Itzae must have abilities

[Majber]

What are Itzae must have or the best abilities to get asap?
Im struggling to do a good build after previous chapter peeing so much different.

[King Roost]

I personally quite like her double jab ability, as it does 2 damage, while her hook attack (which she starts with) does 2 damage and is amplified to 3 with the double jab. This allows for a total of 5 damage over two turns which will take most enemies out.

[minstrelofmoria]

Her speed boost is an excellent emergency move. If you can’t interrupt, it lets you run away from attacks even at close range. Her jump is even better, but the cooldown’s risky.

It’s pretty high up in her tree, but I’m regretting not having her bullet reflect for the later enemies.

I personally went for her magia regen boost, but that was probably a mistake. It costs so much XP that I didn’t have much left over for moves.

[dubiusG]

I like to go straight up to double stab- cheap quick 4 damage (though you likely wont get enough points for this til mid chapter 3), and with any damage boosting can do 6+ damage one-shotting most enemies. Other than that Brace II is *massive* - one use will protect against most small enemies/ bullets and two uses will protect against most melee attacks- and if you wait with two Braces that's net+1 magia that turn while safe from most damage. This is especially useful if you have lots of access to magia with Til I Bleed- which of course also pairs well with Health Buff I/II. Magic shield I/II and provoke also pair well together if you have lots of magia for +2 damage while also being relatively safe (and sightly cheaper than Brace II in this case sometimes). Late chapter 3 once you start seeing newcomers Deflect is nice to have, but you wont get a lot out of it until then imo- also worth noting that damage boosts also affect deflected bullets. This is mostly directed to a more tank-y build with little care for interrupts/stuns

[endaris]

TL;DR:
Make Way into Jump and then ability slots > magia > health in the passive tree.
After that you can mostly branch out to your personal taste, almost everything she has is good.

Long form:
What you shouldn't lose sight of when considering Itzae is that her starting skills are really good, you will likely never replace Hook, the only good replacement for Jab is Double Jab and Brace II is not even necessarily better than Brace I. On my first playthrough I skilled Brace II later on to get access to the missile reflect but I still kept Brace I because it costs no Magia!
But the gist is that you want to add new skills through new ability slots.

In my experience the two core abilities that helped me the most with her early on were Make Way and Jump II alongside with the passive tree.
The mindset is as following: While in melee range, Itzae needs to either kill or interrupt or run away to avoid taking damage.
Make Way can do all of these 3 things at once. While it has a very steep magia cost, there are some swarm type encounters with enemies that only have 1 or 2 health, meaning you can kill a lot of them at once (after hitting with Jab once if they have 2 health) and get a portion or even all the magia restored. And even if you hit only one enemy, they will be interrupted and you will have made distance to continue running away and recovering magia for your future plans.
Jump II is possibly the most broken skill Itzae has. It has INSANE range, returns all the magia it uses if you hit something and pulls enemies together for use with other AoE skills like Make Way or Spin I/II that give you space to run away and replenish your magia before doing it again / finishing things off with Jab and Hook.
As it is an interrupt you can also use it to escape from melee range before enemies hit.

Besides these two skills I would mostly recommend investing in the passive skill tree to unlock all her ability slots and get her magia and health up. Itzae has A LOT of great skills and a lot of ones with cooldowns so while extra slots on Tizo are no longer as valuable once you have ~6, Itzae has so many instant casts and skills with cooldown that every single ability slot will make her stronger and more flexible.
Personally I would prioritize Magia over Health in the passive skill tree because between Brace I and her AoE interrupts you should not get hit for any substantial amounts of damage.

If you decide to play with the merged medaillon it can make sense to also skill Spin I to replace Brace I for an extra AoE interrupt because Brace I will no longer bring incoming hits to 0, making it significantly less useful.