Skill Chains Guide

SoulWorker offers the possibility to chain your skills while using them. When a chain is successfully achieved, the chained skill receives a buff which can either be:

• Getting more damage on hits for this skill.
• Less SG consumption for this skill.
• Less cooldown for this skill.

Usually, newcomers and even some older players don't bother with chains' optimization, but this actually constitutes an important part of your global performance while fighting in mazes, especially in endgame raids; even more during long-terms fights, since you have to chain more skills during a longer period in order to defeat the boss. In such cases, unoptimized chain presets may lead to a passive loss on your global effective DPS.
This loss might be even great depending on the situation.

Note

1. First of all, Read your skills' description! For some skills it provides useful info to know about it: how to cast it efficiently, which part of the skill is the most damaging, etc. Not only the description but also skills' details such as damage or, mostly, cooldown details. This is something important to note.
2. After you identified which skills are the strongest among all, and also the ones with the highest cooldown, you can start making your chains. Keep in mind that your chains must be as comfortable for you as possible, while being optimized using this cooldown info.
   You probably wonder yourself why did I ask you to note cooldown info? One of the chain bonuses can be a cooldown reduction buff, so if you chain your skills with higher cooldown this one will get it reduced thanks to the chain bonus, and then passively bring more DPS eventually as the fight goes longer.
3. The next step is now to build your chains thoughtfully. By that I mean: finding the fastest way to reach skills with the strongest DPS, which usually have higher/the highest cooldown value of all your skills. The most common way (and usually the best) to do that is to follow the chaining scheme '1 > 1 > 3 '.
   Don't get scared by this, I explain: "1" and "3" here correspond to 2 different skills, and ">" refers to a theoretical chain. If you did use 3 skills on 1 column, the scheme would be '1 > 2 > 3 '. Yes, the purpose is to duplicate a single skill 2 times on the same column and put the strongest skill last on it, of some sort that when chaining it with the first skill it directly benefits from the 3rd line bonus; this method intends to save one skill animation duration - and indirectly some SG too - and you only need to use 1 skill before reaching the 3rd row's chain bonus (i.e image below).
   The best move is to put a skill with quick animation and duplicate it on 1st and 2nd rows so that the strongest skill is reached even faster. Ultimately, this chains scheme will help you to save a lot of time sadly wasted before between the utilization of low-tier skills and top-tier skills, and keep reducing their cooldown by doing that will result in using them more often during the same timestamp and then dealing more damage overall eventually.
   Of course, don't forget to change your chain bonuses from any previous to Shorter cooldown +8/15%! 

Example of chain following the '1 > 1 > 3' scheme principle.

1. The last thing to do, when this has been assimilated, is to find which skills match with each other. I mostly talk about BoT here (Buffs over Time), that you can use to improve top-tier skills' damage. Those could either be fully passive (you cast the skill and it keeps working even though you evaded from its cast animation) or semi-passive (keeps proc'ing while the skill is being casted, but directly ends if the cast animation is cancelled/finished). One of the best examples of fully passive chain is Best Tempo > Bass Attack on Stella (passive BoT > Ultimate lv42 skill), and one of the best examples for semi-passive chaining is Death Tornado > Cruel Slash on Lilly (DoT - Damage over Time - skill > semi-passive buff skill during its cast).

I recommend you to try out several chain patterns before admitting you found your final skill build, because it may require time and lots of tests before finding the one that suits you the best for both comfort and DPS optimization.

Small disclaimer: the aforementioned method is very strong about optimizing your efficient DPS, but it also has its constraints:

• The first one is the lack of cooldown reduction/shorter cooldown: when you chain fast without enough cdr, you tend to reach breakpoints with your skills rotation (it basically means all your main damaging skills are all put in cooldown or, even worse, all your active skills). This case is obviously penalizing in terms of DPS efficiency and should be avoided as much as possible.
• The second one is the lack of attack speed. This is where attack speed and shorter cooldown get closely correlated: the more you have AS, the faster you cast skills and chain them. Also, the more cdr you have, the more you can cast the same skills during the same time interval. By deduction, lacking one of those may lead to a breakpoint, either direct or indirect (the direct one: every skills are in cooldown; the indirect one: you chain your skills too slowly so they get available again before you could end your skills rotation).

The best way to avoid that is to increase both progressively, at the same time if possible. Therefore you should not meet any breakpoint... unless your skills' rotation isn't perfect yet. Also, take care about your SG consumption! You obviously cannot chain your skills anymore if your SG falls down to 0 or near it, and this results in breaking your current rotation execution.

Yet even if you have great chains and decent values for AS and cdr, be careful with your chains' execution order! You could prime a breakpoint because you chained your skills disorderly in a given raid (voluntarily or not) and/or badly depending on the current state of your run. So you will also have to train with your new chains to find how to order the cast of your skills and then improve your rotation. Depending on the results you may probably modify some things in your chains and maybe even your skill tree in general.
Don't hesitate to carry your tests in District 6 or some raids like Hidden Hideout, either to handle your new chains or simply test which chain is better for both your comfort and your skills' matching.