Welcome to the combat guide for Flexible Survival! Newer players who've taken a look at the combat system and all that comes with it may get a little overwhelmed due to its complexity, but hopefully by reading this guide, you'll have a much better understanding. And hey, it ain't really all that bad! This page shall detail a large variety of mechanical topics that should take you from the basics all the way to the glorious level cap.

The Basics

Those coming from the single player version of the game may notice several significant differences. For one, we use what's known as the Active Time Battle (ATB) system, which is similar to certain RPGs. Mutant powers are also a very prevalent factor in combat along with crafted gear. This section shall detail the various basics to get you started and along your way.

Active Time Battle

When one initiates combat, they are thrown into an Active Time Battle, henceforth known as ATB. Everything is based off ticks and will determine when it's your turn and when your moves shall land. Every power has a certain amount of charge time as detailed in their description. The more charge something has, the longer it will take to land. Powers also have cooldowns which are also based off these ticks. In more advanced sections, we will detail more about the ATB system and how to tilt the scales in your favour, but one need not worry about it too much when starting out. Rather, it's important to simply be aware of it and how different it is from the single player's dice rolling combat mechanics.

Combat Commands

Now how do you even attack? Why it's quite simple! The common syntax for attacking a creature is use <attack> on <target>. For convenience sake, one may usually use shorthand on most power names and can do the same with their target. If you wish to use a power on yourself, then you can type use <power> on me. This is quite helpful when it comes to using healing or buffing powers on yourself. Items can also be used in the same fashion, but if it's a piece of equipment, it must be equipped in order for it to be used.

When you first start the game, the area you begin in shall have an NPC you may speak to. This course of action comes highly recommended, as they grace you with free items and weapons! Take a look, talk to the NPC, select your choice of gear (Don't worry too much about your choice. It doesn't have any permanent effects), and equip them! Type +gear to pull up your inventory, note the gear number of the thing you wish to equip, and then type +acc <gear number>. You'll then equip the item and it'll be ready for combat.

Your First Battle

Warning!! If you don't have any perks to prevent mutations such as Advanced Inoculation, getting hit in combat may mutate your character and being defeated may result in sexy consequences!!

You've put on your starter gear, learned the commands, and now you're itching for battle! But where do you start? The best place to start is usually right on the streets next to your starter location. Typing map can help you find your way around. But to use Zephyr as an example, going North, then up to the lobby, and then Out shall lead you outside. If you go east again, you'll find that to the east again is a different color!

An area colored in white determines an area that's an equal challenge to someone at your level. Generally, these areas are where you want to fight for the best XP gain. Pink areas are areas that are quite dangerous at your level and may easily lead to defeat while gray colored areas are of little to no challenge to your level.

So now you're standing in the streets right next to a white colored area. It's time to take the plunge! As soon as you move in, you have a chance of getting ambushed by some ferals. If you don't get ambushed, try typing search or move around a bit until you get ambushed. Eventually, you'll find yourself in a battle! When it's your turn, you'll see a list of all your available moves. The attacks in white are ready to fire, while the ones in gray are on cooldown for the length designated within the parentheses. If you win, you shall be rewarded with freecred and XP! Along with that, each defeated mob gives a chance at some builder nanites and salvage. If one doesn't have a perk to prevent victory messages such as Self Control, you'll be treated to a victory message based off your groin mutation.

Losing happens to everyone. If you lose, pick yourself back up with the respawn command (or spend a hero point with +hero revive). You'll be sent back to a triage so you can lick your wounds. Over time, your health and energy will recharge passively. If you're willing to spend a patrol point, type renew to be at full strength once more.

Gaining and Mastering Mutant Powers

Any time you get hit by a mutant, assuming you don't have any perks like Advanced Inoculation, one of your body parts has a chance at getting mutated towards the appropriate infection. But along with this, you also gain their power! So if a mutant has the power of Wild Swing on their arm and they infect your arms, then you get to use that power. So if you're on the lookout for certain powers, then you may want to get hit on purpose. The wiki is a good source for knowing what mutant has what powers. Simply search for the power and bring up its page, click the 'what links here' button on the left, and it should show what mutants have that power. To find the location of these mutants, type terminal <mutant name> and then atrace <location> to find it.

But if you're mutating all the time, how are you supposed to keep these powers? Simple! You master them. With a small fee of XP and creds, you can master these powers and keep them forever no matter what unless you decide to unmaster them. To do this, head over to a training area, easily found in most faction main areas such as the Zephyr lobby, and type train. Using the list of options, you can master a mutant power to make it yours to keep no matter what you mutate to. Even more, you can upgrade them with train upgrade mutant power to make them more powerful! Additionally, you can perform this option anywhere on the website by going to the character tab and clicking training. Each power can be upgraded to a maximum of two times. Eventually, you'll be able to epic and ultimate these powers, but this will be detailed in a future section. What these Statuses and such do on each power and weapon shall be detailed later, but if you're curious, the What is a Power page may help with understanding what exactly each power does.

Leveling Up

Once you get enough XP, you'll be ready to level up if you wish. By default, you are set to level up automatically when you reach the required amount of XP. It's recommended to turn this off by using charedit and modifying option 25. But why would you wish to level up? Every power and item you have shall scale with you as you level! So that Chainsword weapon you have gets stronger with each time you level up. And this applies to every power and item, not just the ones you have now. Let's say you're level 30 and you buy a Laser Pistol from a store. Every stat of the laser pistol will be scaled up for someone at level 30! So when you level up, you simply become stronger at pretty much everything you do, along with getting some additional maximum health. If you want to know more details, check out the Level Scaling page.

In addition, you'll also receive more mutant power slots. For more details on this, see the Level Costs page.

Tips for Beginners

Before we move onto advanced concepts, here are some tips for your first twenty levels or so that'll get you on your way. Nothing beats experience.

FIND A HEALING POWER. It's smart to find a way to heal yourself reliably. At the start, one can easily acquire Deep Healing off a Raccoon Guy or Lactaid from a Blue Gryphon. Nurse is also another great healing power, but it mainly heals over time rather than immediately like the other two mentioned powers. If you're fully a Female Husky, you unlock the power Feed the Puppies to help heal you as well.
Master all the powers you can and upgrade them before leveling up. Once you face harder foes, having upgraded powers shall help you dramatically on your journey.
There are some great powers that will do well in your arsenal at early levels. Raking Claws, Skunk Blast, and Gouging Claws will serve well to fell your foes.
After a battle, health and energy will regenerate automatically. You can use healing powers outside of battle as well. If you're willing to spend a patrol point, you can use the renew command to fully regenerate your health and energy.
If you want to fight something that's bellow your level to a point where they don't spawn, trying mentoring down. This allows you to temporarily level down to fight things in lower level areas again. To do this, first type +haz to see the level range of the area, and then mentor <level> to mentor to something within the range or a maximum of two above the max level of the area.
Fights getting too hard? Adjust your difficulty settings! This may easily be done on the home page of the website with the two buttons on the right side bar. You start off as normal/normal (AKA 0/0). Cycling through it, you'll find the easiest difficulty at easy/small (-1/-1). The button on the left controls the difficulty of the individual monsters while the button on the right increases the density of them. If you wish to adjust this within the game, head to the Zephyr or RSX lobby and head up to floor two and speak with the Tactics (enemy difficulty) and Pheromone (enemy density) NPCs. If you want to check your settings, type +haz and read the numbers on the bottom left.
Ask for help! The newbie channel is more than happy to answer any questions you may have. The science channel can also be used to discuss game mechanics if you're into that. The LFG channel can be used to gather up a group Don't be shy! We pride ourself on our friendly community.

Combat Roles

Once you reach level eight, you'll unlock your very first active role slot. As you continue to level, you'll unlock more slots. A convenient guide to see when you'll receive your next one can be found here. These rolls shall define what your very own "style" of combat. If you're familiar with traditional RPGs, you may know about concepts such as healers, DPS, tanks, support, and the works. These roles shall make you more powerful in what you wish to be, such as healing more or doing more damage.

Each combat role is a package that comes with three skills. To see a list of these roles, click here. So let's say you decide to take the Archfiend role. You'll get one point of Damage, Vampiric, and Warded. To find out what these do, use the rpinfo <skill> command or look them up on the Wiki. These are passive boosts to your character that will really help out and define who you are in combat. So what happens when you take a second role? Now let's say you get Assassin. That has Avoidance, Damage, and Speed. But your other role had damage on it too, right? Indeed! And that means you have two points of Damage now! Each skill can have a maximum of three, so be sure to plan accordingly.

To buy and use these roles once you have slots, type +role or perhaps more conveniently, use the web interface, head to the character tab, and then roles. It even has a simulator you can use!

Dailies

Dailies are missions one may do every day. While the name implies it can only be done once per day, the actual cooldown for the missions is once every eighteen hours. A multitude of rewards may follow for those who complete this mission handed to them and are amplified greatly should the player decide to take on a harder challenge. But what is a daily mission? First, head to either RSX or Zephyr lobby, go up, and then east. From there, you may type daily to receive a daily mission. If you don't like the location, type daily restart to get a new one. If you want to choose a more specific location, you can use the terminal to bring up compatible areas just to the west of this room and then type daily <location> or daily restart <location> if you already have a daily. If you want help finding the location given to you, try typing atrace <location> for some directions.

The objective is simple: Wipe out the creatures at the location given to you! All you have to do is go to that area and fight until it's complete. To view progress, a small status update appears above the Battle Complete line after every battle. It's important to note that a daily is always forty fights in total before it completes. Another thing you must keep in mind is the difficulty bonus meter. To see this, type quest and note the bar on the bottom. When you first start the daily, it shall be at -50%. At max, it may reach 400%. These values modify the rewards you shall obtain at the end of your daily. Every time you defeat an individual monster, some bonus is added to this meter. The system takes into account how difficult the monster was by these methods:

What danger settings you're at. It doesn't look at the pheromone setting (The setting that modifies monster density per battle). Your danger settings may be changed on the web page on the right side (The button on the left) or the Tactics Soldier above the Zephyr or RSX lobby.
The template the monster may or may not have. You may see some enemies with a prefix or suffix attached to their name like Bully or what have you. These are templates that modify the base monster to be either more powerful or weaker. By increasing the danger settings
The rank of the enemy, such as minion, mid boss, boss, hard boss, etc. These rankings may be viewed on either the terminal or using +haz in an area.
Your level compared to the monster. If you decide to fight two levels over the area range, you'll receive fewer bonus.

To put it simply, the harder the fight, the better the rewards. Remember that you only have forty fights total and the difficulty bonus meter works off an individual enemy basis and not after each battle. This means that to get the best results, you want as many difficult monsters you can fit inside each battle. If you spend all forty fights killing one or two difficult monsters each, you won't get a lot of bonus! But how about five? And how can you take on such a challenge? Bring friends! The more friends you bring, the more difficult a challenge you may face, resulting in much greater rewards. Try out the lfg channel to form a group. Upon completion of these missions, you may receive these rewards:

Reward Tokens. The amount is modified by your difficulty bonus meter. If you managed to get 400%, you shall get twenty whole tokens.
Glorious XP
A chance at an uncommon salvage (A 100 common salvage value!)
Any time you help someone with a daily, you get some extra rewards yourself. For one, you get one reward token when they finish their daily. Further, you even get an uncommon salvage roll, possibly netting you a free uncommon salvage! You also get some XP for your troubles. Now imagine the wonderful rewards should you decide to daily with a full party.

