How to Make a Build

I’m not a big believer in “handing out” builds for you to try; instead I believe in understanding what makes a build effective and then allowing you to shape that knowledge into an experience that is fun and engaging for you (I know, ironic coming from the guy who made a website to share Qud builds). I’ll break down making a build into smaller parts to consider and leave it to you to decide what to fit into those pieces.

Tier 0 - Concept

Before your run even begins, you should have a general plan of what type of build you want to go for. After all, this is going to shape everything from your attribute distribution to your mutations. I’ll break down the broad categories of build by their weapon choices as this is going to be the greatest difference between builds. Each build will ideally have a primary and secondary style as backup strategies are always important.

Melee (Agility & Strength)

Primary melee builds are very common and very powerful due to their reliability. The only “condition” to their power is whether or not they are next to the enemy, so it should be no surprise that once the choice of weapon is settled, you have a strategy for how this build is going to close the gap. Mutations and cybernetics should be focused on increasing your melee damage and increasing your options to get into the fight and stay there.

Secondary melee builds are not going to be worried about how to close the gap and instead focused on how to increase the gap. This leaves Long Blades as the clear choice of weapon as you will get those utility tools to give your primary weapon the space it needs to go to work.

Ranged (Agility)

Primary ranged builds have a very slow start until the arrival at Grit Gate since you will be heavily limited by ammunition. Because of this, builds usually transition into being primarily ranged instead of starting there. However, that doesn’t mean you should design your character around your secondary style, it just means you’ll be a bit weaker until your build can come online. Pistols in particular excel as primary ranged weapons because of the plethora of fantastic skills they get. These builds should focus on what to do when the enemy closes the gap, because eventually one will. High quickness or movement speed and force fields are fantastic ways to maintain or grow the gap to give your weapons space to work.

Secondary ranged builds are interested in one thing: clearing out the trash. You’re likely not specialized enough here to fight powerful enemies solely from a distance, so instead your goal is accurate, long-ranged weapons that can reliably clear out weaker enemies. This leaves rifles as a fantastic choice not only because they are long ranged and accurate, but also because they require very little skill investment.

Esper (Ego)

Primary Esper builds are certainly not recommended because of the general unreliability of using nothing but mental mutations as your weapons. Since Esper powers require no skill investment whatsoever, you should instead have these powers as your secondary style. But, if you are bent on using mental mutations as your primary weapon, be ready to take things very slowly in order to allow your damage to come back online and relying on your secondary when enemies get too close while you’re on cooldown.

Secondary Esper builds are fantastic because they allow you to focus on your primary style entirely. The downside is that while they don’t require any skill investment, they do require attribute investment. This leaves secondary Esper builds to pair extremely well with primary ranged builds since ranged combat only involves 1 attribute and many Esper attacks are ranged as well.

Something to note with Esper builds is that you should still be wielding a gun and melee weapon, but the point is that the other parts of your build do not need to concern themselves with these. For example, if you are a ranged/Esper build, you should not consider a mutation like Stinger in order to improve your Axe Charges even if you are planning on wielding an Axe.

Tier 1 - Weapons

Once you’ve decided the type of build you’re going for, you need to narrow down the types of weapons you’re going to use. There’s a lot of decisions here for builds using melee, so make sure to consider all the options.

Melee Weapons

Axes

Cudgels

Long Blades

Short Blades

With melee weapons, you also need to consider whether you are Multiweapon Fighting or Single Weapon Fighting. I’ll break it down like this:

If you are Multiweapon Fighting, your offhand should always be a Short Blade. The only exception is when you are Multiweapon Fighting Cudgels to try and get more chances for a stun, but even here using an offhand Short Blade and investing in would be preferable.

If you are using a Shield, you should use anything except a Short Blade. Cudgels and Long Blades are particularly effective with a Shield. You're probably best off Single Weapon Fighting with the ceremonial vibrokhopesh in the long-term with a Shield, but Multiweapon Fighting builds work well with Shields as well. If you are using Helping Hands, ensure your Shield is in one of your robo-hands.

If you are not Multiweapon Fighting or using a Shield, you should be using a two-handed weapon with Single Weapon Fighting. Even those who are making a Multiweapon Fighting build, until your build comes online (Jab + Multiweapon Expertise) you should be using a two-handed weapon. Only use Shields if you are investing in them.

Ranged Weapons

Bows and Rifles

Pistols

Heavy Weapons

As primary weapons, you’ll probably swap between using Bows and Rifles early to using Pistols mid/late game. The earliest Pistols you can acquire are very underpowered in comparison to the rifles you can get and these rifles will stay better until you get sufficiently skilled and geared with Pistols. A similar story also applies to Heavy Weapons, only Heavy Weapons are extremely hard to find and the most common Heavy Weapons use ammunition like grenades and missiles which are also rare and heavy.

