(This build was created for version 1.2. Version 1.3 appears to have no changes that impact the build, so it should be compatible with that.)

Angra is a god that forces all your allies to sacrifice themselves when they get involved in combat. It gives you interesting elements to play with, but it requires some thinking and assembly. I hope that this guide gives you some insight in how I approached the build, so you can explore the many other options the game has to offer in the same way.

Context/disclaimer: I created and tested this build in the sixth cycle. That means while it was more challenging than the base first cycle, I did get more experience to accelerate through the early levels. I don't think this should matter a lot, but if you're lucky to unlock the culture/class/god options very early on and you're struggling to get it going, that may be because your power ramps up slower than it did for me.

My winning run was my fifth try, with each run resulting in new insights that tweaked the build. The fourth run resulted in a near-victory: I died in the very last room.

Top dmg in ONE MOVE was 350k+ damage against the Yellow Queen, who even started with Protection applied. The synergies are silly strong in this build once you get all the pieces in place.

Angra is a god that makes each of your allies sacrifice themselves whenever they get involved in combat. With the right support, you can maximize your triggers related to summoning allies and ally death.

The Warlock is a class that triggers on ally deaths: you get 5 Inflame stacks (which each give +10 Accuracy and +20 Hit) and you deal 100 Fire damage to the closest enemy.


Angra's 3rd Prayer involve applying up to 50 Sickness and Bleed stacks to ALL enemies in the level. This makes the Brud an excellent culture to pick. On each Attack you will heal for the sum of all Sickness + Bleed + Doom stacks on that enemy. The more debuffs they have, the more you heal.



So we now have the skeleton of a build, which we can turn into a build if we work it backwards.

What do we want to do? We want to attack often and inflict (specific) debuffs on enemies to heal ourselves and stay alive. If we can find a reliable way to summon many allies, they will die quickly and cause more damage and stack us with Inflame buffs.


Let's review the (de)buffs we're going to work with:

• Inflame will give us +10 Accuracy and +20 Hit
  
• Sickness will lower enemy Hit by 10, and deals 5 Poison damage per game turn
  
• Bleed deals 5 Blood damage to enemies on Step or Attack
  
• Doom deals 5 Death damage to enemies when they get Attacked

This hopefully makes it easy for us to do damage in various ways, and makes it harder for enemies to deal damage to us. The damage per game turn and step debuffs benefit us staying at a longer range and enemies being slower than us to maintain this advantage. This means it'll be good to look at Charge (to speed us up) and Entangle (to slow enemies down). Freeze can also be an option, but there was no synergistic clean way to add it to the build.

• Charge increases damage we deal by +5, and (with Master Charge) gives +1 Speed
  
• Entangle gives the enemy -10 Dodge, -1 Speed, and makes them take 5 Pierce damage on step

The Lightning tree has most of the tools we need, but we'll dip into Life and Poison for two crucial helper skills as well.

Stormcalling will summon 2+ Ball Lightning allies on each Attack. What's nice is that they appear in a random spot, so they can appear close to enemies and distract them. Herja will give us extra attacks, so our Attack action will trigger many attacks and thus many summons. These two skills are the one we will scale in the endgame.

To make us fast, Master Charge will give us Charges that increase our damage, and lets them grant +1 Speed. Fulminant Cult gives us more Charges for each ally we summon. These two skills together turn our Stormcalling/Herja package into a way to get faster and deal more damage.

Lastly, Electromancy can be used to reduce Inflexibility back to 1 so our Speed bonuses from Charge will work at full effect. Mostly useful when you want to wear heavy armor.

If we're speeding ourselves up, we want to slow enemies down to exaggerate the effect. Life's Vinakinesis applies 5 Entangle to targets we Attack or Hit, which reduces their speed by 5. This adds up quickly. If enemies survive our attack, they'll be too slow to react. There's safety in being able to stay out of your enemies' range.

Poison's Toxokinesis applies 5 Sickness on hit, and deals Poison damage on attack or when applying Sickness. It's an early source of debuffs and thus healing for our Brud culture ability, but also a key combo piece once we assemble our gear.

Finally, as our prestige class we'll pick the Ormjarl (Lightning + Life). It summons 3 familiars on entrance, and each time we summon something it deals 100 Lightning damage to an enemy. It's a nice counterpart to the Warlock ability that deals damage on ally death.

Start a new character with Brud + Warlock + Angra. This might be the hardest part, because you'll need to have these (randomly) unlocked. Worst case you'll need to win the game 3 or 4 times to unlock all options.

