Some notes on skill builds

[madcapbeatitude]

It seems a lot of the game's criticisms do not have to do with the choppiness of the endgame experience, or the lack of a post game experience. (Neither would require a ton of additional code, but hey, if the game kept me entertained long enough to win three world championships with different primary stats, then as far as I'm concerned the money was well spent.)

People seem frustrated who had trouble winning fights, but that mostly comes down to keeping your HP full between fights, training whenever financially possible, making skill investment decisions and making sure your skill choices suit your opponent. Busy work, for sure, but not esoteric once you understand how to win with each build.

Of four "core" skills, you get two attacks (punch, kick) and two defense skills (dodge, block) that depend on agility and stamina respectively. You get two random skills of the four, and 1/2 are guaranteed to be punch or kick. Sometimes you get two attacks. You can immediately invest in the other four, or proceed immediatley to the one that lets you see skill effects. THAT one branches off into the intermediate balanced attacks, one each that are associated with the three primary stats and a fourth, "lowkick," which is the balanced/beginner tree's only debuff attack. You can only afford to carry about one attack early on, so I recommend using either lowkick or the one associated with your "class." between eventual bear, tiger or turtle.

You will want "high punch" regardless of your primary stat, however, so bears get a small advantage here. "High punch" unlocks both "rest" and the 3rd skill slot. You need both an attack and a suitable defense skill early on to have much chance of winning; you don't have the energy to mow enemies down with pure offense. However, if you unlock a third sklil slot BEFORE unlocking "Rest," you will not be able to enter combat without filling it, probably with a second attack you can't afford yet. I recommend saving up the 13 or so expereince points you need to unlock both simultaneously. This will give you a significant energy production advantage against all of the game's enemies, regardless of build.

After that, you proceed down one branch - whichever starts by capping your favorite stat at 4, then enhancing your ability to train that stat. Then come the third level attacks, the most powerful in the balanced tree. You'll probably want to swap that into the skill lineup as your attack, unless you prefer to use "lowkick" for its lower damage and debuff.

After that attack, you'll unlock the associated specialty style with your preferred stat. After that, the turtle/tiger paths can unlock passive skills enhancing their ability to block or dodge efficiently and effectively. Bear doesn't get anything, but they do get to proceed ahead a little more cheaply. Either way, next comes the other of 2 skill slots from the Balanced Tree. As soon as is feasible, you want a skill lineup of Attack Action /Defense Action/Rest, with your best or favorite attack in play. Lastly is the skill "long timer," which is not that useful when it becomes available. It lengthens the duration of buffs on yourself and debuffs on your enemy, and those sorts of skills are scattered throughout all the specialty trees, so you'll probably come back later for "long timer." (Buying too many skills early can make further advancement prohibitively expensive.) Honestly, I recommend holding off on the 4th skill slot early on to make sure your fighter rests enough to keep attacking.

Bear tree:
Moving out into the bear tree, you'll want "Boxing punch," a high-damage, low-cost, accurate attack that futhermore progresses you towards the skill that will lock your strength at 8. After locking strength to 4 early on, leave it there to train stamina up to par so you can win most of the bar fights. Later, you'll concentrate back on your primary in order to lock it at 8. Along the way, you'll begin unlocking various offensive enhancements. You can make room to equip one of your choice when you buy that aforementioned 4th skill slot, now using a build of attack/block/rest/augment. I recommend taking the shortest possible path to "Some Motivation II," since it will become painfully expensive to pursue later while you have to train your primary stat constantly just to keep it at 8. It's counter-intuitive, but the value in locking a stat is so you can ignore it and still depend on it while you train your stats diversely. Your primary stat should be highest, but it's only with SKILLS that you specialize absolutely.

Moving on, after you unlock Some Motivation II, you soon unlock the fifth skill slot and the "Boxer" skill. Having done that, you soon unlock one of the signature passive skills of the "bear," tree, which increases all damage 30% when you're in critical health. The next one beyond that disables all defensive skills in exchange for an additional 20% increase at all times, but I'd hold off on it temporarily. Circling back to the lower row of the bear tree, you can acquire skills like "counter-cross" and "boxing jab series" that are significantly more effective and appealing once "boxer" is unlocked. Your level up costs will be more substantial, but with "Some Motivation III" unlocked, you'll have all the time in the world to train stamina and a little agility (to keep strike accuracy reasonable) while continuing to execute grievously powerful attacks. Your earliest 5-skill build should go: attack, attack, block, rest, skill augmentation. (These should be suited towards debuffing your opponent's strengths, but energy damage and energy conservation or production are always good investments).

