Levelling Guide

This guide is to help people struggling with their character in the early game.
I’m writing up this advice because I see queries about specific classes on Reddit, and the Steam achievements show that a lot of people drop the game without levelling their character up to 30. I hope this helps someone enjoy the game more.

The advice is specific to pre-level 30 conditions - weak weapons, fewer choices and limited talent points.
Once you are level 30 you don’t have these constraints and can create a wider variety of powerful and fun builds.

Avoiding damage is mainly through dodging, but blocking, pushing and movement all play an important part. In the early game, weapons have fewer dodges and negative mobility stats which significantly impacts how well you can avoid damage. Weapon selection will revisit this theme. In short - you want to prioritise mobility/defence stats early on, and in general you want these stats at least at 51%.

Toughness regeneration is key to avoiding death once you are unable to dodge damage. If you are at max toughness small hits won’t do health damage. All characters regenerate toughness through being in coherency and melee kills. Therefore - stay close to your team, and engage in melee as soon as melee attackers are closing in. Competency in melee combat is critical to your success even if you are a ranged class. Each class also has unique toughness regeneration talents which will be covered in each class section.

Also worth noting that you can push poxbursters to avoid damage, and you don’t need to aggravate daemonhosts.

Ammo, grenades, and healing are limited resources shared by the team. Be aware of how these resources are allocated to keep the team strong.

• Don’t shoot weak enemies you can kill in melee. Save ammo for threats.
  
• Ping resources for your team, even if you don’t use that resource.
  
• Let the player with less ammo have the pick up (unless they are wasting it on poxwalkers). The colour of ammo in the HUD shows how much your teammates need ammo.
  
• Place ammo crates and medkits at events where their usage is maximised. Don’t drop them before a transition as they will likely be wasted. You will often get medicae and ammo chests after a lift. The appearance of a monster when the team is hurt is also a good reason to drop medkits.
  
• Ammo crates have 4 charges. Let everyone get one, and do some shooting before taking yours.
  
• Medkits do not heal completely corrupted wounds.
  
• Medicae stations heal corruption so let the most corrupted player use it first.

The ratings of weapons available to you increases with your character level. This affects both the item stats and blessings available. In the levelling process you will want to replace weapons relatively frequently, so do not invest too many resources in them.
You can get by with only docket purchases from the shop. The requisition option is better because you can choose higher rated items, whereas the armoury is random. The shop resets each hour. Consecrating weapons to blue is good for finding a few useful blessings, and not too expensive. Consecrating to orange is not as expensive as it used to be - you can probably afford a few but not frequent replacements.
Melk’s shop is much better for levelling than it used to be. You can get items with a high base rating from Melk and this will save you diamantine on empowering weapons. Melk can be a secondary source of curios if you can’t get the type you want in the regular shop.

You need to level up weapon Mastery by playing missions with the weapon, or sacrificing at Hadron. This is important for unlocking blessings and weapon marks.

Curios are a significant part of levelling progress. You should prioritise toughness or stamina. Wounds do not increase your health and are the worst choice in lower difficulties. Health is OK, but not as good as toughness.
Spend your resources on adding +10% experience to your curios as soon as possible. If you are getting spanked by snipers or gunners the damage reduction perks will take it down a notch, but it is best to dodge these attacks. The other damage reduction perks are near useless. Don’t worry about upgrading your curios heavily, as you will replace them later.

Updated for version 1.9

If you are playing through the campaign just go with the flow. Note that the campaign has a slowly increasing experience multiplier. To begin with the multiplier is zero, so you level up slower at the beginning, but catch up around level 24.

Skipping the campaign makes levelling faster because you can select quick play for +20% experience immediately, and can also choose special condition missions which can give up to +50% xp. Maelstrom missions are also unlocked earlier and can have +100-200% xp.
Skipping the campaign also unlocks Melk earlier which can be a source of decent levelling gear depending on your luck.

You need to play 4 missions at Uprising difficulty to unlock Malice difficulty. With quick play this should get you to level 9 which is a good time to go to Malice.
With the campaign you will probably only be level 7. I encourage you to get into Malice quickly, but consider whether you are ready. If you are breezing through Uprising and absorbed the training then go ahead. If you are a bit bewildered, just play another couple of missions at Uprising. You get a curio slot at level 8 which helps survivability, and every extra talent point makes you a lot stronger. The builds below go up to around level 9 for the first threshold - you should be stepping up to Malice by level 10 at the latest.

