After experimenting with the Psycho class on heroic, i have concluded that the best build is a defensive hybrid. This is because the only good way of healing your health is in the shadow build, and the best way of recovering focus is in the lightning build.
Your main defensive ability will be free will. You want to maximize this. It really is excellent because it protects you and your team mates AND heals them. In difficult fights, you will have 3 of these on your bar.
In order to recover focus, you want electrical storm. The damage this thing does is also pretty nice at high levels, when you can afford to put points into charged blood.
Your main attack will be epiphany, along with also want overdrive. This strategy works well because the damage from overdrive won't matter as long as your instinct is high and your vitality isn't too big.
I find traumatize most useful for filling up my bar. It works especially well when you are against one enemy. It is vital for the baron. It just generally helps you defend, e.g. when your opponent uses "aim for the heart" and you don't want them to attack.
You can invest in tenacity later on, when you have nothing else to invest in.
You won't be doing HUGE damage with this build but it really is excellent for staying alive in heroic. The thing that makes this build unique is the fact that is usually has 3 free wills on the combat action bar. In easy fights, you will find that you often don't have much to do but in difficult fights, this is the best way to cope because in heroic Veradux isn't reliable enough- in zone 5, his healing is pathetic compared to your free will.
Only put 1 point in shock therapy. This build is hybrid but leaning more towards shadow: the only reason why you would ever want to go down the lightning tree is for focus regeneration.
The main things that set my build apart from the others are as follows:
- It uses, and relies on, skills from both the shadow and the lightning trees - It is the most defensive I've seen - It shows just how good free will is when you're on heroic.
Stats and Equipment
When choosing equipment, your main priority is instinct. This is because the higher your instinct, the more effective free will is. Also, too much vitality means that overdrive's side effect of making you lose health prevents you from getting the healing over time that you need from free will.
Put all your points into instinct.
You don't care about strength.
When it comes to piercing, lightning is what you are looking for. This is because piercing does not affect DoT, so it would be useless for epiphany.
Vitality is helpful, but, again, NOT TOO MUCH.
The Combat Action Bar
Your first priority is to max out electrical storm and free will, so don't even think about this build until you can afford to do that.
The next thing to spend your points on is max epiphany, followed by traumatize (which is vital for the baron).
After that, go for some tenacity if you are struggling to survive; otherwise, you'll want some charged blood to power up your electrical storm.
The standard build is fully maxed out at lvl 29. At this level, your combat action bar will look like this:
2x Traumatize - for stunning and destroying focus 3x Free Will - for healing (and blocking) 1x Epiphany - for DoT 2x Electrical Storm - for focus regeneration and extra damage
You will also have 5 points in charged blood and 5 points in tenacity.
At level 30, you'll probably want to spend that last point on one of the transformations. However, neither of them really fit into this build and it's difficult to find space for it on your bar so I'll leave it to you to decide which one to choose.
The Strategy
You will usually start off the fight by casting Free Will on yourself, to negate the effects of overdrive and protect yourself from you enemies' attacks.
After that, you'll probably want to use epiphany to get that lovely DoT going. In easier fights, you can use this on the first turn.
During the rest of the fight you will be using free will as often as you see fit, to keep you and your allies alive. Use traumatize when your opponent as an enraged-type buff active, or to simply put an all-out offensive opponent out of action for 2 turns, to help defend. Try not to use traumatize and epiphany on the same enemy, because epiphany will only do half the damage each turn.
Use electrical storm whenever you have a free turn, or whenever you need focus. In fact, you will use this very often and at higher levels, when you have maxed out charged blood, the damage will be very nice.
Future Plans
- A full list of THE BEST equipment (because i haven't worked this out yet)
- More in-depth analysis of every skill mentioned, along with more alternatives. EDIT: Eventually i might just go through every skill, say what it does, and comment on it.
- A better explanation of the strategy - Done
Updates
- Posted the guide on the armorgames forum. Previously, it was only on krinlabs.
- I just beat the mayor on heroic with this build. I was at lvl 26 and had all the abilities except full tenacity, which was only 2/5. But i had a fair bit of vit gear and my total health was around 3300, which was plenty. Hopefully this demonstrates just how good this build is =]
- Made it a bit more attractive by giving each section a unique colour, and making the subheadings bigger.
- I made a few corrections and changes. Also, I thank xsupernoob for the link to this guide in his post.
- I added the combat action bar section, so this whole thing is a bit more specific.
In heroic, this would work well. This is kind of a build that requires patience, kind of like slowly draining the enemies HP while staying alive. It won't be too effective, but I suppose staying alive is the main thing. Might try doing that on heroic.
This is actually a pretty good guide! It's amazing how addicted players make such good guides in so little time! Sonny 2 is just the game you can't resist making a guide on! Hahaha
Personally I find this build to be too weak and all in all not that useful. Most of the enemies in heroic will have enough power to actually burst the shield from free will quite fast. And even tough you can actually last longer with that strategy, in my opinion killing faster is the best defense you can have. The faster you get rid of one enemy the less attacks you recieve. It is also slow and weak at the fact that in need to invest way too many points on different branches to be useful at all as compared to others taht are useful from point 1.
In my opinion there are bettter alternatives than this build.
PS: I have finished the game in heroic with all 3 classes using at least 2 different builds each time, so I cleared it about 7 or 8 times already, allways in heroic