Moving down the lower tree of Bear, after unlocking the first of the high-level passive skills, you add attacks like Hook and Counter-Cross that are more appealing after "Boxer" is already unlocked, and eventually "Boxing Jab Series" which is always great but not positioned anywhere near the essential training skills. Counter-cross is a defensive skill that can replace "block" as you move towards having 3+ attacks in a true bear build. So now you have something that looks like Boxing Punch/Powerful Uppercut/Counter Cross/Rest/Triple Punch. You'll want to involve Triple Punch once you have "Boxer" and at least 2 attacks in circulation, alhtough Counter Cross will benefit, allowing you to inflict truly overwhelming energy damage. Once you cross that line, you'll look for ways to increase your damage (to both HP and energy) even higher, with a mind towards destroying your enemy's energy bar BEFORE they can do too much damage to you. The second passive skill will now be a good investment, but before dropping "counter-cross" (which will be disabled along with all of your blocks!), learn Hook. It will work best if you keep up your agility, but just "boxer" and "triple punch" will make it worthwhile. Now your skill lineup will look like Boxing Punch/Boxing Hook / Boxing Jab Series / Triple Punch / Rest. As you get into the late game and have 9-10 stamina to complement your overwhelming force, you can swap in a debuff attack or an augmentation skill for Rest. If you train your strength to 15+ with such a build, you'll be dealing 100+ damage combos and knocking many opponents out in a single round. Along the way, it's all about keeping your damage dealth and energy production up, and your damage received and energy consumption down. Stamina should be anybody's secondary stat unless it's their primary. If stamina is the primary, I usually like agility as the secondary in order to keep accuracy up and energy consumption down.

So that's Bear.

Moving on to Tiger, you will probably want kick/dodge as your starting build in basic, eventually moving onto Karate High Kick/Dodge as you begin. You'll still want to take the shortest possible path to lock agility at II with Do Not Fall Down II. "Wind Flow Dodge" is an acceptable detour, since it's going to keep you alive for a long time. In combination with the "Fast Reflexes" passive skill from the balance tree and an agility stat that is as high as possible, you'll avoid a huge proportion of enemy damage, surviving for many turns in order to defeat them with kicks dealing significant non-strength dependant damage.

Once you've locked agility at 8, you'll soon gain access to the 5th skill slot. This should probably go Attack/Attack/Wind Flow Dodge/Rest / Augmentation skill of choice. There will soon come a controversial skill called "slave to the wind," which caps strength and stamina at 9.0 (You can get them to 9, but can't train them even part of a level beyond in order to safeguard against stat decay.) The thing is, I deliberately used 1 strength as an advanced Tiger and still had energy issues despite having the maximum 9 stamina, with agility at something like 18 when I won world's. Probably could have grinded it up to 20, but all my games took fewer than 200 days to complete. In short, high agility will make you almost invincible for as long as you can sustain the energy demands, which will become increasingly substantial, so you'll want to increase the number of dodges you can execute by making them cheap - with low strength. If advanced tigers had 10+ energy they would probably become broken, so this skill isn't as bad as it looks but it is an accepted handicap. In order to unlock Do Not Fall Down III, however, you will probably want it, but hold off until you can pay for both. Then training stamina up to 9 and agility to 14-15, you'll see HUGE increases in your energy demands but also develop tremendous defensive capabilities.

In order to do more damge, there are augment skills and debuffs to reduce the effectiveness of blocking and stamina-based resistance. (Overcoming dodging, besides debuffs, is about agility/accuracy, and yours will already be fantastic.) So a high-level triger build might look like Kick Attack / Kick Attack (with kick dropper passive unlocked), / Wind Flow Dodge / Rest / One of the augment skills from the lower row that reduces blocking efficacy. If the enemy does not block but has a ton of stamina, consider substituting the one that debuffs stamina defense directly instead of just blocks. If the enermy has no defensive capabilities, there are other augment skills available.

