Let’s have a look at the five main attributes in Battlepaths. When your character levels up, you will want to make sure you make the right choice when selecting an attribute to increase.

Strength
Strength determines how much damage your character deals, as well as which items you are going to be able to use. Many of the powerful equipment you find will require high Strength. Also, Strength determines the level of the special “Power Strike” and “Warcry” when activated. Other than that, there’s not much to say about Strength. It’s pretty straight forward: having a high Strength will allow you to deal much damage.

Endurance
Endurance is all about Hitpoints. The higher your Endurance goes, the more Hitpoints you will gain on each level up. This specifically means that raising Endurance early on will give you more Hitpoints. The effect of “Regeneration” and “Health Boost” is affected by Endurance.

Dexterity
Dexterity determines your base Attack Rating and Armor Class. Also, there are powerful items that require high Dexterity although they are more uncommon than those requiring high Strength. This means that you can neglect Strength totally, if you want. Characters with high Dexterity will have a high chance to hit their foes while they are harder to hit themselves. Did you ever desperately try to hit one of these pesky snakes? Well, with high Dexterity they’re just as easy to kill as some random Goblin. Dexterity will also improve the special “Eagle Eye”, which increases your Attack Rating even further and adds a chance to do critical damage. Everybody wants high Dexterity!

Speed
This may be one of the most underrated attributes. In fact, it’s just as powerful as any other attribute. You might actually find out that a high Speed balances out pretty much any other shortcoming. Speed directly influences your Movement Cost (MC). The higher your Speed, the lower your MC will get, which means that you’ll get more turns. More turns mean more damage, more tactical options while fighting, giving you not only the opportunity to escape from certain death. The special “Haste”, which’s level depends on Speed, decreases your MC even further. A high Speed combined with “Haste” will make you so fast that your foes won’t know what hit them. If this still isn’t fast enough for you, you’ll also get the chance to learn the special “Flash”. Are you mad at those Rogues shooting you down from the distance while they’re guarded by a group of Soldiers? Go flash ‘em!

Willpower
What’s all about those specials when they need like a millennium to recharge? Well, they do, if your character lacks a notable Special Regeneration Rate (SR). Willpower increases SR. If you want to use your specials often, raise Willpower. To use them more often, get equipment that increases SR. Going this way you’ll end up using specials frequently. Even more, you’ll be able to combine specials. What about “Haste” combined with “Power Strike”?!

Conclusion
Each of the five attributes in Battlepaths play an important role. Choose two or three of these attributes you’ll want to focus on and stick to it. Many combinations will yield a powerful character that plays different from any other. You can also try to find a balanced distribution that works well.

How Speed affects your character
When you’re trying out the different starting builds for the first time, you might have noticed that the higher Speed of the Agility build doesn’t immediately pay off so much. The more points you put into Speed, though, the greater the effect on your character will be. To understand the mechanics behind this, you need to understand how creatures take turns in the game. It’s actually pretty simple: There is a counter running in the background that counts time units. A creature’s Movement Cost (MC) determines how many time units it has to wait before getting its next turn.This information is shown in the battle info panel during battles.



Raising Speed lowers your MC. To be precise, MC is 40 – Speed. So at Speed 8, your MC is 32. Looks like you have to spend a whole lot of points before seeing a notable increase in the turns you get, and thus a notable benefit overall. Well, that’s true for one part, but note that you can’t run away from enemies that have a lower MC than you. One point in Speed can make the difference between certain death and a narrow escape! Also note that with each point of Speed you effectively raise your damage output by an increasing amount (do the math yourself). Finally, higher Speed simply gives you more tactical options.

How fast can I get?
Speed builds will easily get their Speed to 21 or higher at some point. Their base MC is 19 or lower, which means that they are nearly twice as fast as builds that totally neglect Speed. With such a high Speed value, they are also nearly doubling their damage output, not speaking about the tactical options they have during battles. And not even speaking about how the special Haste complements a Speed build (have a look at our Specials features to learn more about specials). Okay, now you know everything what you should know about Speed, MC, and how creatures take turns. Oh yes, one last thing you should know: you can’t go below MC 4.

