Hello, Solo-raiders! 👋
Welcome back to Hero’s Path, where we take a deeper look at one of the game's specializations and break down what makes them tick. We've talked about the Assassin, and today we’ll be talking about the one spec a portion of you were craving the most: the Primalist.
The Primalist is a specialization built around elemental power and, most importantly, Totems. You have your own abilities to deal damage and actively fight your enemies, but the real heart of the Primalist is setting up Totems that continuously deal damage over time. Instead of relying entirely on your own attacks, you're creating a little network of elemental destruction around the battlefield and letting it do the work alongside you.
To place your Totems, you'll enter Totem Placer mode, choose the Totem you want to deploy, and then jump straight back into the fight to keep dealing damage with your own abilities. The idea is to constantly balance your personal damage with your Totems, making sure they're correctly buffing each other so they'll have the biggest impact while you continue dashing around and beating the crap out of your enemies. So, basically, this is a class for all the micromanagers out there.
The most important part of the Primalist is, of course, the Totems. You can choose from Totems tied to different elements: Fire, Water, Air, and Lightning. Each one brings its own effects and purpose to your build. Totems have their own lifetime, which means you’ll need to pay attention to when they’ll expire, on top of managing your cooldowns. So, in the midst of battle, you need to worry about your health and cooldowns and your totems, on top of the enemy's health and mechanics. Hope you have good situational awareness!
Totems aren't necessarily independent sources of damage either, some can buff other Totems or even your own abilities, allowing you to create combinations that adapt to how you want to play and what you prioritize. Also, not every Totem is focused on attacking. For example, the Air Totem focuses on healing and boosting you rather than directly dealing damage, giving you another tool to work with depending on what your build needs.
We also have a little quality-of-life mechanic to make sure the Primalist doesn't become one with nature and literally plant themselves in one spot just to avoid losing their Totems. If you move too far away from your Totems, you can invoke the Totems that are still active as you place the new one, allowing you to bring your setup with you as you move through the raid instead of having to constantly stop and rebuild everything from scratch.
So, between choosing your Totems, paying attention if they’re alive, managing your cooldowns, taking advantage of their interactions, and making sure they're supporting your own abilities at the right time... there's actually a lot going on. The Primalist is, at its core, a specialization about micromanaging a whole bunch and finally becoming the new Avatar.
Elemental Brand is one of the Primalist’s core abilities. When applied, it’ll simply mark an enemy, multiple brands can stack on the same target. On its own, the brand doesn’t deal damage or generate any resources, but over time, it evolves into Elemental Overload. Elemental Overload deals elemental damage to the marked enemy while also generating Soul Power, the Primalist’s main resource.
Primordial Strike is a simple but important part of the Primalist's rotation. It deals a small amount of damage, but has a 50% chance to apply Elemental Brand to your target. After the first hit, it evolves into Elemental Fury. Elemental Fury deals almost twice the flat damage of Primordial Strike, and it also guarantees the Elemental Brand every time it hits. It also gives your Totems a 25% chance to apply Elemental Brand as well, meaning your Totems can now help you build up those Brands while you're busy dealing damage yourself.
Now, talking about mastery, there are plenty of ways to shape your Primalist through the skill tree. The goal isn't to have one single "correct" way to play the spec, but to give you different ways to lean into the mechanics you enjoy most. Whether you want to build around your Totems, push your elemental damage as far as possible, or find some weird combination that we didn’t even think about, there's room to experiment and make the Primalist your own.
You can take upgrades that reward you for having all of your Totems active at once, giving you an additional and particularly powerful Totem to add to your setup. You can increase your Totems' lifetime or, if you're more interested in raw elemental destruction, you can invest in stackable increases to your Elemental damage. We want to give you guys enough choices that your skill tree feels like it's actually about deciding what kind of Primalist you actually want to play.
And since you guys seemed to enjoy this breakdown when we did it for the Assassin, here’s one example of the damage distribution a Primalist could have.
And that's the Primalist! It's definitely one of the more complicated specializations, with a lot going on between your own abilities. There's a lot to keep track of, and getting the most out of the spec means paying attention to all of those moving parts. But if you're willing to put in the effort and learn how everything fits together, the payoff can be MASSIVE.
Look at that, you made it to the end! Are you interested in participating in playtests and getting to know more about what the devs are doing? Check out our discord!
Thanks for the support and see you in the next one 😉