Windrunner Radiant Path Optimisation Guide for the Cosmere RPG

Elevate yourself with this guide to the combat and scouting-focused windrunner path.

About windrunners

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

Windrunner 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.

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 adhesion and gravitation once you speak the first ideal, but you’ll have to wait a bit for those.

Adhesion surge (3/5)

Adhesion has some potential to be quite useful, but you’ll be reliant on the GM to interpret a lot of combat effects until later talents kick in. One clarification is that while you can’t use the adhesion surge on people, you can use it on objects they’re holding or wearing. Succeeding at this will require a test against their physical defense, but if you succeed, you could stick a boot to the ground, a weapon to a wall or a shield to their armor. Up your ranks in adhesion to increase your chances of a success here.

The mechanical impacts of these things aren’t necessarily clear and are up to GM interpretation, but there’s lots of potential benefits. Specifically, making attacks harder or losing the use of some equipment. Sadly, it won’t work on invested items like shardblades or shardplate.

Gravitation surge (5/5)

Flight on the other hand, is regularly useful and really helps you at scouting, escaping deadly foes and even means you can keep up with other flying creatures. As a general rule, I’d prioritise gravitation over adhesion.

Honorspren 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.

Reverse lashing (4/5)

The obvious use case for this is to handle projectiles. Basically, things like arrows, stones etc will be attracted to something much less concerning and prevent you and allies from taking harm.

There are other use cases too. Use it to attract gems, a set of keys, weapons or anything else of an appropriate size. You’ll have to declare the type of item when you initiate the reverse lashing. It remains a little situational, but not overly so, and really creative players might get a lot of use out of this.

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)

Thes 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). Gravitation is going to be your best option, but you might as well grant adhesion too.

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.

Adhesion

Level 2 talents

Stormlight reclamation (2/5)

This is only useful if you’ve over-infused something. Admittedly, it can be hard to predict how much investiture to infuse something with. This will work with other surges that require infusing with investiture (handily, gravitation is one of those). However, you need to be in touching distance of the infused thing and you’ll only get use out of this if your estimates are off.

Binding strike (3/5)

Getting a use of your adhesion surge against an enemy without expending an action is good, and having it work automatically if you hit is solid too. However, you’ll need to spend opportunity or use 2 focus for this. Agents will more easily make use of this with their opportunity-focused talents. Those with a bigger opportunity will benefit too or that can reduce the focus cost by being focused (again, agents can be good at this).

Level 3 talents

Distant surgebinding (4/5)

Longer reach for adhesion is going to be useful. Now you don’t need to get into melee range of your opponents.

Binding shot (4/5)

This gives your adhesion a potentially huge range and could work really well for a hunter that can make plenty of shots. It means you can use adhesion at a much safer range.

Level 4 talents

Extended adhesion (4/5)

Much less investiture for your adhesion is going to go a long way and should allow you to have more things stuck at the same time.

Adhesive trap (5/5)

This is a great trap as there’s no save to prevent it working and can easily trap someone in place, especially if you have quite a lot of ranks in adhesion and can infused a larger area. It’ll obviously be most potent in an enclosed space against ground units. And the enemy will be able to try and break free, maybe by removing their boot or just making an athletics test.

Level 5 talents

Living adhesion (4/5)

This is where adhesion gets really potent and much easier to create problems. You’re not just taking their weapon or getting them stuck for a turn, now they’re directly stuck, have the restrained condition, have disadvantage on physical tests and attacks have advantage against them. Pretty good!

Of course it’s still a contested test and they can still attempt to escape so get your ranks in adhesion nice and high as well as your presence.

Superior bond (4/5)

Automatically succeed when someone tries to break free of your adhesion is really good as long as your ranks in adhesion are quite high. You may not need to worry as much about presence because of this. This won’t work for really strong enemies though, which may mean it fades in potency as you gain levels.

Gravitation

Level 2 talents

Flying ace (5/5)

40ft fly speed and you can make a free attack when maintaining gravitation and moving. This means it’s not just the turn you activate this, but every turn you move with gravitation that you can make a free attack. This can be used alongside the strike action and even another action that allows attacks (including dual wielding weapons).

This makes it easy to move where you need to be and make 2-3 attacks in a turn. This is a really strong, low level dip for a windrunner.

Gravitational slam (4/5)

This is really for using when lashing adversaries. Slam them into a wall, or even better, a ceiling. If you have flying ace, you can move them 40ft (which is 4d4 damage) and then let them fall for some extra damage (if the ceiling is just the right height).

More ranks in gravitation will mean higher damage dice. Get to 5 and you’re dealing 4d12 damage with this and moving the enemy out of the way and potentially causing fall damage too (average of 14 damage plus any fall damage). You could even send an enemy diagonally into a wall but give them some height to fall from.

Level 3 talents

Stable flight (4/5)

Ranged attacks while flying can be really problematic for adversaries, especially if they lack flight or ranged capabilities. Just fly out of reach of that chasmfiend and hail down arrows. Your allies might be in trouble, but at least you won’t be.

