Edgedancer Optimisation Guide for the Cosmere RPG

Dance around the battlefield, granting harm and healing with this dextrous radiant path.

About edgedancers

While edgedancers can vary wildly in personality and characteristics, there are certain attributes that they share in common:

Edgedancer talents

Knowing which talents are best and will work well for your character is more important in the Cosmere RPG than in D&D. This is because you have a lot more choice over which talents you take rather than the more rigid progression found in D&D classes.

To help you pick the right talents for your character, I’ve split them into the various bond and surge talent trees and I’ve also divided them by level. This shows the fewest number of levels you need to gain this talent when following the most direct path down the talent tree (ignoring any talents taken at level 1 through a heroic path). This is just to help you know how quickly you can get each talent.

I’ve also rated each talent to give you an idea of how good I think it is. This is a rough rating. Some builds may find different talents more important or integral to their build so don’t be put off by a low score if you think it’s going to help your character or work for them.

Bond and surge talent trees

To take any radiant path, you must first take the key talent and its associated surges.

Level 1 talents

First ideal (5/5)

So the 3 actions you get to use immediately when you take this talent are breathe Stormlight, enhance and regenerate. Breathe Stormlight is more a practical element for regaining expended stormlight. As long as you have a decent number of marks, it should be hard for you to completely run out of investiture. I’d just make sure you breathe stormlight ahead of combat where possible. You can also do this while unconscious so you can breathe stormlight and heal yourself if knocked down to 0HP allowing for easy recovery if you need it (though it won’t be a lot of HP).

Enhance is going to be quite nice, basically adding 1 to attack tests and other physical tests. Be aware that your movement speed might increase with this too. At this stage, you can only use enhance and regenerate so I’d suggest switching this on early in tricky encounters and keep it switched on for better attacks and defense.

But, if you are getting hit a lot, you may need to decide between healing yourself and the better attack. I’d be inclined towards enhance unless you’ve been knocked unconscious, desperately need the extra HP or have the investiture to do both. Just remember, if you want to have plenty of investiture to play with, a high presence or awareness is going to be needed.

This talent will grant you the surges of abrasion and progression once you speak the first ideal, but you’ll have to wait a bit for those.

Abrasion surge (4/5)

You can make surfaces, including yourself, frictionless. This allows a few things. You can skate, which means moving as a free action if you expend 2 focus (you will need to activate abrasion for an action though). It will cost investiture to maintain, but if you want to be doing more on your turn, activating abrasion is a great way to do it.

You can also slip through smaller spaces, escape restraints more easily and make objects and surfaces slippery. This has the chance of causing adversaries to fall prone or drop objects they’re holding (like a weapon or shield).

The best way to use abrasion is by getting a free movement action. But there’s a bunch of situational uses that make it an interesting utility option too.

Progression surge (5/5)

You can make a plant grow or regenerate health for a character. The more ranks in progression you have, the more they’re healed and the larger the plant can grow.

Regeneration is a really strong option, helping yourself and allies stay in the battle longer. You’ll want to invest in awareness as well as progression to enhance this as much as possible. Just be aware that adding investiture to regrowth will still require multiple turns to perform the full healing.

Cultivationspren bond

Level 2 talents

Second ideal (5/5)

Enhance as a free action and without spending investiture is really good! That’s extra speed and damage which means better attacks, faster movement, more carrying capacity and better physical skills. All without spending resources. I’d grab this pretty quickly if you can.

Edgedancer’s grace (4/5)

You have an extra reaction while invested which you can use to make the avoid danger or dodge actions without expending focus. This makes you generally harder to hit both with more opportunities to stay safe and with reduced focus cost to do so.

Level 3 talents

Third ideal (5/5)

Shardblades are great and will really enhance your melee capabilities with bigger damage and more injuries. This is obviously best on melee-focused characters, especially those that can manage multiple attacks in a round.

Invested (4/5)

More investiture means using more powerful talents and less time taken breathing in Stormlight mid-encounter.

Level 4 talents

Fourth ideal (5/5)

Shardplate is an excellent form of protection and can seriously enhance your durability and attacks. You’ve got 5 deflect plus charges that can increase that deflect value further. You get +2 speed and strength (so even better attacks, speed and physical skills) and it can be easily summoned and recharged. Just be aware, being enhanced by Shardplate won’t increase your HP or physical defense. Shardplate, especially radiant shardplate, is really good!

Wound regeneration (3/5)

Technically situational, but very useful when it comes up. There are other ways to recover from injuries, but it’s harder and takes more time. How much you get injured will likely depend on your GM, but this is definitely a good option to have available.

Deepened bond (2/5)

The extra bond range with your spren is OK, as is the reduced focus cost. However, the true benefits feel a little small.

Take squire (4/5)

Granting others your surges can be useful. However, this will typically be NPCs (most PCs will likely bond a spren of their own).

How good this is will depend on the quality of your squires. I can imagine having multiple squires a challenge to manage, but that doesn’t stop this being good.