Most skills are one point wonders, so add one point in each in this order:

• Poison - Toxokinesis
  
• Lightning - Master Charge
  
• Life - Vinakinesis
  
• Lightning - Stormcalling
  
• Lightning - Fulminant Cult
  
• Lightning - Herja
  
• Lightning - Electromancy

Afterwards, you can prestige into Ormjarl.

After this you alternate Herja and Stormcalling until you win the game. You can put another point into Electromancy if you really need it to get your Inflexbility down to 1, but finding lighter gear may be a better alternative.


First raise your Strength enough to not be over-encumbered. Early on you'll be wearing sub-optimal gear that may be heavier than late game gear, so having more Strength is not a problem. Aim to get about 15-20 Strength before raising any of the other attributes.

You'll notice that each time you add a point in Strength, your minimum Speed (the number in parentheses) goes up... until it doesn't. That's the point where the minimum Speed also needs points in Dexterity to further increase. In this build we only add points in Dexterity when our Strength is higher than our minimum Speed and we need a point in Dexterity to further increase it.

Willpower is needed to raise the maximum number of allies you can have. It also increases your damage and healing by 10% per point, so that's pretty significant. You can ignore this until you've got the core part of your build going and you're reliably summoning minions. For me that has been once I've got my first point invested in Herja (2nd to last skill). When you get this, just raise your Willpower to equal your Strength.

Afterwards, keep raising your minimum Speed by investing into 2 Strength and 1 Dexterity, and then raising your Willpower to match your Strength again.

In general: keep early unused gear in your inventory until you find items that you think will be part of your final build. When you have final build items, you can sacrifice unused items of that same type to give 25% of the sacrificed stats to your equipped item. You also get +20 max health per sacrifice.

Sacrificing items in this way is why you try to pick the room with most items, so you get more bonuses. For obvious reasons, you prioritize items for your build over items to sacrifice. And pay attention to enemies guarding these items. Dead heroes don't get to equip any loot, after all.


We start with a range 4 staff. A range 4+ weapon is great to keep you safe, but the starter weapon only gives you 3 minions when you enter a level so it's a little underwhelming.

My winning run used the Brazen Eye, a range 5 Psychic weapon. It grants some Repulsion buffs on Psychic damage, which gives you some free retaliation damage. The Psychic damage type synergizes with the Skull Helm's Doom stack proc, so it's better than it looks at first glance.

I've used the Jade Pilum in an earlier run that also got me very far. It's a range 4 Pierce weapon that gives extra attacks based on the number of effects you have on you. You're likely to have 1-4 buffs on you after you do your opening prayer in a new area, so that's a sweet number of bonus attacks. If enemies decide to debuff you (1-2 is not uncommon), then that's even more attacks you get for free.


You start wielding your main weapon in two hands. That's nice for the hit and accuracy bonus, but you lose out on sweet sweet abilities, so look for a second item in your off-hand.

Your primary weapon determines the maximum range at which you initiate attacks, but you won't use your off-hand weapon to attack unless it is in range. This means if it's range matches your primary, you'll always attack with it. If not, it only attacks when enemies get closer. For this reason I look at the triggers on my off-hand weapon that don't rely on Attacks or Hits, but on Damage or something else.

I finished my run with a Serpent Fetish. It's a range 1 poison weapon. It summons 3 serpents on prayer, which we always do once when entering a new area. When we kill or summon, it triggers a range 4 Poison path attack. This synergizes with a bunch of our other triggers, so it ends up doing quite some damage despite its range.


This gear slot often has a bonus along the lines of "when you deal X type damage, do another 25% of Y type damage as well". Besides 25% more damage, it's also an opportunity to trigger effects with a different type of damage than a skill specifically tells you.

I used the Nadra Kamarband and think it's best in slot for this build. On dealing Poison damage, deal 25% again as Death. This is a separate damage trigger, and allows the Toxokinesis Poison damage (which triggers on each Attack or Hit) to also trigger effects that normally only trigger when dealing Death damage. This synergizes with our Skull Helm.

The Dread Sash gives you Death damage on dealing Physical (Pierce, Slash or Blunt) damage. In case you have a Physical weapon, it can help with synergy.


Robe of Ferment. On dealing Death or Poison damage, apply 1 Poise to yourself and remove Sickness/Doom from yourself. This triggers a lot once you get going, and the Poise is a decent way to get some damage mitigation going. You're quite a glass cannon otherwise.


Skull Helm is probably best in slot. +2 Doom stacks applied, on Death/Psychic/Lightning damage, apply 1 Doom to the target. Which becomes 3 due to the stack bonus. Every attack deals one or more of these damage types, so there will be Doom stacks everywhere. Funny enough, attacking an enemy with Doom will deal 5 Death damage per Doom, which triggers the Skull Helm to add 3 more Doom. When you attack 5+ times per round, this means the new Doom from your previous attack will add more damage on the next attack. It adds up quickly.


