[Music] in the town on the hill where the apples grow the church bells ring every hour so I took a little [Music] walk welcome to the first descendant ultimate starter guide a video that has everything from A to Z it'll cover all of the bits that you need to jump into the game and hit the ground running and because this is a longer video I'm not looking to waste any more of your time let's get started and kick things off with our roster of descendants descendants are characters that you will play as in the game these come in all sorts of shapes and sizes with different play Styles strengths and weaknesses there are some unlock requirements for each one but the game does let you pick from three at the start lepic VSA and Ajax and let's start there with lepic so lepic is your typical Soldier character he's going to specialize in grenades and comes with an arm launcher that can nuke and burn enemies his passive trait gives him a special get out of jail free card if you take lethal damage so it'll save your life but it does have a long cool down Ajax is our tank he's basically a void Titan from Destiny he can create Shields to protect allies and his passive allows him to accumulate void energy when he takes damage once his void energy hits a certain threshold he consumes all of it to enhance his skills via is our Frost Mage she can freeze enemies and control the battlefield her passive allows her to summon ice spheres that orbit and deal damage to nearby enemies so when you need crowd control via is a very very good bet frina is a poison Caster she has lower Shields and health than others but she can quickly inflict high amount of damage to groups of enemies with her poisons she also has a castable shield that offsets her low defense and gives you a little bit of stoutness when you need it and lastly her passive allows you to increase all damage to enemies Afflicted with poison next let's talk about bunny sort of the spokesperson or like poster child for this game bunny is essentially an Energizer rabbit she's built to be constantly in motion and all her skills require you to be as you move you generate electricity and this can be used to cast high damage skills her passive allows you to discharge electricity when you land after a double jump bunny has a pretty complex kit and requires a little getting used to but she is a very high damage character Sharon is a trickster assassin and her play style revolves around camouflage and ambushing enemies with electric attacks she can deal large amounts of damage if the enemy is targeting another player so if you're a rogue type of person be sure to use that to your ADV Advantage now if you like turrets jabber is for you so he can summon a healing turret and a damage turret his passive is a good one so if you have both of your turrets summoned at once which most of the time you probably do he gets an extra damage increase Blair is a fire specialized Chef who excels at dealing damage over time his passive increases his critical hit damage to burned enemies and his critical hit chance increases depending on the number of quote stoves that are deployed now stoves are AOE hotpots that will deal damage to nearby enemies and inflict them with burn these are applied whenever you use certain skills glay is an interesting character so she has minimal defense and low Health but her skills allow her to go berserk and siphon Health from nearby enemies her play style is very jaal and hide and you'll need to know when to berserk and when to return to normal in order to maximize her strengths now if you love water and you love massive AOE damage then Valby is right up your alley she's going to deal range damage she can place puddles to teleport between and has a big skill called laundry bomb that'll pull in enemies and apply a debuff to them now her passive reduces her manic consumption as long as she's standing in water so that's a plus now she isn't nearly as tough as her tanky counterparts but she also isn't quite a glass Cannon either Kyle is a is one built for Magneto fans Kyle's your guy he can cast magnetic fields to block attacks he can build a special resource called magnetic force that serves as a buffer before his health and shields are consumed and he can also fly so for those of you that liked Anthem back in the day Kyle's probably going to be your go-to we also have three unreleased descendants that we've seen in various trailers cinematics and key art the first one is Asimo he seems like he's a brawler type of role we see him ripping an enemy apart in the trailer now this isn't confirmed but it's just what we see from the clip next is Enzo again not confirmed what his role is but we do see him in the trailer using a hand Cannon ripping through enemies then we see him again with a Mech Hawk looking Shield thing on his shoulder so not really sure what his role will end up being he might be an engineer along with Jaber and lastly we have yugin this character looks like a support type of role he has a similar look to Valby he looks sort of like a medic and I think he might be the first outright healer that we have on the roster then we have our ultimate descendants ultimate descendants are special variants of existing descendants but they come with a unique look and increased stats so far we know of five lepic VSA Ajax Bunny and glay so next let's talk about the world of first ascendant starting with [Music] albian albian is the town hub for for all things descendant here you can interact with vendors progress the main story launch side missions group activities check your mail and store items in your Vault you're going to be spending a lot