You need to play 4 missions in Malice to unlock Heresy difficulty. Heresy is a big step up in difficulty so don’t jump in without preparation. If you are playing the campaign you can be as low as level 15 by this point. You should really get to level 16 for the extra curio. To step into Heresy here are a few preparatory steps you might wish to take:

• 2 curios, at least one is toughness
  
• Recently upgraded one or both weapons (see Melk or the shop)
  
• Refined the perk and changed the blessing on a blue weapon
  
• Played a Malice mission without being captured
  
• Or played a Malice Maelstrom mission (not always available)

You can test Heresy on low intensity but this modifier is not always on the mission board.
You need to play quite a few Heresy missions to unlock Damnation difficulty, and so you should be somewhere around level 24, which is when you get the third curio slot unlocked too.
Unless you feel it’s too easy I would recommend levelling to 30 in Heresy. The experience benefits don’t go up as much into Damnation as the previous difficulty levels. You can get more experience doing special conditions in Heresy than regular missions in Damnation.

Sefoni’s Mortis Trials are not really great for levelling. They take longer than a normal mission and you can’t get experience modifiers (although the base xp is higher). They also feel hard when you are low level with weak gear and team mates. The opposite is true when you are levelled up. I would recommend coming back to them for a change of pace and for doing penances.

Updated for V1.9
Psyker can be one of the easier classes to level, but the number of options and desire to use endgame weapons and builds leads to people having trouble. You have to dodge! Psyker is a glass cannon.
I suggest using an Assail build for levelling psyker. It gives good damage against most enemies, and several toughness regeneration options. Assail is overpowered in low difficulties, but is merely good in higher difficulties.
Brain burst is my favourite blitz, but it is really weak levelling - your teammates will usually kill stuff before you can and you don’t have talents that complement or enhance it. If you really don’t want to use assail, BB with kinetic flayer and a gun works pretty well at low difficulty.
Smite is good crowd control, but does little damage. Especially in low difficulty it is usually better just to kill enemies over crowd control. People levelling with smite often go down because one enemy sneaks up behind them.



We have four new sources of toughness regeneration - assail kills, peril generation/quelling, and melee attacks. Feel free to use perilous combustion instead of one if you want a bit more damage.
We also have a toughness node and should have a toughness curio to increase the damage we can take.

The revolver is available at level 6 from the requisition shop and will be the mainstay of the build throughout levelling, as it can take out crushers. You want to get the Zarona. Prior to that the laspistol or infantry autoguns are recommended. I prefer the laspistol as it has good mobility, accuracy, and flak damage, but a small ammo reserve.
Staves are weak in the early game and not recommended until you can get a good base item and some more talents.
The blessings on the revolver aren’t too important yet. You can save your resources for melee, or consider upgrading to green and getting more carapace damage.
We have more options on melee weapons. The knife has high mobility but is fairly underpowered with a low tier weapon and no talents. Worth considering just so you can run around faster, and will do enough to keep you alive in melee. The duelling swords have good mobility and high single target damage. The blaze force sword (deimos) has great single target damage, and is better against hordes than the duelling swords, but only regular mobility. All of these weapons have one extra dodge compared to the other weapons available. Weapons not mentioned are not recommended for levelling.
For melee blessings, uncanny strike is available on deimos, duelling swords and the knife. It is a potent blessing even at low tier. All the recommended weapons benefit from a blessing even if it’s a random one, so upgrading to blue is a good idea. Changing the perk to flak is a good idea for most weapons at this point as they usually have low modifiers against armour.

At close-medium range use assail to kill enemies. As enemies close in keep some peril so that it naturally quells while you are in melee combat. Assail kills and peril quelling are your major sources of toughness regeneration.
Use heavy or special melee attacks against enemies with armoured heads.
For specialists and most elites, or at medium-long range use the assail secondary. It builds more peril so you can spam it less, but also does more damage, is more accurate, and uses fewer charges per kill.
Use your revolver sparingly for high threat armoured targets like crushers, maulers, and bosses. You can also change to revolver while waiting for assail charges to replenish.
Your boss damage will be low with this build, and assail barely tickles them. Consider supporting the team by taking out enemies around the boss. If you are confident in melee combat, this is your best boss damage option.
Your ability is only useful for close range crowd control for now. It can also prevent your brain from blowing up if you go too hard on the peril.