Primes

Once you reach level thirty, you'll find that you can no longer level up without first consuming a boss vial within five levels of yourself. Where do you get these you might ask? One might be able to buy them from another player. However, one way is to go out and get them yourself! Boss vials are gathered by defeating what's known as a Prime mutant. Naturally, they're tougher than your standard enemy on the field and will require the gathering of a party. First, let's go over the requirements of summoning a Prime mutant.

First, you'll need twelve infection vials of the Prime you wish to summon. These can be either bought from players/stores or gathered yourself. To gather them yourself, you'll require a NaniteCollection stat of 2 or more. For this, you can use an Improved Nanite Collector, but it will need modifications and such to raise its NaniteCollection stat high enough. If you are willing to pay mako, you can instead get the Nanite Collector in the elite shop, which can even be upgraded into the Ultimate Nanite Collector later if you want. Keep in mind, the Advanced Inoculation perk gives you a point of NaniteCollection, thus allowing you to collect infection vials with the Basic Nanite Collector available cheaply in stores, or with a cheap Improved Nanite Collector.
Next, you'll need a PSP (Prime Specimen Primer) available for four reward tokens at the token shop (Up from Zephyr lobby and then east).
If you don't have a party already, grab a party! Advertise on the lfg channel and say which mutant you wish to take down. Because everyone who fights gets a boss vial, there will probably be people more than happy to assist. Generally, you'll want at least five people if you can.
Finally, you need to head to the area where the monster typically spawns. Once there, type +haz and note the max level for the area. If you can, type partymentor <two levels over the max level of the area>. So if the level range of an area is 30-35, type partymentor 37. With your vials tucked away within your pocket, use the PSP device and it shall step you through some simple prompts. It'll ask what prime you wish to summon, ask if you're really sure, and then take your 12 vials and some freecred. The Prime will spawn shortly after!

What prime should you be taking on? This is a question with an answer relative to your level. To level up, you'll need a boss vial that's within 5 levels of you, up or down. So if you're stuck at level 30, you'll need a boss vial that's within the range of 25-35. Head up above Zephyr or the RSX lobby and type look terminal. Find an area that suits your level requirements and gather the appropriate vials to summon the prime.

You might be wondering what exactly a prime fight is like and how you should prepare for it! Once summoned, the Prime shall come stomping out and summon some backup. The backup is typically quite weak, but needs to be dealt with none the less. The Prime itself is basically a much much stronger version of the normal variant of the monster and carries a randomly selected template like Perplexing, Fast, Prickly, and many others that modify the Prime's abilities in some way. As the fight goes on, the Prime will summon more backup for you to deal with. It's nice to have a buffer or healer on standby if you can find one, and perhaps even a tank to help soak up damage. Once you finally defeat your first Prime, you, and anyone that helped you, shall receive a tasty boss vial! Eat it and pass onto the next level, brave adventurer.

Epicing and Ultimate

When upgrading a power with freecreds and experience, a power may only be upgraded a maximum of two times. As you level up, you may have noticed that you receive epic power slots on occasion. To know when you'll get an epic power slot, check out the Level Costs table. With an epic power slot, you may choose a power to upgrade even further than that original two maximum. Sounds pretty great, right? To perform this, you need to acquire a boss vial of a mutant that has that power somewhere on their body. The level of the vial doesn't matter, just make sure not to drink it! Once you've done that, simply head to the web page, character, and then training to select the epic option. It's worthy of note that you can't upgrade a particular upgrade more than twice. For example, say you upgraded Wild Swing's damage twice. You can't epic the power and choose damage for a third time. It has to be a different upgrade.

What if you could upgrade an epic'd power even FURTHER? Every thirty levels you shall receive an ultimate power slot. With six boss vials, 40 reward tokens, some experience, and creds, you can indeed upgrade an epic'd power one more time. This one is a bit more picky. You can't upgrade something that's already been upgraded with an ultimate power slot. Again, let's bring up Wild Swing. Say you upgraded damage twice and used your epic upgrade on AoE. With your ultimate upgrade, you can't choose damage or AoE. You'll have to choose one of the other upgrade options. To perform an ultimate upgrade. head to Point Zero/Hotel Oblivion in the north east corner of Fairhaven. Once there, type train, follow the prompts, and watch the magic.

Combat Flaws

Within character generation, you might've noticed two particular flaws. The Feral Mode and All Natural flaws dramatically change the way you play the combat system. Feral Mode was designed specifically for ease of use. When mastering and upgrading powers, it spreads the upgrades out evenly and automatically. It also automatically selects combat roles and skill for you when you level up, negating the need to create a build. In addition, it has access to ferals roles, such as Defender Feral Training that change your combat skills. In that example, taking that training would turn you into a tank build. These trainings can be bought in various stores around the game world. Ferals also get other buffs, but their downside comes with how little equipment they may carry. If you want to know more details, check out the Feral Mode page.

All Natural users get rid of their ability to use mutant powers to increase their skills with gear. Any item you use shall be increased greatly in just about everything it does and you'll also get a wonderful boost to loadout as you level up. This flaw has its advantages and disadvantages, and it's generally not recommended for newer players. This playstyle may require a good grasp of the crafting system and a general idea on how to make a good amount of money and salvage to support such activities. Despite this, All Naturals are a fun and unique way to spice up your combat experience, but make sure you know what you're doing!

Combat Builds

This section shall detail the numerous builds you can create within the combat system. Mostly, it shall go over the more traditional roles such as a tank, DPS, and supportive types. And do not fret if it seems complicated! You don't need to make a number crunching minmax build to be effective. Nearly anything can be effective with a little planning, and generally it's a good idea to have a focus. For example, if you plan on making a healer, it's probably not a good idea to focus your points into damage! Naturally, you would want things to bolster your healing abilities. Also keep in mind that if you're a roleplayer, picking things that make sense for your character is also important if that's your thing. Please take the builds guide as a guideline rather than a bible, and hopefully it shall help you along your way. There are other builds one may make as well, such as off-tank and others, but these guides should help you get the general idea of the basics.

Tank

It's easier to heal one person rather than seven!

The center of attention, the steel wall, the hate magnet. It goes by many names, but in nearly any RPG, the tank's focus is almost always to grab attention away from the party and eat as much damage as possible for them. This game is no different. Your job is all about eating up delicious damage and protecting your battle buddies, so naturally you should be prepared to reduce that damage to yourself as much as possible! Make sure you have a tailor handy, because you're going to get hit a lot.

Hate is a concept you may wish to get familiar with. Any time you put your 'influence' over an enemy, such as damaging them, the enemy will start hating you more. If you have the most hate, then the mob shall start targeting you! To see how much a monster hates you and the rest of your party members, use hate <enemy>. However, this isn't always the case during a boss fight. Having the most hate during a boss fight only heavily increases your chance at getting hit rather than it being a guarantee like with regular mobs out on the field. To circumvent this, you can use taunting moves like Nasty Insult to guarantee a good slapping from a boss! Having high amounts of the aggro and menace effects further increase your hate gain, so you'll want to make sure you have plenty of both. If you have any points in the Intimidation skill, you'll unlock the skill Attention Grab which gives you a GIANT aggro and menace boost. You'll certainly want this.

Cover is also important. So you've gotten the enemy's attention and he's preparing to hit you. Business as usual right? But wait! That's an AoE he's firing! Even though you were the main target, unfortunately is shall end up hitting your friends regardless. So what can you do about that? The cover status is something tanks can put on friends to cover AoE damage for them. So let's say you put twenty cover on a friend. When an AoE goes off, you'll automatically eat 20% of the damage for him, which is extremely useful in damage mitigation. AoEblock can sometimes be a difficult status to obtain, but having some of that makes it so AoEs that target you first are eaten up by that status! 20 AoEblock and an AoE hits you? You shall eat 20% of that damage on yourself for your entire party.

Tank Roles

Durability will be your most important role to invest in. Once you get three points in the skill, all damage coming at you is instantly reduced by a whole 30%, and that's before it has to go through your other resists! And not only that, but it passively increases the magnitude of anything else that grants you resists, creating a VERY powerful package. It is HIGHLY suggested to get three points in this skill if you plan on being a tank.

Front Row is another core tank skill. Part of your job is to attract attention away from your more squishy party members. Any time you 'influence' an enemy, such as damaging them, you generate hate. Having points in this skill dramatically increases hate gain, along with amplifying the magnitude of any cover effects you push out. This skill really enhances many of the tank's basic attention grabbing and covering jobs, so it's highly recommended to grab three points in this important skill!

Having a large amount of Health is very important as a tank. You need as much HP as possible to survive the many blows you'll take for your team. It's a very simple skill, but also very powerful by increasing your health pool by an entire 30% at three points! In this regard, it's highly recommended to nab three points in this skill.

Avoidance can be quite strong, but its importance is a bit behind Durability. Despite that, it's still a powerful skill! It dramatically increases the magnitude of any defense status and allows you to dodge between nine and thirty percent of damage. This effect shall become more powerful when you have less health, which is quite useful in clutch situations. Even if you only hit the minimum amount of dodged damage, it's still quite useful. Get this skills to three if you can, but it's recommended to get at least one or two in Avoidance if possible.

Outnumbered goes great on a tank! You'll be getting hit a lot, so you'll easily get the maximum effect out of this combat skill in a very short amount of time. Each time you get hit, you gain more and more free resists, which shall help you out greatly. It's recommended to get at least a point or two in this skill.

Taunting Strikes can be quite strong, but it all depends on how you wish to focus your tank build. Some simply use cover for everything and rely on hate generation, while some prefer taunts. This makes it so all of your active attacks have a chance at taunting your foes, which is quite helpful when maintaining constant taunting. If you wish to be a taunting tank, consider points in this skill.

Most builds can benefit from Readiness, as it increases your loadout capacity, which of course means more gear. Depending on how much gear you wish to carry, you might want to invest in this skill. Perhaps you'll be able to fit in some extra armor!

Once you have a good amount of these skills above, the rest is up to what you feel best suits you. Warded is a good tank skill that allows you to clean debuffs off you each time an enemy attacks. Some may want to invest in Damage, as more damage also means more hate. Speed quickens how fast powers charge, and may come in handy when an emergency heal is needed or a quick taunt. Reactive returns damage each time you get hit, so expect this skill to fire often, along with Rage if that's your thing.

Tank Powers

As a tank, you'll find that various toggles and passive powers will help you greatly on your journey to eat damage. A rotation of active powers will generally focus on gaining hate or taunting depending on how you wish to build your tank. Passives and toggles shall increase your resists and defense, allowing you to survive longer.

You'll want a Defense Adaptaion Power first for a good passive boost. Plated Hide gives an impressive boost to defense while Furry Hide boosts physical and energy damage resists while also providing other benefits such as energybreak. Jellied Hide gives physical damage resist, increases your maxHP by an impressive amount when upgraded, and provides passive regen to help mitigate damage. All of these options can serve you well, but you can only choose one!

A Special Adaptation Slot Power should be next on your list. It's another passive slot that shall serve you well, but some of these powers do have downsides. Thick Hide is a fantastic choice for tanks, for it gives a massive MaxHP buff and some resists at the cost of accuracy. Thick Shell and Reinforced Skeleton are also choices to consider.

Next, quest for an Offensive Adaption Slot Power. Muscle Mass provides many things a tank needs, such as resists and MaxHP. A very strong choice for the role. Scent of Blood gives you vampiric and attack, which can assist with survivability.