of time in albian so get familiar with where things are laid out and some of the shortcuts that exist throughout the city outside of albian we have eight biomes to explore these will vary in appearance enemies and content the main story will take you through each one of them but at first you'll be exploring Kingston to get things started now out in the world you're going to run across a few things you can interact with chests public events and missions so World missions are like patrols you can activate them by interacting with these floating devices these will start the mission and other players can join in at any time these missions will grant some rewards as well as progress the main story now some of these World missions are tied into special side quests that'll unlock certain weapons descendants or give you rare materials so be sure to look at the rewards to find the one you're after and make sure you're spending your time wisely then there are also some missions that encourage you to group up now from my experience you don't have to play with other people but if you do want to there will be matchmaking available for these and the nice thing is you don't have to wait to start the mission there's a join in progress that'll put players with you wherever you are on the current objective and not to be confused with group missions we also have group content which is special instance content that can be launched from NPCs and albian so let's go ahead and change gears and explore those next so number one out of the gate the devs did recommend collecting as many descendants as you can which is sort of a no-brainer that makes a lot of sense but for those of you out there who were very specific and like only wanted to play Blair or bunny for instance it's good just to get a variety because that's going to play well into all of the other endgame systems because something that they mentioned in each and every one of these is that you need to have a good variety for your team certain descendants will do better at certain modes and having that descendant active and available is going to make life a little bit easier for you okay so let's get into the first one this is sort of the newer one that they talked about and those are dungeons AKA infiltrations so in infiltrations are specialized missions there's two per zone for a grand total of 16 and each infiltration is going to come with two difficulties normal and hard now the normal difficulty is just that you're basically playing through the mission on normal trying to farm out some rewards but as you shift gears and you unlock hard mode which unlocks as you progress the story you're going to be able to earn more rewards now the rewards for these missions are going to be be changed at regular intervals so you don't need to farm a specific mission for a specific reward if there's a particular infiltration that you really don't like then you can just wait for that reward to cycle off of that infiltration and onto a different one now we did get an example of these rewards we can see in this screenshot here for biolab starting from left to right we have a rare weapon we have a rare component and then we have a variety of mods ranging from rare which is purple UL imate which is yellow and Transcendent which is that reddish orange now over on the right hand side you can see that we have a selected reward so we do have some deterministic stuff here where we can click and select one of those then we also underneath that have select more options now these select more options are modifiers to make this Mission even more difficult so you can go through and select as many or as few of those as you would like including you could just leave them all blank if you want to just go in kind of vanilla now why would you want to do that why would you want to make it particularly harder on yourself well the reason being is as you're going through and you're clearing out these missions or these infiltrations you're going to ACR points and the points that you ACR are going to determine the rewards that you will get or bonus rewards that you will get and by activating more of these modifiers you're going to get more points per kill which will allow you to hit those Point thresholds much easier so this is just just another way to go through and make life a little bit easier in terms of unlocking rewards and getting the things you need but obviously more difficult because look at these you're reducing your health by 10% your firearm attack by 10% your defense by 10% so feel free to experiment with these and find the best one for you so let's go ahead and let's change gears and let's flip over to the second thing they talked about and that is Special Operations now Special Operations these are called incursions in the last technical test and there are going to be eight of them at launch but of those eight they cover three different types so that's blocking Kyper mining resource defense and neutralizing void experiments so Kyper mining you're going to need to kill enemies within a certain time limit in order to clear that wave once that wave is cleared more enemies and more difficult enemies will begin to spawn once that wave is cleared a more difficult wave comes com so on and so forth until you reach a point where you just simply cannot win at that point the incursion will end and you'll gather your rewards then the second one is resource defense here you're going to protect a target from enemies for a certain period of time as you continue to battle waves of enemies you're going to need to protect that Target for a longer period of time and this cycle is going