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The four Avowed skill trees available contain a wide selection of varied and unique abilities, that can be tailored to encompass many different playstyles – so if you want to fire off spells, snipe enemies from a distance, or get up close with melee combat, there are always options to suit. However, this can become complicated when you've got Fighter, Ranger, and Wizard abilities to choose from, along with a fourth Godlike skillset that's unique to your character and provides its own divine set of powers. To explain how all of these skill trees work in Avowed, I've highlighted the most important things to know about the Fighter, Ranger, Wizard, and Godlike abilities below.
How Avowed skill trees and abilities work
Avowed features three main skill trees with Active and Passive Abilities that fit around a loose theme and classic RPG playstyle:
- The Fighter is all about battling in close-combat.
- The Ranger splits skills between finesse, ranged attacks, and survival.
- The Wizard is the classic glass-cannon magic-user.
All the active abilities and some Passive Abilities consume Essence when used before going on cooldown, so you'll need things like Essence potions and Essence-restoring food to keep using these abilities in combat.
All three of these skill trees can be freely mixed up and combined as you level up, to create unique Avowed builds. You're not constrained or tied to a specific class. The only restriction is that you must spend your first Ability point on one of the level 1 Active Skills available in each skill tree – Charge, Tanglefoot, or Minor Missiles. After that there's a lot of freedom - you can respec your Abilities at any point to completely rewrite your build, by spending some money (with the cost scaling with level). That means you could unlock Charge and go all in on Fighter for a bit and then respec to a Fighter/Wizard hybrid for some sorcery as well as swords.
As you earn XP and level up, you can upgrade your Avowed Attributes and unlock new Abilities or upgrade ones you have already unlocked. Unlocking a new rank for an ability improves it in some way, either adding an extra effect or granting improving the existing function of the Ability. However, these improvements often come with diminishing returns, so it might not always be worthwhile sinking three points to get a skill to Rank 3.
However, to complicate things a little more, you also get access to the Godlike skill tree, which grants all sorts of unique skills but are unlocked through story progression and exploration rather than levelling.
All abilities can be found on your Action Radial menu (LB) and you can assign up to four of them to your Quick Slots on the D-Pad, which we suggest doing for your most powerful and important abilities in our Avowed tips.
Below, I've covered the four main player skill trees in Avowed, so if you want to know more about how the Avowed Companions and their skill trees work, we've got a separate guide for that.
How the Avowed Fighter skill tree works
The Fighter skill tree in Avowed is perhaps the simplest of the bunch, focusing on brute force with melee weapons (axes, maces, great swords, two-handed hammers, and your fists), the use of shields, and overall toughness and aggression. As you level up, you'll gain access to a few powerful Active Abilities, but you'll mainly be putting points into Passive Abilities that increase your overall power and give you a few extra tricks to use in combat.
Charge is your first Active Ability, letting you dash forward and interrupt any enemies you hit, dealing explosive damage on impact too. Charging can break an enemy's guard, smash walls, and shatter frozen enemies for bonus damage. At level 5, you can add Barbaric Shout, buffing your own attacks with extra Stun and making your them uninterruptable. At level 15, you can use Into the Fray to taunt an enemy and pull them towards you for punishment. Finally, Clear Out becomes available to unlock at level 20, letting you become a Tasmanian devil, spinning around and hitting everything in your path while also being uninterruptable.
As for Passives, Fighters get access to all sorts of buffs, from increased maximum health and health regeneration after taking damage to increased critical hit damage and improvements to the effectiveness of certain weapon types. Some Passives are very powerful and act like Active Abilities in that they must be used manually but they require other conditions to be met first. For example, Shield Bash lets you interrupt, push back, and apply Stun to an enemy, but only if you attack while blocking with a shield.
How the Avowed Ranger skill tree works
The Avowed Ranger skill tree focuses on effectiveness with a very broad set of ranged and finesse weapon types (bows, arqubuses, pistols, daggers, swords, spears, axes, and maces), and emphasizes stealth and evasive action. It also incorporates a lot of general survival skills and boosts that'll make you more effective both in and out of combat.
You'll start Ranger with Tanglefoot, an Active Ability that lets you summon vines that tangle an enemy in place for a short while, which is a nice crowd control ability have in a hectic fight. By level 5, you can unlock Shadowing Beyond to make yourself invisible for as long as your Essence bar allows, or until you attack – perfect for players favoring stealth and asssination. However, if you want to be more of a Druid, you can summon a Bear Ally with the Active Ability available at level 10. Lastly, at level 20, you can unlock Flurry of Blows to grant yourself a burst of speed, maxing out your attack speed, boosting your stamina regeneration, and increasing your movement speed.
As mentioned, the Ranger skill tree's Passives provide lots of survival benefits that help both in combat and when exploring. For example, Evasive reduces the stamina costs of dodges while Survivalist improves the potency of healing, Essence-restoring, and additional effects provided by food. All players should also look to the Scavenger ability, which gives you a chance to receive an upgrade material when collecting herbs, which really helps early on when you need to upgrade items in Avowed.
How the Avowed Wizard skill tree works
The Wizard skill tree in Avowed is the most complicated, focusing solely on wands and grimoires in terms of weapons, but also packing a huge variety of spells to unlock permanently - meaning they do not require a grimoire to cast. Wizard-focused builds can therefore optimize the effectiveness of a small number of spells, or be generalists prepared for any combat situation. There are also several Passives that broadly help with spellcasting and elemental damage.
The first Active Ability for the Wizard skill tree is Minor Missiles, which is a basic spell that fires seeking explosive projectiles that are effective against pretty much any enemy. Beyond that, you can permanently unlock six Level 1 elemental and defensive spells – Chill Blades (Frost), Fan of Flames (Fire), Jolting Touch (Shock), Corrosive Siphon (Poison and converts damage to health), Parasitic Staff (converts damage to Essence), and Arcane Veil (increases damage reduction and makes spellcasting uninterruptable).
However, to permanently unlock spells of level 5 and above, you need to put points into the Grimoire Mastery Passive Ability. This lets you access things like Blizzard at level 5, Missile Salvo at level 10, and Meteor Shower at level 20. If you also use a grimoire, this passive reduces the Essence cost of spells cast using that grimoire at higher ranks.
To top it all off, casting a spell from a grimoire that you have already unlocked causes the spell's rank to increase by one, making it much more powerful – this also saves you having to spend an extra point getting a spell to Rank 3. With all that in mind, Grimoire Mastery is a great Passive to dip into if you're a Ranger or Fighter who wants to gain a bit of elemental power.
How the Avowed Godlike skill tree works
The Godlike skill tree in Avowed is a separate array of Active and Passive Abilities that are not tied to XP levelling and Ability Points. All players start with the Divine Thorn ability, which is the main way of performing stealth attacks.
To get more Godlike abilities, you just need to play the main quest as most are unlocked in key moments where you communicate with The Voice. Choices made during these encounters can affect which Godlike powers you receive too, as in the Strangleroot when you choose to help the Voice in Avowed or not.
Some Godlike powers are also unlocked by finding Ancient Memories, which are secrets tucked away in each region that let you explore a past life of your Envoy's soul and gain power from it. These are optional but are well worth pursuing as Godlike powers are generally quite powerful and can be a big help for you and your party.
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