Rifles can be used to great effectiveness without any skills at all - literally none. Of course, if you find yourself using rifles often you’ll want to get the basic skills inside and especially if you are primarily using ranged weapons. If you are capable of disarming weapons and you have an internal power source, jacked chain lasers can be reliably found in the mid-game and are extremely powerful weapons to use. There’s a lot of options here, but by the late game the king of damage builds will be one that uses Pistols.

Tier 2 - Strategy

Once you know the weapons you’ll use and how often you plan on using them, you should consider your plan for the game and what the build tries to accomplish. Your strategy can be largely reduced to 3 different parts. While these will be described as being very general parts of your build, the more you know about the game the more you’ll be able to identify where your build will struggle and you can get more and more specific with each part.

Gimmick

This part of your strategy is at the core of your build. It focuses on a single idea and tries to do it as best as possible. It should not be extremely specific, but should not be so general as to reduce its effectiveness. If you’re a ranged build, perhaps your gimmick is high movement speed to always be a step away from the enemy with Multiple Legs, or perhaps your gimmick is Phasing with gear modded to be phase-conjugate/harmonic. This doesn’t necessarily need to be online right at the start, but should be usable in some lesser version at every point in the game. This will be your go-to plan whenever you find a noteworthy enemy.

Escape

This part of your strategy should be extremely reliable with as few conditions as possible. This is something you save normally and only use when you find yourself backed into a corner. This can be a part of your build or an item you plan on acquiring or both. For example, a melee build may take the Force Bubble mutation in order to escape with a recoiler, or perhaps they use a combination of the Sprint speed increase from Wings and Juke in order to get away from enemies.

Solutions

This part of your strategy is solely there for when your gimmick simply doesn’t work. With time comes a better understanding of what will counter your gimmick, but you need to have a solution in place for when that time comes. For example, your main gimmick may be to rely on Corrosive Gas Generation to deal heavy damage and support that with stuns from Cudgels to keep them in the gas. What do you do when an enemy resists your stuns or is immune to acid? These are the scenarios you need a solution for. If an enemy resists my stuns, perhaps I also have freeze grenades and high cold resistance. If an enemy is immune to acid, perhaps I fall back on my high-damage Rifle.

Tier 3 - Skills

When you’re in the run itself, you will organically start to choose skills as you find necessary to deal with the challenges of the build. These should not be planned rigidly and instead flex to integrate the kinds of equipment you find and the enemies you’re fighting. Even though there usually is not a rigidly defined sequence of skills to pick up, there is a loose hierarchy to order which skills to pick up first.

Priority 1 : Offense

As the old saying goes, the best defense is a good offense and this holds true in Qud as well. If the enemy is dead, they can’t kill you. The skills you want are going to be shaped from the style of build you’re going for, but early on they will almost always focus on the first few melee weapon skills. Melee builds should also go for Charge.

Priority 2 : Survivability

Once you have your basic weapon skills and you get to the point where you need to start saving up skill points for the next buy or don’t meet the prerequisites is when you should start branching out into survivability skills. These are skills like Mind’s Compass, Shake It Off, Weathered and Swift Reflexes.

Priority 3 : Accessories

If your build is flowing well; you’re survivable and your combat feels good, start branching off to accessory skills like the Tinkering tree and secondary weapons. These are designed to let your build “win more” as opposed to getting it online, so be sure that your build is online in some capacity before looking here. Note that your build doesn’t have to be complete, just functional.

Armor Value and Dodge Value

While any build can use pretty much any equipment in the game and by extension get any AV or DV they want, some builds are better equipped going a particular route. Even further than that, whether you choose to focus on AV or DV largely comes down to your playstyle and how you prefer to play the game. I’ll be breaking down each of these and explaining what exactly they do and the idea behind increasing one or the other.

Armor Value (AV)

AV is the more reliable stat of the two and is much less polarizing than DV. That is to say, there are grades of effectiveness to AV and it will be very reliable within its grade. Whenever you are hit by an attack, the game will calculate whether or not that attack penetrates your armor and therefore deals damage. The calculation for this is rather complex, so I won’t be covering it in all of its detail here but I’ll give the simplified version. Essentially, the greater the weapons Penetration Value (PV) is compared to your AV, the higher chance it will penetrate. When a weapon penetrates, it deals its damage and any on-penetrate effects. The game then reduces the PV of the weapon and then checks if it penetrates again. If it does, the weapon deals its damage again and then reduces the PV and cycles in this way until the weapon doesn’t penetrate. This is why you may see those x4 or x5 numbers by the damage dealt in the chat log; this refers to the number of penetrations that occurred. As you may imagine, we want the number of penetrations to be as few as possible and that’s what AV is all about.

