Crowfall: In-Depth Champion Guide

In this post, I want to give you an in-depth guide for the CHAMPION, including all promotion classes.

I’ve been playing the champion for a couple of months now and I feel quite familiar with it. I did a lot of research so I wanted to share those information with you in this guide.

I’m going to cover…:

• the passive training,
• the playable races,
• the talents and abilities,
• what equipment I would recommend,
• the attributes that you should focus on and what there is consider,
• the stats that all the combination of the former lead to, and,
• last but not least the disciplines that you can equip and that are a good choice in my opinion.

PASSIVE TRAINING

So let’s start with the passive training!

For COMBAT, you will have to start with training the COMBAT BASICS up to 75%. Those are how I set the skills. I definitely take the attack power, those critical hit tips more attack power the hard control intensity since this increases the duration of the stun in the knockdowns which I’m doing a lot.

A very good second choice is the MOVE CONTROL INTENSITY, since you’re going to slow a lot. Especially if you’re going with the illusionists discipline and you’re going to take organic armor penetration, physical armor penetration and the elemental armor penetration so you can get to that last pip on the top tree.

Just pick any path that you like. I personally took this one and then you can max out the last pip. This is pretty cool because it gives you an additional 100 health. Then it’s up to your personal preference if you go down the armor tree and specialize into plate, if you’re going with the pit fighter promotion class or mail if you’re going with the barbarian or the alpha warrior.

For the WEAPONS SPECIALIZATION, if you want to go more offensive:

• first you go weapons,
• then melee and
• then the great melee weapon.

AVAILABLE RACES

Available races for the champion are:

• the Centaur
• the Half-Giant
• the Minotaur, and
• the Stoneborn

If you want to learn more about the races, check out my last video and guide here. I’m going to skip this here since I already got it covered and we have a lot of other stuff to talk about.

TALENTS

So let’s talk about talents!

The first talent we want to take is SPINNING BACKFIST, because we have to take it. Just to talk about the skill a little, be aware that the first skill is going to deal crushing damage. So this will be especially good when you’re playing with a mace and the kicks and ability which is the second in the chain will blind enemies so they won’t see for quite a while.

Then here we have guts which increase our critical chance. This is hard to get by so we take all of them. Same goes for armaments this gives us 15% more critical damage.

Then the leap power that’s our main movement ability. We can use this twice and we’ll also deal damage with it. The leap ability will have a special effect depending on which specialization class you will go into.

Next thing we want to take is THROW HURLBAT because you can apply this. This is a ranged ability so you can apply this over 40 meters. The people you attack, especially squishies, will run away from you. So it’s good to slow them because you want to attack them.

The vicious stomp is a very important ability. You have the first one, just use regular damage and the second chain you have the choice between disarming shout, which will suppress the enemy for six seconds, suppress prevents a character to use abilities OR the rend is great to apply damage because this applies of bleed that will deal damage over time decent damage. so we take that as well.

The exploration slot and the massive cleave is the next ability here. I would take at least one point.

What we definitely want is WHIRLING PAIN because here we’re also going to have synergies depending on the promotion class you’re going to take.

We’ll also always gonna want the 3 points in domination: this gives us 150 extra attack power. This is our bread and butter where we get our damage up.

The minor discipline slot here is also an obligatory take in my opinion. Also here the critical strike should be improved by one, which gives us again 3% of critical strike.

The armor penetration is something you should always take up to 3 points. You will be dealing a significant amount with basic attacks so this should also be skilled at 3 pips.

Here again, the minor discipline slot is obligatory. The control defense depends on whether you are going to be stunned a lot. What I usually do here in the middle is I always take those obvious choices.

So the second wind ability heals you for 25% of your total health once you drop below 50 health. This is excellent for survivability and you should always take this ability in your passive slots as well.

Those two you should also always take: The major discipline slots because you will want to equip major disciplines. My preferred build here – no matter if you want to deal damage or if you want to fulfill on the role – is the pit fighter because it allows you to where played are more which increases your survivability. In general, it’s easier for you to survive on the battlefield so this increases your personal healing modifier.