Abrasion

Level 2 talents

Frictionless motion (3/5)

10ft faster movement while infused with abrasion and you aren’t slowed by difficult terrain, climbing, crawling or swimming. This essentially makes you a decent bit more mobile than before. Some of these things that might slow you down are a bit situational, but if your GM has any kind of terrain going on their battlemaps, then you should find a decent amount of use here.

Reverse abrasion (1/5)

Give things more friction making them easier to hold on to. Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how often this will be useful. It might have been useful for grappling, but you can’t use this on other characters, and for handling climbing or difficult terrain, you’re unlikely to impose this on a large enough area to make enough of a difference. So sadly, I just think this isn’t that useful.

Level 3 talents

Graceful skating (3/5)

You can now move freely when skating instead of in a straight line. This is obviously useful for getting more mobility behind your free action movement.

Stormlight reclamation (2/5)

You can now reclaim over-infused investiture on things you’ve infused. This means you can be a bit more cavalier with how you infuse certain things, knowing you can reclaim that investiture with a free action. How often this is going to be useful is the bigger question. I’m not sure it’s going to be loads.

Distant surgebinding (3/5)

20ft reach for your surges and their talents is a decent improvement and means you don’t have to get in melee range when you don’t want to. Note that this works on progression surges and talents too (or any you have) so isn’t just limited to abrasion. This means your healing gets some range, as does explosive growth for ranged damage.

Level 4 talents

Slippery target (3/5)

You can’t be grazed by attacks and reaction strikes have disadvantage against you while you’re infused with abrasion. This is handy for a really mobile character, especially one that wants to weave in and out of combat.

Smooth operator (4/5)

Removing the investiture cost for abrasion is going to be really useful to allow you to fuel your other talents. 1 less focus for skating is great too making it much easier to basically get a free move action each turn and do more with your turn.

Level 5 talents

Slick combatant (4/5)

You can use actions between parts of your movement and deal extra damage once per round based on your ranks in abrasion. At this point, your ranks in abrasion should be decent so the damage buff is solid and your turns can be more fluid.

Progression

Level 2 talents

Injury regrowth (3/5)

Easily heal allies from injuries with just 2 actions. How often this is useful is difficult to gauge, but when someone is injured, you’ll really want someone that can fix them up.

Explosive growth (5/5)

You can grow plants in an area so aggressively that they damage creatures in that area (there’s even a chance with opportunity that they’ll be immobilised).

While the damage, size of area and chances of hitting are lower with little investment in progression and awareness, they increase quite a bit as these increase (especially your ranks in progression). This has the potential to be really potent, but you will need to touch the area you affect (though distant surgebinding from the abrasion surge will give this some range). I don’t think you need to be in the middle of that area though, just at the edge, making it easy to slip away from danger again

Level 3 talents

Swift regeneration (4/5)

Regenerating is more worthwhile now with often higher dice rolls and a higher bonus to healing. As with other progression healing, more ranks in progression and a higher awareness will increase this further.

You can also survive injuries better, as can those you’ve invested in progression.

Overgrowth (2/5)

You can make plants grow even bigger and make them tougher. I think the use case here is creating a blockade or difficult terrain for enemies. It’s a tad situational to me but I guess it can have its uses.

Level 4 talents

Extended regrowth (5/5)

Regrowth with much less investiture expended is great and if you have 3-5 ranks in progression, you can be healing someone for most of a combat with very little cost. You might as well set your regrowth to the maximum number of rounds allowed to still just cost 1 investiture.

Reliable progression (4/5)

Your regrowth die roll will never be lower than your ranks in progression now with bigger dice getting a bigger benefit here.

This also affects things like explosive growth meaning better damage too.

Level 5 talents

From the brink (4/5)

Revive someone from death. They won’t have any hit points, but you can easily remedy that (or they can re generate themselves if they’ve taken a radiant path). A great option for desperate moments. Death is harder to come by in the Cosmere RPG than D&D, but it’s also harder to recover from too.

Font of life (4/5)

It costs 1 less action to use progression and it’s talents. This means you can heal with a single action, use an area of effect damage dealer in explosive growth with one action and revive from death and still have an action to spare. This is brilliant on your action economy, especially as healing is likely to be a common activity for an edgedancer.

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Building an optimised edgedancer

In this section, I’ll give some advice on which options to consider when building an optimised edgedancer.

Ancestry

Both the Human and Singer ancestries work for an optimised edgedancer.

Human: Humans will get you heroic talents quicker as you’ll be able to choose extra talents from heroic paths as you progress levels. You won’t get edgedancer talents quicker though, but plenty of heroic talents can enhance your radiant capabilities. You’ll get an extra talent at levels 1, 6, 11, 16 and 21.

Singer: Singers get a unique path that gives them different forms they can transform into. Artform, nimbleform, stormform, relayform and nightform are all good options for an edgedancer.

Heroic paths

Matching up capabilities between your radiant and heroic paths can be important as it allows you to focus more on a few different attributes and skills rather than spreading yourself too thin across many areas.

