First skills to pickup as emily

[~Sound Sage~]

what skills should i FIRST be picking up as emily in order. for a combat playthrough, or hybrid stealth and combat playthrough?

[Sunwave]

Well, I did a stealth playthrough w ith Emily and a combat playthrough with Corvo. So, I can only give perfect advice for stealth. Personally, I thought that "domino" was the best, most overpowered skill in the game. You only need to knock out one guard of a group and they all go to sleep. This makes some of the places where two or three guards walk together SO MUCH EASIER. Instead of having to lure them away one by one (which sometimes is hardly possible), you can just connect all of them and knock out one.

Even if you don't have to knock them all out at once, it's still helpful if they're in an open place. You can knock out several guards from a distance with a single sleeping dart.

Of course, it won't get any worse if you want to kill them instead of knock them out, but for killing, there are a lot more possibilities, so it's less important for a combat playthrough. For combat, I assume doppelganger is pretty helpful, especially when it can fight back and/or assassinate targets as well.

[Tony]

Second on Domino, absolutely "overpowered". Then again, Dishonored is all about creativity, pick whatever you think might be the most fun to you. Shadow Walk is a lot of fun, but controls a bit wonky, mostly because you (obviously) can't jump, in addition to the fact that it is quite short. Don't be fooled by the descriptions. They may say that you are now able to take out 3 people in shadow form before returning, but the kill or incapacitation animations are quite long, and you are quite slow, can't jump, and can still be attacked, which makes any situation where you could use Shadow Walk to take out people also one that you could probably accomplish better with your sword and Far Reach, or better yet - Domino. Shadow Walk helps a lot for Ghost, but I've found little use for it beyond avoiding detection when cornered or facing enemies that cannot be approached from above or behind, which rarely happens.
If you invest in Domino, I would also recommend getting the instant sleep dart upgrade as quickly as possible. I've never used Doppelganger, but I read somewhere that you can Domino-tie it to your enemies, which sounds like a hilarious dilemma.

[Zekiran]

Domino and Far Reach. Comedy ensues.

[Burdpal]

Mesmerize is very underrated. Expensive to fully upgrade, but it stops so many things from happening and buys you alot of time to dispatch a large group of enemies much better than Domino can.