For your Mid Slot Power, you'll have the choice between Juggernaut, Myriad Armor and Tooth and Nail. Tooth and Nail is more of a DPS based power and doesn't benefit tanks directly, but both Juggernaut and Myriad Armor give impressive boosts to resists, but you can only have one in this slot. It all comes down to personal preference!

Threatening Presence is a highly suggested tank skill, as it gives off a passive AoE cover aura for your friends. This helps to make sure your buddies are always covered at some point so you can eat damage for them while also giving yourself a nice menace boost. Once you reach level forty, Guarding Stance is another great power to get for deploying passive cover.

Repeats are great at gaining hate, and Prism Storm has repeats in spades, and it's a fine AoE. Wild Swing is a highly damaging attack and is AoE as well for large hate gain. Keep in mind, the more damage you do, the more hate you gain! Hateful Strike is meant just for gaining hate. Take powers that are either repeats or do a solid amount of damage to gain hate. Things like Flutter, Sharpshooter, Takedown, and more are other lovely options.

Consider getting a passive damage toggle for constant hate gain. Quill Wag and Electric Field are great and fire off every round to keep a solid growth of hate. If you're a tank that focuses more on taunts, then one might consider Magnetic Personality. Remember, you may only have one of these types of powers at a time.

If you're a taunting tank, you might want to pick up powers like Scathing Diatribe and Nasty Insult.

Since you'll be getting hit a lot, you'll want to find a way to heal yourself! Deep Healing and Lactaid are quick and easy direct heals. Milk Chug is a very powerful emergency heal, but it can't be used very often. Drain Vitae is a strong attack power that's also vampiric, so you can be on the offense and heal yourself at the same time.

Some other passive moves to consider might be Feline Agility, Skitter, Frenzy, Long Ears, and other things that might give you boosts when you have some empty slots to fill.

Tank Gear

As a tank, you'll find that a majority of your gear is passive, serving to help you eat as much damage as you possibly can. This will come in the form of multiple suits of armor and other various pieces of gear.

Heavy Armor! Never leave home without it. This is a core piece of gear. It gives you passive Damageresist, and you want as much of that as possible!
Thick Armor is another piece of gear that's great to have as a tank. MaxHP is a powerful status, and you'll want to increase your health pool as much as you can.
Generic Armor, Light Energy Armor, and Physical Armor all have resists to contribute to a tank's needs. Simply using only generic armor will save you some space, but taking the latter two together will eat up more damage but also take more space. It's all up to you!
A Nanite Buffer is a very powerful piece of gear. It's an active item that projects some protective nanites to eat up incoming damage. In a nutshell, it's like its own health bar that attacks have to go through in order to hit your main health bar. Having a good nantie buffer will certainly help when mitigating damage.
A Shield gives a large passive defense bonus, but it's also quite heavy. If you have the space, it can certainly tip the scales in your favor.
If you're willing to give up your Heavy Armor, Lifegiving Armor is an interesting alternative choice. As they take up the same slot, one can't wear them both. Damageresist directly eats up damage, while regeneration ablatively mitigates damage, creating more or less the same effect in the end. In the end, it's user choice and both are quite viable!
If you find that you aren't covering enough damage to your liking, you may wish to consider making a Superconducting Magnet. Be sure not too eat more than you can chew!
The Nanite Barrier is another active piece of equipment tanks can use to eat up damage. It's quite powerful, instant cast, and with a short cooldown, but the effects go away once you get hit once. This is a very fine way to add more to your rotation and increase survivability!
If you want, feel free to create weapons to add to your rotation like Heavy Melee, Automated Weapon, Nanite Cannon, and all other sorts of neat weapons. If you're in need of taunts, take any hostile attack item and slap Hooked on it.

Healer

Relax, I'm a doctor. Trust me.

Quite obviously, your job is to heal your friends in battle. Due to attacks always hitting their mark, no matter how low or high the damage might be, the party will need a way to heal off that damage in tough situations. Your two main methods of healing shall be through direct heals and inflicting regeneration upon your friends. Using liberal amounts of HPbuffer will help you with your job, as this status acts like a temporary health bar that eats up damage before hitting your true HP bar.

Direct heals immediately fill up your target's pool of health. For example, the move Deep Healing has twenty base damage. Now this doesn't mean you'll be hurting your friends! It works a lot like hitting an enemy, but instead the damage is converted into lovely health right when the move hits. When your target needs healing and needs it now, look no further than direct heals. They're also quite useful in making sure everyone is topped off. For direct heals, upgrading the damage is generally a good option and will increase the amount of healing done.

Regeneration is a very important status. Rather than immediately healing, it heals over time. By using this status, it's quite helpful in making sure everyone is constantly being healed. In a more advanced way of thinking about it, regeneration is very useful for damage mitigation and one could comprehend it as ablative damage resistance. For example, let's say you inflict one thousand regen on a friend. Now, regen heals the target at 1/5th of its magnitude every 1/5th of a round. So every 200 ATB (1/5th a round), this person shall be healed two hundred health. Now let's say this person gets hit by an attack for one hundred and fifty damage before the regeneration effect ticks. Right when it does tick soon after the attack, they immediately gain a profit in health without you directly needing to do anything about it! When in a large party, you may find it tough trying to heal everyone at once. Using liberal amounts of regen will help dramatically with mitigating damage and allowing others to basically heal themselves. Some people get a little confused about the status. Again, let's say you have a regen status on you for 1000 mag for five rounds. Every round, you'll be healed for 1000 damage. This will last for five rounds for a total of 5000 health healed by the end.

HPbuffer is another important damage mitigation technique. One could think of it as a temporary pool of health that blocks damage before it gets to your main health bar. When an attack hits, it first searches for the largest HPbuffer effect upon you. Let's say an attack worth 100 damage hits you while you have an hpbuffer worth 1000 magnitude. Your HPbuffer shall reduce to 900 magnitude while the 100 damage attack mostly bounces off! Now, there are ways to pierce through HPbuffers, but they will always always reduce damage in some capacity, so it's always nice to have plenty to worth with! When large damaging attacks hit your party, you'll find that having some HPbuffer can mean life or death. Never underestimate the power of HPbuffer.

Two more statuses to look out for are Healing and Healgain. You'll want to try and grab as much Healing as you possibly can. The Healing status increases the power of your heals by magnitude percent. So if you have ten Healing status, your heals are ten percent better. Healgain is a status that scales with level and should be applied to your friends. It's a one-to-one status that directly enhances the heals given to them. So if someone has 1000 healgain status on them and you heal them for something worth 2000 healing, it will then become worth 3000 health! Combining both Healing and healgain can create some powerful heals.

Last tip: Heal your tanks!

Healer Roles

Healing will be on the top of your list. It increases the power of all your heals, including that of regeneration effects. Not only this, but any time you heal someone, they gain damage resistance, healgain status, and some HPbuffer to boot! You'll want this at level two minimum, preferably level three.
Lingering Kindness simply increases the duration of any friendly status you inflict. This is important, as you'll be casting plenty of regeneration and HPbuffer. The longer your regeneration statuses last, the more they heal, so you'll want to heavily consider having 2-3 levels in this skill.
Support won't increase the power of your direct heals, but they will heavily enhance your regeneration, HPbuffer, and healgain effects. In this regard, it's another very important skill for a healer. It's highly recommended to get three levels in this skill along with the above two. As an added bonus, having points in Healing, Lingering Kindness, and Support will grant HPbuffer on all those you heal.

Once you have the above skills, your remaining choices are all up to you. There are a lot of viable options, so it all comes down to what you feel you need for your healing build.

Speed might be a very good investment. It dramatically decreases the amount of time it takes for powers to fire. When you need to save a friend quick, this can make the difference between life and death. But it has more use than clutch situations. Naturally, you'll want your heals to come out as fast as possible to allow you more time to do other things. Like more healing! More time allows more powers to fire, thus more overall healing.
Endurance enhances energy recovery greatly while also increasing your maximum energy. If there is ever a time you run out of energy, that means you won't be able to heal! To make sure that doesn't happen, or at least happen slower, then one may consider putting a few points in this skill.
Back Row heavily decreases hate gain, making sure mobs won't target you. As a healer, being in the center of attention is possibly death. Leave that up to your tank! When an AoE goes off, you get some free evasion if you put points in this skill. Not only that, but the cover effects your tank gives off to eat up damage for you are also increased.
Durability helps a bunch when it comes to eating up damage. One time or another, you'll find yourself getting hit at some point. And when you do, you'll want to be ready. This skill takes out a large amount of damage for you, helping out quite a bit with survival.
Avoidance is another handy tool to help get rid of unfortunate damage inflicted on you. It's less useful than durability, but both combined can help quite a bit when you need to eat damage.
Readiness allows you to carry more equipment! The more loadout you have, the more items you have to call upon! How many points you should put into this skill depends on how much gear you desire to carry.

Healer Powers

Most of your abilities as a healer shall be of the active type consisting of direct heals, regen, and HPBuffer inflicting. Despite this, you may also want to consider a few defensive powers that increases your resists and defense. If you can, grab powers that will increase your recharge and haste to make those heals come out faster! For players that prefer solo play, also try out some offensive powers that can help fell monsters before you fall yourself!

For your Defense Adaptaion Power, there are two great choices. Both Smooth Hide and Crystalline Hide will give you some passive Healing status, which shall increase the power of all your heals. Smooth Hide has a bit more Healing, while Crystalline Hide has some resists, including that of debuffresist. If you don't like either of those options, some choices like Furry Hide increase resists and give energybreak while Feathery Hide increases recharge to get those heals off cooldown quicker. Remember, you may only master one of these.
A Special Adaptation Slot Powers come with a downside, and not a lot of them directly enhance a healer's abilities. However, because you won't be too worried about accuracy, perhaps it's worth considering Thick Hide, as it greatly increases your MaxHP and gives some resists for increased survivability. If you wish, you don't have to take any of these powers.
Despite the name, you'll want an Offensive Adaption Slot Power. There are two powers you'll really want to keep your eye on. Abundant Supply gives you a precious amount of healing to increase the power of your heals, while Stretchy can give you some AoEmod. AoEmod allows you to hit on additional target on occasion with your powers, which can certainly help out a lot! It's a tough choice, but you can only have one.
Quick Fix is a fantastic Mid Slot Power, as it gives resists, haste, healing, AND statusboost, and it just so happens you want all of these! If for some reason you don't want this power, Juggernaut and Myriad Armor can greatly increase survivability if you need it.
Deep Healing, Lactaid, and Nurse are easily acquired and quick single target abilities. They have a short charge and cooldown, making them good to have in reserve, as they'll almost always be available. Choose the ones that benefit your character's sexual characteristics the most.
Delicious Treat is a wonderful AoE heal ability, but it won't heal yourself. It's a fantastic direct healing power with some AoE and even comes with healgain to enhance any further heals you deploy for its duration. It also makes you taste better!
Chock Milk/Cum Squirt are two very powerful direct AoE heals. You may only have one or the other, so choose the one that fits your character's sexual organs and such the best, as the powers will receive benefits from them.
Tears of Life is both a direct heal and regeneration ability for your party . It has a very large charge time, but such is the price for a great healing ability. It'll keep your party nice and safe with a large amount of regeneration. Cast this baby when you can to keep the regeneration effect going.
Protein Shield/Reinforcing Nectar gives a VERY large amount of HPbuffer and is quite quick with a very low cooldown. For a party situation, you may wish to upgrade the AoE on this power. This shall help greatly when mitigating damage.
Lion Within is a passive toggle that's quite simply a large AoE buff that gives your friends some HPbuffer. You may find this quite useful when it comes to making sure your battle buddies have some HPbuffer to work with despite you not actually putting in any input.
Honey Gift is quite the powerful move. If possible, it's best to cast this power before combat or quite soon, as it greatly increases the MaxHP of your friends. The more health your friends have, the longer they shall survive.
Purr gets rid of those nasty debuffs quite quickly for your entire party! If you have some room left, certainly considering acquiring it.
If you have any mutant power slots left over, you may wish to consider moves that increase your survivability like Skitter and Feline Agility or some damaging powers such as Sharpshooter, Wild Swing, and many more options.

