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The First Descendant Crossplay Beta Viessa

Small guide to the Cold-themed femme fatale of The First Descendant.

The First Descendant Crossplay Beta Viessa

“This could get messy!”

Important: If you are looking simply for some advice go to the.

Tips, Tricks and Synergies part. Hopefully you find it helpful.

Viessa

Viessa is one of the eleven playable characters currently in the game. She also has an ultimate version and is one of the three choices new players have when selecting a character in the beginning.

Her role is based around debuffing enemies by freezing them to death or long enough for you and your team to take them out. Her kit allows provides her with some decent baseline effectiveness in form of crowd control no matter the strength of her abilities nor that of her enemies. It makes her an ideal starting character with enough utility to be useful in high level as well.

Viessa lacks support, high damage dealing and survivability characteristics in form of tanking, nevertheless she synergizes well with teamplay and coordination. Her fast shield recovery allow to quickly get back into action, if you manage to successfully disengage with her.

Choosing you fights is important with her.

Disclaimer: Some of the tips can be useful for other characters as well or even all of them. This game is in an early stage, therefore this guide provides a lot of basic, but also advanced knowledge, however it is limited by the game’s current lack of content.

Story

After a smuggler band that she was part of was disbanded by the Albion Posse, Viessa was forced to toil as a digger at the Snowfield of Dawn. She had to serve her sentence there to be reinstated as a citizen.

Her job was to dig up the Colossi buried there, but disaster struck not long after she began her sentence. A Collossus buried everyone in a deluge of snow. Viessa was barely rescued, and her Arche was triggered during the treatment that followed.

Then on the condition that the sentence be commuted, she began her service in the Descendant Corps.

Viessa didn’t use to belong anywhere but is now considered a capable Descendant. If her face looks flushed, it means that a teammates has just complemented her.

Viessa tends to give others the cold shoulder, because she has lost everything that once meant something to her.

Gameplay

“Wanna feel a little chill?”


Viessa

Viessa’s abilities are cold themed. The status effect of frozen enemies is called “Ice Shackle”. Do not confuse it with “Frostbite”, which happens when you get frozen. Viessa is not immune nor resistent to Frostbite.

Viessa

Stats


Viessa’s only defence is her high shield capacity.
Viessa
Nevertheless high is in this case relative as her shields are still significantly lower than her health pool. Making this advantage closer to being irrelevant when playing aggressive. Her shield recovery bonus is noticable however and is the main reason why her shields are so helpful for her survivability. Even in combat the difference is noticable and it is recommended to disengage for a moment with her to recover her defense.

Noticable is her mediocre MP pool. Leaving you with small reserves when using her abilities often.

Getting to her abilities. Viessa has four abilities and one passive skill. 3 Fusion and 2 Tech classified abilities.

All of them help with Debuffing and crowd controlling the enemy, while providing decent damge output. Especially in combination with her passive skill. Every ability deals damage, the only exception being Frost Road.
Her Ice Shackles (the freezing effect) add additively to each other.
This means f.e.
Stage 1 Ice Shackles + Stage 3 Ice Shackles = Stage 4 Ice Shackles; which is the highest stage meaning essentially you froze them completely for a short moment. The duration is refreshable.

Abilities

Frost Shards-Fusion

Launches Frost Shards towards the direction, which inflicts stage 2 Ice Shackles on direct hit and stage 1 on an AoE hit.

By far not her fanciest ability, but useful for priming your enemies with Ice Shackles. The damage is only significant against cannon fodder.

Frost Road-Fusion

“Smooth as Ice!”

You gain 30% more movement speed and 10% more max shields. Additionally you leave a path of ice sheets behind you. The ice sheets inflict stage 2 Ice Shackles.

This ability provides a lot of utility and helps you if you find yourself about to be surrounded looking for a quick way to escape. The 10% shield increase is useful to tank incoming chip damage on your retreat.

Cold Snap-Fusion

You throw ice sheets in front of you. Inflict stage 2 Ice Shackles.

Due to its short range, this ability is essentially another melee attack with a wider hit zone and slowdown. However it has a lot of synergies and because of her fast casting speed it fits good into Viessa’s gameflow

Blizzard-Tech

You create a snow storm that freezes everything in its zone. Every frozen enemy has a zone around them that deals damage to nearby enemies. The AoE inflicts 3 Ice Shackles and the final explosion inflicts 4. The Ice shackle cap is 4 which means 90% slowdown.

High damage potential and good crowd control. Only limited by its range and cooldown and.

Passive Ability

Ice Sphere-Tech

Every time you create Ice Shackles you gain Ice Spheres that fly around you and deal damage as well as Ice Shackles to enemies.

This passive provides additional damage and crowd control rounding up Viessa’s role as debuffer.

Important: Your Ice Shackles slow down bosses as well. However at a much reduced rate.

Tips,Tricks and Synergies

Foresight should be your biggest ally. You should always plan your engagements, as well as coordinate with your team.

Knowing enemy spawn patterns and beingquick high on your toes heels will keep you alive, where even tanks might go down even with Viessa’s squishyness in mind.
Not only will this greatly increase your survival rate, it will also help you with your CC abilities.

Have at least one hard hitting handgun. Mod on high damage, high critical damage/chance and weakpoint damage. I recommend Assasins’s Edge. However the choice is yours. For the reason why read the next tip.

Your grappling hook is a great tool on Viessa. More than on the average Descendant. Besides the obvious mobility aspects it can be used for fighting and espcially stunning as well. Combine this with your CC and you are very effective at stunning elite versions of your enemy.

To execute this you will have to look on an enemy and be in grappling hook range. With these conditions met you will now grapple on to the enemy and perform a melee or sub attack. Congratulations you stunned (or killed) the enemy (with style). Now besides the obvious style points this way you will always guarantee a stun with your melee attack. This is perfect for fighting f.e. enemies with shields. However to get the most use out of it, you should use Frost Shards before the attack and afterwards Cold Snap. The combined Ice shackles from these attack guarantee a stage 4 freeze on the enemy allowing to line up easy and quick headshots.

Not important for the execution but I recommend using the Kicking Module, as it feels and looks pretty good on her and this form of use.

Important:This does not work on Boss type and Commander type enemies.

Fire Frost Shard at the invincibility granting orbs of the commander. You will usually hit all four of them.

Valby’s Laundry Bomb synergizes really well with Viessa’s Blizzard. Look out for Valby players and together you can get some crazy damage.

“How dare they break MY SHIELD!”

While not as fast as Bunny Frost Road gives you a decent boost and is best used as an escape or utility ability, be careful when using it early, as it could have been your or your teammate’s lifesaver.

While perhaps not incentivized by her lack of defensive capabilities besides her shield stats and rather glass cannon like performance sometimes, because of that you should try to stay in a Close Quarter Combat like zone.

One reason is because of your abilities, the other is because of their melee synergies.

Adaptive and nimble behaviour will be more rewarded with her than static gameplay.

Viessa

Beware of Trackers. While they are pretty much cannon fodder, they pose a threat when allowed to mass up, as they are essentially your counterpart on the enemy side. Their freeze can be refreshed so you can be chain stunned. Additionally their mortar like projectile arc can hit you behind cover. Finally they cause constant damage in addition to freezing you. This means that even if they aimed for someone else and don’t continue to attack you, they will prevent shield regeneration, removing your most important life insurance.
Fortunately they only appear in the Sterile Lands. However you will have to go there if you want to farm material for Viessa’s Ultimate version, so you better get used to fighting them.

Written by Finni

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