General Skills: Griffin School Techniques, Focus
Equipment:
Gear: Viper gear
Min. level requirement: Level 33 +25 Places of Power = 58 skill points
Recommended:
- Glyphs: Aard
- Runestones: Veles, Morana
- Runewords: Preservation, Replenishment
- Potions: Thunderbolt, Petri’s Philter, Tawny Owl, Maribor Forest
- Decoctions: Katakan, Ekimmara, Ekhidna
Summary:
Little is known of the Viper Schools teachings. We know that they are trained assassins and use poisons in their fighting style. Also it’s possible to deduce from some clues found in the game, that they’re trained to use short blades (unlike other Witcher schools) and their favored sign in combat is Aard.
These facts in mind, I created this “Apprentice of Letho” character build! He got his assassin codename “Black Mamba” because of his extremely fast fighting style – circling around fast attacks, poisoned blades and Aard knockdowns.
How it works:
- The foundation of this build is to take advantage of preparing right blade oils for battle
- Poisoned Blades in tandem with Venomous Viper swords innate poison ability almost guarantees that the enemy gets poisoned
- Protective Coating adds needed buff to damage resistance, as long as the right blade oil is equipped
- Aard is your main combat sign to use
- Crowd control and knockdowns for easy assassination style kills
- Griffin School Techniques, Focus, Aard glyphs and potions buff the sign intensity to reasonable state
- Feel free to mix your active sign skills depending on the situation you’re going to face!
- Ignis’ Firestream may be handy with certain enemies
- Active Shield offers healing, although this is not preferred because it lacks offense which Black Mamba craves
- Delusion and Puppet makes your Axii sign extremely handy when dealing with human opponents – a small of roleplaying element as you set your enemies to slay your assassination target perhaps?
- Refreshment keeps you healthy while Acquired Tolerance has allowed the usage of potions and decoctions
- Boost your sword damage and sign intensity to slay your target quicker!
- Muscle Memory and Precise Blows makes fast attacks deal reasonable damage
- Resolve is mainly used to keep adrenaline at full for Focus
- If opportunity arises, combine maxed adrenaline with Blizzard potion!
Pros and Cons:
+ Interesting build focusing on poison damage
+ Fun combination of combat, sign and alchemy skills
+ True assassin build
– Lacks damage output when comparing to other builds
– Some enemies can give hard time (elementals)
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