Beginner's Guide to Elex: Tips and Advice (Updated Ver 1.1)

(Note: This article is an updated version of an article I posted in November 2017, with extra tips and a full embedded video of this article.)

Helping you get the most enjoyment out of Elex's sometimes rough and daunting beginning.

Elex is a third-person open-world action-RPG from Piranha Bytes, a small German studio, that blends traditional fantasy, science fiction, and post-apocalypse themes. Set on a world 200 years after a comet wipes out nearly all life on the planet, the survivors have split into three factions that use elex, a mysterious substance that appeared with the comet, in their own unique way to fulfill their own goals and agendas. You can be a Dungeons & Dragons-style berserker who wields swords and casts fireballs, or a Mass Effect-style cleric who uses plasma rifles and psionic mind control, or a Mad Max-style outlaw who makes their own gear from scrap and enhances their abilities with powerful stims. It's got a huge world full of diverse environments, tons of quests, lasting consequences for decisions you make, and three different factions you can join, all of which radically alter your gameplay experience by offering unique equipment and skills.

It's surprisingly good, but like other Piranha Bytes games, it has a lot of quirks and idiosyncrasies that can make it difficult for unseasoned initiates to figure out how the game actually works, what you should be doing, and so on, combined with a really steep difficulty curve that makes no effort to hold your hand. For many players, this can lead to a lot of confusion and frustration right at the start of the game, which is never a good thing, obviously, but is especially unfortunate because Elex offers an extremely compelling, rich, and rewarding experience for those who can get into it. As a long-time Piranha Bytes veteran, I still struggled with a few things in my first playthrough, and had some of my expectations subverted when I realized, dozens of hours into it, that I wished I had done things a little differently.

The purpose of this article, therefore, is to help new (or prospective) players with general tips and advice about how the game works and what you should expect, with a few basic, spoiler-free strategies to facilitate a better gameplay experience. A large part of the fun in these games is the satisfaction and reward that comes from exploring the world and discovering things on your own, so I won't be going into specific detail about "go here and get this item, then do this quest and pick these choices, build your character exactly like this, etc," because I want to leave you that room to figure things out for yourself. But some things are tough to figure out without doing a lot of trial-and-error and seeing how things pan out over the course of a 50-100 hour playthrough. So, here are some of my thoughts and observations after pouring 223 hours into four different playthroughs, which I think should be helpful to other new players.

Elex has a very steep difficulty curve. It is intentional.

Understand up front: you will die a lot in this game. Most enemies will be too strong for you to even think about fighting in the beginning. Lots of enemies will kill you in only one or two hits. Some quests that you pick up early on will be basically impossible to complete until much later because of the enemies they expect you to face. This is an intentional aspect of the game's balancing and ecosystem; you're meant to start out feeling incredibly weak and helpless so that as you level up and get stronger, you actually feel like you're getting stronger. You're supposed to feel yourself working your way up the food chain, so to speak, and it's meant to be satisfying when you come back to kill enemies that were giving you a tough time in the beginning. It's also part of making the world feel dangerous and hostile, which adds tension to exploration and quests because you never know what dangerous threats lie in wait and which NPCs could betray you and kick your ass at any time. So if you feel like you're struggling a lot in the beginning and can't kill anything, don't get discouraged; that's how it's supposed to be.

Watch this beginner's guide in video format.

Save now, save often.

If you're not pressing F5 every 30 seconds to save your game, you're gonna have a bad time. Death can be instantaneous in this game, and it can come rather unexpectedly, whether that be from an enemy you didn't expect one-shotting you, or an NPC ambushing you after dialogue, or getting overwhelmed in what should be a simple fight, or if you mis-judged a landing with the jetpack and ended up falling to your death. Knowing that you're going to be dying a lot, you should be saving your progress frequently so that you lose less progress when you inevitably get killed. This might be obvious advice for many of you, but it's worth pointing out just in case.

Avoid combat early on; level up by completing quests.