to repeat until again you fail and then lastly we have neutralize void experiment so there's going to be these little bombers which are these little kind of creatures with bombs on their backs and they're going to be running away and you need to go and kill them while also surviving enemy assaults so it's going to be waves of enemies you're going to have to clear and work through as you're trying to get to those fleeing bombers to complete your objective just like the previous two it's going to get more and more difficult until you fail the whole point of this is to try to last as long as possible and progress by killing enemies and completing objectives which will then earn you rewards the devs did say that these are more of the challenging missions in the game and I would agree when I did these during the technical test they ramped up in terms of difficulty very very quickly the first couple waves were okay but then the scaling after that was insane and we quickly were overrun outnumbered and just destroyed I think we lasted four or five waves and then after that we were just ground to dust so if you're looking for something challenging this is one to go for next we have void intercept so here these are basically just giant boss batt void intercept we've had these since the first beta that we've had access to and they're continuing to grow over time so these boss battles they bring Unique Mechanics to the fold you're going to have to use specific strategies in order to defeat them and this is really where the dev team hammered home the concept of bring a variety of descendants each run to make sure that you have everything you need whether that's clearing out AOE whether that's single Target damage whether it's crowd control protection defense all of those different things you don't want to just run in there with a glass Cannon team because they account for that and some of these bosses will absolutely Crush that team to dust so making sure to bring a varied team is what you want to do now why do you want to run void intercepts what's different between the other two well void intercepts are a fantastic place to farm for materials to unlock descendants and ultimate weapons we've seen this during the technical test and the betas this is the spot you would go to grind out bunny unlock materials glay unlock materials Blair unlock materials all of the different descendants have at least one material tied to void intercepts so this is a system you definitely do not want to skip out on now that we've talked about the group content let's talk about how we can use all of the loot that we got during those runs starting with [Music] equipment so first let's talk about our weapons that we'll be able to find and equip like those other games these do come in a variety of flavors we have common rare ultimate and Transcendent common is gray rare is purple Ultimate is yellow and Transcendent is red now in my personal opinion I really wish they would have stuck with the regular array of colors here where common is gray rare is blue ultimate is purple and Transcendent is yellow but it is what it is at the end of the day it's not a huge deal now every weapon will have a baseline Stat system you have DPS s attack magazine size and fire rate but rare weapons end up come with extra affixes to look for now these are bonus stats that'll help make the weapon more valuable they can be increases to things like Baseline stats like an attack or a magazine size or they can be bonuses to secondary stats like Elemental damage now ultimate is when things take a step even further here you have a special effect that's tied to the weapon now not all ultimates will have special effects but some do and this is where you'll start to see them these can give things like Buffs to yourself or your party or they can inflict enemies with a specific debuff there are a range of different effects some will synergize well with your chosen descendant others may not so the question is how can you easily tell if your Ultimate Weapon has a unique effect or not well you can always check the tool tip or you can check on the right hand side of your weapon image if you see three dots then it does now these unique effects can be enhanced by consuming another weapon that has a unique effect sort of like a cannibalism type thing this enhancement will increase your stats and you can even take your previously enhanced weapon and carry that progress over to a higher level one in the future so you're not wasting any of that enhancement investment that you put into that weapon now next is transcendent Rarity so we don't have too many details on this Rarity quite yet but we do know that they come with a higher range of affixes than previous Rarities and they'll also have a unique effect as well so we have seen a couple of these in previous betas but I believe they're all tied to components or even a reactor so it's not necessarily something like Whoa we know everything about Transcendence um but we do know that it is a rarity that's coming so you probably have the question great I have all these piles of loot what do I do with all the spare weapons do I have do I just throw them away actually no you use them in what's known as a transmission process this is going to allow you to take higher level weapons that you don't really care for and then consume them similar to the ultimate enhancement process to increase the rank of the weapon that you want so for instance let's say you have a level one Scout rifle that you really like and you have a level six shotgun that you're like uh not really for me you can sacrifice the level six shotgun to