Unlocking Limitless Potential: Exploring Character Builds in Remnant 2

We’ve seen the comments, the tweets, and posts on Reddit saying the limiting of trait points, removal of armor perks, and the introduction of archetypes is going to be hamstring players when it comes to Remnant 2 build potential. With so many changes being implemented and only a limited number of people having experienced a small fraction of the game, we can understand why there’s confusion. However, once you really dive into all the new additions and improvements Remnant 2 is bringing to the table, there’s nothing short of an incredible amount of build potential.

Elements of a Build

I think it’s important we show the components of a build from Remnant: From the Ashes, and Remnant 2, side by side, before we jump into the finer details. You’ll notice immediately, when these lists are compared, Remnant 2’s comes out on top. Let’s break it down.

In Remnant: From the Ashes you had 3 Weapons. There was 1 Handgun with 1 Weapon Mod Slot, 1 Long Gun with 1 Weapon Mod Slot, and 1 Melee Weapon that had no adjustable features. Weapon mods, for those who aren’t aware, are abilities that become active after enough damage has been dealt with the weapon they are equipped on. Of course there were also traits, jewelry, and set bonuses that could make this generate passively, but at a base level, shooting weapons equated to charging these abilities.

Then you had 3 Armor Pieces. Each piece was part of a specific set, and each set had a 1,2, and 3 piece set bonus. You could wear all 3 pieces from a specific set and receive the most potent form of that set bonus, or you could mix and match pieces to get a hybrid set of perks. Each armor set was also a specific weight class, directly influencing your damage resistance and the speed of your dodge mechanic. This meant more often than not, your desired set bonus would lock you into your weight class. You could negate this with jewelry, but then you’d also be wasting one of those gear slots as well to offset something, not necessarily improve your effectiveness in combat.

Finally, to round out your gear, you had 3 jewelry slots. This was made up of 1 Necklace and 2 Rings. These had a massive impact on your build and a lot of damage perks won out over most other effects in what was actually a really large pool of jewelry to pull from.

The only other things that would factor into a build in Remnant: From the Ashes were your traits. When you were just starting out and adventuring through the various worlds in search of gear, unlocking traits was integral to beefing up your character. As time progressed however, and you pushed into harder difficulties, you could quite literally unlock and max out every single trait in the game, making you an unstoppable killing machine that didn’t have to think critically about a single trait in order to make a build work. You just collected them all, and as long as you had specific ones available you didn’t need to really invest too much energy to spec into what you needed. Meanwhile every other extra trait just became icing on the cake, and to be blunt this was an incredibly boring power fantasy.

In Remnant 2, most of this still exists, but in a lot of cases has been drastically expanded upon and even overhauled.

We’ll still have 3 weapons; a handgun, a long gun, and a melee weapon. The handgun and long gun slots will also still feature 1 weapon mod slot each that functions in the exact same way. Where this starts to differ is that all 3 weapons also have, what the developers call, mutator slots.

These really haven’t been shown off at all. We’ve seen the empty slots, but that’s it. Thankfully, Tragic over at Gunfire Games did a bit of clarifying on this system over in the Remnant 2 Discord. In short, the set bonuses that once were part of armor sets have now become mutators that can be dynamically slotted onto any of your 3 weapons, melee included, and there are even more effects than what we previously saw across all armor sets in Remnant: From the Ashes. These start out with 1 perk each and upon leveling them up to 10, by defeating aberrations for specific materials, they’ll gain an additional perk, effectively allowing you to have a 2-piece set bonus on each weapon. I don’t know about you, but this alone is fantastic news leading to much deeper build-crafting.

Armor on the other hand, not only got bumped up to 4 pieces instead of 3, but because of this addition, it has allowed the team to strip armor set bonuses off of armor completely. What you’re left with is cosmetic armor that really only determines your weight class and dodge roll speed, as well as how resistant you are to different forms of damage. Additionally, you now have finer control over your weight class, as the system now spreads across those 4 pieces of gear instead of just 3, allowing you to mix and match different pieces of armor more freely.

In the jewelry department, 2 additional ring slots have been added, bringing the total in Remnant 2 up to 1 necklace and 4 rings. This is huge for multiple reasons. First, it’s easier to stack synergistic effects and really augment your build in a specific direction. Second, because you have 4 slots instead of 2, you’re free to experiment with more unique effects on jewelry pieces without completely derailing your build. Things like the “Bright Steel Ring” from Remnant: From the Ashes, which gave the wearer the fastest evade roll, regardless of their armor encumbrance, can now be an integral component of a build, without feeling like you just wasted 50% of your potent jewelry effects.

Trait points are also a massive factor now, as you can no longer max everything out. In fact, you’ll only have around 85 or so points to spend in total. Combine this with the fact that most flat increase damage traits have been completely removed, and you’ll quickly realize how the potential diversity this section of your build enables. Traits that benefit stamina or mod power generation could be the play for one build, while another may want to focus entirely on health and overall survivability.

On top of all of that we also need to think about our Archetypes, a brand-new system in Remnant 2. Each archetype effectively grants you access to 3 different skills, 4 different archetype specific perks that not only benefit you, but your teammates as well, a more potent and unique prime perk, and an archetype specific trait that becomes available for any build to utilize once it’s leveled-up rank 10.

You can even slot 2 different archetypes at the same time, creating a dual archetype and allowing you to equip up to 2 archetype skills, 1 from each archetype you have equipped. It’s a bit confusing at first so if you want a deeper dive into archetypes and really everything we know about the game so far, I strongly recommend you check out our Ultimate Preview for Remnant 2 as it explains every drop of important information up until this point.

I mentioned a bit earlier, mutators sort of took over for armor set bonuses, but archetypes kind of did as well, and these two new systems, working in tandem, will help create a much more customizable set of perks and bonuses, while allowing players the freedom to be more expressive with which armor set suits them best.

Finally, to round things off, we have to talk about Relics and how they will factor into builds. In Remnant: From the Ashes, you had a limited amount of Dragonhearts to burst heal, and that’s pretty much all they did. In Remnant 2, Dragonhearts still exist, but so does a wide array of other relics that can apply any number of effects. Some relics heal over time. Others provide damage or utility bonuses to the player. We’ve only seen a small number of relics up until this point, but to make things even more interesting we have to talk about the 3 relic fragments.

These can be used to further augment yourself whenever activating a relic, and while not groundbreaking flat increases to crit damage, overall damage, and the promise of more utility buff is promising.

All of this just proves builds will be more specialized, team gameplay will play to each member’s unique strengths, and the variation you’ll see from the community at large will likely be staggering. It should come as no surprise, when looking at all the information we just presented, that Remnant 2 is effectively doubling the options for how a player can build out their character… allowing you to play the way you want to. 

The Bottom Line

if this didn’t convince you that Remnant 2 is much less limiting for build crafting, then only going hands on for yourselves will. Thankfully, that is right around the corner on July 25th, and we’ll be right there with you with build guides, boss guides, secrets, and a whole lot more.