Multiple lashings (4/5)

Send enemies higher and get them out of the way longer. 3 lashings with flying ace will launch them 120ft in the air! That’s 12d6 fall damage.

Lashing shot (2/5)

I think this is less good than just using gravitational slam to lash the individual and launch them into a wall. However, ranged attacks are safer and with decent ranks in gravitation, you quickly outperform the average ranged weapon. Your only problem is this takes 2 actions and a strike takes 1. This also costs investiture and a strike doesn’t so the price is fairly hefty.

For this reason, I think windrunners will do more damage as melee combatants, even if it’s easy to play it safe by flying and launching volleys of projectiles.

Level 4 talents

Group flight (3/5)

With a decent rank in gravitation, you should be able to take the whole party on a flying trip. Sadly, it’s no good in combat making it more a matter of convenience. Bring along the party scout into the skies to explore, launch everyone to the top of Urithiru or just traverse Roshar easily. It’s a talent of convenience more than one that’s going to significantly alter your gameplay.

Master of the skies (5/5)

Always on flight is great and means you can save your investiture for other things like healing and enhancing. This also means something like flying ace is easier to be using too.

It’s worth being aware that there isn’t an interaction here with group flight as that only activates when you use investiture for a basic lashing, not when you do so without expending investiture.

Level 5 talents

Aerial squadron (5/5)

Now you can use group flight in combat. This can be tactically quite powerful. Get your less resilient allies into the skies to stay out of reach of some enemies and keep everyone involved in the fray against other flying enemies. The investiture cost is fairly cheap here too.

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Building an optimised windrunner

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

Ancestry

You can choose a Human or Singer ancestry for an optimised windrunner.

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 windrunner 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. Nimbleform, warform, direform, stormform and relayform are all good options for a windrunner.

Attributes

Recommended attributes

Speed: An option for weapon attacks which you should be making a lot of, especially with flying ace and close combat adhesions. It’ll also up your defense significantly. As a strong option for a scout, this will help with the likes of stealth and thievery too. You may need the movement speed less as you take more levels in gravitation, but it’s still an important attribute.

Strength: Your other option for physical attacks. It’ll also help with your physical defense and increase your HP.

Awareness: As a natural scout, you’ll likely want a strong presence. Add to this the fact that if you want a decent amount of investiture, you’ll need a high spiritual attribute. This is also the attribute used for your gravitation skill tests.

Presence: In many ways, presence isn’t overly important for a windrunner other than the fact that it’s the attribute for which your adhesion surge tests are used. If you intend on doing a lot of sticking of other characters and their things, then you may want to consider investing in presence.

Attributes to avoid

Unless you’re planning on using binding strike a lot, you don’t need much focus, this means willpower is less important for a windrunner. However, you may want some investment in a cognitive attribute and willpower is a better option for a windrunner than intellect which is even less important.

Skills

You’ll want to focus on skills that lean into your strengths as a windrunner. It’s generally better to have specialists in different areas in a party than lots of generalists. Primarily, this means we’ll want skills that enhance attacks and that are related to physical skills as well as those for scouting (so mainly those associated with strength, speed and awareness). Of course, much will come down to your chosen heroic path as well, but the best heroic paths for a windrunner 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.
• Thievery: Less essential for a windrunner, but you could easily build into thievery If you wanted to.
• Light weaponry or heavy weaponry: Really important for windrunners that will typically want to get up close and personal but may also want to shoot projectiles from afar. Either way, strong attacks will help out a lot. Your choice here just depends on which of strength or speed is your strongest.
• Agility or athletics: Will help you avoid the danger you’re hurtling into. You’ll only need one of these though. They do a lot of the same things so you can just pick whichever is associated with your strongest attribute out of strength and speed.
• 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.
• Adhesion: One of your surges so you may want to invest in this a bit, especially if you intend to use adhesion against things that might resist it.
• Gravitation: I would say that most characters will likely find gravitation to be the more important and useful surge for a windrunner. You’ll need gravitation ranks to handle tricky maneuvers, to succeed at gravitational slams, to lash more allies for group flight, to make lashing shots and to use multiple lashings.

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 need some decent defenses for all the melee fighting you’ll be getting into. And radiant shardplate won’t come until you reach at least level 13+ (unless you take the shardbearer warrior specialty, and even then, you shouldn’t normally be receiving shardplate until tier 3). This means grabbing expertise in some armor. Chainmail is likely your best option if you’re high speed and only some strength (if you grab expertise). You can go for half plate or full plate if your strength is high.
• Weapon expertises are going to be your most important: Windrunners are generally built a fair bit for direct combat. Match up your weapons and your expertise with the kind of fighting you want to engage in and the effects you want and make sure you prioritise grabbing these.
• Utility expertises aren’t overly important for a windrunner: So feel free to take whatever utility expertises you want. That’s not to say they can’t be useful, just that they’re not needed for an optimised windrunner. You’re mainly about scouting and combat.
• 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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With gravitation, Windrunners can fit a number of different party roles. But they’re best suited to close combat and scouting. Flight and adhesion give them plenty of utility though, both in and out of combat.

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

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