The next skill we want to pick is basically all in your specialization class. So here we get an extra 150 attack power. The talent leap to safety enhances our leap to heal us when we are more than 30 meters away from the closest enemy. After the second leap, when we are below 50 health, this can only occur every 90 seconds.

Our retaliate now also restores stamina over 7 seconds. We get the invincible warrior ability which is an alternative ultimate to the neckbreaker. This is also a heal over time that applies a barrier great for survivability. And here our whirling pain that we picked in the middle also gives us a damage preventing barrier.

The almighty hugeness improves our maximum health and increases the amount healed by Ultimate Warrior.

So, of course, we take the pit fighter ability for the passive where whenever we heal ourselves we get an extra 150 attack power. So whenever you take the pit fighter specialization you should always pick the Ultimate Warrior because of the passive talents improving your Ultimate Warrior.

Whatever specialization you pick, you always want to pick only one of those 3 warrior types because they share the same resource. You don’t want to waste one of your points on one of the other two warrior abilities.

So ALWAYS ONLY PICK ONE of those.

Now, let’s talk about the other two specialization classes. For those two, you always want to take all 3 of those points.

Go for the Alpha Warrior if you want to play a bit more damage focus and say you don’t need the extra survivability that the pit fighter gives you, then, of course, you take those extra 150 attack power.

You take this extra 30% critical hit chance. You take the dominance smashing where the first ability of your basic attack grants you 1 point of dominance whenever you critically hit with it.

Butcher improves the rend ability to reduce the enemy critical strikes defend for 7%. This means that whenever you have a bleed on the target you deal extra damage with your critical hits.

The dominant leap also increases your leap to create a point of dominance whenever you leap. So, you want to use this twice per CD and as often as possible to stack up the dominance power.

Creating and consuming dominance is a mechanic of the Alpha Warrior. What basically happens here is that whenever you use the leap or hit critically with 1 of your basic attacks, you generate one stack of dominance which is indicated around your class icon down here.

Certain abilities are a guaranteed critical hit when they consume 1 pip of dominance.

• Your neckbreaker gets the cost reduced to 350 and consumes 1 point of dominance when it critically hits.
• Barbarian also increases your armour penetration by an additional 3%.
• And the Alpha Warrior increases your critical strike chance by 5% for 15 seconds whenever you spend 1 point of dominance.

So, this is synergy wise pretty interesting because you automatically crit when you spent 1 point of dominance.

The 3^rd promotion class I want to talk about is the Barbarian.

The first skill here improves your movement control intensity by 7%. It’s great for slowing, blinding and knocking down your targets. It also improves your attack control intensity by a total of 21 %. The next talent enhances your brutal warrior.

So, the regular ability inflicts a knockdown and damages enemy. And by applying a barrier of 20% of your maximum health this ability here enhances this brutal warrior to also reset the cooldown of spinning backfist and kicking sand. So, this means extra damage and more blinding enemies.

Whenever you use Ultimate Warrior, this ability enhances your whirling pain to first slow the enemies and then suppressing the enemies.

The death from above enhances your leap to also inflict knockdown when hitting enemies. The radius of this ability isn’t too wide, so you have to aim quite thoroughly.

If you really need a cc machine in your fight that has high mobility, the barbarian is really good to knock down people and allow your team to pump this damage out. And, of course, you get the barbarian passive which increases the damage bonus by 15% in combat and the movement speed by 25% whenever you apply a crowd control effect.

So, also, when you stun, slow or blind people, you get this extra damage and this extra movement speed.

The remaining 8 points that we have left, I usually put in outrage to get faster reach rate regeneration inside of combat and slower rage loss outside of combat.

And I usually put an extra 3 points in fortification to increase the resist all by another 3%.

The remaining 2 points should really be spent on your preferences.

Since I usually use my champion for harvesting as well, I take the extra stamina.

Here are the talent trees again for you to check them out again.

