The First Descendant Viessa build – skills and best loadout

How to unlock Viessa

If you select Viessa during the tutorial, she is unlocked permanently at no additional cost. But if you didn’t, you’ll need to collect resources and unlock her at Magister Anais. This lengthy grind will involve Void Intercept Battle and Fusion Reactor events. She sits at a decent spot on our character tier list so she’s worth the effort. Here’s what you need to unlock Viessa:

• Viessa Enhanced Cells
• Viessa Stabilizer
• Viessa Spiral Catalyst
• Viessa Code

Here’s how you can obtain these resources:

Viessa skills and abilities breakdown

Viessa might focus on support skills but don’t underestimate her. Here’s what you need to know about Viessa’s ice skills:

• Ice Sphere: A passive move that creates a floating spherical drone when you use a skill on an enemy affected by Ice Shackle. It flies towards the nearest enemy and explodes to deal a moderate amount of ice damage. Use the right modules to improve its damage.
• Frost Shards: Fire shards of ice that detonate on impact for burst damage to nearby enemies. This inflicts Ice Shackle on enemies. Modules can enhance shard blast radius and damage.
• Frost Road: As Viessa moves, she generates sheets of ice that boost her movement speed and debuff enemies with Ice Shackle. Rely on modules to increase buff duration and ice sheet size.
• Cold Snap: A wave of ice that damages enemies in a line. Ice Shackle is inflicted on foes hit by this ability. Boost wave size and damage with modules in The First Descendant.
• Blizzard: Toss a sphere that generates a blizzard that deals continuous ice damage to enemies. They are also hit with Ice Shackle. Once the blizzard ends, it explodes and deals more damage to nearby enemies. Modules will let you increase the duration, size, and damage of this ultimate move.

By latching enemies her Ice Shackles and detonating Ice Spheres on them, she’ll be able to clear mobs fairly easily. You can pair this with Lepic’s Traction Grenade for maximum impact. And her moves can take on bosses as well. Even their invulnerability-granting orbs can be wiped out with her Blizzard move. But remember that Viessa is pretty fragile, with poor shield recovery and HP. So try not to run into every enemy with Frost Road. We’ve summed up her strengths and weaknesses here:

And here’s a neat table that summarizes all the key values of Viessa’s abilities:

Tips to use Viessa’s skill combos in combat

Here are some tricks to making the most of Viessa as a support character who deals decent damage:

• Use abilities one after the other in quick succession to activate Viessa’s Ice Shackle and Ice Sphere passives. This will let you dish out some serious damage to mobs and bosses.
• While the slow debuff might not mean much at first, it scales well into harder opponents and bosses. And with teammates, it will let you make enemies easy pickings for more offensive abilities.
• Use Frost Road to give enemies the Ice Shackle debuff right away as you start a fight. You can then chain this with Ice Shards or Cold Snap to lob Ice Spheres at them.
• Opt for the right modules to enhance Viessa’s abilities in combat. While extending range might not sound like a big deal, it will let you trap more enemies for allies to wipe out.
• Ice Shackle lowers enemy action speed, movement, and fire rate. You can have up to four stacks of them on an enemy, even a boss. So use this to your advantage while detonating Ice Spheres on your foes.

Use modules that enhance your Ice skills. Image captured by VideoGamer.

Frozen Reactors are ideal for Viessa. Image captured by VideoGamer.

Opt for close-range guns. Image captured by VideoGamer.

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Viessa build loadout and recommended gear

As a support character that relies on getting close to deal more damage, here’s our ideal loadout for Viessa:

• Modules: Storm Fist, Skill Extension, Skill Expansion, Chill Specialist, Energy Collection
• Reactor: Frozen Mixture or Frozen Mechanics
• External components: Boost Max Shield, Max HP, and DEF
• Weapons: Thunder Cage, Nazeistra’s Devotion, The Last Knight

Best modules

The Storm Fist sub module is an orange mod which, when levelled up by Silion in Albion, boosts your max module capacity. So spend your Kuiper Shards there to optimise your module strategy in The First Descendant. Here are the modules we recommend for a levelling build of Viessa:

• Skill Extension: Improves your Skill Durations in combat.
• Skill Expansion: Considerably increases your Skill Effect Range.
• Chill Specialist: Boosts the power of all your Chill Skills.
• Energy Collection: You leech some MP from enemies.

Best reactor and external components

When it comes to reactors, here are the two items we recommend in-game for Viessa’s ice powers:

• Frozen Mixture: Grants a boost to Chill and Fusion types
• Frozen Mechanics: Grants a boost to Chill and Tech types

Remember to use the appropriate weapon mentioned in the reactor description to boost your Skill damage. As for the external components, here’s what you should focus on as Viessa:

• Max Shield: This bar will be restored after you take cover for some time.
• Max HP: You need health pickups to restore this so having more HP is better.
• DEF: Take less damage with these enhancements.

Best weapons

We recommend close-range to mid-range weapons for Viessa. Since you’ll have to get close to enemies to debuff them with Frost Road, you can lean into this with SMGs, handguns, and shotguns. Assault rifles are a great pick too. Try having guns with multiple ammo types to ensure you don’t run out of ammo mid-fight. Here are some weapons we recommend for Viessa:

• Thunder Cage submachine gun
• Nazeistra’s Devotion hand cannon
• The Last Knight shotgun