For an edgedancer, I’d recommend the following heroic paths and specialties:

• Agent: edgedancers work well as investigators, spies and thieves due to their natural speed and stealthiness.
• Hunter: Hunters can easily be speed based and operate at range which suits an edgedancer nicely. They also work great as scouts which leans into the awareness you should be investing in.
• Scholar (surgeon): While edgedancer’s don’t normally make great scholars, a surgeon gets enhanced healing which is perfect for an edgedancer. Grab swift healer and applied medicine and your healing from edgedancer healing will increase too, especially if you invest in ranks in lore and medicine.

Attributes

Recommended attributes

Speed: Your most important physical attribute. I’d use this for physical attacks which means investing ranks in light weaponry over heavy. It’ll also up your speed to make you more mobile, allowing you to use hit and run tactics and get to injured allies more easily. It will also up your physical defense and capabilities with skills like stealth and thievery.

Awareness: You’ll need one decent spiritual attribute to fuel your investiture and as progression relies on awareness, this makes the most sense here. It’s not essential, but you won’t skate for long or heal much without it. The strength of your healing and damage with progression is also fairly reliant on awareness.

Willpower: I’d probably invest at least a bit in willpower. It’s not as important as your other attributes, but it does up your focus, which will quickly get expended by you zipping around with abrasion.

Attributes to avoid

If you opt to go down the surgeon route, you might want some intellect, otherwise, this isn’t important for an edgedancer.

Strength can be useful for a bit more physical defense and HP, but you can make attacks with speed and as a ranged/hit and run/healer path, you can afford to be less durable than others.

You have very little reason to invest in presence so I’d dump this attribute.

Skills

You’ll want to focus on skills that lean into your strengths as an edgedancer. It’s generally better to have specialists in different areas in a party than lots of generalists.

Primarily, this means you’ll want skills related to speed and awareness which means those associated with stealth and scouting. If you’ve gone down the surgeon route, you could also enhance your lore and medicine for a bigger boost to healing. Of course, much will come down to your chosen heroic path as well, but the best heroic paths for an edgedancer will share many of these aspects in common.

I’d recommend investing skill ranks in the following skills:

• Stealth: If you’re the party scout, you’ll likely want to do a lot of sneaking. High ranks here will help with this.
• Light weaponry: As a speed focused path, you’ll want to make attacks using light weaponry rather than heavy weaponry.
• Agility: Will help you avoid the danger you’re skating near. Agility is best for edgedancers due to their natural speed meaning you can avoid athletics entirely (as they do much of the same things).
• Lore: Most edgedancers likely won’t want to invest in lore, but those that take the surgeon specialty can use it to enhance their healing.
• Medicine: The same goes for medicine, it’s only good for edgedancers with the surgeon specialty, but it’ll also grant you enhanced healing.
• Perception: As a natural scout, you may want to invest in perception to stay aware of your surroundings.
• Survival: Survival only tends to be important in campaigns with more exploration, but survival is decent enough, especially for a scout.
• Progression: Progression really benefits from gaining ranks in it, especially if you have quite a few levels in edgedancer. Your damage and healing both get more potent with increasing ranks in progression.
• Abrasion: Ranks in abrasion are surprisingly less crucial than you might think. If you’re just going to use abrasion to slide around the battlefield, then you can easily just not invest much in abrasion. However, if you intend to help others with difficult surfaces, make enemies drop items or use slick combatant (which is a higher level talent), then you might want some ranks in abrasion.

Expertises

Expertises can grant some special knowledge or benefits when using certain items. Largely, you can take whatever expertises fit your character, but there are a couple of things to consider:

• You’ll want decent armor until you can grab shardplate: You’ll likely want some decent armor, even if you don’t intend to be in melee combat too much. As a speed path, the best you can manage is by taking expertise in chain so you can avoid the cumbersome trait. If you have invested in strength (3 to be precise), then you can grab a breastplate or take expertise in half plate to avoid the cumbersome trait.
• Weapon expertises are going to be your most important: Edgedancers should be investing ranks in light weaponry which means using light weapons. With free movement actions, you’ve got spare actions for things like offhand attacks so you might want to consider weapons like knives and sideswords and grabbing expertise in those for reduced focus for offhand attacks. Alternatively, a ranged build is good. Shortbows can be a good choice or javelins. You can also just throw knives and still get that offhand attack at reduced focus.
• Use utility expertises to fill expertise gaps in the party: It’s not overly important what expertise you take, though if it might relate to speed or awareness, that will likely be best. You can however, use this to fill knowledge gaps in the party so there are a wide range of expertises in the group.
• Take whatever cultural expertise you like: You can take whatever cultural expertise fit your character best. You may want to consider taking cultural expertises that fill knowledge gaps in the group, but it’s not overly important.

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Edgedancers work best as healers, but like the clerics of D&D, they can do some damage too. Unlike clerics though, they are highly mobile, making it easy to get to those that need healing (or hurting).

Do you have a strong edgedancer build? How have you built them? Let me know in the comments below.

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