With the game's steep difficulty curve in mind, you need to accept the fact that you won't be a badass killing machine at the start of the game, and therefore need to pick your battles. In the beginning, this means avoiding combat basically whenever possible, because you're too weak to fight anything but the absolute weakest variants of the weakest enemies in the game. Even these ones can pose a serious threat, and the reward you get for killing enemies really isn't worth the time, effort, or risk of killing them. A typical enemy that you stand a reasonable chance of killing may only give you 10 experience and net you a single piece of raw meat; this pales in comparison to the hundreds of experience and shards (the game's currency) you can earn by doing a single quest within the safe confines of the first town, Goliet. Duras, the first NPC you meet on your way down from the radio tower, will escort you there; follow him, and do as many quests in town as you can. If a quest tells you to fight a tough enemy, save it for later. If a quest sends you into dangerous territory, try to complete the objective while avoiding the enemies, as sometimes a quest will imply combat that actually isn't necessary. Basically, don't even bother trying to fight until you've leveled up several times and have put significant upgrades into your equipment and abilities.



Focus early skill points on combat and money-making.

Your biggest impediment to exploring the world and experiencing all of the content that the game has to offer is the fact that basically everything in the world starts off significantly stronger than you, so to make the early stages of the game less frustrating, and with less frantically running away from enemies, you should focus on closing that gap as quickly as possible. The early stages of the game give you a decent variety of weaponry to choose from, so you basically just want to pick something you like and then strive towards equipping a stronger version of that weapon type, which you can either buy from a merchant, or upgrade yourself from weaponry you already have, or discover while exploring the world. Then you simply have to increase your attributes to meet the minimum requirements of the stronger weapon, and put some skill points into whatever combat field you've chosen. If you've chosen ranged weapons, then the "Ranged Weapons" skill is all you need, but melee fighters will have a choice of "Melee Weapons" which increases damage by 10% for each level, and "Heavy Punch" that increases damage from special attacks. "Attack Strength" seems to enhance your ability to stagger opponents, which can be helpful but that doesn't do you any good if you aren't doing enough damage to beat the opponent's armor value.

The next hurdle is the fact that everything in this game is also insanely expensive, not just in terms of buying new equipment and supplies but also paying skill trainers to teach you new skills. You will be needing a lot of money in this game, plain and simple, and so the earlier you can start fattening your wallet the quicker you can afford expensive gear and skills. Skills like lock-picking and pick-pocketing are always good options to increase your income, but you can "learn" at least one level of these skills simply by equipping the right pieces of jewelry, which can be found relatively early in the game (one is near the starting radio tower, before you leave, and another is outside the Domed City), so you don't necessarily have to invest points in these skills, but it's not a bad idea to put a point into lock-picking early on since higher levels of lock-picking will allow you to open more valuable chests as you find them, instead of having to remember where they are and returning to them later. Higher values of pick-pocketing aren't as essential because it only improves your chances of success, which you can circumvent by simply reloading your save file. You do need at least one point (either from a skill trainer, or from jewelry) to pick pockets, however. 

Learn the "animal trophies" skill as soon as possible.

As previously mentioned, you'll be needing a lot of money in this game, and it's often in short supply. The "animal trophies" skill is one of the best ways to earn money, because it grants you extra rewards like claws, teeth, pelts, and so on for every animal, monster, and mutant that you kill, which can be sold to merchants for money and/or used in crafting. The earlier you get this skill, the more animal trophies you can accrue over the course of the game, meaning more money in your pockets. You can go for the second level of this ability right away, if you desire, since it'll grant you even more trophies over the course of the game, but you should definitely get at least the first skill level, possibly even as the very first skill you learn. Hold on to a small supply of each trophy type (say, 20-30), because you'll want to have some available for crafting, and then sell the excess. 

Attributes don't give the benefits they suggest.

Each attribute gives a brief description of its function in the game. For example, strength says it increases melee damage, and constitution it says it increases your health. This makes it sound like each point you put into these attributes will also improve your melee damage or health by a small amount. That is simply not the case. People have tested this, and if there is any increase it's so minuscule as to have no practical benefit. For that reason, you should treat the attribute points as simply requirements necessary to equip better gear and to learn new abilities, and therefore don't have to push your attributes any further than the minimum necessary for your next upgrade. With that in mind, don't feel obligated to spend attribute points just because you have some, as they're effectively worthless unless those points allow you to learn a new skill or equip a stronger weapon.

Attribute costs increase as your attributes increase.

