Arborus, the ancient star tree, is a deceptively powerful prestige class. Upon meditating beyond one's own limits (or in our case, putting 25 points between astral and life), they will take on a new form - the divine wisp-tree.

As you might have inferred, Arborus is a transformation class. Upon standing still, you will gain six stacks of treeform. This will set your maximum speed to 1, give you ridiculous immunities, and summon a lot of wisp allies, up to 30 per game turn.



This seems pretty weak at first, doesn't it? Having a grand total of 1 (one) speed in exchange for some summons and resistances. Well, with the correct build, you can clear out even the latest cycles with relative ease.

Although it may not look it at first, Arborus has a surprising amount of synergy with just the base starting options.

Culture
For our culture, my favourite pick is Volkite. The 75% fire resistance and armour buffs it gains from encumbrance are incredibly useful in Arborus builds, as fire is the only damage type they dont have natural resistances to. In my ideal build, we will also be gaining lots of encumbrance, and in turn, lots of armour. The adjacent hit retaliation is borderline useless, but I suppose it's still nice to have a way of doing damage in an emergency.

Ihra will provide you with the protection status effect, which reduces all damage taken by one with a 20% chance of removing the buff. This is applied on game turn, which is excellent since game turns will actually be passing faster than your character turns.

Albaz is good for similar reasons, however, you will be taking Life Chant once the game begins, vastly outdoing the natural healing. Plus, you have no real reason to level dexterity, and you won't be short of healing when playing any Life build, let alone a summon-based one.

Valr could be good for builds that use Angra as their god, but I haven't used this yet. You will be filling the screen completely with summons, which will combo well with any "on ally death" effect.

Siku makes you immune to the damage debuff from inflexibility, which is good for tankier ice builds. The Crystal Plating gives you stacks of meditate for blocking and shrugging off hits, and the Crystal Helm increases stacks of meditate and freeze. Ultimately, I don't think this is worth it.

Class
Classes have the most variety, not having any single "best" choice.

I ran Summoner, for obvious reasons - we summon a lot of allies, and we level willpower a ton. The free familiar is a good early headstart, too.

Warrior applies poise on game turn. As a stationary, slow character, this will be a huge boost to our defensive capabilities.

Ascetic applies meditate on stand still. Not the best considering we'll have one speed, but all meditate stacks are increased by 1. With Star Cult, this will lead to a lot of meditation, and in turn, a lot of damage.

Secutor is... actually not that good. Don't get me wrong, it's useful, but I feel there are better options. On game turn, it gives you healing, which we have more than enough of, and applies a random "martial" effect. The only good martial effect for our build is poise, which we'll only have a 25% chance of applying.

Apostle is quite good - Our god of choice allows for lots of divine intervention, and since our turns pass slowly, the self damage is negligible.

Warlock is a decent pick. Inflame isn't useful for non-attack builds, but fire damage will be dealt to the closest enemy on ally death. As previously mentioned, you summon a lot of allies, and a lot of allies will probably end up dying.

Finally, Priest. Undoubtedly one of the best classes in the game. Simple but effective, it increases status effects you apply by 50%. Pretty much every half decent build will benefit from this in some way.

Religion
Yu. Pick Yu. It is, by far, the best god for this build. It is designed to be overpowered with one major drawback - having low speed. We already have even lower speed, so we will only benefit. Furthermore, it is very easy to achieve divine intervention with Yu, which will save your life a few times if all else fails.

Alternatively, Angra may have some good synergy with ally death builds. Arborus is by far the best prestige class for pure summon numbers, making this a great combo. However, I do not like builds like this, and rarely use them.

Eresh is good for similar reasons - more healing. However, you don't really need healing. I wouldn't recommend picking this.

Ninhurs will absolutely flood the arena with divine grass. You gain a 50% buff to healing, which is far better than a flat boost. You can also summon Musmahu familiars if wisps aren't getting the job done. Probably the second best god for this build, but I would still take Yu over Ninhurs.

Cycle
My favourite cycle is the 12 Cycle of Glory. It provides ample exp and levels while not making the game too hard. However, to demonstrate the power of this build, I used the highest cycle available to me at the time, the 27th Cycle of Cosmic Rage. I would be a little hesitant to use this build on lower cycles, as you need quite a bit of exp to get it up and running.

Stats
Before we can get into the powers, we have to talk about stats. Don't worry, I'll make this quick.

