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.
For the hybrid Psycho build strategy against Yosuke, I meant that both teammates should be on Phalanx, not Defensive. As for putting Roald on relentless for one turn in hopes of getting the extra 10% damage, you really do need him to cast Greater Purpose right away, otherwise Yosuke will knock you down too far with his second attack. I don't think the extra 10% will help kill him much quicker.
As for the Epiphany kill, yeah it is quite the sacrifice move. In fact, when I first tried it, I almost quit and reloaded when he killed me, but I waited to find out how much damage Epiphany would do. What a nice surprise to find out it killed him after Sonny was "dead" - talk about striking from the grave.
I've gone back and forth with using Insecurity or Dark Echoes in that attack combo on him. Dark Echoes does give a better damage boost (24% vs 20%), but Insecurity is guaranteed to hit. The shadow Psycho build tends to have fairly low speed and Yosuke has very high speed, making Dark Echoes miss pretty frequently.
I used Confinement after Epiphany since the former lasts five turns, and the latter lasts seven turns. Swapping the order would lose one turn of effectiveness for Confinement, and since Yosuke regenerates only 300 health each turn, it's not really missing much.
About the PvP stuff.... I'll leave a quick comment here, but we should take that to another thread, like this one: [url=http://armorgames.com/community/thread/7778216/sonny-2-pvp-for-the-pro-nonstunners/page/1]
About a speed Bio in PvP - Agile Exposure only last 2 turns, giving the attacker only 1 effective turn to attack while it's still on. So, if you use it before using Shadow Blend, it's essentially wasted (teammate attacks do benefit from it, though). But ultimately, vesperbot is correct. An Ice Hydro will end up being a solid punching bag. More on the other thread....
crud... my bad for third post - it was the wrong link. Although interesting to the current pvp conversation, since spartandestroyer is so excited about Ice Hydros, yet posted a hacked speed bio with two Crystallize on the ability wheel in a thread calling for nonstunners. That said, maybe that is the right thread for this pvp convo.
you missed an enemy with disrupt? weird, it's an auto-hit attack. You might be mistaking this with regulate (a hydro move that reduces enemy focus and also dispels), that one requires a hit check. And so what, any bio gets 2/2 disrupt when fighting Baron It's useful in many situations to overlook.
vesperbot - Even though disrupt is an automatic hit, it will fail to dispel a buff on rare occasions. I'd estimate it fails no more than 1 in 10 tries.
spartan - As I noted in the other thread, I didn't say your Sonny was hacked, but the health of your teammates was - at least for Veradux. He was geared with all Dr. Kilma's armor and the Mending Beacon. His health was 12540 when it should have been 8778.
Hmmm ... I just checked the numbers again and this is weird. 12540 is exactly what Veradux's health would be with that gear plus the Blast Shield. When I load that code into PvP, though, I don't see any Blast Shield. It always displays fine when I equip Veradux with it. I'll concede there could be some weird bug going on like the Velocious Handgrips never appearing. If that's the case, then my apologies for the hacking accusation, but it certainly appeared that way.
In any case, that was a crazy ability wheel for a speed bio, especially if you're not allowing stuns. The hybrid Psycho I posted in that thread had no trouble demolishing it. But I still want to see your Ice Hydro.
hmm, to test the bug, just load up PVP arena with speed bio in both sides, and check if there is a display difference in team's gear.
about disrupt - a somewhat weird behavior, this has something to do with 99-turn undispellable buffs on enemies, the skill wastes dispel-slots on them. I was able to disrupt a Shadow Blend off Felicity in Z1 100% of the time prior to her casting Serious Business, but then zero dispels worked, but my Disrupt was level 1. If I up this to level 2, it worked 100% after she buffs, but if disrupt's aftermath was still there, it got dispelled but not SB, due to it lasting longer. (I have tried to de-focus her just for that, placing focus recovery buff, she used SB, I threw another disrupt and was surprised to dispel focus replenishment only, and SB remained in place.)
I tried exactly that test vesperbot. The Blast Shield shows up on both sides with local configs, regardless of the opponent. I can only presume that there is something wonky with spartan's exported code. It's all but impossible to imagine that he would have hacked an export file that ultimately provides no actual benefit. But, as I mentioned earlier, the ability wheel for that export is garbage. Ridiculously easy to beat with no stuns (which is what it was posted for).
yep, a weird thing that there's no blast shield on the saved Veradux. It's however probable that export character routine malfunctions with exactly this item, I have heard about some problems that it doesn't get displayed, or something like this. And, it's pretty much one-hit when he goes SB+Withdrawal, against maybe all but hydro geared in vitality and having cold neurology. But, a hydro can use Ice Wall if you shadowblend... and then, if you DO withdrawal, a subversion will slay the bio yep, without stuns it's more of a rock-paper-scissors tactics
Thank you for this guide, Im trying to beat the LEGEND achievement as a Psycho. I was on the 5th zone but couldn't beat few of the end fights So I had to train