EQUIPMENT

What I want to note regarding equipment is that:

• the alpha warrior can only wear mail,
• the pit fighter can wear plate and
• the barbarian can also wear mail.

The CHAMPION can wear great excess as well as great maces.

The statistics you want to have on a great axe is:

• attack power
• critical damage
• critical strike and dexterity, as well as
• final damage modifier

You will get attack power anyway but you don’t need to focus on that to value caps.

I’m gonna explain later what this means in detail.

The value on the chest piece is preferably damage bonus. It should be crushing when you’re using a mace and it should be slashing when you are using a great axe.

The attributes critical amount ore an critical chance ore is for harvesting so whatever you’re harvesting get that harvesting bonus on your armor.

The preferred values on your boots, helmet and gloves are anti-critical strike, unless you want to go with something else, because anti-critical strike helps you against any type of damage that you were receiving.

Regarding jewellery, you should aim for rings with critical strike dexterity and final damage modifier or critical strike and final damage modifier and personal healing modifier if you are playing a pit fighter, because the pit fighter benefits greatly from the personal healing modifier as well.

Regarding the necklace, I would go for:

• attack power,
• critical damage, and
• health regeneration.

When you click on details, this opens up this detailed stat part.

Depending on whether you are using a great axe, you should try to maximize the slashing armor penetration as well as the slashing damage multiplier. If you have a great mace, those should both be aimed for crushing. Final damage modifier helps you with both weapon types.

Other values you should focus on are:

• the armor value, so you can mitigate more damage,
• the barrier bonus, which increases your shield
• the anti-critical strike chance, and
• the personal healing modifier, if you are playing the pit fighter.
• Special utilization for the alpha fighter specialization: you should try to maximize your critical damage bonus since when you consume dominance you will automatically create critical hit anyway.
• And with the barbarian you should go for hard control and movement control modifier.

In case you have any campaign badges from the early campaigns, I can highly recommend to equip the trial of Valkyn which increases your final damage modifier by 2%.

There is also a batch which increases the bleed damage. But still, I wouldn’t go for that with a bleed damage, since it’s only the bleed by 1% and you’re going to deal a lot of damage with other abilities as well.

So, I think the trial of Valkyn is far more valuable here.

Before we go to the base disciplines, I want to talk about the BASE VALUES to the right.

Your primary attribute is basically strength. You should put points into strength as long as your attack power reaches a value where you will get to the theoretical attack power cap of 1000, subtracting the amount of attack power that your abilities passive abilities and disciplines give you.

On my champion, for example, I tried not to get over 700 attack power, since I was using the pit fighter specialization, which gives me an extra 150 attack power whenever I heal myself and the force mage where my auto attacks have a chance to create a barrier that mitigates damage and additionally give me another 100 attack power.

So, with those two additional bonuses that add up to 250 attack power, I want to make sure that my base character doesn’t lose those 250 extra attack power.

That’s why I stopped putting in strength and put them rather in dexterity in order to get my critical strike and my resist rate up.

You should also keep in mind that the attack power on your weapon, rings and equipment also raise your attack power.

So, I advise you when you get a vessel to first make sure that you equip all the items before you spend those points in strength dexterity or whatever and then max out your strength.

Because all the points that go over the max are lost and are better spent in other values.

DISCIPLINES (This part is outdated, since Disciplines got updated. I’ll rework this once we get closer to beta – I updated the screenshots of the Disciplines at least…)

Now we get to the last point: the disciplines.

I usually run my champion pit fighter with blade master and force match if I want to go for damage.

But, at the time of making this guide, I would even prefer the illusionist. I’ll explain to you what those do just in a minute.

So, I basically started off with that. I had made the decision for myself that I wanted to go with the pit fighter because in larger fights the high sustain is key for staying alive, especially if you’re new to the game.

So, this helped me a lot to just stay alive long enough to make damage. 

But now, I came to the conclusion that I don’t have that much impact on the whole battle because I was going for the tankyness in the beginning and there I found a good foundation with the pit fighter and then I thought “okay, how can I deal out this consistent damage that’s actually useful?”

