The best skills in Crimson Desert cover a range of combat and abilities, but also core things like health and stamina. It's a complex system where you need to chose carefully as, whether you unlock things with Abyss Artifacts, or learn them by observing other characters, it's all essential to progress.
There are even certain puzzles that require specific abilities so your journey through the story can be dictated by what you can do. which means making the right choices can prevent you locking yourself out of certain things until you unlock what's missing.
Below I'll cover the different skills in Crimson Desert that you can learn, cover which ones are best to get early for each character, and what you need to know about learning skills as a system in Crimson Desert.
Best skills in Crimson Desert for every character
Below I've listed all the best skills to prioritize first for each of the Crimson Desert characters, and the skill trees that they're under. One crucial thing to remember while playing Crimson Desert is to regularly invest in your core Stamina, Health and Spirit stats. Ideally you want to level those up by a point at least every couple of chapters. Without upping those periodically you can struggle to use some things, and you'll want to double-check abilities to see how much Stamina and Spirit they cost to use - it's entirely possible to buy an ability like the Axiom Force Aerial Swing, but be unable to use it because it costs more Stamina than you have.
The best powers for Kliff
- Stamina (Blue)
- Armed Combat: You fight a lot in Crimson Desert, so levelling up basic damage and sword skills a lot is essential.
- Grappling / Lariat: This slam move is great against groups, doing major AOE damage, destroying structures and further enhancing your fighting ability.
- Turning Slash Expertise: As your most powerful attack, levelling this is great against bosses, especially in the period after finishers where they're still recovering.
- Spirit (Green)
- Force Palm / Expertise: One of the best strategies against bosses is to stun them for finishers. Force Palm upgrades make that far easier.
- Focus / Focused Insight: This upgrade lets you parry enemies while in Focus mode, which gives you much easier counters against bosses and can be used infinitely.
- Keen Senses / Dodge: A timed dodge makes you far more effective in combat against all enemy types.
- Nature's Echo / Echoing Forward Slash: This lets you power up your heavy attacks for even more damage.
- Health (Red)
- Axiom Force / Aerial Swing: This takes practice and a lot of stamina to get the best out of it, but this power and the Aerial Manoeuvre ability make platforming and climbing much easier.
The best powers for Damiane
- Stamina (Blue)
- Shield Toss / Expertise: Damiane is great against groups, and her bouncing shield is a strength you want to maxismise.
- Piercing Light / Rend Armor: Damiane's stab moves are really good, so enhancing as much as you can is worth doing,
- Smiting Bolt / Sure Hit: Damiane's heavy attack is strong, but needs the improved accuracy to ensure steady damage output.
- Spirit (Green)
- Shield Sentinel: A passive drone that supports you with its own attacks is a really strong buff and you don't even need to manage it.
- Flurry of Kicks: This heavy barrage is really good for setting enemies up for finishers or driving back regular foes.
- Health (Red)
- Skystep: A basic upgrade to Damiane's platforming that's more of a requirement than a real buff.
The best skills for Oongka
- Stamina (Blue)
- Rampage / Sure Hit: Oongka's strongest moves need this accuracy buff to guarantee they keep landing and keep up the assaultt.
- Armed Combat / Dual Wielding Mastery: Oongka's can dual-wield the biggest Crimson Desert weapons, making him a high DPS tank. So make sure that you're leaning into that build with this potent upgrade.
- Quaking Fury / Rend Armor: This is a great boss-killing attack, shattering through defenses for maximum impact.
- Spirit (Green)
- Explosive Strike: A devastating attack that's something of a boss-killer. Worth investing in all the way.
- Health (Red)
- Vertical Flight: This makes Oongka's jetpack far easier to control once you've unlocked it.
How to get Abyss Artifacts to unlock skills in Crimson Desert
Most abilities and skills you unlock along the way are bought with Abyss Artifacts, items you can find in Crimson Desert from these activities:
- Mission completion. Many missions have Abyss Artifacts as rewards. You'll be told in upfront if they are the reward for doing so.
- XP gains in combat. As you defeat enemies, you'll fill the curved yellow bar next to the minimap. When that maxes out you'll get an Abyss Artifact and it resets.
- Sealed Abyss Artifact challenges. Around the world you'll find Sealed Abyss Artifacts (marked as purple cubes on the mini-map). When you pick one up, you'll get a unique challenge that gets you a reward completion, which is usually a regular Abyss Artifact.
- Abyss Cresets. These are usually unlocked through puzzles like the Crimson Desert Dragon's Stone Chamber, and double also as fast travel points.
- Purchased from merchants. Occasionally merchants will sell Abyss Artifacts in small quantities, such as the network of Witches that can also install the Crimson Desert Abyss Gears in your weapons.
How to learn skills from NPCs and enemies in Crimson Desert
Occasionally you can watch NPCs perform skills to learn them for yourself. This unlocks the ability for free, without requiring an Abyss Artifact. This could be from enemies performing certain attacks, or just friendly NPCs performing actions that you can then mimic.
Watching and learning skills is an automatic process. All you need to do is stand close enough to the character performing the action and the screen will go blue when they're performing the skill, as a meter builds in the top-left corner of the screen. With certain skills you may need to watch them perform it multiple times to learn it yourself.
No skill is gated behind this learning process completely. If you kill a boss before learning a skill from them, there will be other opportunities to buy or learn it later. I've seen multiple bosses perform the "Multishot" skill, for example.
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