Underrail – Psychic Grenadier Build

Starting stats

End game stats

Here we see our end game. Our goal is to reduce psi cost to the greatest extent possible. While also creating all of our own gear, having a glut of powerful grenades and consumables, and controlling enemy movement while maximizing our own. We’ll go over this in more detail in the tactics section after discussing powers and equipment.

As a couple notes, feats are all in order and this build is very skill rich, frankly I had more skill points than I knew what to do with and you should feel free to move them around. Additionally I would say every feat after level 14 is not required to make the build function. Go with whatever works for you at that point. (I’d still take empowered metathermics though for ridiculous endgame power)

Recommended gear

In an effort to not make this guide too dense we’re gonna break this up into parts.

1부. 갑옷

Armor consists of four pieces. Our energy shield, foot gear, chest armor, and our headgear. These are all straight forward single choices.

Our chest armor is going to be the highest quality tactical vest we can craft, with a psi beetle carapace and black cloth. This gives us great mechanical protection, and enhances our psi and stealth skills.

Energy shield is our highest quality materials again. I prefer a low-medium shield modulator, with a high efficiency energy converter. With the power management feat we will easily reach 2000 shield HP.

Foot gear will be Black cloth tabi boots. This enhances our stealth and movement points, be sure to always update them with the highest quality cloth possible as that directly increases your movement points and speed.

Head gear is slightly less straightforward as we have multiple good options here. The first being the normal psi band. Our only psi school is metathermics, so all bands will be metathermics bands. After that we always add the enhancement that reduces psi cost, from there choose either a modification that enhances a specific spell, or the modification that increases crit chance. Simple as.

Our last headgear option is the cyclops eye. Which super powers our strongest spell by a huge margin, useful when facing robots and temperature resistant enemies

2부

소모품

Grenades are a big part of the build, we have access to a large amount of AOE attacks in our psionic powers, and grenades push that into a critical mass of explosive power that let us destroy large groups of enemies near effortlessly. We have great chemistry and electronics to make the highest level EMP grenades, frag grenades, HE grenades for bots, and Plasma grenades.

Be sure you’re always stocking up on crafting material for this purpose.

The taser is a very simple utility device that stuns an enemy in melee range for 1 회전하다. Despite that its easily one of the best utilities in the game, get one early in the game and keep one on you until the very end.

We have high biology and can craft every drug in the game. The stand out ones being adrenaline shots for an extra cast, morphine to help reduce damage, and focus stims to increase crit chance. Otherwise just craft whats available to you, you can craft everything and almost every drug is useful.

전술

This build is really straightforward in operation, keep the enemy at long range, blow them up from long range.

Theres a couple ways we achieve this from the very beginning to the very end. Our first feats are sure step and sprint, sprint is self explanatory, sure step lets us walk over caltrops like they’re not there. If you run into a hard fight, set up a killing field then get the enemy stuck there as they try to get to you. The movement penalties from cold spells and caltrops brings even fast enemies down to a pathetic crawl, where they will inevitably be killed from the sheer quantity of spells you’re slinging, and grenades you’re throwing.

When the enemy gets too close we have plenty of tools to deal with them there too, even if its less efficient. We can stun them with tasers, freeze them in place with cryostasis, catch them in nets, or panic them with pyrchokinetic stream. That last one still does high damage in close range so can outright kill certain enemies.

Be sure to use the destabilization spell to make your killing fields even more deadly. an extra high damage explosion from that spell can easily finish off whats left of a group.

One important note is that we are absolutely trying to minmax our spell cost as much as possible. The more AOE spells we can throw out the better. We want to get past 50% psi cost reduction as soon as possible. Following the feat and gear recommendations here will take us there.

Once you get plasma beam you should have enough psi cost reduction bonuses to have reached 50% psi cost or less. Late game is a lot of chucking plasma beams around and one shotting everything in your path.

The final section will be geared to players new to the game. If that doesn’t apply to you then I hope you enjoy the build! Please leave a comment if you have any improvements or criticisms, and thank you for reading.

New player guide

This build requires a teeny bit of meta knowledge to get off the ground. If this is your first or second play through please read this.