Healer Gear

Training - Medicine grants a powerful ten healing status to directly enhance your healing abilities. It costs a good amount of credits down at your local faction's Employee Wellness Area, but it can really pay off huge if you're willing to pay its twenty loadout cost.
A Nanite Buffer is quite the powerful tool. If you were to slap on basic/extreme spread, it can easily be used for a good amount of the party rather than just yourself. If you picked the Support skill to invest in, this shall be increased even further. A great piece of gear you should consider investing in.
The Medicinal item is fast and has a short cooldown. It inflicts a good amount of regen and can be further customized with additional mods to grant buffs to your team mates. Putting Basic Spread/Extreme Spread on it will allow you to heal more party members rather than just one.
Liquid Bandage is a nice party healing item that inflicts a sizeable amount of regen for your party members. It can sometimes be a bit difficult to make and it takes up a gigantic amount of loadout, but the effects are hard to ignore. If you have the loadout to spare, consider it.
The Triage Kit can greatly increase the power of your healing thanks to its large Healing status and the healgain it deploys to your friends. You'll find that both of these stats combined scale quite well with each other! On the downside, it's quite a heavy piece of equipment, sitting at 30 loadout without mods. If you've got the space for this thing, strongly consider it.
Down at the mall, there is an item called Ear Hoops. This is nothing more than a renamed Breathing Clothes item. This item, when worn, shall give you some passive energybreak, reducing the amount of energy your moves take.
In Hotel Oblivion (Point Zero), there is a quest line that shall reward you with a Void Totem. This is a nice piece of gear that greatly speeds up the cooldown of your powers for little cost at all. However, as a warning, the quest will force you to downlevel once and fight a boss, so be prepared for a fight or perhaps call some friends.
If you have the loadout, the Triage Kit can be a powerful item for healers. If gives yourself a very large Healing status and gives your party members a hefty amount of Healgain. Not only that, but it's entirely passive and can have further mods put on it!
A Heavy Armor can assist when it comes to survivability. If you find yourself eating too much damage, this should help you out.
With any remaining loadout you may have, you may wish to consider some Priming gear. Basically, put the Priming recipe on anything that you can inflict on yourself (Such as a Medicinal or Liquid Courage) and you shall receive a large amount of statusboost that greatly increases things like your regen and HPbuffer effects!

Buffer

Power Overwhelming.

The buffer is another wonderful party support based role that can easily change the tides of battle. Rather than focusing on healing, a buffer enhances the power of the party defensively and offensively. However, some buffers choose to mix the roles of a healer and buffer all into one for a nice support package. On the defensive side, they can increase resists, defense, HPbuffers, regeneration, and many more. Offensively, increasing damagebuff, attack, and other things help your team deliver powerful punches to the opposition. A buffer may call upon other useful things such as increasing the MaxHP, accuracy, various procs, energybreak, haste, recharge, and more. Before becoming a buffer, you may wish to get familiar with the Statuses page on the Wiki, as playing around with them and slapping them on your team members shall be your primary role in battle. Most especially, you should take a look at the statusboost effect, as it greatly increases the power of all your friendly statuses! You may wish get as much of this as you can, which shall be detailed down bellow.

Being a successful buffer means enhancing your party's abilities in both defense and offense. It's an important concept to note that the faster you kill something, the less time the enemy has to damage you. This can be accomplished through liberal amounts of damagebuff and attack buffs that can dramatically enhance your party's damage by an amazing amount. However, there will come a time where you and your party shall be on the receiving end on a bunch of damage. Keeping a constant flow of regeneration, resists, and HPbuffer on your team will increase survivability by large amounts. Put offense and defense together and you have a dangerous team of agents.

While being a buffer, you may realize you have a lot of powers and such to cycle through! This is normal, but how are you supposed to get through all those buffs and enhance your team? It's important to note that you can cast all your buffs OUTSIDE of battle, so your team shall be nice and ready the moment fighting starts. Simply use the power as you normally would in combat and it'll work just the same. If you run out of energy while buffing outside of battle, consider using the renew command to sacrifice a patrol point for full energy or eat up a fine Energy Snack. The use of aliases can greatly speed up this process, and it's recommended that you have a trigger that fires off buffs after a battle for convenience sake. If you don't know what those things are or how to work them, don't worry about it too much. But if you do get curious, the newbie or science channel would be more than happy to help you out.

Buffer Roles

Support shall be your most important role. Quite simply, it enhances all the friendly statuses you put on your friends by an incredible 30%. Because most of what you're doing shall be firing off friendly effects, you'll certainly want three points in this skill.
Lingering Kindness is another very important skill for a buffer. Any friendly status you fire off will last much longer, which shall help tremendously in battle. You will want three points in this skill if you can.

Once you have the above skills, you're pretty much all set! What other skills you should choose is up to you, but bellow are some choices that will be of direct benefit to a buffer.

Healing can enhance the power of you regeneration statuses by a good amount, and it stacks with Support. As a buffer, your main goal isn't quite healing people directly, but a few points in healing can be quite beneficial depending on how you've built your buffer. Not only that, but the people you do heal shall gain an HPbuffer status to increase survivability.
Speed, for when you want your buffs and want them now. During battle, your friendly powers will take time to fire. When the situation gets tough, you'll want to get those buffs and heals out as fast as possible!
Readiness may be something buffers wish to have a few points in. As a support, you may find yourself carrying a bunch of gear if that's your style of play. Buffers have a lot of toys they can play with beyond their mutant powers, and more loadout will be very beneficial. If you don't plan on carrying a lot of gear, then this skill shall not help you. But if you are, look no further than Readiness
Endurance increases both energy regeneration and max energy. Buffing can take a lot out of you, so if energy is a major concern, it may be helpful to take a point or two in this skill.
Back Row helps you survive in a party situation. It decreases your hate generation tremendously, allows you to avoid AoEs better, and makes it easier for tanks to cover for you. You may wish to get a point or two in this skill if you can, because you don't want to end up being the center of attention!
If you have some points left over, it can be a good idea to increase your survivability in some form or fashion. Health, Durability, and Avoidance can all help you stay alive longer in the field of battle in order to allow more time to fire off crucial buffs and heals.

Buffer Powers

As a buffer, you will find yourself filling up all your slots quite quickly with actives! There are a ton of buffs out there to play with that can really turn the tide of battle. Because there are so many, the choice of what to take is yours, but here's a handy reference to some powers that might be beneficial to you. You'll want a good balance of offensive and defensive buffs to secure victory!

There is a great power that can fill your Offensive Adaption Slot. What you may wish to consider is the power Stretchy, which can give you some AoEmod to help hit more friends with your powers. When in a full eight person party, having more strong players is quite powerful.
Quick Fix can be a pretty good Mid Slot Power, as it increases statusboost, healing, and haste. Statusboost is what you're mainly looking for, but the healing and haste certainly help out as well.

Offensive Buffs

Coordinated Work is a powerful buff, as it not only increases your party's statusboost, but it also increases attack by a large amount. It's slow and costly, but its power is undeniable.
Breast Waggle is an extremely powerful buff that greatly increases you party's offensive capabilities. Not only does it dramatically increase damagebuff, but it also inflicts an amazing amount of accuracy for a very powerful combo. The choice between upgrading accuracy or damagebuff is a tough one, but it depends on what other buffs you take as well. Certainly consider getting this skill.
Howl focuses on heavily increasing your party's damagebuff, thus dramatically increasing damage. It comes with a large energybreak penalty as well, so you may wish to find a way to mitigate it if you decide to take this great power. Breast Waggle and this go well together to create a powerful offensive combo.
Scent of victory greatly increases your party's haste, causing them to attack much faster. Faster friends means faster everything! Because the effects are so dramatic, you should definitely consider having this skill. You may notice the energybreak penalty on your friends. Don't worry, there are ways to mitigate that debuff. And if you remember, your Lingering Kindness skill will help lower that as well.
Incite Riot not only increases haste by a good amount, it also gives them five whole energybreak to work with to lower the energy cost of powers. Some buffs unfortunately LOWER your party's energybreak, like Scent of Victory, but this power is strong enough to lower that penatly by a great amount. Highly consider this skill.
Leap helps eliminate those pesky cooldowns after people fire off their powers. The faster your party can use their powers again, the more things they can do! Recharge and haste go great together, as cooldown only starts when the power actually lands.

Defensive/Supportive Buffs

Honey Gift is amazingly strong when it comes to increasing party survivability. It increases maxHP to great levels, allowing them to eat more damage before falling down. You'll want to highly consider adding this skill to your rotation, especially for taking on primes and bosses.
Protein Armor can be a bit tough to acquire sometimes, but it does a pretty good job increasing the damageresistance of your party, helping not only your tank, but everyone survive longer.
Protein Shield/Reinforcing Nectar gives off a powerful HPbuffer effect, which shall shield your party greatly against incoming damage. Not only that, but it's quick to fire and has a short cooldown for easy refreshing. Overall, a fantastic power for a buffer to have.
Pack Loyalty helps get rid of those nasty energybreak penalties some of your other buffs might have accrued. And not only that, it's a passive toggle! If you have buffs that give negative energybreak like Howl and Honey Gift, you may want to consider taking this power to help get rid of those effects. Your friends will thank you.
Tears of Life inflicts a great amount of regeneration for your party, which will dramatically increase survivability. If you can, you'll want to make sure your party has a good amount of regen to play with. While you are a buffer and this is technically a heal, one could also classify regeneration as a defensive buff to take away that awful damage.
Much like the above power, Nurse inflicts a great amount of regen as well, but it's only single target. Regardless, it's fast, strong, and effective.
Lion Within is a passive toggle HPbuffer effect for your battle buddies. It's a bit costly, but if want another layer of protection, it might not hurt to pick up this power.
Morning Song helps get rid of all those debuffs that are getting in the way of your beautiful buffs! This power is another great passive toggle that pulses out delightful debuffclear and a considerable amount of recharge to help speed up cooldowns.
Purr rips through debuffs like a hot knife through butter. With such a high debuffclear combined with your Support skill, those debuffs will find themselves either dead or cut very short! Not only that, but it also comes with a chance for debuffresist, which can help out considerably.

Others/Misc. Buffs

Trivia is a fantastic power for any buffer's rotation. It has a good chance for both defensive and offensive buffs to fire. And not only that, they're strong buffs too! There are so many ways to upgrade this power it's hard to go wrong. A flexible and powerful buff that comes highly recommended. You may even want to consider epicing or ultimating this power.
While it may be better classified as an offensive buff, Infuse Blood might be a bit of a special case, if only for how it's used. This power is betraying, which means it will take a good chunk of your health bar. But in return, you can heal someone and give them a tremendous amount of energy to play with. This power is strong, but please be careful with it.
If you find yourself in need of more statusboost, Long Ears is a good toggle that can help out in that regard.
Even though you're a buffer, you might find yourself getting hit here and there. You may wish to consider some survivability increasing powers like Feline Agility, Skitter, Solid Frame.