Willpower is EVERYTHING in this build. offence, defence, utility, all of it. It buffs your damage, your allies' damage (assuming you picked Summoner as your class), buffs your healing and lets you summon more allies.
Max weight doesn't matter, neither does base speed. As such, Strength and Dexterity are useless to us. Ignore these.

TLDR
Just level willpower until you have 20, or 30 on higher cycles. Then level Vigour until you're happy with your max health, then finish levelling Willpower to 50, 60 or even 70 if you feel like it. You should be in the void by this point, so switch back to levelling Vigour for the full heals.

Finally, the good stuff - Powers. We'll need to go for Astral and Life powers to get our prestige of choice, leaving one extra tree for us. Keep in mind you can only pick one extra element, and I strongly suggest you pick ice. However, Death and anything with a decent "chant" talent are also viable.

Life
The Life skill tree (haha) is all about summoning and healing.

For Life powers, Life Chant and Grove Cult are must haves. One single point in Life Chant outweighs any damage lost via chanting, and Grove Cult gives ridiculous heals so long as you can still summon. Invigoration is... decent. It buffs your allies health, but this may actually be a bad thing. The more wisps that die, the more you can summon back, and the more on summon effects you'll trigger.
Overgrowth is pretty good, summoning strong familiars on game turn. However, they have limited range, and I don't think it's worth the steep price.
Vineform is... weird. You summon a ton from your prestige class, granting lots of Vineform stacks, while removing your old transformation. I see potential for a very interesting build here - unfortunately, I simply don't know how yet.

On my first run with this build, I picked Piercing Vines, and I regretted it. I just saw that it was a game turn talent and took it without much thought, but it doesn't do much in a functional Arborus build. Enemies won't be within a 3 tile range of you, and if they are, applying a tiny bit of entangle won't help.

These are the Life talents that took my interest. I don't see much use for the others, unfortunately.

Astral
The Astral skill tree revolves around teleporting, usually. We do not want to teleport.
Instead, just take Innervation to buff your allies, Star Cult to apply LOTS of meditate, and consider Astrostoicism to teleport enemies away from you while buffing your defenses.

There aren't that many key players in the Astral tree, but Star Cult is a key part of the build I ended up running.

Ice
Ice is a rather defensive tree, and my tertiary tree of choice.

It has one of the best skills for a Volkite Arborus: Frostpulse. I can't even begin to tell you how excellent this talent is. It gives you 5 encumbrance per level - more than double the encumbrance gained by the Heavyweight talent in the Martial tree - it also costs the same. This means we will gain 25 base armour per level. But not only does this talent improve your defence, it also gives you your best offensive option. On game turn, you will deal damage to all enemies within a certain range. This range is determined by skill level, meaning your range is practically global if you level it enough, which you absolutely should.

If all that's not enough, Frostpulse is tied for one of the cheapest talents in the game, costing a mere 2 points. In short - Get this talent. Level it up a lot. It's excellent.

Do not take Crystalform or Frost Armour. Crystalform will override your Treeform, and Frost Armour is only slightly more effective at raising your defences than Frostpulse. Both talents will increase your inflexibility, which is usually a bad thing. Might be somewhat viable for builds that picked the Siku culture, but... Overall, no. Not worth the talent slot.

Death
Death skills typically summon undead allies. As a summon tree, there's some pretty good stuff in here.

Necromancy summons skeleton familiars, but most importantly, deals death damage to enemies on being attacked by your allies. Put one point into this, then level Cursed Flesh. Healing on enemy death is nice, but most importantly, death damage dealt by you now applies Doom. Doom is a very good status effect for summoners. In the words of the late and great SsethTzeentach: My skeleton swipes at the enemy, misses and nukes them for six million damage.
Blight Cult is... underwhelming. On ally death, deal damge to enemies in a four tile range. That sounds great, but the enemy has to be in a four tile range of you, not the dead ally. This means you will very rarely be triggering it.

Martial
Don't be fooled, Martial is actually not that good a tree for this build. You could use Heavyweight, which is a worse version of Frostpulse, or Stand Ground. Stand Ground is decent, however, you will rarely be standing still. Game turn effects are more useful.

Chants
While not a skill tree, I will be grouping all the "Chant" abilities together.

Frenzied Chant isn't worth using. You attack adjacent enemies, disabling your transformation, and apply Inflame to yourself. This is just a debuff, taking extra damage per turn and disabling your transformation if enemies get close.

Gore Chant is just some free summons. It's just okay. Not worth investing heavily into, especially since the blood tree doesn't have much for us.

Grave Chant feels like a worse version of Frostpulse with some extra summons sprinkled in. It also costs more than Frostpulse, so it will be harder to get a high range with it.

