Picking a Build¶

A Lyonspyre character is four layers stacked on each other. Your skills are the spine. Your talents specialise you for the dungeon you're standing in. Your Affinity slots decide your set bonuses and your Ultimate. Your professions run alongside all of it and never cost a skill point. This page explains how the four fit together and how to make the first choices without regret.

Nothing here is permanent. Skills grow with use and can be saved as loadouts, talents refund for free, affinity levels are never lost when you switch, and every character can work every trade. Pick something that sounds fun and start hunting.

Start with a path¶

Character creation offers five paths. Each hands you starting skills, gear, and an Affinity school already assigned to every slot. The path is a head start, not a class.

Path	Starting kit	Affinity	Plays like
Warrior	Combat skills, a weapon, a shield, bandages	Tempest	Front-line melee. Simple to learn, durable, always wanted in a group
Mage	Magery, Eval Int, Meditation, a spellbook	Arcanum	Burst damage and utility from range. Fragile until Resist and Wrestling catch up
Ranger	Archery, a bow, arrows, bandages	Hawkeye	Kiting, hinders, and big hits from distance. Rewards positioning
Bard	Musicianship, Provocation, Peacemaking, Discordance at 50, plus Macing, Tactics and Healing, a lute	Tempest	Turns the room against itself, then cleans up. Instruments are craft-only, so guard the lute
Tamer	Animal Taming, Animal Lore, Veterinary, Healing, Wrestling, a bonded pet, plus a secondary combat skill of your choice at 50	Sylvan	A pet does the tanking while you heal and fight beside it. The slowest start and the strongest late game

If you can't decide, take Warrior. It teaches the combat loop, every dungeon wants one, and the skills carry into any melee template later.

Choose seven skills¶

You fight with seven skills at 100. The total cap is 700 and each skill caps at 100; both can be raised later with a Mote of Mastery (total, up to 750) and Scrolls of Mastery (one skill, up to 150). The rule from the old days holds: specialise. Seven skills at 100 beats fourteen at 50.

Templates that work:

Mage: Magery, Eval Int, Wrestling, Meditation, Resist, Tactics, Anatomy
Warrior: Tactics, Anatomy, Healing, a weapon skill (Swords, Macing, Fencing or Archery), Parry or Resist, and Magery at 30 to 50 for recalls and heals
Bard: Musicianship, Provocation, Peacemaking, Discordance, Magery, Resist, Meditation
Tamer: Animal Taming, Animal Lore, Veterinary, Magery, Eval Int, Meditation, Resist
Thief: Stealing, Snooping, Hiding, Stealth, Magery, Resist, Wrestling

Two notes that change the old math:

Crafting and gathering are not skills. Blacksmithing, Tailoring, Carpentry, Apothecary, Mining, Lumberjacking, Skinning and Fishing are professions, levelled 1 to 7 by doing the work, entirely outside the 700 cap. There is no crafter template to sacrifice fighting skills for. Every build can also be a smith, a miner or an angler.
Magic Resist is worth taking past 100. Every point past grandmaster keeps shaving boss spell damage, up to a 75% reduction at 150. See Skills.

Full skill-by-skill detail, including what Lyonspyre changes about each, is under Skills.

Spend talents for the place you hunt¶

Dungeon Talents are earned per dungeon and only work in the dungeon that minted them. Kill creatures in The Pit and you earn Pit points to spend on Pit fights. Points in one place do nothing in another, so you build for the dungeon, not the character.

There are eleven archetype trees. Most run an Offensive path and a Defensive path plus a short Efficiency column, with a fork at the fourth tier where you pick one of two features and a capstone active at the top. You can spend at most 30 points in any one dungeon, which fills roughly two paths. Refunds are free and instant outside combat, and every archetype has three save slots per dungeon, so a tank build and a damage build can sit side by side.

A good first spend: put your first ten points into the Offensive path of the tree that matches your weapon, then start the Defensive path. Read your archetype's page under Talents for the rank-by-rank numbers.

Split your six Affinity slots¶

Every character has six Affinity slots and seven schools to tune them to. Matching slots unlock set bonuses at 2, 4 and 6 pieces, and whatever sits on your Weapon slot powers your Ultimate.

The question is how you split six slots:

6/0: one school everywhere. All three set tiers, the strongest Ultimate proc rate, maximum depth.
4/2: your main school's strong perks plus a second school's entry perk. A melee fighter with 4 Tempest and 2 Bulwark hits hard and mends fast.
2/2/2: three entry perks at once. Less depth, more breadth, three schools levelling in parallel.

Levels are stored per slot and per school forever, so you can rebuild any time. Understanding Affinity walks the loop in plain language.

Pick your professions on the side¶

Because professions live outside the skill cap, the choice is about what you want to make, not what you can afford. A smith keeps your own armour coming. A miner feeds the forge. An Apothecary makes the potions and food buffs every fighter wants. A carpenter builds bows and furniture. Level them as you play, at your own pace. See Professions.

Save the whole thing as a preset¶

Once a build comes together, the Presets tab in [profile saves your Regalia arrangement, talent build, affinity assignments and skill loadout as one named preset. One click applies all four. Keep a PvM preset and a PvP preset, or one per dungeon.

One rule for PvP¶

Talents, affinity, food buffs and regalia are PvM power. None of it applies against another player. When both sides of a fight are players, combat runs on skills, stats and gear alone. Build for the dungeon knowing that in a duel, only your seven skills come with you. See Combat.