At level 17 we can afford the shield with toughness regeneration, as well as One with the Warp. Quick Shards & Warp Expenditure have been dropped for the meantime. Seer’s presence is an excellent aura, one of the best in the game.

The mk4 duelling sword is available by now if you are mastering this weapon, and it is the best one of the three due to the stabbing heavy attacks. Illisi force sword is also a good option for hordes.
By now you should upgrade your revolver to get some blessings options.
If you really want a staff, anything but inferno can fill your crusher killing needs.

The only addition is your shield ability. Feel free to use it regularly, you don’t need to save it. It is useful for toughness regeneration when the team is in melee, covering teammates for a revive or hacking objective, and blocking gunner fire. Shield also blocks Beast vomit, your teammates will love you for that.


Adding to the above tree - we stretch to reach empowered psionics and true aim which will massively increase assail performance. Quick shards has been re-selected (not shown).
To finish the build go for overpowering souls, charged up, and perfect timing.

These talents are very strong and are used in many builds.
Psykinetics aura - extra cooldown reduction.
One with the warp - toughness damage reduction
Kinetic deflection - allows you to block insane damage
True aim - significant increase in crits for many builds

The Ogryn is pretty straightforward as a class, but poor selection of weapons or talents early on can make you feel really weak and slow. Ogryn has the worst mobility of the classes and has a large hitbox, these combine to make ranged enemies a great threat. Even just the regular shooters can strip your toughness if you get caught in the open.
We will combat this weakness by choosing a melee weapon with good mobility - the cleaver. The cleavers are available in the requisition shop after a few missions. Mark4 is recommended for its strong light attacks, and alternating combos. Use the mark3 if you can't get a mark4.
The other melee weapons are by no means bad, however early on they will have negative sprint speed, terrible dodge distance, and high stamina consumption. You will get trapped and hit more. The basic shovel is fine until you get a cleaver - it has the same combos as the mark4 knife, and neutral sprint speed.
You should upgrade your knife to blue as soon as the tech priest becomes available. Get new knives regularly and repeat the process. You are looking for the blessing Slaughterer, Tenderiser, or Thrust. A flak perk is recommended.
If you are going down a lot get the Confident Strike blessing as this will massively improve survival chances.
The Mark4 cleaver is forgiving on combos, but also rewarding when you do them. Spamming light attacks is enough for most enemies, spamming heavy attacks is better against tough enemies. But the combos are stronger. Starting with a heavy then alternating light-heavy is the single target killer. Starting with a heavy or two lights then a heavy-light loop has powerful slashes that mince hordes. The punch stuns enemies and also helps reset your combo.



We have three talents that give toughness regeneration. Steady Grip works when holding aim with your gun. The other two work on melee attacks. This means you get toughness in very different scenarios and so complement each other. We also have a +25 toughness node, 10% toughness damage reduction, and ideally a +10% toughness curio to help with tankiness.
For the blitz, anything is good. I’m showing the new and improved box, but try them all out.


For your ranged weapon, the kickback is recommended for high power and decent ammo economy. Upgrading to green and getting a flak perk is a good idea.
The ripper (not Mark6 - inaccurate) is also good as its special stab does good damage regardless of item level so it is quite strong early on. The special attack counts as a heavy melee attack so it will replenish toughness. It has low ammo though so you will need to focus on melee combat. The ripper with can opener is very powerful early on, if you have the resources consider unlocking this blessing.
The grenade weapons are discouraged because they really need a high quality base item to shine. Come back to these once you are higher level.


Slide to avoid enemy shots and to close distance for melee combat. Light attacks take care of most enemies, mix in heavy attacks for larger threats and to top up toughness. The special attack on your knife (punch) can stun ragers out of attacking you. If your dodges are feeling droopy, push enemies back to allow your dodges to replenish while giving you space.
Your shotgun is for taking care of specialists at range and disrupting groups of ranged attackers. You can use the special to top up toughness too, as it counts as a heavy attack. If you are separated from the team, or need to top up toughness in cover, brace your shotgun to get 12.5% per second.
Use your grenade for big threats or to clear an area around a team mate.