Early on I did not get ideal gloves. For a while I used the Fire Gloves, which on Attack apply Scorch to the target and summon a Burning Blade ally. Some fire damage and a minion is not bad, but it's a little low on synergy later on.

Once I got to the void (2nd area) I found the void-exclusive Ill Manica. On dealing Poison damage, you gain 2 Meditation. Each of these gives +10 damage, which applies to everything similar to the bonus from Charge. With so many triggers, this ramps up quickly. The initial Prayer 3 vs a full room will give over 100 Meditation, which is 1000 raw damage on top of every single damage trigger. It's very good.

Poison - Toxokinesis: apply 5 Sickness on Hit, deal Poison damage on Attack. On apply Sickness, deal more Poison damage to the target and 3 nearby enemies (hopefully nobody is ever nearby to you, though).

Synergy with legs + helm to deal Death damage from Poison, and generate 3 Doom stacks on target. An Attack will thus result in 5 Sickness and 2x3=6 Doom added to the target. That's 11 debuffs which your Brud culture ability will use to heal itself when it next Attacks the target.

Lightning - Master Charge: on Hit gain a Charge. Each charge inherently add +5 to all damage. Charges now also give +1 speed each.

Generating a bunch of Charges by Hitting things will quickly speed you up and allows you to act more often than enemies. This means you can either Attack them or step away when they get too close to you.

Life - Vinakinesis: on Attack or Hit, apply 5 Entangle to target. Entangle which slows enemies down by -1 Speed per Entangle. Applying Entangle also deals Poison damage to the target, which synergizes with legs + helm to also deal Death and thus apply Doom stacks.

Lightning - Stormcalling: on Attack, summon 2 Ball Lightning allies per skill point.

These distract enemies and suicide themselves on Attack, feeding your on ally death synergies and making room for new allies and on summon synergies.

Lightning - Fulminant Cult: on Summon, gain a Charge. Also summons 3 free allies on Entrance.

Synergy: on Attack, you Summon, which now gives a Charge per ally. When you Attack multiple times per turn, and summon multiple allies per Attack, the number of Charges you gain increases quickly. In turn, this makes you faster and thus allows you to control the battlefield. As a glass cannon, you need it.

Lightning - Herja: gives extra attacks! On Attack, you now also deal lightning damage in a path to the furthest enemy, which hits many other enemies (or allies, oops!).

When you're not using a weapon that grants extra attacks, this is the only reliable way to get more attacks. It's this late in the build order because you need the other combo pieces first to capitalize on them with more Attacks.

Lightning - Electromancy: +5 speed + lower your Inflexibility by 1. Inflexibility lowers your speed and damage and healing, so you need to keep it at 1.

Minor bonus: on Step or Prayer you gain 1 Charge and deal Lightning damage to a close enemy. Early on this can help you build up some Charges before you reach your enemies.

Prestige: Ormjarl. On entrance gives 3 Blue Wyrm familiars, which seem to apply Charges to their allies. On Summon, deals 100 Lightning damage to 1 enemy. This synergies very well with your helm to apply even more Doom to enemies.

So, how does this build play?

You try to shoot enemies at the furthest range you can engage them at. Early on that's range 4. With luck you can find a range 5 or 6 weapon.

I try to prioritize enemies further away from me with my attacks, because there's a bunch of procs that target other close enemies. If you keep your main attack sequence going and let these procs clear out other enemies, you'll deal more damage in one turn than when all procs target the same enemy your main attacks are targeting... because your target will die faster.

When there's no enemies in sight, try to step to places that have good line of sight but don't risk running into enemies at point blank.

Early bosses and ranged attackers can be dangerous because you don't have a lot of sustain yet. If possible, try to limit how many dangerous enemies can see you at once. Attacking enemies to summon allies will let you use them as decoys, which is safer than being the tank.

Remember: you're a glass cannon, not a sturdy tank.

Your first prayer is not ever meant to be used in this build. It's a counter that goes up to power your second and third prayer. Ideally you charge it early on, when enemies are relatively weak. If you want to avoid it getting reset to 0 by an untimely Divine Intervention, it makes sense to stop getting close to enemies once you have 40-45 charges. You'll occasionally bump into an enemy and gain an accidental charge through that. Or just don't get killed, then you don't have to worry about DI resetting these charges.

Prayer 2 is a heal that's useful early on to top yourself up before you enter the next area. It gets better with more charges in Prayer 1.

Prayer 3 once you get it will be what you always use as the first action in every new area. It inflicts all enemies with Sickness and Bleeding, which is the basis for healing ourselves.