then boost the rank of your level one your favorite level one weapon and that'll increase its damage and its stats the only requirement is a consumable material called a phase exchanger that you can actually craft yourself from materials that you earn from dismantling weapons so at a high level that's how weapons work in the first ascendant you go get the weapons you want you break down the weapons you don't want and you can either break them down and dismantle them into parts to then craft phase exchangers or you can use them as consumption material in order to upgrade the weapons that you do have so let's talk about the other pieces of equipment that we have those are components and reactors so think of components like trinkets or gadet GS you can equip four of these and they provide a variety of stats things like increased resistances maximum health Firepower Etc but they also come in sets if you manage to get two or four of a matching set then you're going to unlock Extra bonuses so for example here we have a set bonus for the Supernova set that grants extra electric power when two are equipped and then a more powerful effect when all four are equipped now weapons are how you dish out the damage but components are really kind of a huge part of being able to actually make your character go they're sort of the backend for building out a character whereas weapons are the front end that are going to kind of take that power that you're building with components and then dish it out to enemies so components there are drop from void intercept battles which are boss Arenas and different bosses will drop a different set so there's going to be some bosses you want to do more than others depending on what descendant you're trying to main outside of components and weapons we have reactors these are items that increase the power of descendant skills each reactor has a skill type that supports it and because of that there are some that will match super well with certain characters and others that are virtually useless for instance you can have a reactor that dishes out ice damage and helps increase all of your ice skills that's not going to be very useful to Blair who is a fire based descendant but it'll be way useful for a descendant like via who deals primarily ice damage the same goes for all the other descendants so being able to kind of pick and choose what reactors are going to work and understand these will work for this type of descendant but not for this type now these reactors are going to boost your base stats along with specific skill power types like I mentioned these can be optimized if you manage to reach a certain condition this condition can range from multiple different things the example we see here is that it requires a specific weapon to be equipped and if it is it'll increase your skill Power by 160% instead of 100% so these are the little things to watch out for when it comes to components and reactors you want to make sure you're optimizing your reactor as best you can to get all of the juice you possibly can out of it whereas components if you can mix and match them to create a really really cool set or get a set bonus out of them then that's going to be more beneficial than just throwing on four random ones so one last thing reactors can also be upgraded to improve their stats so what you see here isn't always what you get you will be able to spend some consumable items in order to improve their power just like virtually any other piece of equipment that we've talked about now that we know what equipment looks like let's talk about the module system modules are used to outfit your descendant to do all kinds of interesting things it can augment your melee ability it can provide you with base stats and you can do the same thing with your weapons now let's dive in and explore this system a little bit further starting with mastery rank so when you unlock and use one of your descendants you're going to build up something called Mastery experience over time when you fill up your Mastery bar you can return to town albian and you can perform a Mastery rankup and if you reach a point where you're going through a mission and your Mastery bar is full but you need to continue doing what you're doing you don't have to worry about losing any experience it just rolls over into the next Mastery Rank now once you improve your Mastery Rank you do get some pretty nice bonuses you get increased module slots which will'll get to module capacity and inventory and storage slots for equipment giving you a chance to carry even more stuff which in a looter shooter is always good so that's what goes into the Mastery process for Descendants it's incredibly straightforward and easy to understand use The Descendant reach a point where you can level up your Mastery and then get all the benefits from it but let's talk about how we can take advant AG of those new benefits with something called modules so modules are items that you can attach to your weapons and your descendants in order to increase their stats now these are specific to certain weapons and descendants so you do need to match the type in order to use them so please keep that in mind now for weapons you can equip six modules each which honestly is quite a bit to view the modules you just have to hover over the tool tip and then open the modules to see them then from here you can set a preset for each weapon name name now this is a little weird but essentially what this means is if you have a level one Devil's call SMG and then you find a level 9 Devils call SMG it'll retain the same modules so you don't need to move anything around