Willshaper Path Optimisation Guide for the Cosmere RPG

Manipulate stone and transport between realms with this intellectual, utility radiant path for the Cosmere RPG.

About willshapers

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

Willshaper 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.

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

Cohesion surge (2/5)

You can basically mould stone into a simple shape of your choice. I can’t think of many uses for this if I’m honest. Perhaps if you need to pass through a wall that isn’t too deep, you could make the wall malleable and scoop it out this way or with preparation time and plenty of investiture, you could create a pit. This perhaps wouldn’t take a really long time, but it is limited to stone. This means material like brick or even mud is off limits. The transformation surge can handle this kind of thing much better.

Transportation surge (2/5)

The transportation surge lets you identify emotions, motives, locations and sense investiture. There are obvious use cases here. Understanding motivations without an insight check, for example, can be helpful in some social situations. Knowing if someone is invested is handy too.

However, there are both limitations here and question marks over just how useful this is. Understanding emotions and motivations is the most likely to be useful, but it remains situational and often unimpactful (or could be accomplished with a strong insight skill).

Determining location is limited to your spren bond range. This never gets huge and starts off quite small making it only useful for identifying someone if they’re hidden and close by, which is again, quite situational.

Again, knowing if someone is invested is occasionally handy, but usually not, making this a very situational talent.

Lightspren 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.

Spiritual cohesion (4/5)

An opportunity for a few allies is nice and increased spiritual and cognitive defences once this is used is pretty good too. It’s a once per scene talent, but that’s still a decent amount.

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. That may not be the case for a willshaper, but your attacks will still get better regardless.

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 still really good though!

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 (3/5)

Realmic step gets a further range meaning much further teleportation, which is very handy. You can also locate and view things in the cognitive realm from further away. The reduced focus cost is decent if this is going to be used a fair bit too.

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.

Cohesion

Level 2 talents

Stone spear (3/5)

A decent ranged attack with solid distance, scaling damage and the potential to knock prone. It does require 2 actions though.

Memories of stone (3/5)

Being able to speak to the stones will allow you to do some decent investigative work. The fact it can show you images and whispered communication is potentially quite useful for investigative activity. The drawback here is it’s probably also going to be a bit vague or unclear in communication.

This is one of those where what you gain depends on a bit of luck and how generous your GM feels. They might just tell you footsteps were felt here or you may learn descriptions of the bandits that walked by including numbers, insignias and things they said to each other. Has the potential to be excellent, but could also be vague and useless, but I do quite like what this talent does.

Level 3 talents

Sinkhole (4/5)

Really great way to nullify a bunch of enemies, especially as your ranks in cohesion increase and the area you affect also grows. Immobilised is strong and many enemies may not have a great rank in athletics. Just be aware that this doesn’t generally cause a creature to be restrained. It seems that creatures are buried somewhere along their legs rather than their arms.

Level 4 talents

Tunneling (4/5)

Now you can properly move through walls and allow others to follow. This doesn’t require actions (just initiating the infusion of investiture requires an action). Instead your movement is slowed. Great for getting into places you’re not meant to be; or out of them.

Through the stone (4/5)

Ranged cohesion is pretty useful, but primarily, this affects sinkhole as most of your other talents don’t benefit or allow a ranged component to them. It can also affect your true stoneshaping so you can potentially create walls at distance or even cages.

Level 5 talents

True stoneshaping (4/5)

Now your natural cohesion gets quite interesting. You’re not just moulding rough shapes, you can instantly reshape the stone into walls or pits. Great for blocking line of site or trapping enemies.

Unbound cohesion (4/5)

Taking away the stone requirement and allowing you to reshape anything solid and non-living makes cohesion a whole lot more flexible. Now you can manipulate earth and dirt or brick and mortar.

Level 6 talents

Flowing earth (4/5)

As part of other cohesion talents, you can now also move yourself in any direction by pushing yourself with stone. This could be upwards out of reach of enemies or sideways to gain a bit more distance. You likely have at least 3 ranks in cohesion at this point, if not more, so the distance should be decent. Handily, it doesn’t allow reactive strikes against you either making this good for more evasive characters.

Transportation

Level 2 talents

Cognitive farsight (2/5)

Further range when peering into the cognitive realm makes some talents more useful, but these remain situational. Knowing direction and where settlements are is only useful for more exploration and survival focused adventures. Many adventures won’t be like this, making this often useless.

Realmic evasion (4/5)

Easy evasion is great. Weirdly, this is most useful on low defense characters. Because the DC is determined by the attack roll, lower defense characters will not only need this more, they’ll also be up against a lower DC. If your defense (especially your physical defense) is quite high, the DC for this will often be high making avoidance harder.

Once you get the realmwalker talent though, this will be an automatic success, but that is likely to come a fair bit later in your progression.

Alternatively, you can save this for nasty effects that are often tied to cognitive and spiritual defenses.

Level 3 talents

Cognitive vision (4/5)

Learning intentions and locating objects is OK, but again, this is an extension of your transportation surge, and these remain situational. However, a free action to grant disadvantage on a test to an enemy can be quite good. It’s not limited to conversations either. You can do this in combat, making this much more useful. A great option if you have plenty of investiture to use.

Realmic step (3/5)

Teleportation is often useful. Depending on your spren bond range, it may not be further than normal movement, but it can become much more than this. It also means you can traverse vertically and move without allowing opportunity attacks.

There is a decent possibility of this failing, which loses it a point, however, this restriction is removed when you get the realmwalker talent.