Charging your Special Power Meter
First of all, let’s have a look at how the special meter actually recharges. Every time you attack, the special meter increases by a certain percentage. The actual percentage is the product of your current recharge base, your Willpower factor, and the current item factor. The recharge base is 0,2 and is multiplied by your current movement cost. This is done to ensure that your special doesn’t regenerate faster with lower movement cost. The Willpower factor is your Willpower divided by 16, and the item factor is the sum of your equipment’s special regeneration bonus. So at Willpower 16, with no item bonuses, you will recharge your special every 500 time units (as long as you are always attacking). This is already fast enough to have two special powers activated simultaneously (Eagle Eye and Power Strike last for 750 time units, e.g.), as long as you are attacking most of the time.

All non-passive specials have a corresponding attribute, that determines the power level of the special. For power level 2, the corresponding attribute has to be 14 or greater, for power level 3, 21 or greater.



Power Strike
Power Strike increases your damage by 66%/100%/150%, depending on your Strength. Dealing more damage means your foes go down faster which in turn means, you’ll get less damage from them. Pick Power Strike for your damage dealer to deal even more damage. Pick it for any Dexterity build to compensate for the lack of Strength. Or pick it for yet another build.

Regeneration
Regeneration depends on your Endurance and is great in different ways. It saves you money in that you can frequently use it instead of using a healing potion. It will help you in situations where a healing potion just doesn’t suffice for healing away the damage you get. Regeneration is the best special to use if you want to play as a tank. Plow through your enemies without flinching a bit. You should think about if your build really needs regeneration, though. In the end, it only allows you to endure more damage and doesn’t yield any tactical options. An Endurance build using Regeneration will endure MUCH damage, though!

Eagle Eye
Nobody likes the “Miss” showing up when attacking a monster. Characters that lack a good Attack Rating (AR) like it even less. Spending some points in Dexterity is a good way to increase your AR, but what about builds that neglect Dexterity totally? A great way of compensating for low Dexterity is choosing Eagle Eye as a base special. On power level 1 it already increases your AR by 250 points, which equals about the base AR you’ll have with your Dexterity at 18! Plus, it has a 5% chance to do a critical hit, effectively increasing your damage by 15%. Since the power level of Eagle Eye depends on Dexterity, it is also a good choice for Dexterity builds, giving a 12% critical hit chance.

Haste
Low Movement Cost (MC) will generally give you more tactical options, because you can often move faster than your enemies. Haste decreases the MC by 33%/45%/60%, depending on your Speed. Even if your build lacks any Speed, Haste will give you a notable boost that might just be enough to turn the tide in your favor, by allowing you to reach that pestering ranged enemy just in time, or by giving you the chance to escape from certain death. Note that Haste will also effectively increase the amount of damage you deal. Having said that, one of the most impressive builds is a Speed build using Haste. Try it out!

Conclusion
Picking the right special for your build isn’t as obvious as one might think. The specials depend on one specific attribute, but that doesn’t mean that they are useless when you don’t invest in that attribute. On the other hand, getting a special to higher power levels will certainly pay off. What about a Willpower build having activated two base specials on power level 2?

There are three advanced specials that each require a basic special as a prerequisite. You can learn up to two advanced specials, one at level 20 and one at level 30.

Warcry
You can pick Warcry when you have learned the special Power Strike before. Warcry depends on Strength and is helpful in situations where you are surrounded by a bunch enemies. When activated, it deals heavy physical damage to all nearby creatures. Additionally, there is a chance that those creatures will get weakened, reducing the physical damage they deal by 50% for quite a while. That means that you’ll get more time to defend yourself and makes Warcry extremely helpful when fighting against heavy damage dealers, too.

Health Boost
Health Boost is the big brother of Regeneration. When activated, it instantly heals an amount of Hitpoints your character has lost so far. It even heals more than Regeneration heals you on the same power level (which depends on Endurance). Health Boost is the perfect fit for Endurance builds but will definitely help any other build in many situations.

