As a new arrival in the Living Lands of Avowed, your character has to learn a lot of tips and tricks to survive in this powderkeg of an island. You have an important mission to find a way to cure the Dreamscourge, but there’s a lot of danger between you and that goal which will require more than just your weapons. Leveling up will let you spend your points on new skills, just like most RPGs, but they are split between several pages. You are not locked into a single class and can invest your points into one or all of them, but there are some skills that you will want to prioritize getting first. Here are the best abilities you should work toward unlocking in Avowed.
Best Fighter abilities
Charge
Charge is an easy pick to invest your first few points into on the Fighter tree. It is a powerful dashing attack that can interrupt enemies with an explosive hit that breaks through guards. For bosses, saving this move to stop a deadly attack while staying in melee range is always reliable. The explosive damage is good for splash damage but also has utility outside of combat. Instead of wasting grenades to break walls, you can just use this skill to blast down cracked walls.
Constant Recovery
No matter what weapons you focus on, you’re going to get hit eventually. Melee fighters especially will be tanking a ton of hits, so Constant Recovery will keep you alive without draining all your potions. When hit, you can recover 50% of your HP lost over time, and with further upgrades, this skill can eventually let you restore all the damage you took.
Devastating Criticals
There’s nothing more satisfying than a critical hit. You can increase the chances of landing one with your character traits, but this skill makes each one count by upping the damage by 30% at the first level and 60% at max.
Reflect
The main issue with being a melee class is all those pesky rangers. Having a second loadout with a ranged weapon is always a good idea, but Reflect can almost do the job on its own. If you time your block perfectly when a projectile is about to hit, you can send it back to hit the attacker.
Best Ranger abilities
Tanglefoot
Tanglefoot is a skill every class should keep handy, but especially rangers. It prevents a target from moving for 8 seconds (up to 12) and can even inflict poison when upgraded. Most fights in Avowed will swarm you with enemies and your companions can only draw so much aggro so having a way to keep yourself from getting surrounded is vital.
Steady aim
When you aim with a bow, you have the chance to hit an enemy’s weak point for bonus damage. Unless you’re in stealth, it is very difficult to land another hit on a weak point on purpose when everyone is running around. Steady Aim lets you slow down time by 25% (up to 75%) when aiming to land more shots.
Shadowing Beyond
Stealth is how you should begin every encounter in Avowed, but sometimes there’s no way to take advantage of stealth based on enemy placement. Or, you just want to sneak past and not start a fight at all. Shadowing Beyond lets you turn completely invisible while draining your essence. Upgrading it will boost the damage you deal on your first attack from stealth and your movement speed.
Bear Ally
This skill lets you summon a bear. Do you need any more justification than that? Sure, it only lasts a maximum of 45 seconds, but that’s plenty of time to give yourself breathing room and snipe enemies from a safe distance while the enemy deals with a magical bear.
Best Wizard abilities
Chill Blades
Each element has a benefit to building up its accumulation, but frost is the best one to grab first for all classes. This spell shoots ice shards that can freeze an enemy in place for free attacks to let you retreat for a moment. Ice is also very handy to have for creating ice platforms in water or breaking certain metal barriers.
Wand Mastery
Wizards will be casting plenty of spells, but your main wand attack will always be your primary damage dealer. Wand Mastery isn’t super exciting, but a flat 25 to 50% damage increase on all attacks can’t be ignored.
Grimoire Mastery
For full magic builds, you will be holding a grimoire in your off-hand at all times for easy access to more spells. Until you level up Grimoir Mastery, though, you are stuck using the weakest spells. Besides letting you use level 5, 10, 15, and 20 spells, it also reduces their essence cost.
Secret of Rime – increase frost accumulation by 20 to 45% (or choose whichever element you want, fire, shock, poison)
Once you get deep into Avowed and find which element accumulation effect you like most, invest deeper into it. Secret of Rime, for example, focuses on frost accumulation but each one increases that element’s rate of buildup by 20 to 45% so you can trigger the effect far faster.