Buffer Gear

There are a lot of toys buffers can play with. If you're the type that likes to play with a lot of these toys, you may wish to consider increasing your loadout capacity. This can be done with the Always Be Prepared perk, the Readiness combat skill, and the RSX Operative dedication. A lot of your gear will probably be of the active variety, so be mindful of how much goes into your rotation!

Banner is a blank canvas for you to create your very own custom buffs! Without mods, it has no effects. However, putting any active ally modifier on this item can create some great things. If you ever wished you had a buff that could do a certain special something, you may wish to check out this piece of neat gear. They're also quite fun to play with.
Inspiring Drills casts some great buffs by itself and can be further enhanced by various mods. Attack can sometimes be a bit difficult to get a hold of in buffs, so having this item may be to your benefit. Attack, damagebuff, accuracy, and defense all in one! And that's before mods! With some mods that enhance its already great effects, you can have a very powerful item.
A Nanite Buffer is quite the powerful tool. If you were to slap on basic/extreme spread, it can easily be used for a good amount of the party rather than just yourself. If you picked the Support skill to invest in, this shall be increased even further. A great piece of gear you should consider investing in.
Not only can it heal, but the Medicinal is also great at giving off buffs too with some mod combinations. It's light, quick, flexible, and quite useful. Heal people and buff them at the exact same time!
Liquid Bandage is a nice party healing item that inflicts a sizeable amount of regen for your party members. It can sometimes be a bit difficult to make and it takes up a gigantic amount of loadout, but the effects are hard to ignore. If you have the loadout to spare, consider it. While your main job isn't to heal, making sure your party has plenty of regen can easily increase party survivability.
The Scattershot 2000 is a very expensive piece of gear, but it can pay off if you need the AoE. This passive item will hurt your bank and loadout, but hitting an extra person or two can really make the difference. With the way AoE now functions (Friendly AoEs can only hit up to a maximum of two additional targets with the AoEmod status itself), this piece of gear isn't strictly necessary, as Stretchy can help fill this roll. However, if you feel you need some more AoE, this is an item to get it from.
Down at the mall, there is an item called Ear Hoops. This is nothing more than a renamed Breathing Clothes item. This item, when worn, shall give you some passive energybreak, reducing the amount of energy your moves take. You'll be doing a lot of buffing, which eats a lot of energy, so you may want to think about this item if you're having energy troubles.
In Hotel Oblivion (Point Zero), there is a quest line that shall reward you with a Void Totem. This is a nice piece of gear that greatly speeds up the cooldown of your powers for little cost at all. However, as a warning, the quest will force you to downlevel once and fight a boss, so be prepared for a fight or perhaps call some friends.

You may want to consider some Priming gear. This means any item you can inflict on yourself that can give you the effects of the Priming mod. The power of this mod comes from the large amount of statusboost it gives you, and you'll want to try and get as much of that as you can. You don't particularly need it, but its effects are quite powerful. Here are some items you could put them on as an example: Medicinal, Liquid Courage, Amplifier, Vibrator (outside of combat), and more. Note that putting Priming on something gets rid of all its AoE. And don't get too worried about this concept. You can still be a great buffer without these, but if you thirst for more power, consider building some! And be mindful of the softcaps for statusboost found on the Statuses page.

Big Hits DPS

A bang here, a boom there, and the problem is solved.

Big hits DPS (Damage Per Second) is all about bringing the smackdown, and doing it hard. One could describe it as burst DPS. Generally, big hits are slow and have large energy costs, but they pay off huge with giant damage. This type of DPS is great against both regular monsters on the field and bosses. You'll need to find a way to manage your energy and such, but generally it isn't too much of a problem with some moderate planning. If you enjoy seeing big shiny red damage numbers, this type of DPS could be just for you.

All DPS types can benefit greatly from haste, but big hits probably needs it the most considering their generally lower speed. Because big hits also play with large numbers, it scales fantastically with the damagebuff and attack Statuses. It'll also be useful to upgrade your accuracy when possible, as that giant attack you've been charging would look mighty small if it managed to get deflected.

Big Hits Roles

Damage! What DPS lover wouldn't want a straight up increase in damage? Not only does it do that, but it has some other nifty effects as well, such as helping to pierce HPbuffers and lowering dodge resistance when your attacks get evaded. Simply a must have for all DPS types. Get three points in this skill!
Bleeding benefits big hits the most, as this skill is percent based and you're dealing with very large numbers! With three points in this skill, 30% of your damage is automatically done again on your target the next round. This boosts your DPS by an extreme amount, making this a core skill for big hits. You'll want to max out this skill.
Accuracy can help greatly mitigate the damage losses that come from enemies deflecting your attacks. This skill has many effects, the most basic of which is to simply tip the scales in your favor. In addition to this, it also reduces how much is deflected by your primary target up to a maximum of 15% with this skill, which can pay off greatly in the grand scheme of things. Finally, it helps you pierce HPbuffers and even stacks with the Damage skill in that regard. Consider a few points in this skill.
Speed things up a bit! Some big hits are slow, taking quite a while to land on their target. With this skill however, this time can be dramatically reduced. The faster you attack means the more time you can be doing other things, like charging up another attack! Consider some points in this skill if you can.
Readiness is great for those that will be carrying a good amount of gear with them. Big hits have some fun weapons and toys to play with, so if you think you want to wear some more gear, consider some points in this skill.
Vampiric may or may not be something you wish to invest in. Points in this skill can increase survivability and the regenerative effects of vampiric powers like Drain Vitae. If you want more survivability and/or intend to use some vampiric powers, this skill can certainly help you.
Sacrificial Fury can greatly increase damage, but it's going to hurt yourself a lot! While this is a very powerful skill, make sure you have some good ways to heal off the damage done to yourself, like with the Vampiric skill, healing powers and gear, and perhaps a Blood Extractor.
If you have some more skills to fill, consider something like Penetration to further increase DPS. Also consider survivability skills like Health, Back Row, and Avoidance. If energy is constantly a problem, try a point or two in Endurance.

Big Hits Powers

There are some great choices for Defense Adaptaion Powers. You may consider Plated Hide, as it comes with an amazing haste boost that you can use to speed up your attacks. Defense too! Furry Hide comes with precious energybreak and resists you can use.
Special Adaptation Slot Powers come with downsides, but also some pretty great upsides as well. At the cost of energybreak and recharge, you can get a great boost to haste and damagebuff via Endocrine Overdrive. At the cost of precious haste and knockdown resist, Reinforced Skeleton can also increase your damagebuff by a large amount and gives you some resists to boot. If you want something a little 'safer', you may want to consider Fiery Hide. Mostly, it's a simple increase in damage. The choice, or deciding not to choose, is up to you!
Muscle Mass makes for a wonderful choice for your Offensive Adaption Slot Power. It increases damagebuff and some resists. If you're more a fan of vampiric, Scent of Blood is another choice that may benefit you. Another considerable choice is Stretchy, which gives you a chance at hitting an extra target.
Both Juggernaut and Tooth and Nail make great powers for your Mid Slot. Juggernaut gives a great amount of damagebuff and damageresistance while Tooth and Nail increases attack and many other things like accuracy, haste, and recharge. It's hard to go wrong with either of these powers! Though if you're taking something like Frenzy that would lower your accuracy, you may want to consider Tooth and Nail to make up for it.
Quill Wag is a great choice for your hostile aura slot power. It's a spread toggle that fires off every round to keep the damage flowing, further increasing DPS. Electric Field is an option as well, but big hits users might benefit more from Quill Wag if at the cost of more energy.
Wild Swing is a core and powerful big hit attack. It comes with a hefty amount of damage and some great AoE to really lay the smack down on your foes. The accuracy is a little weak, but the low cooldown will make sure the swings keep coming. Highly consider adding this power to your rotation.
Sharpshooter takes a good amount of energy and needs some time to charge, but its damage is frightening, along with its wonderful accuracy! With its short cooldown and high damage, this makes it quite a great contender for one of your mutant power slots.
Takedown is similar to Sharpshooter in many ways. It's extremely accurate and damaging, but only for a single target while Sharpshooter, with some AoEmod, could end up hitting another target.
Drain Vitae does wonderful damage AND has some innate vampiric to drain your foes of health and give it back to you. It's a great big hit and helps survivability with some precious health to play with.
Both Heavy Slam and Tail Smash are strong big hits that also apply some knockdown to your foes. With this knockdown, assuming they don't resist it, they are temporarily stunned in combat, allowing you and your buddies to ready up another attack while your target can only sit and take it!
Skunk Blast and Gigantic Body Slam are both sloooooooooow attacks to charge up and cost 'a lot of energy. But with a high amount of payment comes a high reward. Both of these abilities have innate AoE attached to them, allowing you to smack multiple foes with your dangerous damage. Just make sure you have the time necessary to fire these abilities! Gigantic Body Slam might be a bit of a dangerous power to use considering its three round long charge time, but it also comes with a nice knockdown bonus to play with. Skunk Blast is faster and also comes with an energydamage DoT just for fun.
Frenzy gives you an excellent about of damagebuff and haste at the cost of precious accuracy. These buffs are wonderful, but you may wish to mitigate this accuracy lost by upgrading the accuracymag via training and taking other things that increase accuracy such as Tooth and Nail.
If you're still in need of some accuracy, look no further than Long Ears. On this fantastic toggle, you may upgrade it to give you 20 whole accuracy. Certainly consider getting this skill, ESPECIALLY if you took Frenzy.
If you have some slots left over, consider some survivability toggles like Feline Agility and Skitter. While you're charging up those slow attacks and getting wailed on, it helps to have some defense.

Big Hits Gear

Training - Strength gives off a great amount of passive damagebuff for the price of twenty loadout and ten upkeep. If you're in need of some damagebuff, you may want to consider this item that's sold for some creds down at each faction's store.
If you're still finding yourself in need of precious damagebuff, consider making some Muscular Enhancers or maybe even a Steroid Injection Unit].
Heavy Melee, Nanite Cannon, and the Unshielded Prototype shall make up the main arsenal at a big hits user's disposal. A Heavy Melee is cheap, but quite effective. The Nanite Cannon and Unshielded Prototype are quite expensive and could be a bit hard to acquire, but they may certainly bring the pain.
The Scattershot 2000 is VERY expensive, but if you're in the need of AoEmod, this could help you out. It's big and expensive, but hitting that extra target could make all the difference in the world. Before making this item, please be sure it's right for your needs!
Speaking of expensive gear, the Blood Extractor is quite the costly bit of equipment. Not only does it take a lot to craft, but it's quite heavy as well. However, it does give one some fantastic vampiric, which may aid in survivability. Be sure this item is right for you!
Down at the mall, there is an item called Ear Hoops. This is nothing more than a renamed Breathing Clothes item. This item, when worn, shall give you some passive energybreak, reducing the amount of energy your moves take. Your attacks shall generally eat up a lot of energy, so you may wish to consider wearing this item.
In Hotel Oblivion (Point Zero), there is a quest line that shall reward you with a Void Totem. This is a nice piece of gear that greatly speeds up the cooldown of your powers for little cost at all. However, as a warning, the quest will force you to downlevel once and fight a boss, so be prepared for a fight or perhaps call some friends.
A Power Gator can help cure those energy based woes. It gives you some great energymod that shall help keep your energy pool in check for those awfully costly big hits attacks. If you're having energy troubles, you may want to craft yourself one of these.
The Module item may give you some custom passive buffs if you have the extra loadout to play with. Putting things like Cool, Flexible, Quick, or Fast on some of these may come in handy for bolstering your overall power. And of course, there are plenty more mods you can put on these things!
If you're in need of more survivability, consider wearing some armor like the always wonderful Heavy Armor or maybe even the Lifegiving Armor. Thick Armor is great as well, as it increases your MaxHP considerably.