Level 4 talents

Elsecalling (3/5)

Transporting between the cognitive and physical realms can be very convenient and it’s one of those powers that is technically, very powerful. The problem is that if an adventure requires cognitive and physical realm traversal, that the GM should provide a way to do this. True, it may be harder, but I suspect it’s rare that this will be needed or useful. While this talent may not allow the entire group to do this yet, shared transportation will eventually allow this.

However, there are potential ways to use this that may be useful beyond just trying to be in one realm or the other. For example, if you want to get into a locked building, you could attempt to elsecall to the cognitive realm, enter that area and then elsecall back inside that location. There’s no guarantee that this will be an easier process, but it could be.

In some respects, this could be a frustrating talent for a GM to accommodate. They’ll need to be prepared for elsecalling at any moment, meaning knowing what might be there in the cognitive realm as well as the physical. So GMs, be prepared. It might also mean characters bypassing some carefully laid plans so be ready for this too.

Level 5 talents

Shared transportation (4/5)

This is where elsecalling becomes really easy to bypass GM prepared encounters by having the whole group elsecall with you. Of course, that could be some major investiture expenditure so larger parties may struggle here.

This means you can transport the whole party between realms, but you may find shared realmic step more regularly useful. Now you can transport allies around the battlefield to where they’re needed.

Elsegate (2/5)

Travelling to highly invested locations is again, powerful magic, but for the purposes of an adventure, is more of a convenience than useful. It’s likely more useful for a GM to easily get players from one locale to another than for players themselves, and even then, a friendly elsecaller or willshaper NPC could assist with that. Sadly, for playing purposes, as great as it is, it’s not that useful in actual play.

Realmwalker (5/5)

Transportation tests now automatically succeed. This is useful for a few talents. Specifically, this affects; realmic step, realmic evasion, elsecalling and cognitive vision. It turns some of your better talents into even better talents.

You can now automatically succeed when transporting from the cognitive realm into the physical, imposing disadvantage as a free action always works, as does your teleportation and realmic evasion will always allow you to evade an attack. All combined, this is very strong.

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Building an optimised willshaper

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

Ancestry

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

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 willshaper 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. Scholarform, workform, envoyform, decayform and nightform are all good options for a willshaper.

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 a willshaper, I’d recommend the following heroic paths and specialties:

• Agent: But mainly only investigators. Your intellect for transportation goes hand in hand with deduction and your ability to access the memories of stone is great for some investigative work.
• Envoy: Faithful in particular are reliant on a good intellect and willpower for their lore and discipline. They also work well as backline support characters which fits the evasive nature of a willshaper well and their ability to teleport, manoeuvre and throw up protective walls.
• Scholar: Your intellect focus makes you great for any kind of scholar, especially as willshaper are also great at staying away from a danger; a good place for any scholar to be.

Attributes

Recommended attributes

Speed: You’ll want an attribute for attacks and physical defence. Attack is unlikely to be your forte, and as willshapers work quite well alongside stealth approaches, I’d opt for speed over strength.

Willpower: The strength of your cohesion surge talents is reliant in part on your willpower. This will help you have plenty of focus too for while you’re not using invested talents.

Intellect: Transportation relies on a high intellect so you’ll want to make sure this is increased. It will also help you with tests like deduction which will help you in social situations. Intellect also helps with focus making willshapers really highly focused.

Attributes to avoid

If you’ve opted for speed, then you may want to not bother too much with strength. Awareness and presence are also easy attributes to dump for a willshaper.

Skills

You’ll want to focus on skills that lean into your strengths as a willshaper. 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 intellect and willpower (and potentially speed) which means those associated with knowing things and mental fortitude. Of course, much will come down to your chosen heroic path as well, but the best heroic paths for a willshaper will share many of these aspects in common.

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

• Light weaponry: If you’ve invested in speed over strength, then ranks in light weaponry are the way to go. If you have gone for a strength build, you can invest in heavy weaponry instead. Either way, you’ll likely want some kind kind of attacking skill.
• Crafting: If you want to go down the crafting route, then willshapers can do this well and skills in crafting will be important.
• Deduction: Willshapers are good at deducing things so ranks in deduction make a good idea.
• Discipline: Discipline is good for holding your nerve, and with a strong willpower, willshapers can be quite good at this.
• Lore: You likely want at least one character that knows stuff and willshapers are a good option for this.
• Medicine: If you want a healer, willshapers are a solid option with their intellect focus (though edgedancers and truthwatchers are your best options here). This is especially the case I’d you’ve gone with the surgeon specialty.
• Cohesion: Ranks in cohesion will help you shape larger areas of stone and make your cohesion attacks and other talents like sinkhole more reliable.
• Transportation: Ranks in transportation will help you be more successful at transportation skills, though this can become less important at later levels as you grab automatic success talents like realmwalker.

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. Since you likely won’t be investing a lot in strength, 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: Willshapers usually aren’t built for close combat and speed tends to suit them better meaning investing in light weaponry which means using light weapons. I’d consider using hit and run tactics (especially with teleportation as an option) or making ranged attacks. Shortbows can be a good choice or javelins. A short spear is your top damage melee option too, allowing you to wield it one handed.
• Use utility expertises to fill expertise gaps in the party: Depending on your focus might affect what utility expertise you want to take. For example, if you go for ranks in crafting, you may want expertise in equipment and fabrial crafting.
• 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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Willshapers are more about movement, knowledge and debuffing enemies than pure damage. This makes them more like wizards or bards from the D&D universe than anything else. They have magical capabilities that fit a range of utility needs including teleportation andanipukating stone.

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

Spotlight on the Cosmere RPG