We can get the ability Point blank barrage plus rending (armour piercing) which makes it a potent tool against crushers and monsters. You could also use the flame version if you change weapon to the mark7 stubber. Don’t use the mark5 stubber - it’s not as good as the other two.
We also have extra ammo, and take less ranged damage.
The aura is OK. You can take Soften Them Up or Slam instead for more melee prowess.

At this point you will start to see melee weapons with mobility/defences above 50%. This means they will have an extra dodge which is quite nice. If you are bored of the knife look for a weapon with an extra dodge. Basically anything except the power maul is fine.



From level 16 you have all weapons available, so an optimal guide isn’t possible for all of them. This will work quite well for all, but is probably better for twin-linked stubbers.
We have two sources of cooldown reduction (Bruiser and Maximum Firepower), better ammo economy and more ranged damage. Weapon Emplacement lets you take a couple of little hits while focused on a priority target.
Weapon swap speed is purely quality of life, feel free to move it elsewhere.

Slam for stamina regeneration and more staggering.
Soften Them Up - melee damage.
Frenzied blows and Just Getting Started for melee attack speed.
+25 toughness nodes.
Batter & Delight In Destruction pair well together. Should be in any heavy attack build.
Bruiser is excellent for reducing cooldowns. Practically mandatory.

Updated for V1.9
The vet feels really weak at first because all their ranged weapons have terrible armour penetration stats. You want to quickly get krak grenades to deal with armour.
After a few level ups the veteran becomes the easiest class to level due to some insanely powerful weapons and one ability.

The highlighted nodes are the core of any vet build. It’s also a fast path to krak grenades so you can easily deal with crushers and monsters.
We've got two sources of toughness regen, two toughness damage reductions, extra toughness, and some damage too.

Your shovel is fine for taking care of hordes for now. Prioritise your ranged weapon.
Infantry autoguns, and revolver are recommended. Later you can also take the recon lasgun or laspistol.
Your first curio should be stamina or toughness.

Prioritise elite and specialist enemies. You will get ammo back for killing them. Don’t waste ammo on weak melee enemies. Yes, you are a ranged class, but there’s no need to waste ammo on trash.
Throw krak grenades on crushers, maulers, monsters, or bulwarks. Crushers are your main concern.
If any enemies are close, immediately switch to melee. Your melee attacks stop enemies attacking as frequently, and you regain toughness from melee kills.
Your ability is total garbage at the moment so just ignore it.




The aura is not a big upgrade to the starting aura, but it is nice to have.
The big upgrade here is Voice of Command.
We also take some utility nodes to replenish grenades and have better crates/medkits. The reload talent is more important now that we change weapon. You can choose any of the alternative paths instead of Opening Salvo.
We don’t need krak grenade anymore, so we change to shredders.

You get access to the plasma gun at level 16 and it is quite powerful. Get one ASAP, you don’t even need to upgrade it. [note: bolter is a good alternative]
The shovel, chainsword and combat axe (mk2) are good melee options.
Your second curio should be toughness or stamina, but not 2 stamina curios.

You should be using Voice of Command as much as possible. It stuns enemies too. If anyone is missing toughness just pop it.
Shoot specials and elites with your plasma gun. It can clear dense hordes too, but this is a waste of ammo. Your ammo economy isn’t good enough to constantly spam plasma. The charged attacks aren't that great, hip fire works fine.
Frag grenades stagger enemies and apply bleed. You can drop two for high bleed damage against monsters. [bleed damage is some kind of polynomial function of the stacks so two grenades does much more damage than just one]




The bottom of the skill tree has loads of powerful talents. You don’t even need a keystone, although they are good too.
The talents chosen above are mostly in the notable talents section below.

You’ll see that the veteran is the most spoiled class for powerful talents.

Close order drill - toughness damage reduction when with the team.
Confirmed kill - massive toughness regeneration
Demolition stockpile - regenerate grenades.
Precision strikes - weakspot damage
Fully loaded - more ammo reserve
Superiority complex - elite damage
Born leader - share toughness regen
For the emperor! - damage buff on ability use
Tactical awareness - cooldown on specialist kill
Iron will - toughness damage reduction when at high toughness
Demolition team - replenish grenades on elite/specialist kill
Bring it down! - ogryn/monster damage
Reciprocity - crit chance on dodge
Desperado - melee crit chance and crit/weakspot damage
Trench fighter drill - melee attack speed
Onslaught - strips armour, very effective with fast firing weapons.