Repeats DPS

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

Rather than focusing on big single hits like its big hits brother, a Repeats DPS is all about a flurry of much smaller hits. Repeats are quite an interesting style of DPS. They're fast and furious and use a special status. When one lands a repeat attack, it does some direct damage and inflicts the repeat status upon your target for whatever magnitude the move has. As time goes on, the attack shall repeat upon the target for half-damage and as many times as the magnitude allows. For example, say you land a repeat worth ten magnitude and for five rounds. Every round, the attack shall repeat itself twice for half of the base damage of the attack. Repeats try their best to divide themselves equally amongst the amount of rounds the repeat is supposed to last. In this regard, REDUCING the amount of rounds for a repeat shall make it come out quicker, which plays heavily in your favor. Now let's take that ten magnitude repeat and make it last two rounds instead. Each round, for two rounds total, the attack shall be repeated five times!

The advantage of repeats comes with its intense speed and fury. Enemies will find themselves being wailed upon and perhaps overwhelmed by your quick fists. They do small but frequent damage, making them great for taking out mobs with little resists and such. However, this is where the downside comes in. Each individual repeat must go through an enemy's resists. Because repeats do small damage on their own, they can easily get cut down to size by those tough tanks and bosses. Being so fast, they'll also require some energy management to keep up the pace. Despite this, repeats are still very strong and should certainly be considered for those who enjoy a fast style of DPS as opposed to the slower Big Hits and DoTs. Prepare to spam everyone's screen with your pages and pages of glorious repeat attacks!

Because the Flurry combat skill is percentage based, you'll more than likely end up with fractional repeats, like 5.6 for example. The important thing to note about this is that the system shall always round this down. So the 5.6 in this example shall be five repeats and five repeats only. Recall that repeats do their best to spread themselves out evenly amongst its total round time. Despite fractions not giving you an extra repeat, it will instead squeeze the even spread a bit, forcing the tail end to come out slightly faster

Repeats Roles

Flurry increases your repeat status magnitudes by a good amount. Simply put, the more repeats you have, the more damage you do! If you think about it, adding on two more repeats adds up to the original power of the attack (Assuming the repeats don't get resisted of course). Because repeating is all you're going to be doing for the most part, max out this skill!
Speed is an incredibly important skill. Not only does it speed up your charge times by a dramatic amount, it also reduces the total rounds for your repeats much the same. You want your repeats to come out as fast as possible, and having three points in this skill shall deliver amazing results. Much like Flurry, you'll want three points in this skill.
Damage simply increases the power for all of your attacks. As someone who's primary job is doing damage, you'll want to invest some points in this skill! It also helps with penetrating those HPbuffers and reducing dodging that may be eating up some of your precious repeats.
Penetration helps overcome the main downside of repeats. Remember that each and every repeat must go through resists and deflections, so it's quite possible that they may get cut down to size should they ever wail upon a tough and resistant foe. With a few points in penetration, you'll start cutting through those pesky resists and even reduce their dodge chance while also penetrating their HPbuffers a bit (This stacks with the effect on Damage). It's recommended to get at least a point or two within this skill if you can. Three if possible!
Sacrificial Fury will greatly increase your DPS, but it comes at a cost. All of your attacks shall be increased by a mighty 30% in damage, but will also cause you to hit yourself for 9% of each of your attacks. This can end up hurting you quite a bit, so be prepared to find a way to help heal off that self-damage. If you're willing to trade some health, highly consider some points in this skill.
If you plan on using Sacrificial Fury and/or betraying powers like Fire Dance, you may want to consider a few points in Vampiric. The lovely thing with Vampiric is that it gives you some fine health with each of your attacks, which certainly helps when mitigating self-damage. It also increases the potency of any vampiric power you activate.
Readiness allows one to carry more gear. If you plan on taking on a bunch of equipment, you should consider some points in this skill.

Repeats Powers

There are some great choices for Defense Adaptaion Powers. You may consider Plated Hide, as it comes with an amazing haste boost that you can use to speed up your attacks. Defense too! Furry Hide comes with precious energybreak and resists you can use as well.
Special Adaptation Slot Powers come with downsides, but also some pretty great upsides as well. At the cost of energybreak and recharge, you can get a great boost to haste and damagebuff via Endocrine Overdrive. At the cost of precious haste and knockdown resist, Reinforced Skeleton can also increase your damagebuff by a large amount and gives you some resists to boot. If you want something a little 'safer', you may want to consider Fiery Hide. Mostly, it's a simple increase in damage. The choice, or deciding not to choose, is up to you!
For your Offensive Adaption Slot Power, you'll mostly have the choice between Muscle Mass and Scent of Blood. Both increase damage, either through damagebuff or attack, so one must consider which is the best for their situation. Attack increases the base damage of an attack before it scales up through various means, making it work great with damagebuff. Because your repeats do much less damage per individual hit than big hits, it might be a good idea to increase the base damage through attack. Remember that each individual repeat does half the damage of the power's base damage. Attack is also a harder status to get in higher amounts, and Scent of Blood has some vampiric if you plan on using Fire Dance and/or Sacrificial Fury. Despite this, both powers work wonderfully when it comes to increasing damage.
Tooth and Nail and Juggernaut will be your primary choices for your Mid Slot power. Tooth and Nail comes with precious attack and some very nice accuracy while Juggernaut has damagebuff and damageresistance. If you plan on using something like Frenzy, one may wish to pick Tooth and Nail to make up for the accuracy loss. If you're short on attack too, again, Tooth and Nail shall really help you out.
Quill Wag is a straight up damage toggle that increases your overall DPS. This helps keep the damage on, along with pulling some extra vampiric here and there if that's your thing.
When starting out, Raking Claws will make for a fantastic repeat power. It's quick, cheap, and does some pretty good damage. In the future, you may or may not want to replace it, but it makes for a great rotation filler.
Quad Punch, for your flurry of blows needs. With a measly cooldown of 2300, a charge of 400, and a repeat duration of 1, this attack is fast and furious. With all this in mind, this power makes for a great slot upon your rotation if you need something that's always there to rely on.
Prism Storm is great for laying the hurt upon a group of enemies. It's very quick and starts off with a round time of ONE, making the repeats come out at an insane pace. The damage is a bit low, but the AoE and quick repeats along with such a low cooldown make the power pretty great to have. As an added bonus, you'll find yourself filling the screen with glorious repeats if you use this power. Not recommended for mobile users!
Flutter shares some similarities with Prism Storm, but is a bit different. Flutter is slower in both its charge time and repeats speed, but in the end it shall end up doing more damage. Between the two powers should it come down to a choice, one must decide if they want speed or more damage.
Ice Shards combines the power of big hits and repeats together for a frightening package. Not only that, but it comes with a nifty debuff as well to sweeten the deal. It has a very large amount of base damage for a repeat and has a penetration value, but it's also a bit slow and costly.
While it's the slowest repeat in the game, Blade Flurry is also the most heavily damaging overall. With a base damage of twelve and a frightening ten amount of repeats, upgrading this power and combining it with your repeats skills shall deliver a deadly blow upon your target. Because this attack is so slow (2000 charge), you may want to consider if this power is right for you.
Fire Dance can pull off some insane damage. It has a great repeat value, low repeat duration, high base damage, AND it's a medium AoE to really eat up those poor monsters that stand in your way. What's the downside? It hurts! Use of this attack shall drain your health bar, but its effects upon enemies are dramatic and deadly. If you decide to use this great power, prepare to have a way to heal off the damage such as with Vampiric based things or other sources.
Forced Milking helps out with those HP issues you may be having. And if you aren't, this power makes for a good panic heal should things get a little dicey. It's strong, has a shortish cooldown, and pulls out a good amount of vampiric regen. If you plan on using Fire Dance and/or Sacrificial Fury, this power makes for a great combo to heal off self damage.
Need more damagebuff and haste? Check out Frenzy. It comes with both in very large amounts! However, it does come with a nasty accuracy penalty, so be prepared to deal with that. Something like Long Ears may certainly help.
If you have some slots left over, consider some survivability toggles such as Feline Agility and Skitter. The more defense you have, the better!

Repeats Gear

Training - Strength gives off a great amount of passive damagebuff for the price of twenty loadout and ten upkeep. If you're in need of some damagebuff, you may want to consider this item that's sold for some creds down at each faction's store.
If you're still finding yourself in need of precious damagebuff, consider making some Muscular Enhancers or maybe even a Steroid Injection Unit.
The Automated Weapon is your go-to weapon of choice for something that benefits from all your repeats skills. It's an awfully heavy piece of equipment, but it can deliver some good damage if one puts on some good mods like Repeating.
The Scattershot 2000 is VERY expensive, but if you're in the need of AoEmod, this could help you out. It's big and expensive, but hitting that extra target could make all the difference in the world. Before making this item, please be sure it's right for your needs!
The Blood Extractor is something you may wish to invest in if you decide to use Sacrificial Fury and/or Fire Dance. It's big and expensive, but the effects are powerful when you need to heal off damage quick and easy. Betraying damage needs to be healed off somehow, and this could be just the thing you need.
Down at the mall, there is an item called Ear Hoops. This is nothing more than a renamed Breathing Clothes item. This item, when worn, shall give you some passive energybreak, reducing the amount of energy your moves take. Your attacks shall generally eat up a lot of energy, so you may wish to consider wearing this item.
In Hotel Oblivion (Point Zero), there is a quest line that shall reward you with a Void Totem. This is a nice piece of gear that greatly speeds up the cooldown of your powers for little cost at all. However, as a warning, the quest will force you to downlevel once and fight a boss, so be prepared for a fight or perhaps call some friends.
A Power Gator can help cure those energy based woes. It gives you some great energymod that shall help keep your energy pool in check for those awfully costly big hits attacks. If you're having energy troubles, you may want to craft yourself one of these.
The Module item may give you some custom passive buffs if you have the extra loadout to play with. Putting things like Cool, Flexible, Quick, or Fast on some of these may come in handy for bolstering your overall power. And of course, there are plenty more mods you can put on these things!
If you're in need of more survivability, consider wearing some armor like the always wonderful Heavy Armor or maybe even the Lifegiving Armor. Thick Armor is great as well, as it increases your MaxHP considerably. Lifegiving Armor has some wonderful regen attached to it, which shall help when it comes to healing off betraying damage.

DoTs DPS

Give it a minute and he'll start crying like a baby. They always do.

The best way to think about the Damage over Time type of DPS is the ever growing snowball rolling down a snowy mountain. It starts off awfully small, but eventually turns into a giant and dangerous ball! Like that snowball, your damage will initially be quite low when the battle goes off on its first few rounds compared to the other damage types. As time goes on, your damage will grow and grow, and soon you might even out damage the other DPS types in the long run. As a DoT user, you shall be inflicting various statuses on your foes such as physical and energy damage. Each round, these statuses shall tick and do their damage. After laying down one DoT attack, you lay down another, and another, and another, and another until your enemy is screaming to make it stop as they burn under the sizzling torture of your massive DoT stacks!