At the start of the game, it costs one attribute point to increase an attribute by one, or in other words, you increase your attributes at a one-to-one ratio. Once an attribute hits 31, it starts costing two points to increase the attribute, a two-to-one ratio. At 61, it's five points per attribute, and at 91, it's 10 points per attribute. This is easy enough to discover on your own, but I want to warn you in advance, because it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "I just need 20 more attribute points to learn this new skill, which means I can learn it in two levels," when in actuality you're looking at three or four levels because you didn't realize the costs would increase. 

You can increase attributes and skills with jewelry, but...

Rings and amulets (and even sunglasses) can give you a lot of good benefits, like increasing your attributes or allowing you to use or benefit from certain skills (like +1 lockpicking, or highlighting items in the environment) as long as you have them equipped. These can be extremely useful, especially if equipping a ring or amulet will give you enough of an attribute boost to equip a new weapon, but these attribute boosts do not apply when learning new skills at a trainer. If your base strength is at 15 and you've improved it to 20 with a ring, then a trainer's skill window might show that you meet the minimum requirements to learn a new skill, but when you click on the skill, you won't actually be able to learn it, and the game won't tell you why. This is because learning skills requires your base attributes to meet the requirements, meaning you have to get your natural strength to 20, without the aid of rings or amulets, to learn that skill. You can still use those extra attribute points to equip weapons and armor, but not to learn skills. Note that any skill for which you meet the base requirements will be marked with an exclamation point to the left of the list; if that exclamation point isn't there, even though your stats appear to match the requirements, then they're being boosted by equipment and thus you won't be able to learn the skill.

Get a companion as soon as possible. 

One of the quickest and easiest ways to mitigate the game's tough difficulty curve is to get an NPC companion who will follow you on your adventures. They each have their own quests associated with them, interject in conversations, and react to the way you behave in the game, but their main function early on is that they're all decently competent fighters who can tank hits for you and dish out a lot more damage than you're capable of, making difficult fights much more manageable. Duras, the first NPC, can become a companion if you work on the quest associated with him. You can also find CRONY U4, one of your combat drones who became separated from you when your raider crashes in the opening cutscene, somewhere in Goliet, though he's a little harder to find. In each case you'll have to trek long distances across the map through dangerous territory to advance the quest, but you don't actually have to fight anything to complete their quests (Duras's is much easier in this regard), so remember that you can avoid combat by sneaking past or simply out-running enemies, and just focus on getting to your destination and completing the objectives. Another companion can be found relatively early in the game and you don't even need to do an associated quest for him; he's just hanging out under some shelter on the side of the road leading up to the Domed City, so he's even quicker and easier to recruit than Duras or CRONY. 

Time your attacks to take advantage of the combo system.

When you attack, a blue meter in the bottom left of the screen progressively fills up; this represents your combo meter, which on all difficulties except for easy, requires you to time your attacks just right to build the meter faster. After it crosses the light blue line in the middle (and you see the flashing "Q" prompt above the meter), you can execute a special attack, which does extra damage. These special attacks are really important, especially early on, because of the way armor works. Armor seems to enable a flat reduction in damage, so if your regular attacks deal 25 damage and your enemy has 20 armor, then you'll only be doing 5 points of damage per hit. But, if your special attack deals 50 points of damage, then suddenly you're hitting for 30 points, or six times as much damage as you were previously. For some enemies, that's your only reliable way of actually dealing damage to them as their armor values will otherwise soak up your weaker attacks for little to no damage, and so it's important that you learn how to build your combo meter and use those special attacks.

In a safe area, practice clicking and watching that bar fill up, and then click again once it reaches the white line. Note that if you click too early or too quickly then the bar will fill up more slowly and you might run out of stamina before you unlock the special attack, and if you click too late, then you'll stop attacking for a brief moment and will have to restart the attack animations having gained no progress on your combo meter. Get a feel for how how that timing works with your attack animations and sound effects so that you can time your attacks more naturally without having to glue your eyes to that meter. Typically, you want to click again right as your attack follows through. Also bear in mind that you need to monitor your stamina, since each attack, dodge, parry, and block will consume stamina, and you can't perform any actions except basic movement when your stamina is depleted. Early on you don't have a lot of stamina to work with and it'll take almost your entire stamina gauge just to build the combo meter, so you want to find moments in the battle that you can start a full combo with a full stamina gauge so that you can actually pull off those special attacks.

Consider putting a skill point into stamina.