+15% melee damage node
+5% crit chance node
+25 toughness nodes
10% toughness damage reduction node

Updated for version 1.9
The zealot is an interesting one to level, as a lot of the power comes from the abilities and keystones at the bottom of the skill tree. You won’t be at full power for quite some time.
Counteracting that is a lot of ways to regenerate toughness, and good starting conditions. You have one of the best melee weapons starting out. You have the best starting ability, which gives you one powerful hit and regenerates half your toughness. Your starting aura prevents 7.5% toughness damage.
The first thing you need to do is get rid of the garbage autopistol you are given as a starting weapon. Change to a braced autogun or lasgun.



I’ve highlighted a bunch of survival talents, you can move ahead to malice without all of these.

Second Wind is the best toughness regeneration talent, as it activates when we are at risk, and it replenishes a large amount of toughness. You can also activate this when dodging ranged attacks.
Blood redemption is pretty good, as we will get most kills in melee.
The ranged survival talents are weak and don’t activate when we need them.
Enemies Within, Enemies Without is good early on as your kill speed won’t be that good and you will take some hits. It replenishes when we need it, but not a huge amount.
Vicious Offering gives a good lick of toughness on a heavy attack kill. A good option depending on your eventual build.

For blitz I’ve recommended immolation grenade because it is the easiest to use. All the blitzes are excellent though so feel free to swap it out. The throwing knives take the most skill but are fantastic for taking care of specialists. The stun grenade is the best crowd control in the game, but has several mediocre nodes to get to it.
For weapons you should keep the Rashad axe and focus on updating it every few missions. You should upgrade to blue and be on the lookout for Brutal Momentum blessing which will increase your ability to clear hordes.
At level 7 the revolver becomes available. The Zarona is better for dealing with crushers but will require some mastery points. You can use another weapon if you prefer, but put extra carapace damage on the axe in that case. Upgrading the revolver is your lowest priority for resources.
Your first curio should be toughness or stamina.

Sliding and dodging are critical for avoiding damage and closing the distance to enemies. Dodge is necessary to activate many of your talents. Dodge sideways around a group of enemies while hacking at them.
If you have lost toughness, or want to make a strong hit against a bigger enemy use your charge ability. You can also charge to get close to ranged attackers.
Your heavy attacks deal a lot more damage to armoured enemies, but you need to weigh this up against just hitting areas without armour. The dreg bruisers have a flak helmet which your heavy overhead attack will hit, vs low armour body shots with light attacks. Same for maulers.
Your revolver will help you take down distant specialists, and is a safer way to deal with crushers while your build is weak.
Throw down grenades as area denial while doing objectives, reviving teammates, or holding choke points. It also does OK damage against monsters.


Until Death and Holy Revenant give you another chance after being smashed.
Duellist is incredibly good and activates regularly.
Benediction is twice as good as the starting aura. Definitely zealot’s best aura.
Charge now gives increased attack speed making you an absolute beast.

Upgrade your axe to get a second blessing. Shred, Thrust or Headtaker are ideal paired with Brutal Momentum, but anything is fine.
Your second curio can be anything except Wound. All toughness is fine, and one of each is also good.


I’ve also taken Blood Redemption at the top of the tree, but cut off the picture.
This is the core of a classic crit build.

Scourge increases our crit chance, but doesn’t activate regularly if you don’t have a reasonably high base crit chance so only take it when you can get to the keystone.
Enduring Faith protects us a lot more now that we will do many more crits.
The keystone increases crit chance and has a feedback loop with Invocation of Death which lets us charge more (another crit).


Your last curio can be anything except Wound. All toughness is fine, and one of each is also good.
Your ranged weapon choice is less important now, feel free to take whatever you like. Laspistol and infantry autoguns are a good choice. Laspistol is notable for its mobility and high crit chance which helps build stacks of Blazing Piety.

Backstabber - works better than it sounds. I always take it.
Purge the Unclean - great against monsters.
Enduring Faith - damage reduction on crit.
Dance of Death - massively increases accuracy after a dodge.
Thy Wrath Be Swift - also affects ranged attacks so you won’t get stun-locked by reapers or gunners. You can also do hacking objectives without being hit out of it.
Good Balance - damage reduction on dodge.
Duelist - huge headshot and crit multiplier on dodge.
Faithful Frenzy - melee attack speed

The Arbitrator is probably the easiest class to level, not just because the class is strong, but the starting conditions are good. Good weapons, the mastiff, decent ability, and good toughness regen options. The only meh thing is the grenade, but that gets upgraded soon.

