Path of Achra: How to build Your first Character

This guide only covers basic choices concerning character builds. It does not cover basic concepts of the game, those topics are already covered by other excellent guides.

If you feel as overwhelmed as I did when making your first build choices: this guide is for you.

I’ll go through the life of a single character, explaining the choices I make along the way.

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20240707 V0.8 (guide) for V1.3 (game)

Starting a new character on The Path shows you, that there are many choices to pick from. However, if you just started playing PoA (=Path of Achra) those options will be unavailable to you and you’re left to pick a single combination:

Stran (Culture)

Amir (Class)

Achem (Religion)

Notice: Culture and Class summon familiars, while your Religion prevents some damage and counters a little. This sets us up for effects that synergize with familiars.

So for now my vision for my character is that our cute Tugar familiar and our Nomads do the fighting for us, while we hang back.

Starting the game we get our first level up for free!
There are 4 stats to pick from.

Strength
Encumbrance is still green (yellow arrow 1), so there’s no need to raise Strength.
Remember: you can gain Armor and max Life from sacrificing items.

Dexterity
Not our style today.
We don’t need block, dodge or speed, as our familiars will do the fighting for us.

Willpower
This is where it’s at! It’ll boost familiars (yellow arrow 2)!
Also it’ll improve our damage, healing and summons.

Vigor
This is the emergency option. Only ever pick this if you’re about to die.

So we pick Willpower and discovered a new synergy for our familiars: summons.

While choosing the right skills is important, don’t let that keep you from experimenting and picking whatever.

According to the vision we have for our character, we are going to search the skills for the key word ‘familiar’ (yellow arrow 1):

Out of the highlighted skills only the Element of LIFE has more than one skill pertaining to familiars.
Picking skills in this element will give us the best synergies for our build.

Comparing all skills for familiars, Overgrowth costs the most to learn. Surely that must mean it’s good, right!? Let’s learn Overgrowth as our first skill!

Overgrowth turns our familiars into plants and gives a few bonuses to those types of creatures.
Another skill that synergizes with the plant trait and familiars is Arboromancy.

What a lucky coincidence too: it costs 4 points, perfect for us.
Let’s pick Arboromancy as our second skill!

We are now ready for our first confrontation.

In combat we want to stay safe, while our familiars and summons fight for us.
Familiars will spawn in when we drop into a floor, summons will appear while turns pass.

We should make sure that our allies can tank for us and attack enemies, while we stay out of the way:

There should be terrain and allies surrounding us at all times. Meanwhile, we’ll just wait until our minions do their work, healing ourselves and spawning additional plants through prayer, if necessary.

So the basic combat controls boil down to:
1. Are we between an enemy and an ally? Yes => trade places with ally ; No => stand still (spacebar)
2. Are we getting seriously injured? Yes => prayer ; No => stand still (spacebar)
3. Are all enemies dead? Yes => tab to collect loot/end level ; No => stand still (spacebar)

Pretty quick it’ll be clear that we could use a damage boost.
Arboromancy and Overgrowth both share a synergy with Entangle. Boosting it seems like a good idea, so let’s learn Vinakinesis for 2 points.

Our allies clear enemies noticeably faster now!

Entangle seems to be doing wonders for us. There are two skills that we haven’t learned yet, which synergize with entangle: Piercing Vines and Master Entangle.
Piercing Vines doesn’t really do anything new, it mostly adds a damage over time bleeding effect; Master Entangle on the other hand adds a counter to enemies attacking us. Also looking at the name, it seems core to an Entangle build.

We pick Master Entangle and get closer to the final build idea of our character: a summoner who uses allies to Entangle enemies, while they hurt themselves trying to deal with the summoner directly.

It’s always good to understand what we want to play, because a clear vision leads to clear decisions.

Now that we have a clear direction to follow for our build, we choose the path that will result in items we can use well. The first one I found were these bracers:

Not amazing, but I’m happy to have them. Also I now feel comfortable to sacrifice all items of that type to boost this piece of equipment that I want to keep for a bit, as well as our life total.

We’ll put some points into Strength to make up for the additional Encumbrance whenever we’re gearing up.

Read items carefully, some of them provide antisynergy:

This skirt will for example seemingly help us, as we benefit from end of turn effects, but the additional inflexibility will severely reduce our hard-earned Willpower.

We fill the rest of our skills with Invigoration

and Innervation

as these will obviously boost our allies.

At this point some enemies seem to hurt us quite a bit. We definitely need to think about defense and regaining life, so we plan on rounding out our build with Life Chant.

But before we can get our regen up, it finally happens!!!

Now what? We unlock more options so we could try a different build.
But having experience with our summoner let’s think about WHY we died:

• We didn’t heal up enough
• Our Tugar was the only ally to consistently survive
• Enemies were able to get past our thinning allies easily

When we start another run with this concept, we should try to skill Life Chant as our fourth skill to take care of timely healing. And if we take Grove Cult instead of Life Chant we get some healing as well as allies.

Losing our allies besides Tugar isn’t an issue if we keep summoning reinforcements. That can be done by either finding items that summon allies or replacing one of our skills.

Our next run could for example use the following Skils:

1. Overgrowth
2. Arboromancy
3. Grove Cult – more initial allies and a bit of healing
4. Mass Mind – more summons per round
5. Master Entangle
6. Innervation
7. Invigoration

When 25 points are invested, Prestige Classes become available.

For our build we currently can choose between Paragon and Briar Mage.

Comparing the two we decide that Briar Mage synergizes better with us.

Note: take a close look at the prestieges’ items. The portraits equip items that exist in the game and are a good fit for standard builds.

Looking through Prestige Classes is probably the best source for build ideas you can have. If you take item and skills that synergize with a Prestige Class, you’ll certainly have a halfway decent build on your hands that you can expand upon.

I hope this guide gives you a good starting point to get into the game, start building characters and most importantly HAVE FUN!

Please let me know in the comments if this guide was helpful to you and/or if you have constructive criticism.