Now, the final skills of the tiger tree do not require energy but are strategically unusual. "Fan of Ninjitsu" causes your agility to increase as you execute successful blocks, an effect made quite valuable by the "long timer" skill buried back in the advanced tree. "Mimic" causes your enemy's first attack to be reversed on them each turn. (I found it underwhelming against high level enemies with multiple attacks, but it's damage and defence that doesn't cost energy, so using it will help sustain a defensive build.) So a defensive build can be Attack / Wind Flow Dodge / Unstoppable (defensive augment skill that causes successful dodges to reflect damage) /Rest / Mimic. You'll reflect significantamounts of damage, and when you're able to get by without "rest," you can make room for a second dodge if you're looking for reflected damage or a second attack if you'd rather continue kicking your enemies into submission. A mature tiger is accurate enough to kick dodging enemies, and can pierce thick defenses including blocks. They eventually spend a lot of their energy dodging, but their dodges eventually develop offensive components. It's easy to use kicks, dodges and reflected damage to win a world championship with 15+ agility, 9 stamina and a sophisticated buildout of the highest-level passive skills. It can remain very difficult to win stamina challenges, since enemies can drain your energy dry early in the first round by merely attempting many times to attack you. Suffering early knockdowns won't help you survive six opponents.


Finally.............turtle!

Turtle is about huuuuuge damage mitigation and vigorous energy regeneration, and benefits from having naturally spectacular HP and defense. (Tiger defenses tend to result in lower HP, and bears require constant maintenance to keep their energy up. Bears keep slugging away through the worst of times.)

Once you have your highest-level stamina attack from the balanced tree, you'll want the passive skill enhancing your ability to block.

"Paw Punch" is a reliably powerful attack. It costs significantly more than the bear's "boxing punch," but you'll also be in a better position to afford it. "Headbutt" is this tree's introductory stat debuff attack, and reduces enemy dodge/block by 25%. Small reduction in offensive power, but significantly less expensive and less accurate. It's a bit touchier and more situational, but if you can easily use it for block penetration against a slow enemy that is more forgiving of low accuracy. Landing it against a higher-dodge enemy can require you keep your agility respectable, so I tend to stick with Paw Punch. Paw Punch also unlocks Energizer, which is a valauble skill if you are able to keep your energy high. I recommend taking the Energizer Line all teh way through to Good Sneakers II, then double back up through Iron Curtain, which replaces Block with higher damage mitigation. In combination with the passive skill from the balanced tree improving your blocking, this will make you very hard to defeat.

Backbreaker is one of various skills that periodically allow you to skip your enemy's turn; this seems unambigously good but will cause you to spend energy more often than you can produce it. Basically, the turtle build is heavily about affordably blocking huge amounts of damage, having tons of HP, generating huge amounts of energy and then spending this overflow by constantly making it your turn so you can throw big expensive attacks like Paw Punch - or, if you're into stat debuffs, headbutt or huckle bone blow. Backbreaker is the "attack" centered around this style; "Brawler" is a defense skill increasing the number of such hijackign chances, while good old Energizer is the attack version. So, a build of Iron Curtain/Rest/Backbreaker/Brawler/Energizer would require a TON of stamina to sustain the energy production, but it would throw a LOT of backbreakers and block most of everything.

Shining Knight, along the upper path, will lead towards the fifth skill slot and the third-level stamina training skills. This is the only tree that allows you to choose or leave the "sacrifice" skill, "No rest." In short, if you are like me and don't bother with hijacking, simply pairing powerful attacks with powerful blocks and debuffs, you'll have 100 energy most of the time. "No Rest" levies huge energy penalties against both you and yoru opponent, but unlike you your opponnet isn't prepared for it so they get knocked down a LOT. "Infinite Energy" is one of the game's best passive skills and makes it difficult to run out of energy, ever, causing the last 25% of your energy bar to go more than 3x as far; this effectively almost doubles your energy output potential, perhaps doubling it when you account for the energy you produce while it's active. "Spear" becomes free when you have low energy, so it works well with a style built around constant interrupting; you can just smack the hell out of your enemies, with more interruptions at high energy and free attacks/super cheap blocks at low energy.

The turtle tree contains most of the game's best anti-dodge debuffs, so you'll eventually get your victories by cheaply absorbing blocked enemy attacks, dealing significant HP/energy attacks with bearlike attacks like Paw Punch, and constantly generating so much energy that enemies that survive into the 2nd/3rd rounds start getting knocked down a lot.