By having higher AV, you reduce the effectiveness of each hit when you get hit. With very high AV, you can reliably take no damage at all from nearly any attack. A good rule of thumb is to have 2 higher AV than the enemy has PV. The math works out to where you will usually only take a single penetration and rarely a second. Even having equal AV to the enemy’s PV is quite good, but does result in a fairly common (50%) chance of a second penetration.

AV comes at a cost, however. Most equipment that raises AV will actively decrease DV. There is a lot to be said about a build that sacrifices all attempts at increasing DV and instead just focuses on AV. These builds tend to be very survivable until they meet a counter to AV, but that’s not to say they’re building wrong. In fact, if you use even a single item that reduces DV, unless you really know what you’re doing around these stats you’ll probably just want to entirely focus on AV. There are exceptions of course, but we’ll talk more about that in the DV section.

While having high AV can potentially net you invulnerability to conventional attacks, not all attacks are conventional. It is these scenarios where your defenses will be tested.

Counters to AV

Dodge Value (DV)

DV is less reliable in terms of how absolutely you can rely on it, but is balanced by the fact that when it works, you take no damage at all. You can also get improved DV in ways outside of your equipment by having higher Agility: you get a DV bonus equal to your Agility modifier. The good thing about DV is once you get it high enough, virtually no further improvement to it is beneficial so you can transition to AV improvements. The bad thing is that number is actually quite high.

How attacks work in Qud is that a random number from 1-20 is rolled. The game will add the attacker's Agility modifier to it and that’s usually all that will be added. However, certain skills and weapons will give a bonus to hit and in those cases the bonus will be applied. This is somewhat rare for creatures to have though. That sum will be compared to the defenders DV and if it exceeds it the attack will hit. There’s a little more to the story with “true DV” but we can essentially ignore that.

If a 20 is rolled, the attack will always hit. Regardless of your DV, the attack will hit. Only the player's attacks are guaranteed to penetrate on a crit, so we didn’t need to worry about that with AV. However, critical hits are very troublesome for DV focused builds. We’ll put those aside for now, but don’t forget it: critical hits are the bane of DV builds.

Most creatures actually don’t have very high Agility. In fact, even most endgame creatures have less than a +5 to their Agility. So having a DV of 15 or above nets you fairly reliable odds to dodge many attacks. Of course, this is still too low to be a DV focused build, but it’s a good starting place. Our goal for DV builds is to ensure that nothing hits us ever. Once your DV reaches 22 or so, you become virtually untouchable. The maximum DV you should shoot for is 25, as if you also have the Swift Reflexes skill you will become invincible to all projectile attacks. Anything higher than this and you are really hurting yourself with the investment instead of investing into AV, as melee critical hits will still hit you and without the AV to withstand them, it will hurt.

Regardless of how high you go into DV, it is foolish to rely on DV alone. Eventually, you will be hit and in these scenarios you have to have some kind of AV in order to not be completely blasted apart. Pure DV equipment is a trap and only should be worn if you have sufficient AV already. You’ll want to get around 8 AV as soon as possible as this is a fairly decent middling AV that will allow you to take the occasional hit when it comes. As long as you otherwise maximize your DV, 8 AV is actually a fairly comfortable place to be for most of the game. Some items will reduce your DV and give you AV. Pay special attention to these as if your build focuses on DV, many of these will be too crippling. It is only when you arrive at the flawless crysteel tier of armors that the DV decrease does not outweigh the AV increase (there’s a compelling argument for simple crysteel, but leave that for the more advanced builds). Even then, you want to ensure you still have enough DV for your build to function so limit this to only a few pieces of armor.

Critical hits are the obvious bane for a DV build. However, it’s not the only one. There are a number of dangers that you must absolutely have a solution for when they appear. Note that even though there are more items in this list, these typically are far easier to have solutions for or are far rarer than those than counter AV.

Counters to DV

Build Conclusions

Any build can be effective in the game, this is something that I’ve spent many hours trying to verify myself. After raising every preset mutant to be capable of running the Cherubim gauntlet and beating the game without using any equipment at all, I truly am satisfied that the conclusion is that any build can be successful.

Certain builds will of course be more powerful than others, but determining which build is the most powerful is not going to help you improve. The best build to beat the game with is one that you understand how to use and understand the limitations of. Keep it simple at the start and as you learn more about the game you can branch to more and more specialized builds.