Kyrie build (class unlock spoilers)

[MTaur]

Alright, so I've just about given up on Marked active skills. Just not worth it. You have to build like a Warmage to get much out of it, and it's borderline suicidal. At least Anadine can go pure physical and go to town. Anadine just puts Marked Kyrie to shame, and if I wanted a DPS hybrid Kyrie, I'd just build a gun Warmage and do everything from 7 tiles away twice as easily.

So if I were to play through again, I'd maybe master a few classes on Kyrie for bonus points and passive options, but I'd stick with pure tank in the end:

Knight/X or X/Knight, Counter: Slow, Defense Expert, (2nd passive)

Counter: Slow, that's it. That's all I really want from Marked. It's an excellent counter, and works a lot better on someone you expect to take a hit. i.e., absolutely NOT a MND/ATK glass cannon.

What do you get from Knight? Taunt is amazing. Defensive Hit is strong on a dedicated build, and doesn't self-harm like Wrathful Blow would. Heavy Hit is a real boss slayer. One For All can sometimes work if the turn order hits a good sequence. Chivalrous Spirit is great if you have a spare turn and MP. As a primary class, Knight passives are also strong. Defend and Protect have situational uses... I guess...

Plague Doctor is an interesting primary here. First of all, you can still equip Heavy Armor + Shield! That's unique for a spellcaster. Treatment's AoE dubuff cleanse alone is great. Mass Barrier is also a fine spare turn skill at the very least. Bleed/Poison/Weaken immunity is awesome for someone you just want to survive.

[lavexis]

i build my kyrie as sword/board tank
knight/marked
2 knight passive
health expert
defense expert
counter attack

having her maxed out on defense and hp allow her to be in front line soaking up the hits, i might change her counter to slow but im not sure yet, i like the damage that counter attack gives.

playing this game on hard currently with 5% stats gain and shes been helpful.

i think it really depends on what difficulty you playing this game on, if its veteran or below then im guessing that any build should work.

[Conan The Librarian]

MTaur-

Just as inspiration for people, I also recommend seeing this thread on (close to) the same subject:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/699170/discussions/0/1676938384259483901/

Also for sake of discussion, I also quite like [Execute] (in addition to [Counter: Slow]. I tend to take my Kyrie through various physical classes (in my current playthrough she’s on Duelist atm) and she ends up being one of my heroes who can not only take a lot of punishment, but can dish it out as well.

Enjoy the theorycrafting.

[OnlyOffensive]

i use marked / templar and its super strong. Marked has low cost / high power abilities + templar chant, once you get / siphon some mana you punch 1000+ righteous blades.

Execute makes marked incredibly powerfull damage dealer. The advantages of marked ( besides good stats ) versatile abilities with long range, aoe, low mana cost. And her last ability EXTREMELY powerfull later in story.

As a final touch you can use phoenix ring for suicide chant, Cleansing blade and siphon mana are very usefull on high difficulties, unless you want enemies to oneshot your low defense characters with night embraces / assassinates etc.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Important thing to note: With Kyrie's ATK+MND (and Fellblade, or Elemental Burst from Warmage, etc.), your ATK+MND values don't have to be even. It's the sum of those values that matters. So something like 5.5 ATK Growth and 2.5 MND Growth (Reaver), for example, won't ruin Kyrie's ability to use her Marked class. The only time both values have to actually be leveled "evenly" is with Warmage, where you use ATK for Infused Edge and MND for the Elemental Bolt or Pulsar that follows.

While the classes that tend to have the best sum ATK+MND growths do also tend to be mixed (Warmage, Fellblade, Marked), you're locking yourself down a really linear path that doesn't actually exist. As long as your combined growths between ATK and MND are at least 8.0 or higher, and as long as your gaining good raw values from each of your equipment, you can very easily (for example) make Kyrie a pure-ATK Maul user and her skills will lose little to no effectiveness, nor will a secondary of Fellblade (the one she usually benefits most from packing). The main difference is that she'll want to be the recipient of things like your Ancient Locket and Battle Claw, as her Marked skills get double-boosted by them.

(This also goes in reverse - you could easily make her a pure-mage, taking tons of levels in Sorcerer, and her Marked skills would still be good for the same reason, just shifting to MND as the primary stack instead of ATK.)

That's the real difference between her and Anadine - Anadine is "better" but is locked into ATK, whereas Kyrie can be ATK, MND, or mixed, and all cases will have builds and growth paths where her damage skills remain effective.

[MTaur]

Originally posted by OnlyOffensive:

i use marked / templar and its super strong. Marked has low cost / high power abilities + templar chant, once you get / siphon some mana you punch 1000+ righteous blades.