At the start of the game you have just barely enough stamina to execute a full attack combo, if you start from full, but doing so leaves you completely drained afterward and therefore unable to dodge, block, or parry possible counter-attacks from enemies. With a single skill point invested into stamina, you can boost your total high enough to leave you with a little bit after a full combo, which gives you a lot more flexibility and control over your options in a fight. You don't really need this skill to get by with melee combat, as there are other ways to increase your stamina (such as with jewelry and permanent potions) but if you find yourself struggling or want to focus more heavily on playing a melee build, then you should consider investing in it. Ranged builds don't really need this skill as you don't consume stamina firing a ranged weapon.

Make sure "close combat focus" is set to manual.

On normal and easy modes, when you approach an enemy the game will automatically lock on to the target, which focuses the camera on them and alters your movement patterns so that you stay facing that enemy at all times. While this can help keep your eye on the target and ensure your attacks are more likely to hit, it's extremely problematic when facing multiple enemies. First of all, it hampers your mobility because your movement speed gets lowered slightly, and you lose the ability to sprint, or turn and run, which is necessary to get out of a difficult fight or else to buy yourself some space to regenerate stamina or to chug a healing potion. Plus, it just becomes awkward trying to weave in and out of enemy attacks and switching target locks with the rigid lock-on system. With it set to manual, you can choose when you lock on to enemies, instead of being forced to. You may still want to use the lock-on feature against single targets, but against groups you're generally better playing unlocked; it just improves the feeling of movement and gives you a little more control of your positioning and what you're attacking for virtually no downside, as long as you're capable of manually adjusting your facing and the camera orientation when you attack.

If you don't like melee combat, use ranged options.

The melee combat system has some really interesting ideas and actively engaging elements with the way the stamina gauge and combo meter work together to create a system that values player input and requires more skill than similar types of games, but unfortunately the whole thing can feel clunky due to stiff animations, weird hit boxes and targeting system, and sometimes unresponsive controls. It also doesn't really change over the course of the game -- although things do get easier as you level up and get better armor and weapons, and as you gain a better understanding of things like timing and reactions, it's still the same basic system from beginning to end. So if you're definitely not liking the melee combat, then don't stubbornly persist with it on the hope that it will get better, because it won't -- you might get better at it, but the actual system won't change or improve much. Keep in mind you don't have to use melee weapons as there are a plethora of ranged options at your disposal, ranging from bows to laser rifles to flamethrowers to shotguns to rocket launchers, and, if you join the berserkers or clerics, several different types of magic spells. Most ranged weaponry is usually a simple matter of "point and click," so it's not particularly sophisticated, but it's functional and would let you get through the game without messing with the melee combat, and the different types of magic spells can help mix things up with some interesting variety.

Join a faction sooner rather than later.

Don't be afraid to join a faction relatively early in the game because you think you'll miss out on other factions' quests. Although there are many quests that you can do in each faction before joining them, only the faction leader's official membership quest will be canceled if you join another faction, first; every other faction quest will still be available to you, later, even if you've already joined another faction. I'd still advise visiting all of the factions and checking out their skills before making a decision (don't just rush into it), but the faction armor and abilities give you a pretty big boost early in the game, which means the sooner you join a faction the sooner you can get into enjoying all of their benefits and having a somewhat easier time with the game's tough difficulty curve. If you wait to join a faction until you've already done everything else, then you'll just be unnecessarily handicapping yourself and missing out on the fun, unique faction stuff.

Periodically advance the main quest; don't put it off.

Likewise, don't put off advancing the main quest until the very end of the game. You can continue playing after you complete the main quest (though how it resolves will have consequences for how different NPCs and factions treat you), so you don't have to save it for last. But really, the reason I say you should advance the main quest is because a lot of the objectives send you out to explore wide swaths of the world map, and a lot of these objectives can be completed or discovered long before you pick up the quest to actually do them. This, I feel, has a negative effect on the pacing of the story when you meet an important NPC and they task you with a list of objectives, and you tell him then and there that you've already done all of it, because then there's no build up for the next section of the plot. In some cases you might have to return to a hidden place you've already discovered to do something that wasn't possible previously, which can make it feel like you're wasting time backtracking. So, since you're going to be exploring all these areas, anyway, you may as well have the actual quest for them active so that you discover things when the main quest expects you to, rather than basically spoiling the plot for yourself and finishing most of the main plot objectives before actually beginning the main story.