Life Chant has already been mentioned, and is ridiculously powerful. More health, more heals, it's good. Every Arborus build needs Life Chant.

Aurora Chant is very good, and I regret not using it in my first build. It applies meditation, and deals ice damage at a global range. Incredible talent for this build.

Plague Chant is a resistance shredder. Apply plague to all enemies on game turn, and your summons now inflict plague on hit. Plague decreases resistances by 1% per stack, however I didn't find enemy resistances to be that big of an issue. Your main damage types will be astral and ice, which are somewhat rare to resist. I never felt threatened when choosing enemies to fight.

Miscellanious
This is where I'll put talents from trees that aren't worth mentioning in full.

Master Repulsion is a game turn talent that applies repulsion on game turn, increases block and increases astral and psychic damage by one per stack. I don't see many ways of stacking up tons of repulsion in a build like this, but it could be a decent defensive option if combined with the Intabah chest armour. The Astral/Psychic buffs are negligible since meditate is pretty much the same, but ten times stronger.

Mass Mind summons allies and deals psychic damage at a range depending on the talent's level. I would really like this if Frostpulse didn't already exist. Could be really strong if you try making a psychic Arborus build.

Burning Ooze deals poison and fire damage on ally attack. Decent for some extra damage types, and gives you some more healing with Poison Skin. However, I see this as a downgrade to Cursed Flesh + Necromancy.

Gore Tide deals blood damage to enemies in a 3 tile range on game turn. I don't see much of a use for this, as the blood tree doesn't have many helpful talents for this build. Not worth it.

Head

By far the most important piece of equipment we can find is the Saafa. This will deal astral damage to an enemy at any range upon us gaining a stack of meditate. Combined with Star Cult, this will lead to ridiculous amounts of astral damage.

Alternatively, the Crystal Helm is viable if you picked Siku as your culture, as it increases meditation stacks, or Lizard Visage for extra damage, which is usually counteracted by the inflexibility increase it grants.

For more versatile options, consider the Mind Diamond, Toushi or Khedira for a little extra damage and some more debuffs/buffs. The Skull Helm is good for necromancy builds, and the Emerald Helm gives a little boost to your healing.

Chest

There aren't many good chest options for us. The Intabah gives you a very small buff to your armour, while the Jade Discplate buffs armour for one per effect stack. The Jade Discplate is the best chest armour we can find, but it's okay to go without it.

Arms
Your best bet is either the Jade Bracers or the Bracers of Command. Still not that useful, though. The Ice Gloves are also quite nice, but don't provide the biggest boost to your build.
If you get no good weapons, consider the Boulder Fist. Extra armour for each point of encumbrance, which goes nicely with the Volkite culture and Frostpulse talent.
However, none of these are very important. Your gauntlet choice doesn't matter very much.

Legs
The Ragna Wrap and Tikaani Sash are the only two that make a big difference to your build, and that's assuming you're using Frostpulse. Switch to whatever damage conversion pants suit your build best.

Weapons
Weapons are a bit more important. Shields give a decent survivability boost, and staff weapons are good for stationary builds.

The Star Staff applies meditate and deals astral damage on stand still. Not the best, but it's pretty nice.
Earth Staff should apply poise on stand still, but it didn't for me. I'm not sure if it's bugged or if it needs to hit an enemy, but if it works for you, it's a viable choice for a nice defensive boost.
The Staff of Chaos is interesting, but doesn't do much for this build. You may kill some of your allies, which is good for an ally death build with Eresh or Blight Cult, but I wouldn't recommend it. In fact, the Staff of Excruciation is more effective for ally death builds. Although I still wouldn't recommend it, and your allies will serve you better alive. These two weapons only appear in the void, so you won't get to use them much unless you walk the path of dust.

As for shields, the Diskos, Scutum and Zengja are good. Diskos deals damage to enemies that you block attacks from, the Scutum applies poise on block, and the Zengja buffs your block, scaling with the amount of status effects on you. The Sraval Shield is pretty good too, but you can only get it late game. It will apply a lot of willpower to the user on block.

In short, Arborus is a deceptively powerful class that thrives when using game turn talents. You want to apply meditate and have a high encumbrance, levelling Life Chant, Grove Cult and Frostpulse a lot.

This is the character I used to beat the game:


If you got this far, thank you for reading. This is my first guide, so sorry if I rambled too much. Please let me know how your runs go, as I am very excited to learn how others use this class.

Big thank you to Ulfsire for creating this incredible game, good luck and have fun!