Execute makes marked incredibly powerfull damage dealer. The advantages of marked ( besides good stats ) versatile abilities with long range, aoe, low mana cost. And her last ability EXTREMELY powerfull later in story.

As a final touch you can use phoenix ring for suicide chant, Cleansing blade and siphon mana are very usefull on high difficulties, unless you want enemies to oneshot your low defense characters with night embraces / assassinates etc.

Yeah, Templar is sort of tempting and I've used it with Marked at times. Emboldening Chant and Siphon are also great neutral/positive MP balance skills.

I think ultimately I've decided to go back toward the Knight thing, not that you or Conan or wrong. Templar has decent MND/ATK, but not great. Maybe it would've worked out better for me if I'd kept Execute and paid attention to it.

EDIT: I actually run Templar on Anadine sometimes, and also Templar/Vessel on someone else. So that's a not-about-Kyrie reason for me to pass on it.

[Lasci]

You mentioned Knight but didn't touch on what I think is its best ability -- Life Font. In my opinion it's of the best passives in the game because it's incredibly easy to access and lets you manage chip damage as you move around the battlefield, which is what you're going to be doing with Kyrie anyways. Heavy Hit falls off a bit later in the game once Kyrie gets more powerful and starts wielding a Maul, but for a sword and board Kyrie, it's a great skill for initiating a fight and putting the enemy in a health deficit she wouldn't otherwise be able to create. Knight is a great class and you probably won't be disappointed by it if you just want to sit Kyrie in there.

A lot of people have mentioned Templar and while I'm not very fond of its passives, Siphon --> Righteous Strike is a combination that will last you until the end of the game while Emboldening Chant is one of the best ways to start off a battle. It has a few other nice kit pieces for Kyrie, but those are the big selling points, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking the abilities you like from that tree and sitting her in Marked. I'm strongly opposed to Defense Expert because it discourages enemies from targeting someone who is using it and Defensive Hit falls off as the game progresses for a handful of reasons -- weapons get better (there're weapons with status ailments that are better than the extra damage), exploiting elemental weaknesses gets more important, etc.

If you're looking to avoid grinding, Kyrie as some combination of Knight, Templar, and Marked is great.

I'll also mention that Fellblade is a great place for her to explore as well. It meshes incredibly well with her Marked class and I'm a huge proponent for anything that provides debuffs and Fellblade also provides Kyrie with some safe AOE potential if you're not a fan of Wrathful Burst.

All that said, I think you're giving Kyrie a bit of the short end of the stick compared to Anadine. Yes, Anadine frequently has a lot of raw damage, but Kyrie is able to comfortably maneuver through a variety of different roles because of Marked's good MND growth. It makes her a better Templar and, yes, a better Warmage, but Marked's abilities are Skills, not Spells, so Warmage has disappointing synergy with Dark/Holy Bolt. But unlike most classes, Marked is able to target both DEF and RES depending on the situation and, combined with Life Font, doesn't suffer from its self-harm abilities as you might think. The burst abilities are great management tools to kill off low health enemies (especially combined with Execute) so that you aren't wasting your actions finishing off low-health characters. Later in the game, the Holy element is a frequent weakness and one of the hardest to acquire outside of secret classes.

[lavexis]

would love to see a poll on how most people pair up the marked class with

i notice that most people go with
marked/knight
marked/templar
marked/fellblade

[MTaur]

Originally posted by Lasci:

You mentioned Knight but didn't touch on what I think is its best ability -- Life Font.

Very briefly in passing, I said that "Knight passives are also strong". But that was probably easy to miss. And for stat growth, it's the only way to maximize Defensive Hit. I agree that Life Font is top tier, especially with the synergy. If all else fails, you can Defend-bait like a boss, but that's not the only option, either.

[Sdric]

Gear: Dominance, Drake Talon, Cap of Ages, Arbiter Garb, Gigas Fist (Battle Claw works here, too), Zephyr Locket

Class: Ranger/Wargmage - Versatile, Exploit Weakness, Slow

(Use Scout to get from 76% to 100% critrate)

That's 850~1850 depending on the enemy type weaknesses and whether you use Infuse or Snipe

[Fail Tank]

Let me start off by saying my opinions are going to be really messed up by playing on +50%. That said, I don't dig Marked at all. Counter: Slow is so good that I feel like if you want to use Marked in some way, it's to create a really tarpitty tank. The rest of her kit is good offensive growth, no major weaknesses, and good gear options. She also gets access to a bunch of dark/holy, most of which still checks vs DEF, or uses straight MND with a low %. Execute would also be pretty sweet, if I was building her to deal damage, but I'm not. Using Kyrie as a glass cannon is wasting the best part of her kit: Slow. The weakness of her kit is that she gets 9 different ways to do damage, but only 2 elements (as well as no element), and no debuffs. You can only pick 1 a turn, and they all do mostly the same thing.

