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.
@robbie: thanks, i'm glad you like the guide. however, pictures wouldn't make it better, they would just make it prettier. all of the information content of the guide can be communicated just fine in text format. and as mentioned there's no edit button anyway.
@kererr: sounds like a bug. post it in the glitch forum.
@spearthrower: i've posted a pretty detailed guide to the Baron in this thread, on the first page of this thread actually. please read it.
my characters are all lvl 30 and my Sonny has: 660 instict 128 speed 141 vitality and 5.5k shock therapy crits and 5.1 k electical storm crits unbuffed and 9.4 k shock therapy crits buffed BTW dont spec lightning piercing spec all instict as a tip.
what buff are you using that increases your damage by that much?
also, without sufficient Speed and Lightning Piercing your crit percentage will be pretty low. there's a sweet spot that balanced an adequate amount of speed/piercing with Instinct that results in a much higher damage output than just Instinct.
Just in case anyone is interested I've figured out how to use ultimatum effectivly now... I answered my own question by experimentation and (i think) that freewills shield stops appearing if it is broken while the buff is active BUT it resets the damage each time you recast it (although I still need to check if you have to wait for the buff to end first and then recast or just recasting is good enough).
As i have already said casting ultimatum reduces damage to you shield. Basicly if you cast ultimatum and then freewill, most of the damage to your shield will be the 10% health decay. If you keep your vitality low then this is really small.
I currently have ~ 500 instint and 100 vitality. This shields me from 2500 damage over 5 turns and I recieve around 300-200 per turn from ultimatum. that means that if you recieve less than 1000 damage over those 5 turns your shields won't break and you can recast them again and again.
1000 damage doesn't sound like a lot but as ultimatum prevents 95% of damage that equates to 20k or 4k per turn. You are unlikly to recieve that much damage EACH turn but it is still possible. That said as a level 23 my shield didn't break agaist the final boss.
bear in mind if you DID manage to minimize your vitatly this could realistily be up to twice as effective.
I'd like to thank transitive for his amazing guide. My build an electric build now; just with a bit of ultimatum and sacrifice (you don't need allies if you can't be healed).
I'd like to try my build out against a pure electric so if someone could kindly post their charater code... Thanks
Nightmare is a really nice skill, it can do 520% damage but coupled with Shock Therapy, the effect of Nightmare will disappear. With Wraith form, Damage from your attacks increase and with Electrical Storm, you dont have trouble regaining focus, Traumatize comes in handy in disabling enemies and regaining cooldowns. I maxed Tenacity so I could put more points on Instinct and Charged Blood so my Electric Attacks would deal critical damage.
Here are my skills
Shock Therapy x 2 Nightmare x 1 Electrical Storm x 2 Wraith Form x 1 Traumatize x 2
im gonna have to go ahead and disagree with those endorsing Nightmare.
these are the problems i have with it.
1) its not an electric attack. none of your electric piercing gets applied to it so you just won't get the big crits out of it that you get from Shock Therapy.
2)it doesn't actually do 520% instinct, unless its the blow that actually kills the enemy. the maximum damage it can do is 445% instinct because the enemy will regenerate 1/7th of the damage from nightmare (75% of your instinct for a 4/4 Nightmare) before you have a chance to dispel it with Shock Therapy. they may regain more than that if you fail to dispel it next turn for some reason (Shock Therapy misses, you get stunned, etc.)
3) its a waste of ability points. you don't really get anything out of it that you couldn't already get from another damage skill. being forced to blow ability points on it doesn't make sense to me. you don't actually need a better damage skill than Shock Therapy. In fact, there just isn't a better skill than Shock Therapy which is why I recommend it in my guide.
dots and hots combine additively. if you had a 1000 point per turn DoT (say a nice big Epiphany) running and a "Dream's Over" HoT restoring 350 a turn the net damage would be 650. one doesn't cancel the other, they're both running and the damage lost to Nightmare's HoT is very real even if your DoT damage overtakes it.
the most efficient use of the skill is as a finishing move. if the enemy dies from the attack they obviously won't heal anything. i consider this to be a niche usage and unnecessary, even for a shadow build.
