Best Witchcraft Perks and Abilities

During the day, Coen is bereft of his vrakhiri powers, but instead of being rendered little more than a mere mortal by the sun, his lack of vrakhiri healing allows the rune-scars to fester, giving him the ability to use the spells he has learned. This dichotomy provides a nice gameplay contrast between night and day, but more importantly for this page, a different perk tree you can invest in. This page will cover the Witchcraft perk tree in The Blood of Dawnwalker, providing info on its best perks and abilities.

Page Breakdown¶

View Full-size

The Witchcraft tree features the expected perks that boost your Witchcraft abilities,

View Full-size

as well as crafting-related perks.

Best Witchcraft Perks¶

Best Witchcraft Perks
Unnatural Resilience
Forbidden Sigils
Aether Flow
Lasting Malediction

The Witchcraft perk tree works much like the Swordmastery tree, save that it’s much more focused with the boons it provides. Investing in it will, in some way, make your Witchcraft abilities more potent, either giving them more damage, duration, less health consumption, chances to refund Activation Charges, and more. It does take a bit of a diversion by also including crafting and herbalism related perks, like snatching more herbs while harvesting, increasing the duration of consumables, allowing you to equip more consumables in a quickslot (and hence use more in battle).

We’ll be honest with our assessment up front - the Swordmastery tree eats the lunch of the other two. It’s got great generalized perks and abilities that make Coen an engine of Activation Charge generation, allowing Witchcraft and Vampirism to mostly focus on abilities and the few perks that are necessary to equip them. Just keep in mind that we recommend investing in Swordmastery perks and abilities like Renewed Focus, Adrenaline Rush and Walking Fortress, which go a long way towards fueling your offense in all trees.

Unnatural Resilience¶

Gives you a +25% or 50% bonus to Armour depending on how many points you’ve put into the skill. It’s cheap, and with abilities like Soul Reaping or Soul Stigma, this can functionally give you a massive boost to your defenses for an entire fight - just reapply the aforementioned hexes as necessary. At least one rank is basically a freebie on the way to Forbidden Sigils.

Forbidden Sigils¶

Increase your Witchcraft Ability Slots. The more abilities you want to use at once, the more ranks of this you need - nothing to get excited about, it’s just a mandatory cost.

Aether Flow¶

Reduces all cooldowns by 10% or 20%, depending on rank, with the third rank reducing cooldowns by -5% when you land Critical Hits. Unless you’ve got a very specific build, you probably don’t need the third rank… and honestly Cycle or Ruin and/or Walking Fortress might just make this completely redundant, but if you need faster cooldowns, this is a fairly cheap option.

Lasting Malediction¶

Another perk with fringe utility, if you need your spells to last longer, 4 Skill Points and 3 TIME will get you a hefty +40% duration boost. Again, Cycle of Ruin may be all you really need, along with ranking up the skills you want to extend (presumably Soul Reaping and/or Soul Stigma).

View Full-size

Soul Stigma increases your critical hit chance against a marked target,

View Full-size

while Soul Stigma leeches life over a long period of time.

Best Witchcraft Abilities¶

Best Witchcraft Abilities
Soul Reaping
Soul Stigma
Unholy Vitality
Cycle of Ruin
Mercurial Fervour

Soul Reaping¶

A stupidly strong skill, it gives you lifesteal for a long duration (18s - 36s, depending on rank), and, less importantly, damages the victim whenever you take damage at higher ranks. It’s pretty hard to die when Deal damage to a foe, keep them away, and heal yourself in one potent cast.

Soul Stigma¶

Hexes and enemy for a long duration (20s - 35s), vastly boosting your critical hit chance (35% - 50%) and critical hit damage (10% - 40%). It’ll probably never be your primary means of damage-dealing, but you can’t exclusively spam Artery Strike, and this will give your Weapon Arts and normal attacks serious bite and proc Unnatural Resilience.

Unholy Vitality¶

Get passive health regen (10% - 25% of max health over 10 seconds) every time you use an Active Ability. Certain builds can absolutely spam abilities, and this is just another way to keep your health up. Making full use of Last Stand can be tricky if you get this, but you can always just take hits until your health is low enough for the aforementioned Ultimate ability to proc, and after you land a massive Artery Strike, this will help heal you out of danger.

Cycle of Ruin¶

Another passive, it extends the duration of Witchcraft Abilities by 1s - 3s depending on rank, and at rank 3-4 this increases to 4s - 5s on critical hits. Naturally this goes great with Soul Stigma, and may all but negate the need for perks like Aether Flow or Lasting Malediction.

Mercurial Fervour¶

There are plenty of shrines in the game, so you won’t often be far from a fast travel spot, but sometimes hoofing it around on foot can be… tedious. Save yourself some time and drop a Skill Point in this and you’ll vastly increase your speed while exploring. Further investment is unnecessary.

Best Witchcraft Ultimates¶

Alas, we don’t think any of the Witchcraft ultimates are all that compelling. They take too much investment and frankly do too little. If you go full mage, Aether Cascade will become handy, but Entwined Torment only procs once per fight and Runic Bulwark has a miserly 15% chance to proc.