I'm a big fan of Knight/Templar. Knight's got the better passives, so obviously that's main. Knight gives Def Hit and Heavy Hit, which are 2 of the only relevant attacks at +50% on a non-glass cannon character. It's got 100% zerk, to shut down casters or foes with dangerous skills. It's got defend and prot, which are very situational on lower difficulties, but on +50% my whole team strategy is first control the fight, then defeat the enemy in detail. Control is accomplished through sleep/zerk and other debuffs, by picking off extremely dangerous/squishy enemies with my own glass cannons, and making absolutely certain none of my guys die and pick up a permawound. Prot/Def accomplish the last task, as oft times, prot is the difference between a caster living to get healed, or getting a one way ticket to injurytown. The longer the fight goes without me taking a casualty, the higher my chances of winning. Knight's defensive abilities help me do that.

Templar, on the other hand, covers a variety of situations. ATK up for my cannons, cleansing for buff-heavy enemy comps, injury-free reset button in rapturous chant, and it has a couple vs RES attacks on a class combo that doesn't get any from Knight at all. Not that I use them very often. Templar exists mostly for Cleansing, Righteous, and Emboldening.

Fellblade would also be a very neat secondary for her, as the point of fellblade is really the high % sleep and other debuff options, but I have another character on fellblade, and nobody else with dispel.

As for Anadine, she's another case of big DPS and no utility, but also no range and no vs RES options.

[OnlyOffensive]

Originally posted by MTaur:

Originally posted by OnlyOffensive:

i use marked / templar and its super strong. Marked has low cost / high power abilities + templar chant, once you get / siphon some mana you punch 1000+ righteous blades.

Execute makes marked incredibly powerfull damage dealer. The advantages of marked ( besides good stats ) versatile abilities with long range, aoe, low mana cost. And her last ability EXTREMELY powerfull later in story.

As a final touch you can use phoenix ring for suicide chant, Cleansing blade and siphon mana are very usefull on high difficulties, unless you want enemies to oneshot your low defense characters with night embraces / assassinates etc.

Yeah, Templar is sort of tempting and I've used it with Marked at times. Emboldening Chant and Siphon are also great neutral/positive MP balance skills.

I think ultimately I've decided to go back toward the Knight thing, not that you or Conan or wrong. Templar has decent MND/ATK, but not great. Maybe it would've worked out better for me if I'd kept Execute and paid attention to it.

EDIT: I actually run Templar on Anadine sometimes, and also Templar/Vessel on someone else. So that's a not-about-Kyrie reason for me to pass on it.

You can switch to marked and keep templar optional, you dont need to level in templar, only get all abilities.

[OnlyOffensive]

as a side note, tanks are completely useless in this game. Any character has TON of ways to live, starting with good old mystic shield to stacking evasion / using items like cursed shield with combination of evade skill counter. The way AI works tank is just going to be walking no damage that enemies will simply ignore.

Now there are ways to make Kyrie do damage ( simple combo that ends with righteous blade ) AND have enough def so that enemies dont really prioritize her.

And never take life font over no flank, because walking heal is gonna be lower than damage you take from sides ( you also might not want move or move long distance ), not to mention you are just going to get oneshoted by snipes, night embraces etc. Life font isnt bad early game, but quickly becomes bad, comsidering you can use ANY passives from classes you have access to.

[Tuidjy]

Originally posted by OnlyOffensive:

Now there are ways to make Kyrie do damage ( simple combo that ends with righteous blade ) AND have enough def so that enemies dont really prioritize her.

There are ways to have Kyrie do damage?

You don't say.

The character with the best offensive stat growth in the game, the character who can use all the best gear in a class with enhanced mobility, the chartacter who can be built into a tanky combat beast while retaining precisely tailored ranged attacks for every imaginable medium or close range target? That they can add to whatever the secondary class brings to the table, from sustained damage, to MP fueled massive damage.

That character can be made to deal damage?

Yup, you won't get an argument from me. The Pacific is also somewhat wet.

----------

Kyrie's Marked has two weaknesses:
1) It's not worth losing 5 badge classes for it. BUT, that's common to story characters.
2) Avenger is a passive for crappy play. BUT, that's great for new players, and to prevent frustration.

The rest is all win.

[OnlyOffensive]

thats what im saying in response about kyrie with life fonts and knights.

[Tuidjy]

Originally posted by OnlyOffensive:

thats what im saying in response about kyrie with life fonts and knights.

I was not being sarcastic, at all. I agree with you, I am just amazed that it has to be said.

And yeah, you had ample provocation.