Understand how the "Cold" meter works.

Based on how you act in dialogue and how you choose to solve certain quests, you'll see "Cold increased" or "Cold decreased" messages appear on screen. "Coldness" represents Jax's stunted emotions as the result of his heavy use of elex as an Alb commander. Your coldness level begins at "neutral," after most of the elex has waned from Jax's system following the failed execution at the start of the game, and decreases as you choose more emotional responses, or increases as you choose more cold-hearted, machine-like responses. It's not a morality system, and it's neither good nor bad. Getting mad at someone and yelling at them is an emotional response that will decrease your cold level, but obviously may hurt your relationship with that person; while cold responses may be dispassionate to the human condition of others around you, they tend to be guided by reason and logic, and therefore could be the most practical solution. It's mainly a tool that allows you to role-play as Jax, but it also affects your relationships with companions and can have serious consequences for how certain main quest events play out, while also being the primary factor in determining which ending you get, based on what your net coldness level is at the end of the game.

You have a jetpack; use it.

Elex has an extremely varied topography with a lot of hills, mountains, ravines, canyons, and so on, meaning a lot of areas are hidden out of view by being on a completely different plane from the one you're standing on. The jetpack, which you gain in the starting area and remains with you for the entire game, gives you a ton of freedom to explore vertically. You can find a lot of useful items, cool hidden areas, and fun easter eggs by descending into obscure low points or flying on top of things that you would never be able to reach in other games. You can even use it in combat; with ranged weapons, you can hover in mid-air and fire down on opponents, and with the jetpack attack skill you can do a devastating plunging attack on enemies with your melee weapon. It can also be useful for evading attacks and getting out of a tough spot when you run out of stamina, but be careful because many enemies have ranged attacks and will try to shoot you down if you spend too much time in the air or get too far away from them. If you want to cross a large chasm, then you might consider using the hover function with a ranged-weapon equipped, since hovering with that method consumes less fuel than propelling yourself upward, so you can travel farther lateral distances that way. 

Consider exploring at night.

Normally in these types of games, exploring at night can be an extreme detriment due to low visibility, but there are some benefits in this case. A lot of beasts and monsters go to sleep at night, which can make it easier to sneak past them or avoid them if you're trying to complete quests in dangerous territory, or else want to get into an area and snag some valuable loot. Plus, rare plants like golden whispers (which are used to brew permanent stat-boosting potions) glow very brightly at night, making them much easier to spot at a distance.

I also want to take a moment during this section to recommend installing a "darker nights" mod, because it seems like at some point during Elex's post-release patching, the developers changed the way the weather and lighting system works, which had the side effect of making nights way too bright, to the point that it feels like you're just running around in the daylight with sunglasses on. Seriously, visibility is not at all impacted, as you can see everywhere, even all the way to the horizon, with perfect clarity -- everything is just shaded in a dark blue hue. That can certainly help with gameplay functionality, but it really ruined the atmosphere and immersion for me. I installed the "Darker Nights and Fixed Broken HDR" mod from the Nexus, which reverts the graphics back to how they were pre-patch and it all just looks so, so much better. You can see for yourself in the comparison footage how the game looks pre-patch and post-patch, so if that looks better to you, then go ahead and install that mod.

Plan to learn (and use) crafting skills.

Modify weapons, chemistry, and each faction's unique weapon enhancement skill, all give a huge benefit and should be learned by every character build. Chemistry lets you brew your own potions from the plethora of plants that you find out in the wild, but more importantly, it gives you access to permanent stat upgrade potions, which can give you a ton of free boosts for a minor skill investment. Modify weapons lets you upgrade your weaponry, which is by far the most reliable way to improve your damage output; it's faster and easier to improve a weapon you're already using than to hope you can find something better, and weapons that you upgrade to max often perform as good or better than legendaries that you can find in exploration. Each faction also gets an ability to add extra damage types to their weapons (fire, energy, radiation, etc), which act as damage-over-time in addition to the weapon's base damage, further enhancing your weapon's total damage output, which can only be done with that skill unless you luck out and find something good that already has a damage effect on it. Goldsmith is a little less important, but allows you to craft skill-boosting jewelry that will sometimes be stronger than what you can find normally. Gem socketing is even less important because not all weapons will have gem sockets on them, and you generally don't find enough gems to get a big enough boost, but it can still be a nice benefit later in the game if you've got nothing else to spend skill points on.

