Best Skills in Dune Awakening – Starter Build Guide

Dune Awakening has a complex class system with several subclasses with different skill trees. This makes the choices difficult because you can mix and match different trees on one character.

Yup, you can learn skills from all the classes as long as you unlock the upgrades from the specific trainers. That’s going to make your skill choices a bit harder. Here are some of the best skills everyone can use in Dune Awakening.

The Best Skills in Dune Awakening

Shigawire Claw – Trooper’s Tactical Tech Tree

The Shigawire Claw skill from the Trooper’s Tactical Tech tree offers some of the best movement and maneuvering in the game. The skill gives you a grappling hook that can propel you to high terrain, close gaps on enemies quicker, and use a floating mechanic to let you fly up for a quick survey.

Using the Suspensor Pad from the Planetologist’s Explorer tree should give you more maneuverability. Still, most players will try to use the suspensor to launch themselves high up in the air.

When your player falls, your suspensor activates, lowering the gravity to prevent fall damage. But when you use your Shigawire Claw to launch yourself up while you have the momentum of falling with your suspensor, it slingshots you straight up to the sky. It could be a bug or an unintended mechanic, but that’s what makes the Shigawire Claw the best skill out there.

Related: How to Get Spice-Infused Copper Dust and Plasteel Microflora Fiber in Dune Awakening

Energy Capsule – Trooper’s Gunnery Tree

The skill activates an energy capsule, filling you with neurostimulant buffs and pain dampeners, giving you 35% more ranged damage.

Combine this skill with other talents from the Mentat’s Mental Calculus tree, like Marksman, Exploit Weakness, and your preferred weapon damage buff, should increase your DPS tenfold.

There’s a reason why it is way up there in the Gunnery skill tree. A player’s damage shouldn’t be able to scale this high early in the game.

When going for hard PvE content in the future, you might want to look into some cool synergies using Energy Capsule and other skills, passives, and gear.

Poison Capsule – Mentat’s Assassination Tree

The Poison Capsule skill is the first skill from the Mentat’s Assassination tree. It applies a cloud of poison to an area, poisoning enemies. It may seem unappealing or useless, but poison actually helps starter players deal with those annoying shielded enemies.

When you start exploring scavenger camps in the early game, you’ll encounter some melee mercenaries with active shields and other ranged enemies. The melee ones become hard to deal with when getting shot from afar.

If you are looking to do a perfect parry and a brutal attack to deal with the shield, you’ll get shot by ranged enemies before you even try to get a parry attempt in.

The Poison Capsule skill helps deal effectively with the shielded enemies, allowing you to focus on the other enemies.

Cutterray Mining and Vehicle Mining – Planetologist’s Mechanic and Scientist Trees

Once you get to the “tier 2” or “tier 3” (iron and steel) part of the game, resources will feel much more scarce because you’ll need thousands of them to sustain yourself as well as craft new things. You might already have your Sandbike to help you save time traveling from one place to another to farm specific resources, but it’ll still take a long time to farm hundreds of resources.

The Cutteray Mining and Vehicle Mining increases your mining yield when farming for resources, giving you up to 30% more resources when farming.

As someone who gathers resources in bulk, this is an unbelievably efficient talent, especially for a skill so accessible at the early or midgame.

Healing Talents – Bene Gesserit’s Body Control Tree

Trauma Recovery, Vitality, Recovery, and Self-Healing are all passive skills under the Bene Gesserit Body Control tree. Trauma Recovery gives you a healing regeneration rate, while the other talents improve on the threshold, max health, and effectiveness.

Roaming around scavenger camps, wreckages, PvP zones, and other contested areas always feels hectic when you are low on health.

Fights seem endless, and talents with health sustain drastically improves your quality of life. You always tend to get hit by a random shot from an NPC because they constantly spawn around Arrakis. 

You may even get time stopped or frozen and get ambushed by mercenaries. You barely have time to heal using consumables between fights; even if you do have time, you sometimes forget.

This is where these talents come in handy. You’ll have some natural health regeneration when you lose HP. These talents become even more useful when you get your shields up because you don’t get damage as frequently, and you’ll always be in tip-top shape.

Disciplined Breathing and General Conditioning – Swordmaster’s The Way Tree

Disciplined Breathing and General Conditioning are passive skills from the Swordmaster’s The Way skill tree. You get it way later in the tree, but it is highly efficient regardless of your playstyle. The skills give you better stamina recovery rate and maximum stamina, and since stamina is essentially used for everything, you want to buff it as much as possible.

You can climb higher, use more skills (since they cost stamina), run for longer, perform melee combos, parry, dodge, and much more.

Stamina is so useful that it is almost mandatory for melee users because having more stamina indirectly buffs your damage output by using more skills and attacking more.

You can never go wrong with taking these skills, so it is a must-have, especially if you have already invested points into the Swordmaster class.

While the game has several other skills, it depends on what type of playstyle you want. Do you want to be a sneaky assassin or a ranged heavy gunner? There are a lot of hybrid builds, but the skills listed above are all generally good for any build, perfect for any starter.