The first bit to know is that quinton requires you to do a quest for him to learn your first spell. Which requires you to use a crossbow to kill a rathound with special bolts. You’ll have a really bad time actually killing the thing with only the crossbow. So buy 1-2 molotov cocktails from quinton when you speak to him, shoot a rathound with a single special bolt, then throw the cocktail at it to kill it and gain your first spell. You can now do the first stage as normal.

This build sucks at killing robots until you get our final spell. The third mission requires you to fight robots, they can be mostly avoided after that until you get plasma beam. So here is how to beat the GMS bots. You want to buy 2-3 HE grenades at the armory, and maybe 1 EMP grenade as well. There will be more EMP grenades in GMS. You want to find a door near a camera and trigger the camera. Wait for the bots to come, run into the door and close it behind you. Open and close the door each turn until the bots are all piled up on it. Once every bot on the floor is there kill them all at once with EMP and HE grenades.

Junkyard will be straightforward for this build.

Let me know if you get stuck and I’ll give you some advice. This is build is proven to beat the hardest difficulty so you should do just fine!

Psychic powers breakdown

This is going to be a general breakdown of the metathermics powers, and how to use them effectively.

This is the first spell we acquire, it fires a single ice projectile from long range. Doing medium damage and causing our enemy to be slowed. This is your bread and butter spell, spam it from long range to keep your enemy slowed and at a distance, it has a very cheap psi cost and does good damage when paired with a headband that boosts it, medium damage otherwise, we will use this the entire game.

This is our second spell, it launches a fireball at slightly less range than cryokinesis that does splash damage. works best when paired with a grenade right after. When you get pyromaniac at level 8 it gives a decent chance of igniting an enemy, causing them to be panicked and run. You’ll start a lot of fights like this.

Another spell from Quinton. This one works a bit differently in that it will consume all available action points to make the fire stream last longer. This is our only close range spell and is often a get out of jail free card when we lose the distance we want to keep, as pyromaniac has a good chance of panicking the enemy if we cast at full action points. Keep this in your back pocket when your personal space is violated or when your enemies stand in a convenient line.

We get this one at the same time as pyro stream. It freezes the target making them unable to act. The more stacks of chill they have, the longer they’re frozen. This WILL freeze robots for 1 turn so keep that in mind. Using your other cold spells to chill a tough boss target then freezing them for 5 turns is a great delaying tactic.

This spell is when we really start using combos. When cast on a target they receive a status affect that lasts for two turns. If they die while under the influence of the spell they will explode, doing damage equal to the amount of health they had when the spell was applied. That damage also scales with your psi skill and can get really really high. Apply it to enemies with high health and poor armor for max damage.

This spell combined with a good grenade and pyrokinesis will wipe large groups of enemies in a single turn. Later when we unlock plasma beam it becomes extra easy to blow someone up from very far away.

A very powerful ranged spell that does damage over a huge area. This is easily one of the most powerful spells in the discipline and can be built around on its own. Open combat with this and cast it at every opportunity

A really weird spell that sets you on fire as well as making you immune to flames. You also set the ground on fire all around you. Has a few super useful niches. The first being that it removes cold air gas around you in the few places thats an issue. Its also very useful against crawlers and other stealthed enemies as they will refuse to step on the flames, giving you time to detect them. Can also be used to flame off chokepoints, as again the enemy wont step on huge flames on the ground.

Cryo Barrier/Cryo shield

You can experiment with these when you find them, but theyre so niche as to be useless in the majority of scenarios, i’m not even going to describe them, pretend they dont exist

The last spell we can possibly get and by FAR the best. Our build revolves around this one spell to function and it is why we are trying to reduce psi cost as much as possible. You fire a plasma beam that needs to travel a certain distance before reaching full damage. Keep your enemies past arms length and you’ll devastate them with absolutely brutal volleys of plasma. This spell kills everything in the game effortlessly besides the robots in the DLC, we need lots of EMPS for them on top of our plasma beam. Using the cyclops eye is reccomended in fights vs robots as you wont be using your other spells anyway, in general we still like having the rest of ours spells though.