Soulframe Best Garren Rood Build

Welcome to our Garren Rood Build Guide for Soulframe. In this guide, we’ll explain how you can create a powerful Garren Rood build that deals high damage. The build is good for both solo and co-op play.

Garren Rood is an unlockable Pact in Soulframe. It allows you to summon spirit wolves to help you in combat.

Please note that this build guide is a Work in Progress. We will continue to update it as Soulframe evolves in the run-up to its full release.

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Table of Contents:

• Garren Rood Overview
  • Arcanics
  • Playstyle
• Best Virtues
• Best Equipment
  • Best Armour
  • Best Weapons
• Combat Arts Upgrade Priority
  • Short Blade
• Garren Rood Upgrade Priority

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Garren Rood Pact Overview

Royal tines thus graced in blue, Skyward bent to Mora true. Take ye the pact of Garren Rood, the great spirit stag of the Andurin Glades. Bare blessing and burden of the Dendrit herds through bounty of seedtime and hollow of frostfall, both. By grace’n crown and cloven pride, charge noble as Mora from horizon to rise.

Garren Rood is very prolific at staggering and stunning enemies. Behest stuns all enemies around you for a very long time, or until they take damage. This is one of Garren Rood’s most powerful abilities, allowing you to fight enemies one at a time. Garren Rood has decent survivability; it allows you to heal yourself with the Torment arcanic. The healing from Torment can also spread to nearby allies if you are playing in a group.

The Garren Rood Pact has affinity with the Spirit virtue. Increasing your Spirit makes your Arcanics last longer and boosts the damage of your Spirit attuned weapons. You could build into a different Virtue if you want, but it will be less optimal because Garren Rood has an innate boost to Spirit, so it can attain a higher maximum with Spirit than any other Virtue.

Garren Rood is currently in a rough state – its first Pact Art upgrades Idol Power, but Idols have currently been removed from the game as part of ongoing development. This means that your first Pact Art does nothing. Also, the Stampede ability is quite undertuned – what should probably be the defining Arcanic of the Garren Rood Pact looks very impressive but does very little damage and is very unreliable.

You can still become a powerful solo player or valuable group member with the Garren Rood Pact, and these shortcomings will surely be fixed in a future update – it just seems like Garren Rood drew the short stick in Preludes Update 10.

Garren Rood Arcanics

The Garren Rood Pact has the following Arcanics:

Garren Rood Playstyle

Garren Rood works great as a support build when you are playing with other people. This is thanks to its huge stagger and stun potential from Behest and Stampede, and Torment, which allows you to absorb health from an enemy and distribute it among your team.

This Pact often feels a little weaker in solo play, but the Torment Arcanic helps a lot in this situation, as it deals quite a lot of damage and heals your entire health bar. At low levels, you may find it easier to play more defensively and make plentiful use of Torment to deal damage and heal yourself.

Your Behest Arcanic can also be very helpful in solo play, particularly when you are heavily outnumbered. It applies a very lengthy stun to enemies. The stun ends when the target takes damage, so you can use this to stun a large group and take them on one by one instead of all at once, evening the odds.

Stampede deals a little bit of extra damage and can apply a small amount of stagger to enemies. It works best against a large group of enemies or one enemy with a large hitbox. Note that the small amount of damage from Stampede is still enough to cancel any ongoing Behest stun, so these two arcanics don’t work very well together. I only use Stampede when Behest is on cooldown.

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Garren Rood Build Best Virtues

The most important Virtue for the Garren Rood Pact is Spirit. You should put most or all of your points into Spirit.

Having high Spirit will increase the duration of your Arcanics (most notable for Stampede and Behest) and increase your damage with Spirit attuned weapons.

You can build into Courage or Grace instead if you want, but this is less than optimal because Garren Rood can attain a higher total amount of Spirit than either of the other Virtues. The only reason to do this is if you want to use a weapon type that does not contain a Spirit attuned weapon, which is quite rare.

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Garren Rood Best Equipment

In this section, we will explain the best armour to wear as Garren Rood and the best weapons to equip.