Flash
As we have already seen in previous articles, Speed builds are powerful characters and they are fun to play. They have way more tactical options than slower characters and they will hardly ever get cornered or surrounded. But there certainly are situations where high Speed – even combined with Haste – won’t help you out. That most certainly will be situations where you’d beg for having the special Flash handy. Flash can be learned when you’ve already picked Haste and let’s you instantly move on a tile in your visible range, allowing you to escape from battles that you wouldn’t have a chance to survive.
But that’s only one part. Flash can be used offensively, letting you warp right to those pesky ranged enemies that you wouldn’t reach otherwise. The secondary effect of Flash – irritating enemies around the destination tile – makes such an offensive move even more effective.
Lastly, Flash can be used to avoid a battle. There are numerous locations where a horde of monsters guard an entrance to some dungeon you might want to get into quickly. Why not just flash there and skip the fighting?

Conclusion
The advanced specials in Battlepaths are all pretty powerful. Note that when you don’t choose any passive specials, you’ll even be able to learn two of them. Also, remember that you’ll only be able to learn 4 specials in total. These 4 specials will have a big influence on how your character plays. This holds even more for Willpower builds that heavily depend on using the right special at the right time.

Having said all that, you won’t get far without the right equipment. As with the specials, you can choose your equipment to compensate for any shortcomings your character build might have, or to amplify its strengths. And then there is the alchemist offering a bunch of powerful potions. We will have a closer look at character equipment and potions in our next articles.

When your character reaches level 10, you can learn your first passive special and another one when you reach level 20. Passive specials give you a permanent advantage and are independent from your attributes.

Adventuring
You’ll probably have difficulties finding good items for your character when you are playing for the first time. Adventuring is the first passive special you’ll be able to learn and helps you get going by increasing your chance to find magic items, giving you a 50% magic find bonus. You’ll also receive the double amount of gold from gold drops. The more gold you get, the more potions you can buy to hunt down those monsters that you wouldn’t stand a chance otherwise. Yet the best thing about Adventuring is that it enables you to swim, giving you access to quite a bunch of awesome treasure rooms that can be found in each of the realms except the Challenge Realm. And finally, being able to swim will occasionally yield more tactical options during battles.

Natural Resistances
Natural Resistances gives you 30% resistance to magic, curse and poison. That’s pretty handy because you are not so dependent on getting resistances from your equipment anymore. Other than that, there’s not much to say about that special. Take it or leave it!

Conclusion
The passive specials in Battlepaths are really nice to have, but since you can only learn four specials in total, choosing one means that you’ll only be able to pick one of the advanced specials later on.

A weapon skill increases by fighting with a weapon of the corresponding category. Each skill has a different bonus on your stats when wearing a weapon from that category. All weapon skills can be skilled up to level 9. The first weapon skill to reach level 10 will become your specialized weapon skill and can be trained up to level 20. Let’s have a look at how the different weapon skills affect your character stats.

Sword Skill
A high Sword Skill will greatly increase your Attack Rating. If your build lacks Dexterity, specializing in this skill will make sure you won’t miss your targets too often. Swords are in general much more versatile weapons than axes or blugdeons, so mastering them will also give you a notable bonus on your Armor Class. Last but not least, the skill slightly increases the damage you deal with swords.

Axe Skill
Improving your Axe Skill will moderately increase your Attack Rating and the damage you deal when wielding an axe. Also, you’ll have a small chance to deliver a critical hit with your weapon. Pick this skill for specialization if you want a more balanced bonus for your stats.

Bludgeon Skill
Bludgeons are bulky slow weapons used for the sole purpose to deliver heavy damage with a single blow. Specializing the bludgeon skill will maximize the damage output when fighting with those weapons. You’ll also receive a slight bonus on your Attack Rating. A true damage dealer will certainly pick the Bludgeon Skill, but of course, it’ll come in handy for many other builds, too.

Piercing Weapon Skill
Piercing weapons are the weapons of choice for many dexterity builds. Mastering this skill will not only increase your Attack Rating. Due to their low weight, you retain high agility when wielding a piercing weapon which gives you a slight bonus on your Armor Class, too. You won’t get a damage bonus though. Instead, your chance to deliver a critical hit increases up to 6%. A dexterity build using Eagle Eye will end up with an 18% chance to do critical damage!

Conclusion
As with the attributes and specials, each weapon skill has a notable impact on how your character plays. Yet again, these skills can be used to compensate for any shortcomings your character might have, or to further improve his strengths. Make sure you pick the right one for specialization.