Stick to the starting weapons for now - arbites shock maul and the exterminator shotgun. They are both very good. Both weapons benefit from having the execution blessing which will be helped with talents later.


We have two damage buffs, toughness damage reduction and flat toughness. Very nice.

The Remote Detonation blitz is nice because it recharges by itself. It can also stagger bosses, so sic your dog onto a monster then detonate when the dog is latched on. You can also use Remote when you are carrying batteries or capsules to keep enemies off you while doing objectives.
You can set your dog to attack on single tag in settings if you want.

The toughness regen nodes are quite good. The maul has good stagger so Force of Will gives lots of toughness. We will guarantee this later. Walk It Off works with both sprinting and blocking which are things you could be doing to avoid damage. Up Close works on all close range kills, so melee and short range shotgun kills.

The shotgun is not great at long range, but useable. You can later change to mark8 for better range at the expense of short range power. Mark3 is great when a pack of ragers is coming at you and you need to demolish them.
The maul is good at everything, but not excellent at anything; it has no weaknesses.You can get away with light attack spam, or even heavy attack spam, but the combos are rewarding. Heavy-light repeating is overheads for single target damage, e.g. crushers.
Heavy or light, followed by heavy-light repeating gives sweeping attacks that are good for groups.
The special attack uses a light attack in the combo. It’s technically always better than a light attack but takes more buttons. The special attack is also good defensively as it stuns enemies.

Pop your ability when the team is taking damage, or if you want to defend a choke point or objective.


Adding to the above we are heading straight to the ability.
The middle tree has lots of damage reduction and attack modifiers. We especially want Concussive as it will guarantee toughness regen with Force of Will. The aura is free damage and works with Concussive.

Break the Line help with mobility, closing the gap to enemies, improves damage, and provides regen. It has a short cooldown so use it frequently.



Everything added gives damage or damage reduction.
We have more stagger benefits which Concussive helps trigger.
After this consider getting the cooldown node on the ability, and cleave boost in the middle tree.

Almost everything is good or has a use…
Arbitrator is strong because it has no empty talents.

Warning
First of all; I’d like to caution you against starting Hive Scum as your first class. The class is very strong and fun, but relies on mobility and positioning to avoid damage. This takes time to learn. If you are dying a lot consider changing to Zealot, Ogryn, or Arbitrator.

We will go through a ranged build. The right hand stim branch is best once you have a max level stim. The middle melee branch will be missing some key elements until you are close to level 30. Ranged is just a bit safer early on and we have more pieces of the build early on.

Gear
I recommend the shivs or tac axe for this build as we will have a strong crit synergy by the end. The crowbar is a solid alternative if you don’t vibe with the crit weapons.
For your secondary choose an automatic weapon (autopistols, infantry/braced autogun). We will take a talent that makes them significantly more powerful early on. The other weapons are either not that good, or don’t synergise as well with the build. Come back to them later.




We’ve got toughness regen on ranged kills and melee hits. The damage nodes are just free damage for ranged. The interesting one here is Sticky Hands, the reduced spread is really helpful for most weapons, but especially the automatic ones. Better accuracy effectively means more damage.
Burst of Energy is a good safety net if your toughness is broken.
Take chem grenades to begin with, they are insanely powerful and can just liquefy whole hordes of enemies.

Stim
In the beginning the stims you find in the mission are better. You will probably want to heal with green stims too which you can’t use with the custom stim. Just leave it blank for now.

Gameplay
Whenever your ability is available pop it and go to town on everything. You can go through most of the mission shooting, but watch your ammo and don’t be greedy with supplies for your team mates. You get 5% of whatever ammo they pick up anyway.
If you are closed in by enemies, switch to melee and spam light attacks. If using shivs you need to use heavy attacks against heavily armoured enemies. The shiv special attacks are great for increasing your DPS against ogryns and bosses.
Use chem grenades when overwhelmed, or at choke points, and for area denial while doing objectives or reviving allies.

The aura and ability are upgraded, but nothing super exciting.
The blitz has been changed to rockets as you will now be facing more bosses and groups of armoured enemies. Desperado builds aren’t great against carapace so you have to have a tool for them. Save them for emergencies, or lots of crushers, or bosses.

