WhileDeathboundbegins with you playing a single character, the tanky paladin “Therone Guillauman”, the game truly starts to shine once you gain a second Essence and can start using the Morph mechanic to your advantage. This begins once you find the corpse of Anna Lepus and discover that you can absorb the essence of dead people.
Anna Lepus is a nimble character who uses a dagger and crossbow to strike down your foes. InDeathbound, Anna provides some much-needed mobility and range to your moveset, complementing Therone’s tankier playstyle perfectly. She is also able to perform backstabs on unaware foes, allowing you to deal a ton of damage at the start of combat.
Gameplay Overview
Anna Lepus relies on dodging to avoid enemy attacks, owing to her inability to block, parry, or otherwise deflect incoming strikes. In exchange,she is able to use the crossbow in her left hand to fire bolts at enemies from a distance, dealing a decent amount of damage that can be further enhanced with status effects if you have the help of a certain party member you’ll get later. Reloading the crossbow takes a short amount of time and should be timed carefully if you’re in combat. She can slash with her dagger or perform a leap attack to deal more damage and advance towards her target.
Anna is able to backstab humanoid enemies, which deals critical damage. It is important to note that backstab only works on humanoid foes and can only be used on enemies that are unaware of your presence or frozen. There are plenty of throwable items lying around that can freeze a target, so you can abuse this against groups of humanoid foes to great effect.
Essence Talents
Anna’s Talents focus on her strengths,granting benefits to striking unaware foes, allowing her to reload her crossbow with morph strikes, and adding status effects to her attacks. Here is the full list of her Talents and their effects:
Notes and Comments
Toxicology
Melee Attacks inflict Poison.
An excellent first pick, this adds damage over time to Anna’s kit and pairs well with Coup de grâce to improve her damage output.
Twist the Blade
Can morph during backstabs to increase damage using sync.
A solid option if you’re confident in your stealth skills, this can improve the damage of Anna’s backstabs while also swapping in another character to follow-up. That said, this talent is much more situational than some of the other options here, so you don’t need to prioritise it.
No Witnesses
Backstabbing increases the damage of Bound Essences by 20% for 6 seconds.
This is an excellent Talent for opening fights with style. The damage boost to Bound Essences allows Anna to initiate the fight and then trade off to another damage dealing character to continue the fight. While 6 seconds isn’t a huge amount of time, it’s often more than enough to crush weaker foes. Naturally, this works very well in conjunction with Twist the Blade.
Tactical Retreat
Increases Movement Speed by 30% when at low health.
A situational talent. This can be handy for escaping from a fight you don’t think you can win, though in practice you’re unlikely to make much use of it.
Coup de grâce
Grants 10% damage increase when killing poisoned enemies. Max 5 Stacks.
When paired with Toxicology, or the buff the third Essence you’ll find can cast, this Talent becomes an incredibly powerful tool. You can get up to 5 stacks pretty easily once you’ve gotten used to Anna’s fighting style, resulting in a 50% damage bonus.
Tricks of the Trade
Anna’s Morph Strikes reload her crossbow with corrupted essence bolts.
Easily one of the best Talents available to Anna early on. You can use this to skip the reload time on her crossbow by simply making use of Morph Strikes effectively, which is essential to the gameplay anyway. The corrupted essence bolts can build up Poison on a target too, helping to set up Coup de grâce.
Staggering Shot
When in Conflict, Ranged Attacks stagger unaware enemies.
Another situationally useful talent. It isn’t hard to set up your essences so Anna is in conflict, especially since Therone conflicts with her, but the stagger on unaware enemies isn’t hugely useful in most situations.
Essence Skills
Anna’s skills are a mix of stamina, movement speed, melee power, and ranged power effects. She also provides a boost to Standing Morph Speed and tolerances to all status effects.This mix of boosts is excellent for any playstyle, though they favor builds that utilize melee and ranged combat equally.
+1% +1 to Max Stamina
+2% +1 to Melee Power
+2% to Movement Speed
3
+2% +1 to Ranged Power
+3% +6 to Max Health
+5% +1 to Tolerances
+8 to Reload Speed
+5 to Critical Bonus