which makes life a little bit easier especially if you're constantly switching weapons around now whenever you equip a module you're going to see those applied values on the left and this gives you sort of a total impact of all of your modules and that helps you sort of make good decisions knowing if this module is going to be a net positive or maybe even a net negative now when it comes to descendants you do have six module slots but you also have something called a skill module and a sub module now skill modules are going to modify how your skills actually work so for instance we can see hypothermia here this is going to swap vssa ice shackle debuff to something called ice needle which ultimately just swaps your crowd control for a damage overtime debuff now subm modules will Ally to perform different melee attacks so you do have to slot these in in order to actually melee these will also change how melee works so here's an example of shock punch for you to see exactly how this thing kind of stacks up now just like weapons and components you can also dismantle and enhance modules which is great there's a lot of layers of progression in this game and really this is just another one of them when you break down unneeded modules you're going to get something called CER shards these can be used to enhance modules as well as gold you have to have a gold currency in order to do that as well now increasing or enhancing these modules will increase the stats but it'll also increase the capacity cost meaning it's going to eat up more space in your module capacity which may cause you to have to make some sacrificial choices do you want to increase the stats and therefore capacity of this particular module knowing and understanding that you might not be able to equip a different module that you had targeted who knows it's going to come down to your build your play style and your preferences so next we need to talk about mod sockets and mod types so for mod sockets just like in Warframe if you match a mod socket type to a mod socket then it's going to reduce its capacity cost you can use this to your advantage to equip more modules you can see a screenshot here as to how this sort of works red is bad and means it's going to be an increased cost because it's not matching whereas green is good and it's going to give you a reduced cost because you're playing along and you're matching the type to the socket now modules do have some restrictions like I mentioned you can only equip one module of the same group meaning you can't equip a lot of attack modules you can equip one attack module and then from there one accuracy module so on and so forth you can also only equip as many modules as your capacity allows which remember is determined by your mastery rank or by acquiring a crafted material called Energy AC activators energy activators can be crafted through your research requests we have two topics left to cover one is the battle pass and how that whole thing works so we'll cover that and then I'll leave you guys with a list of my favorite descendants that I think would be awesome as starter descendants for people just getting into the game so the battle pass for the first descendant is very much what we see in other free-to-play games and it looks like it mirrors Destiny pretty closely you have a premium track and a free track both of these contain resource items boosts and a free Ultimate Weapon now the premium pass gets the weapon immediately while the free pass gets it much later on I didn't see anything egregious like with the paint system so it's neither a high or low for me this is just a traditional typical battle pass that we see in freet to-play games these days now Shop prices this is going to be something that I know a lot of people are going to ask questions about the prices of shop items we don't really have a context for them some things are 750 caliber some things are 1,250 caliber some things are 225 caliber we don't know how expensive or cheap these are because we don't know the price per caliber yet and because we don't know that we have nothing to base this around so we have no context around the different price structures so until we know what caliber is going to cost we can't really speak as to whether these things are expensive or cheap to wrap this up I'm going to leave you guys with a list of four descendants that might be really good starting Ones based upon their kit as well as my experience with them during all of the different technical tests that I've been a part [Music] of first we're going to start with fra the poison descendant she is fantastic for group clear and with her ultimate ability she has insane burst damage if you're somebody who really likes to wipe out large groups of enemies frina is one that you want to look for next is Ajax he's perfect for protecting the team with shields and making sure that you guys last a little bit longer or withstand a barrage of attacks if you're doing group content Jaber is a great addition to the team for both his healing and his off DPS using his turrets don't sleep on him because even when those things are on cool down he's still able to push out some decent damage with his ultimate and lastly we have Sharon she has incredibly High burst damage and she can blow through health bars incredibly fast so everyone I hope you've enjoyed the ultimate starter guide for the first ascendant and you learned something whether it's one thing or everything as long as it was valuable to you it's valuable to me thank you all so much for watching this has been Vulcan and I'll talk to you guys next time [Music] w [Music] [Applause]