stacks over several turns. So it actually does quite a bit more damage than shock therapy.
Nice guide. Though i started 2 pshs and i beat the game with both. A shadow-user and a Electric one. Though the shadow is starting to do alot of damage the shock one does Massive.
Alright, well, I havn't used psycho in heroic mode yet, (i finished it with hydro and am currently working on it with bio), but here is my take from finishing it on challenging. If you can't defend yourself even after maxing out tenacity and using free will almost 100% of the time (so that you are always shielded), then is the time to think about getting some vitality equips/distributing some attribute points to vitality.
Heroic = They will one-shot you if you don't have the chance to get a free will in. Ie, anyone with a high speed and targets me has about a 50% chance of KO-ing me before it's even my turn. I'm going andriod, but the loss of nearly 50 intel saddens me.
Anyone else's opinion on Charged Blood? It's effects don't actually register in the stats. I've been staying away from piercing all together. The numbers are big on the weapons, but the effects themselves are much smaller. I prefer consistency over the occasional gift.
Worth it. If it's maxed, expect anywhere from 1/3 - 2/3 of your moves being critical.
I stand by my assessment of Charged Blood. Its a crucial skill for the class and is responsible for a gigantic damage increase. You are correct, Cedric, it does not show up on the character sheet. That doesn't mean it isn't working though.
Also keep in mind that very high levels of piercing don't only boost crits it will also increase base damage by a certain (somewhat smaller) percentage.
I may experiment with High Voltage to see if its worth it. It may legitimately result in higher damage output but that doesn't necessarily mean its the correct choice. Its riskier than Shock Therapy and it also lacks the dispel ability. Thanks for the tip though, I'll give it a try.
Charged Blood is a passive effect. So it doesn't show on your normal stats, but in combat it shows. I highly recommend at least one point in there, or if you choose to go for Electropsycho class, max it out. It'll help you get consistent crits, combined with lightning piercing armor and arms.
Sorry for triple posting, but no one else is posting here.
You won't believe this, but now I'm stuck on Captain Hunt. He isn't too hard, but his two followers, you can't hit them due to their energy shields, and one of them used lock and load, and they nailed me in one hit as a critical damage.