The main disadvantage to DoTS is how slow they take to really get going. When you land a DoT attack, it shall apply a status such as physical or energy damage. Every round, until the total amount of rounds for the status is achieved, the magnitude for the DOT status shall tick and do its damage. Now while that DOT is ticking away, why not add on another DoT? Now you have TWO DoTs ticking down at the same time. Now add another DoT for three ticking at the same time! This is part of the advantage for DoTs over other DPS types. It's important to note that DoTs CANNOT be cleared, even with debuffclear. Once that status is on, it stays on until its allotted time is up. Another powerful advantage of DoTs is how it penetrates half of your target's resists and HPbuffers. This makes DoTs great at taking on tanky foes such as bosses and primes.

There are two types of DoTs: Regular DoTs and stacked DoTs. A regular DoT would be something like Flamethrower. You cast it on an enemy and they receive the energydamage mag for five rounds. If you manage to cast the same power again before it expires, the effect will simply refresh. Poison Bite is an example of a stacked DoT. The first time you cast this power, it shall inflict energydamage worth 4 mag for 8 rounds. The next time you cast it, this effect shall stack AND refresh, causing 8 mag energy damage for 8 rounds again. This process may be repeated up to a maximum of five times for an amazing 20 mag worth of energydamage! The decision to focus on regular DoTs or stacked DoTs is up to the user. In fact, you don't have to focus on either! You can combine the two quite well for great damage.

Important Note: Due to recent updates, DoTs are no longer affected by the stautsboost effect or the Enduring Malice skill.

DoT Roles

Tactician increases the magnitude of DoTs by a good amount. It also greatly increases the power of debuffs if you ever plan on using a few of those. Consider slapping some points in this skill!
Damage increases... well, your damage! As someone whose job it is to do damage, you'll want to nab three points in this skill. It's important to note that DoTs have an innate ability to pierce HPbuffers and this skill shall allow you to enhance said ability. It also goes great with Tactician to enhance your DPS.
Accuracy indeed affects the magnitude of your DoTs, believe it or not! Each of your attacks must run through the deflection system, thus having some points in this skill might be something you should consider to enhance your overall DPS.
Speed is quite the important skill for DoT users. Your primary job is to apply as many DoT effects you can in the shortest amount of time. By reducing the charge time so heavily with this skill, all of that extra time gained may be used to apply even more lovely DoTs! Get as many points as you possibly can in this skill!
Vampiric has special properties just for DoT attacks. Rather than the 6% the other attack styles receive, DoTs get an amazing 12% of their damage converted into lovely health with three skill points. While this may not seem like much at first, imagine the health one could gain if they had multiple DoT effects going off at once on many different enemies. Highly consider investing in this skill!
Opportunity directly increases the damage for DoT effects and even applies some damage for any debuffs you deicide to give off. While the effects might not be as dramatic as Damage and Tactician, it might be worth a point or two if you have some slots left over and you need more damage.
Readiness allows you to carry more wonderful gear. There are some neat toys DoT users may play with, so if you plan on using a good amount of equipment, consider some points in this skill.
If you have some skills left over, you may want to consider a few survivability things. Bewitched is quite an interesting and fun skill considering its ability to turn hostile effects you nail on enemies into buffs upon yourself. DoTs are specifically transformed into regen, so some of that wonderful damage shall become healing for yourself. If you combine this with Vampiric, it should certainly help in the survivability department. A few points in Durability, Avoidance, and Health may also help when the going gets tough.

DoT Powers

There are some great choices for Defense Adaptaion Powers. You may consider Plated Hide, as it comes with an amazing haste boost that you can use to speed up your attacks. Defense too! Furry Hide comes with precious energybreak and resists you can use as well.
Special Adaptation Slot Powers come with downsides, but also some pretty great upsides as well. At the cost of energybreak and recharge, you can get a great boost to haste and damagebuff via Endocrine Overdrive. At the cost of precious haste and knockdown resist, Reinforced Skeleton can also increase your damagebuff by a large amount and gives you some resists to boot. If you want something a little 'safer', you may want to consider Fiery Hide. Mostly, it's a simple increase in damage. The choice, or deciding not to choose, is up to you!
There are lots of great choices for your Offensive Adaption Slot Power. For example, Keen Vision increases your accuracy greatly, along with defense, to really land those DoT effects at full power. Muscle Mass greatly increases damagebuff and some resists, while Scent of Blood increases attack and enhances your vampiric regen as well. Another fantastic choice is Stretchy, which may grant AoEmod that could make you hit another enemy with your attacks! So many great choices, but you may only choose one.
Tooth and Nail and Juggernaut will be your primary choices for your Mid Slot power. Tooth and Nail comes with attack and some very nice accuracy while Juggernaut has damagebuff and damageresistance. If you plan on using something like Frenzy, one may wish to pick Tooth and Nail to make up for the accuracy loss. Either way, both are very wonderful options.
Tired of choices yet? Your Hostile Aura Slot power has some nice things to choose from. Field of Dread benefits from all your DoT skills like Tactician and slowly starts stacking up as time goes on. Quill Wag is also a spread power like the previously mentioned, but its focus is on direct damage instead. Debuffs also benefit greatly from your Tactician skill, so moves like Ensnaring Webs, Distracting Lure, and the like shall be amplified.
Need more damagebuff and haste? Check out Frenzy. It comes with both in very large amounts! However, it does come with a nasty accuracy penalty, so be prepared to deal with that. Something like Long Ears may certainly help considering its very large accuracy status. Remember that accuracy and deflections do indeed affect your damage!
If you have some slots left over, consider some survivability toggles such as Feline Agility and Skitter. The more defense you have, the better!

Bellow, the powers shall be divided between regular DoTs and stacked DoTs. One could decide to focus on either, or perhaps decide to use both in their rotation. Both are quite viable, so choose whatever suits your interests.

Regular DoTs

Bleeding Bite is an easy power to nab and shall help you during the early levels. It's very quick to come off cooldown and does some pretty good physical damage considering its speed and energy price. As a bonus, one could even score a nice critical hit for further damage.
Skunk Spray is arguably more of a Big Hit skill rather than DoTs. Still, it has some nice energydamage that lasts awhile, generous
Flamethrower does some pretty great damage in your rotation. Part of its power comes from its ability to be upgraded to perform lovely AoEs and hit multiple foes. If you need something to suppress and keep the hurt on multiple targets, consider this skill.
Marsh Wisp is another fantastic AoE DoT that hurts quite a bit! It's highly recommended to have some AoE abilities to help suppress groups of enemies which you shall undoubtedly face, especially if you plan on using Vampiric. After all, more enemies hit means more damage, thus more vampiric regeneration.
Solar Ray lays down the energydamage and even has a nasty knockdown effect well to really bring the anguish upon your foes. Like Flamethrower, this power also has the option for AoE upgrades to spread the pain. What's perhaps most surprising about this power is its impressive 1600 cooldown, making it almost always available. A great power to add to your rotation.
Mirage is a bit slow, but it's another AoE DoT should you need to fill in your rotation. It does some good damage, has natural AoE and AoE upgrades, and even clears off a lot of debuffs that may be sticking on you.
Unrelenting Suckle is a naturally vampiric DoT power that could come in handy when you need a heal, especially if you invested in the Vampiric skill. It also comes with a powerful damagebuffdebuff that eats off a whole 10% of your target's damage. Quite powerful, and made even better with the Tactician skill. Good damage, some nice vampiric, and a great debuff creates a nice package.
Peck might be slow, but it HURTS. Not only does it delivers a heft amount of energy and physical damage, but it also brings a crippling rechargedebuff worth an astonishing 20 magnitude. Ouch! Even though it's quite costly, the power is immense and should be highly considered to really bring some hurt upon mobs and bosses alike.
Lockjaw is perhaps the most damaging DoT power in the entire game. Its energycost is large along with the charge time, but laying down both a critical and physical damage DoT worth ten magnitude each will have your target screaming in pain. Consider this skill, and may whatever deity they pray to help them.
Considering how these powers don't exactly fulfil the Over Time part of DoTs, some would argue Sharp Bite and Slip Beneath aren't actually DoTs. This is debatable, but what is factual is that both of these powers shall benefit from Tactician and are quite strong at what they do. They don't last very long, but their damage is pretty great when you need a quick chunk of health that needs removing, especially considering the large amount of direct and critical damage they do.

Stacked DoTs

Poison Bite is your bread and butter stacked DoT power. It allows stacking up to five times, creating a 20 mag powerhouse if you manage to get your full stack in order. If you plan on investing in stacked DoTs, consider getting this skill and perhaps lowering the cooldown and charge for faster stacking.
Love Box benefits females the most, but does some pretty good stacked DoT damage. It's very quick to come off cooldown, so it'll be quite available within your rotation when you need to reapply it.
Scratch's damage isn't too amazing, but its strength comes from its negative charge. What this means is that this power can be used instantly and even allows you to apply another attack right after that! If you don't mind the energy cost, one could think of this ability as a mostly free damage booster.
Masochistic Fury is a powerful AoE stacked DoT attack. It has a charge time of zero and quite a short cooldown. Without even upgrading it, the AoE is quite large, allowing you to deploy the hurt on many foes. The downside comes from its betraying damage that'll sting a bit, but its certainly worth it considering what returns you shall receive in the form of damage.

DoT Gear

Training - Strength gives off a great amount of passive damagebuff for the price of twenty loadout and ten upkeep. If you're in need of some damagebuff, you may want to consider this item that's sold for some creds down at each faction's store.
If you're still finding yourself in need of precious damagebuff, consider making some Muscular Enhancers or maybe even a Steroid Injection Unit.
The Improved Laser Pistol is a great weapon of choice for DoT users, and especially for those who enjoy stacked DoTs. It's pretty low on the loadout as well, making it a great fit alongside your other equipment. With so many ways to modify this weapon, you may wish to consider investing in it if you can.
In the realm of regular DoTs, there are plenty of weapons to play around with such as the Laser Rifle, Heavy Beam, and the Portable flamethrower. The Laser Rifle is a bit basic, but it has a high amount of modability and does great damage at base. A tried and true weapons for DoT users. Heavy Beam combines the power of big hits and DoTs within on package to deliver a mighty punch that keeps on stinging. Also worthy of note is the great hastedebuff that it gives off which is further enhanced by your Tactician skill. Finally, the Portable flamethrower is... a flamethrower! How cool is that? It's similar to the Laser Rifle in a few ways such as cooldown and charge, but it does more direct damage at the cost of other things such as DoT damage and loadout. Decide what weapon suits you, or perhaps even take all three.
Down at the mall, there is an item called Ear Hoops. This is nothing more than a renamed Breathing Clothes item. This item, when worn, shall give you some passive energybreak, reducing the amount of energy your moves take. Your attacks shall generally eat up a lot of energy, so you may wish to consider wearing this item.
In Hotel Oblivion (Point Zero), there is a quest line that shall reward you with a Void Totem. This is a nice piece of gear that greatly speeds up the cooldown of your powers for little cost at all. However, as a warning, the quest will force you to downlevel once and fight a boss, so be prepared for a fight or perhaps call some friends.
A Power Gator can help with alleviate any energy problems you may be having. It's also quite moddable should you ever decide to make something that really suits your needs.
The Scattershot 2000 is VERY expensive, but if you're in the need of AoEmod, this could help you out. It's big and expensive, but hitting that extra target could make all the difference in the world. Before making this item, please be sure it's right for your needs!
The Blood Extractor is another piece of expensive gear, but it can have dramatic effects. Recall that the Vampiric skill is enhanced for DoTs, so combining this and the skill could bring huge results. It's quite big and expensive, so make sure this item is for you before investing in it.
The Module item may give you some custom passive buffs if you have the extra loadout to play with. Putting things like Cool, Flexible, Quick, or Fast on some of these may come in handy for bolstering your overall power. And of course, there are plenty more mods you can put on these things!
If you're in need of more survivability, consider wearing some armor like the always wonderful Heavy Armor or maybe even the Lifegiving Armor. Thick Armor is great as well, as it increases your MaxHP considerably. Lifegiving Armor has some wonderful regen attached to it should you need it.