Pick up everything you find.

This might seem like obvious advice, but I feel like it's worth pointing out: you have no inventory restrictions, so you can (and should) pick up everything you find, because everything in the game has some sort of value. Most items can be sold to merchants for extra money, and since money is hard to come by and a lot of things are really expensive, you'll need all the money you can get. Plus, you never know when a particular item might come in handy.

Junk items have no use; sell them.

Mugs, forks, cigarettes, toilet paper -- basically everything that appears in your "other" tab of the items screen is completely useless except to sell to vendors, with one exception: old coins can be used to buy food and drinks in vending machines at the clerics' headquarters, which you might consider doing for healing potions or other ingredients for cooking recipes. There's not a single NPC who will ask for a few packs of cigarettes, or a dozen rolls of toilet paper, to complete a quest. These things only exist to populate the world with "stuff" and to give you things to sell to vendors for extra cash. This also applies to items in the "other" tab marked "valuables" like chalices and caskets. Quest items also get lumped into this section, but they're specifically marked as "missions items" and cannot be sold, anyway. Hold on to any old coins you find, because you may actually want to use them at some point, but sell literally everything else in this tab.



Don't automatically sell "weaker" weapons.

With the way the crafting system in this game works, weapons have overlapping tiers of performance as they're upgraded, with huge jumps happening every time you upgrade a weapon as it effectively skips several tiers of progression, while weaker weapons fit into those gaps as they're upgraded. In those situations, upgrading a weapon that you're currently using wouldn't make any sense because it would become unusable due to the higher requirements, in which case you're better off upgrading a weaker weapon. For example, if you're currently using a Hunting Bow and want to get a stronger bow, the War Bow would be the next obvious step up, however its requirements are much higher and would take several level-ups before you could equip it, and upgrading the Hunting Bow would actually push it beyond the War Bow in terms of both damage and stat requirements. The solution, therefore, is to upgrade the Cultivator's Bow -- a much weaker weapon at base value -- which might only take a single level-up before you can equip it, while being only slightly less powerful than the War Bow. For that reason, it's a good idea to hold onto a few different weapons that might appear to be weaker and therefore obsolete, because they actually become more viable when they're upgraded.

Basically every attribute is useful.

Typically in RPGs, you're encouraged to specialize in only a few stats, even going so far as to engage in "dump stats" where you specifically lower less useful stats in order to pump up more useful ones. That's not really the case in Elex, because every attribute has some kind of use for basically every playstyle. Every faction, build, and playstyle is going to require some of strength and constitution to equip better armor, for instance. Likewise, crafting skills are going to require an assortment of intelligence, cunning, and dexterity. Combat skills and faction skills use various combinations of everything. All of which is to say that you're eventually going to end up with at least a moderate amount of points invested in every attribute, so don't expect to have any "dump stats" that you can ignore in favor of more desirable ones. It's still a good idea to specialize in two or three primary attributes, however, because you don't really have enough points to pump every attribute up to 60 or higher, and some of those higher-level skills and equipment will need 85 or more to use. But if you put 20 or 30 points into an attribute early on and then decide to change your playstyle, it's not the end of the world and probably not worth starting over because you would eventually end up with those points there, anyway.

Personality skills aren't really worth it.

Most of the skills in the "personality" tab are about boosting skill checks in dialogue and giving you other such social rewards for how you interact with the world. These skill checks grant you a little extra experience and a small reward -- in some cases, alternate solutions to quests or extra story-telling from NPCs, which can be fun but aren't that crucial, and the skills that enhance those social stats aren't worth the early skill point costs. You'll see a lot of skill checks in dialogue early on, when they're either low enough for you to meet without needing the extra boosts, or so high that you'll never meet them in time, in which case the personality skills don't really help. Worse yet, these opportunities become pretty rare in the second half of the game. The skills that grant extra attributes are kind of nice, but you can achieve the same effect through standard elex potions. The skills that grant extra experience points also seem nice, but this amounts to a meager 5% -- against most enemies that means an extra one or five points. The skills that reward you for your coldness level are kind of nice, but are situational depending on your build and playstyle, and sort of force you to meta-game your role-playing so that you stay within a specific range. A few of the skills in this tab can be useful, of course, but you should be prioritizing other skills first.