Garren Rood Best Armour Setup

Currently, the armour system in Soulframe isn’t very complicated. There are three armour stats – Physical, Magic and Stability.

• Physical reduces the damage you take from physical attacks, such as ordinary weapon strikes and arrows.
• Magic reduces the damage you take from all magical attacks, such as lightning and fire spells.
• Stability improves your resistance to stagger effects, making it harder for enemies to stun you or knock you to the ground.

All three of these stats add up to give you a total armour rating, which is visible in the top-right of your character menu.

There are currently no armour pieces or sets that grant special effects, so you should keep crafting better armour until you have the highest possible rating in each armour stat.

Note that it is sometimes better to have a balanced armour distribution that is a little lower on your overall armour stat. For example, having 5 points in each armour stat for a total armour of 15 is better than having 18 points all in physical armour.

Garren Rood Best Weapons

I’ve been having a lot of success with the Short Blade weapon type. With a Short Blade equipped, your character will dual-wield shortswords or daggers, allowing for rapid, high-damage attacks with a very generous Smite chance. After sufficient upgrades, your Smites will absorb HP from enemies, allowing you to easily sustain your HP even with Orengall’s lack of innate healing abilities.

Short Blades have a surprisingly decent amount of cleave, so you can hit several enemies with a single attack.

The main weakness of Short Blades is their low stagger, but your wolves help a lot with this by distracting enemies, and their bites will sometimes knock enemies over, too. This allows you to use one of the highest DPS weapon types in Soulframe and partially negate some of their largest downsides.

Make sure you obtain a Spirit Attuned Short Blade weapon; otherwise, your damage output will be quite low.

Garren Rood Best Sidearm

Sidearms are small weapons, usually in the short blade category. They can be equipped in your Sidearm weapon slot, allowing you to swap to that weapon at any time.

You can choose any Spirit attuned Sidearm. Since our main weapon also falls into the Short Blade category, we don’t need the Sidearm much. It is quite good for throwing, though, because the aiming is a bit imprecise with the dual-wielded Short Blade that we are using as a primary weapon.

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Combat Arts Upgrade Priority

As you use the weapons mentioned above, you will gain XP towards upgrading the Combat Arts for those weapon types.

In this section, we have some advice for levelling up your Combat Arts for this Garren Rood Build.

Short Blade

Short Blade is the most important weapon type for our Garren Rood build. Here is how I recommend you level up your Combat Arts for this weapon:

1. Smite
2. Perfect Throw
3. Momentum
4. Smite Rank 2
5. Smite Rank 3
6. Riposte
7. Swift Parry
8. Vaunt
9. Spectre Strike
10. Misdirection

Momentum is a great Combat Art for Short Blades. It builds up bonus damage on consecutive attacks, which plays very well with the rapid attack speed of daggers. Besides that, we want to get a high Smite chance to deal more bonus damage. Remember to press the Spirit Vision button when Smite procs on an enemy (look out for the glowing soul).

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Garren Rood Upgrade Priority

We recommend upgrading your Garren Rood Pact in the following order:

1. Herdheart
2. Iridis’ Favour
3. Rooted
4. Righteous
5. Akin
6. Wingspan
7. Sympathy
8. Voided
9. Akin, Rank 2
10. Iridis’ Favour, Rank 2
11. Iridis’ Favour, Rank 3
12. Iridis’ Favour, Rank 4
13. Saphene’s Gift
14. Everbound
15. Sympathy, Rank 2
16. Voided, Rank 2
17. Everbound, Rank 2
18. Everbound, Rank 3

Herdheart currently has no effect, since Idol Powers were temporarily removed from Soulframe. However, we have to spend one point in this Art to access the rest of the tree.

The most important Arts are Akin (reduces your Arcanic Cooldowns), Iridis’ Favour (increases your Spirit), Sympathy (allows you to heal on Smite) and Voided (increases Smite damage). We put our final few points into Everbound to increase maximum HP.

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