Crafting for Success

With so many mods and recipes, it can get a little difficult to wrap one's head around the crafting system. That's okay! Everyone had that reaction at first. By the end of this guide and some playing around with the system, hopefully you'll have a better grasp on the subject. Once you do, you'll find that it probably wasn't as hard as you thought it was. This section shall detail more of the mechanical side of things rather than how to actually craft or find recipes. For hints on that, load up the Web Store and search for it there. Failing that, try asking out lovely players. For other information, check out the Crafting page, help crafting in the MUCK, or the Newbie Guide's crafting section.

Before we even begin, there are two very important things you'll want to get familiar with: The Test Crafter and the Statuses page on the wiki. The Test Crafter can be found on the website under the Game tab. This very handy tool allows you to play around with every recipe and mod within the game and see what it does on the item. Play around with it and get familiar, because you'll be using it often. Because most items will work with various effects and statuses on yourself, allies, and friends, you'll want to learn what they do by referencing the Statuses page often.

Basic Fundamentals

Every item has some kind of purpose. Before modifying an item, take note and try to figure out its primary use. For example, let's take a look at the Laser Rifle. You can see that the item is primarily used to deliver both Physical and Energy damage upon an enemy. If you want to enhance this item with mods, it would be a good move to make it better at this job. Naturally, you'd try your best to increase its physical and energy damage and maybe even put your own spin on it.

Enhancing an item's primary purpose shall generally bring success. However, some items have downsides that you may want to mitigate. These can include loadout costs, energy needed to fire, and perhaps a large cooldown and/or charge time. You may make a weapon that can deliver a massive amount of damage upon your foe, but you might want to make sure it doesn't take five rounds and all your energy to fire! Combining both of these ideas, you can make an item best suited for your purposes. Enhance the primary purpose of an item and try to minimize the nasty parts of said item. Overall, tweak and play with some mod combinations until you're satisfied!

Power of Statusmag

There are various mods that increase the statusmag of an item. What this means is that any status that an item inflicts is increased by the amount of statusmag a mod may apply. For example, let's look at the Laser Rifle again. This item has two statuses: Physicaldamage and Energydamage at magnitude five. Now let's look at the Heavy mod. This mod increases an item's statusmag by 25%. When applied to our Laser Rifle, it shall bring the magnitude of both Physical and Energy damage up an incredible 25%! If an item has a status you wish to enhance, consider adding on a mod that brings some statusmag to the table.

Mods that can increase Status mag: Heavy, Overwhelming, Blocking, Unpredictable, Flexible, Overcharged, Piercing Design.

Increasing the Pain

There are multiple ways to increase the damage of a weapon. First, you need to determine what a weapon's primary way of dealing damage is. For example, a Laser Rifle is focused on DoTs, while a Heavy Melee is all about direct damage. Once you've figured that out, it's time to start playing around with mods.

For direct damage weapons like the Heavy Melee, you'll naturally want to find mods that increase damage. For example, the Heavy mod increases damage by a deadly 35%! However, making the weapon simply hurt more isn't the only thing that can increase damage. Other notable things that may help bring the pain are mods that increase penetration such as Piercing Design, which helps rip through an enemy's resists. Increasing accuracy, such as with the Targeting mod can help bring about some consistent damage with each use. You could even add some critical damage (Backstabbing) or even other types of damage Poisoned if you're feeling really creative with your weapons.
As previously discussed in the Power of Statusmag section, DoT based weapons like the Laser Rifle benefit most from status mag increasing mods. In addition to this, one could get creative and add even more DoTs to a weapon, such as with Jagged, Backstabbing, Hooked Sharp, or Poisoned. If an item doesn't have Physicaldamage, adding something like Hooked will make it so! So say you put it on an Improved Laser Pistol. Now it's a pistol that does energy, critical, AND physical damage. Remember that they're called Damage Over Time weapons for a reason. The long a DoT lasts, the more total damage it does. Using mods to increase how long a DoT lasts, such as with Enduring Effect adds on more ticks, thus more damage.
Repeat weapons benefit greatly from both statusmag and damage increasing mods. To make a great repeats weapon, one would want to increase the base damage (Which also increases the damage of the repeats themselves), increase the amount of repeats, and lower' the amount of rounds for the repeat status. Statusmag increases the amount of repeats greatly, along with mods such as Repeating and Automated. To increase base damage, mods that simply increase damage will do nicely, like Extra Lethal for example. Finally, there's a special property repeat weapons like the Automated Weapon have. When applying mods that INCREASE the total amount of mods a status lasts, like Enduring Effect, it will actually DECREASE the amount of rounds for the repeat status despite what the test crafter may tell you.

Mods that increase direct damage: Heavy, Extra Lethal, Overcharged, Crippling, Backstabbing, Amplifying, Unpredictable, Wild, Focused.
Mods that increase accuracy: Targeting, Directed, Focused.
Mods that increase status duration: Enduring Effect, Poisoned, Overcharged, Unpredictable Heavy.

Mitigating Weaknesses

Some weapons will have some downsides to them. Perhaps they're really slow, or maybe take a lot of energy to fire. Perhaps its accuracy leaves something to be desired, or could it be that the thing is just too darn heavy? You'll also have to keep in mind that some mods have downsides to them as well that apply to the item. Heavy, for example, grants a bunch of bonuses, but also does nasty stuff like increasing the loadout, charge, cooldown, and more while also lowering accuracy. It's the price one pays for power. When encountering downsides of any type, you must determine if it's something you can work with or want to decrease the effects of.

It's often easy to go mod-happy and suddenly find that your weapon ways a giant forty loadout or something along that range. While the item will probably be quite powerful, it may not leave room for very much else! You'll want to find out how much loadout you're willing to sacrifice for an item and also think about what other items you are and plan on equipping in the future. There are a few mods that can help with this: Miniaturized and Ergonomic.
Some damage and statusmag increasing mods love to increase the charge time and cooldown of a weapon. If it takes too long to charge, that's precious time wasted that you could be using for other things! If it takes too long to come off cooldown, it'll take forever before you can use it again.
- Mods that decrease charge speed: Hair Triggered, Cool, Computerized, Quick
- Mods that decrease cooldown: Rapid Cooling, Quick
If an item costs too much energy to fire, you may find yourself too tired to do anything else. Make sure your item has a reasonable amount of energy required for the output, or be sure you can handle it.
- Mods that decrease energy use: Self Powering, Cool, Directed, Windup

AI Settings

Chances are, you'll be using auto combat for a good portion of your combat career. This function allows combat to automatically play out, letting your AI settings choose attacks to use for you. Generally, most parties will want you to turn auto on in order to get things done quicker. If you don't have your AI settings picked out, the AI will use a random round robin system. This has the possibility of really going against your favor. For example, it could pick a healing power when you're at 98% health! When you actually need that power, it might be on cooldown, leaving you in a bit of trouble. So if you plan on using auto combat, and you probably will, take a look at this guide to help get you started.

One may modify their AI settings on the webpage by clicking the character tab and selecting AI. You'll see a list of dropdown menus and such. At the bottom is your entire list of powers that can be used. You can either make them usable by your AI, or make sure they can never be picked. This is quite useful if you have points in Intimidation, which grants Avoid Notice and Attention Grab. If you're a tank, it'll be a good idea to set Attention Grab on use and Avoid Notice on do not use so the AI will always have the prefered toggle on rather than the other which can cause problems. The main attraction is the AI settings. The first column represents the condition of which the move will fire. The second column determines what the power should hit, and the third column defines the actual power that shall be used on the target and in which conditions. To find more AI program settings, check out the regular shops, token shops, and the elite (mako) store.

On the top of your AI settings, you should put things that are most important, as the AI settings prioritize what's on top first. A good idea might be to put your emergency heals at the top and set the condition to something like HP 50 or HP 25. Say you put HP 50 - Self - Milk Chug. Any time your health drops bellow 50%, the AI will make sure that Milk Chug will fire on your next turn if it's off cooldown, possibly saving your life. To make sure this power fires only in this condition, you may wish to scroll down and set Milk Chug to do not fire in this scenario, so it can only be used if your health goes bellow 50% for emergency situations. Another good idea is to put your energy regenerating abilities up at top for mostly the same reasons.

Next, you'll want to find what powers and items you use the most in combat and start putting them in. If something is more important than the other, simply put it as high as you believe it should go. For your most frequently used powers, it's generally safe to put them on the Always condition, which makes the power fire as soon as it comes off cooldown. For the target, you may want to consider something like Ranked, which targets the highest ranked enemy on the field. If it's a buff or something that induces an effect on friend or foe, you have the choice between Always and Renew. Renew only fires when your target, such as yourself, no longer has the statuses that the move provides. For example, if the maxHP buff of Honey Gift expires on your target, then it shall reapply this buff. Heals should more than likely use the Ally HP 50/25 condition. If anyone in your party drops bellow 50%/25%, then it will use the power on the target you have selected (Most Hurt being a great target).

Once you have put your most important and frequently used powers on your AI bar, you will have created a rotation. You won't be able to fit all your powers, so choose carefully. Good AI settings can really make the difference in the heat of battle. When your AI bar has nothing to do any more, then it shall go down to any powers you have marked as use and randomly select them until a condition triggers.

Miscellaneous Topics

This section shall contain various topics that don't quite need a main section of the combat guide, but are still very worthy of note. As time goes on, new sections shall be added to both the main section and this portion. Within here, various hints, tips, and other concepts that may help one on their journey shall be described. Other things that fit here are topics that people seem to get confused about and demand explanation. Overall, both newer and veteran players might pick up something neat.

Passives and Toggles

Technically, toggles are indeed passives. For the sake of this explanation however, we'll call something that needs to be activated a toggle, like Long Ears and something that's on all the time without user input a passive, like Furry Hide. Some people get confused on what exactly the status durations mean on something like a passive or toggle. Aren't they supposed to be on all the time? Yes and no! A passive will refresh itself every five rounds while a toggle will fire off every round. You'll notice that a move like Quill Wag fires every turn! Regardless, most passives and toggles are designed to be always on, so it's generally never a worry.

Deflections

When you're in battle, you may see something like this: <[22%]5. Rabid Greedy><Repeated Prism Storm> Player takes 12 damage! So what does that 22% mean on the left? That is the deflection amount. All attacks must go through the target's defense status, the process of which is detailed more on the Statuses page. The higher the number on the left is, the more damage was deflected. Up to a total of 75% of an attack may be deflected, and it still even has to go resists and such! It's also possible that 0% damage could be deflected, allowing the attack to go hit against resists and such as normal. With this in mind, you can see that having lots of defense and accuracy can really pay off big when it comes to survivability and damage.

Overheat

As of October 24th, 2013, a new overheat mechanic was put into play. What this basically means is that if one uses highly damaging powers too quickly, it may overheat and add to the cooldown. Any power that has a damage rating less than fourteen, such as with Small Claws, will not be subject to this. Healing powers aren't nearly affected by this as much as big hits are. What's considered too fast for a damaging power is when the cooldown to damage ratio is 100 cooldown per 1 damage. This is a method put into play to prevent spamming of the same high damaging powers over and over again. Generally, you'll never have to worry about this if you have a basic rotation, but it's worth mentioning.

Combat Guide

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