So, of course, single target damage appeared quite nice.

The thing is, with the rend you already have a quite good ability output for a bleed.

So, I was looking for a second ability and I found one on the blade master. That forced me to switch from MACE to an AXE. So, basically you have those two bleeds that you can dish out. I actually did some number crunching on that and figured out that my damage is actually with 90k damage over 2 minutes on the 3 practice dummies with all white equipment like basic self-crafted white gear.

So, if you equip yourself with white gear from war tribes you should have around the same numbers, I guess. Unless they changed something.

And, so I thought about what a good 2^nd discipline could be. That brought me to knife grinder.

So, what knife grinder does, and what I was interested in, was to tenderize. So, to get a stackable bleed mitigation debuff. But it wasn’t significant.

In the same two minutes, I lost about a bit less than 20% damage (around 17-18% damage).

I’d say knife grinder actually reduced my damage for me equipping it.

So, I thought now that’s not an option. I’ll have to look for something else.

And then what I basically ended up with was illusionist on the same target, because when you take those base numbers, what it does is you have 2 passives.

Usually, I have only room for equipping one of them.

We still have to talk about which abilities and skills to equip.

So, I would leave out hotfoot because it only slows people on your last basic attack.

But since you have the hurl bat (which is a ranged ability) up all the time, this is actually better.

So, you can always keep the damage buff that phantom veins give you up which increases your damage against slowed enemies. At the time of making this guide, it’s around 20% I think, which is massive.

And if you are already live, if you’re still low on attack power, you get this buff with a 45 second cooldown, which increases your attack power by 150. And, of course, you can get invisible.

They nerfed the champion too much for that to be true, but I still love him.

I still like to fight with him and he’s still very strong. He just stays alive and alive players usually deal the most damage.

But to the next discipline another option is of course force mage so if you say him

I actually care a bit more about the whole dealing AoE damage out then you can go the second ability you get from the blade master it’s also an AoE plead that you apply.

So, throwing that into groups is always nice and kinetic boost also gives you 20% total damage boost.

So, actually, not this one person gets more damage when you’re singling out on one, but running the force mage with the same combination gives you a more steady AoE output of the neckbreaker and the blade master bleed (also AoE). When you time those right with the kinetic boost. You can also push enemies away which is a channelled ability and the reactive barrier which creates a barrier around you and gives you another 100 attack power.

Then, I also worked around a bit with mace builds.

One that I find very, very interesting but requires you to play together with a confessor, is the adjucator. So, with the adjucator you just have holy damage which can’t be mitigated. That is always good to throw out and cooldown and the prosecute if you have some confessors or paladins occasionally applying a stack of sin.

But confessors are really good at stacking sin on your target. But you would have to find one who doesn’t rely on consuming the sin himself to do the damage, because that’s what you want to do.

So, if you have a confessor that has the ability to apply in effects but doesn’t rely on consuming them to boast his own damage, then you could jump in with a champion maze educator build those prosecutes on white equipment.

I managed to dish out between 2500 and 3000 damage with one attack when they crit on white gear.

So, I think if you do this at good gear and you get your crit damage up and if you are well it won’t work with the definite grits that you get from the alpha warrior build.

So, yeah, just very high well you have to max the crit at 50 as fast as possible. Work with your attack power buff that you time right with those.

But the hardest part is so far to find a confessor, because when I find a confessor who is willing to do that, champions and confessors I think could potentially become the next burst machines of the next meter we’re coming to.

If this is going to happen, I might have added some inspiration to the community.

But I guess a lot of people have already seen that a prosecute on a champion works very well with a confessor.

I haven’t seen this yet, though, nobody has done it.

Some other mazes which are interesting if you were purely using the champion for levelling, you could go for a pit fight or maze build with Holy Avenger.

The Holy Avenger is a maze build where you have the battle chant and it creates an aura of hammers around you. The very interesting thing is that you can still continue casting other spells.