Tis but a Scratch helps reduce your toughness getting chipped away by ranged enemies.

The five utility skills in the middle of the tree are really powerful for survivability. I have only selected Nimble, but you should strongly consider putting more in your builds later.

Stim
Two options - either go for rending stim as a damage booster, or cooldown stim to get Desperado back faster when it finishes.

Go back to the top of the tree to get Float like a Butterfly. Combined with Hyper-Critical this allows you to insta-kill enemies in melee (not ranged). With these two nodes and a crit weapon you can do solid damage in melee even though you have a ranged build. This is why shivs and tac axe are recommended, as they have innate crit chance.

The keystone and most of the other nodes are just extra damage.

Pickpocket basically gives you infinite ammo. If your ammo turns red you need to kill an elite or specialist to top it back up.

Hive City Brawler is for extra damage mitigation.

Skitarius is an odd one for leveling because you can access anything quickly, but you also have no obligation to do so.
The starting blitz, ability, and aura are all solid, so there’s no rush to replace them all.

You gain capacitance passively, and from kills, and extra from elite/special kills. The passive gain is affected by cooldown curio perks, but I can’t tell if the others are.

There are single nodes that enhance capacitance generation, and the keystones also can enhance it.
Single nodes:

• Reactor Coil Recharge is probably the strongest effect for the lowest investment. 2% on weakspot kill adds up to a lot, and is uncapped.
  
• Augmented Power Cycle is not as strong but completely unconditional. It works when you are in a lift. 1% per second on top of the passive 2% per second.
  
• Flux Conduit Build-up is OK. It has a condition you might not be getting all the time, and it caps how much you can gain. Fitting for a crit build.
  
• Capacitor Reclamation Loop also has a condition that you might not have up consistently, and it doesn’t return that much. It’s good against hordes and with shock effects.

Keystones

• Redline Capacitors gets you more charges to work with, and modest gains to capacitance regen. It’s still good even though it has bugs at the moment (July ‘26).
  
• Power Overload needs your team to kill loads of enemies before you get the modest gains to capacitance regen. It’s just not that good for leveling, but good for supporting the team in higher difficulties.
  
• Flensing Protocols is definitely the best option. You get damage, damage reduction, and with Higher Purpose you get a strong capacitance regen effect.

The following builds will get something to spend charges on, then focus on improving capacitance regen.

Ranger

Keep the arc maul as your melee weapon, it’s an excellent all-rounder. Get the Enhanced Voltaic Arcs blessing.

First we want to rush to Advanced Combat Doctrines. This ability is extra powerful for the rapid fire weapons because of how much it reduces spread. Take a laspistol or an auto__ weapon. The ammo related nodes at the bottom of the ranged cluster are all really useful.

Second: we need toughness regen, ranged damage, and capacitance regen. Superior Tracking Litanies is notable for how much it will improve your accuracy when not using the ability.

Third: Foe-render Creed is the best aura, and we get some more damage resistance on the way to Flensing Protocols and Higher Purpose. Spec into the remaining keystone addons as you can.

Sicarian (melee)

Stick to the arc maul for your weapon, it’s the safest and still has great damage output. The galvanic rifle is a great sidearm for sniping specials and elites, very useful on a melee build where you don’t need to worry as much about ammo economy.

First: rush to Noospheric Command, this makes the servo skull quite powerful at killing single enemies. It will also stagger enemies about to hit you so it is a layer of safety. Plus it can do all your hacking for you! Consider the medicae version if you want to efficiently pick up team mates.

Second: If you need toughness regen get the nodes at the centre, otherwise rush Chordclaw. With Axial Slash you can clear several elites at once, or break out of a mob when cornered. Hold the ability to do a high damage single target attack that can one shot crushers.

Third: Pick up any toughness regen you don’t already have, and get more capacitance regen. Then the aura.

Fourth: Flensing Protocols and any extra melee nodes. Galvanised Coating is optional - good damage reduction but if you are hit a lot it will drain your capacitance.

Shock tank

If you are struggling this is a tankier build with some shock elements. As usual take the arc maul, but take the arc rifle too. Both need the Enhanced Voltaic Arcs blessing.

First: as before, a rush to Noospheric Command. Use the servo skull liberally.
Second: All the toughness regen, and damage reduction, plus some capacitance regen.
Third: Upgrades for the aura and ability, and a few enhancements to shock.