You have an AoE around you and you can keep playing. This is a very, very interesting thing and I have to say I always felt like playing this a bit as well with the champion because I think you don’t get that good numbers out of it if you can’t compare the values.

The whirling pain and the blood strike from the blade master we get 92k out on the bottom of 3 dummies we still get 83k out. So, we’re actually pretty close. It’s just the Holy Avenger champion build is really like you are the frontline you want to be inside of the enemies.

You want to push them forward or to flip below. Like you want them okay. You’re either in or you’re out because I am just dealing damage constantly and you get an extra stun on the second ability of the Grabarth´s hammer.

So, it could be very nice or very interesting also for barbarian build because you stun someone you get more movement speed and more damage.

So that’s always pretty cool and I mean getting the CC out. It’s sometimes key to finish people.

Another nice discipline is the madman.

Well, it makes you more resistible against crushing damage so all those other people, who will most likely be hitting you in the front line, will likely have some maces as well because maces are quite effective against other plate wearing glasses.

And I love muck spatter. You’re crushing attacks, triggering an area blindness disease, so basically when people hit you with crushing damage, I think that’s the way it works, then you blind them which is pretty nice.

Juggernaut is always a good pick if you want to stay tanky. You can give the group toughness buff which increases their maximum health by, I don’t know, 20% to 50% (I have to check the numbers).

Unstoppable gives you and your group crowd control immunity despite as a passive that heals you when you get knocked down or stunned and your retaliate gives you more resolve.

So, resolve makes you more resistant to crowd control.

Mole Hunter is great for exposing stealth glasses

Plague Lord is always a very good pick because you can reduce healing on the target that you’re attaking, so it´s great debuffing discipline.

Rune Caster is great for defensive purposes.

The rune shield increases the elemental resistance when you’re standing inside the circle.

Several other useful buffs…

The Shield Breaker is not only useful on the champion but also against the champion or other classes that work with various (the secular knight for example), because you don’t only cancel the shield, you also punish the barrier use.

So, you will actually take away their shield and you give them that much mitigation debuff after you remove the shield. So, this is very good if you want to deal with champions in the enemy frontline.

The siege engineer is a generally good pick when you’re going for sieges because you can repair catapults ballistas and trophies.

You can also boost their damage and also give them a damage mitigation buff so you mitigate 90% of the receiving damage of the catapult.

So, if you want to go to a siege and you want to help but you have no idea what you are supposed to do bring one siege engineer.

Just take one useful discipline for PvP but if you want to take that keep bring us each engineer and just stand next to anything that is built up by somebody else.

Because whoever builds it up usually has a plan on how to use it. But he might not have enough siege engineers in his own guilde and so this is a great way for new players and randoms to help. Bring the siege engineer.

The standard-bearer is always great. It places a banner. So, if you like the guy who runs around and dictates “Ok, this is where we fight”, “This is a good spot putting a banner in the ground”, it helps you a great deal with saying “Okay, this is where we go now. This is where we group up. This is where we fight.”

It changes every type of damage into electricity damage and increases the electricity resistance of the group. So, that’s a very interesting mechanic, I find.

And then, you have the rallying banner where you increase the attack power of the group and you heal people when they are below a certain health threshold. And it cleanses, slows. So very good defensive manner.

To put up those, they actually both of them and it also gives you increased crit chance when you’re standing still.

So, the Troubadour is very interesting because it not only increases your critical strike up here but also gives you a song that increases the damage that enemies take by everybody, also you actually buffing the damage of your group members.

So, I would say if anybody would ask me about what’s the meta, I would say one in your group runs troubled or on every 5 man group that you have that’s what I would do.

Underdog: it’s if you want to be the underdog. It is great, because you need the passive slots and then when you get knocked down you return with 150 increased attack power. And that’s substantial!

Payback gives you increased critical strike chance after you retaliated so especially on low levels, those give you a very nice boost.

So, underdog – if that’s your playstyle – that’s also what you can go with.