The First Descendant best character tier list

S-Tier Descendants

These are easily the most effective characters you can pick right now for melting both bosses and mobs.

Gley

Thanks to Gley’s mixture of big buffs and damage debuffs to enemies, you can play her any way you want. If you want to shred bosses, go berserk mode with a sniper and nuke enemies. To play a more supportive role, you can debuff enemy ATK stats while in Frenzy mode with mob-controlling weapons. Since she uses health as a resource for buffs, you can kill enemies and get more health globes for self-sustain. This makes her fantastic for solo play, group play, support play, and boss killing. She’s a fairly safe character to research for all the right reasons. Gley can even get infinite ammo to sustain combat encounters.

Bunny

Bunny’s build enables burst damage from her double jump Lightning skill that pulses around her. She’ll tear through spawning packs and destroy enemies through cover and shields. While it’s easy to fumble her unique electricity meter, no other character is as good at clearing missions and mobs. You will need strong defensive buffs to your build or party support to see Bunny used properly. We expect balance changes to either nerf her or buff everyone else to her level.

Freyna

Freyna is a poison-themed Descendant that can do lots of damage. She has a unique debuff effect via her Room 0 Trauma effect that deals continuous damage. Since it is easy to apply, you can combo it with other status effects for some incredible DPS. Throw in her defensive and stacking ATK buffs from poisoned enemies, and Freyna is a great character.

The only downside is how much value you get from poison buffs as her allies can nuke her buff potential. Her playstyle relies on using poison to get buffs while slowly weakening elites or bosses. Freyna is a good choice for boss-killing or clearing missions.

A-Tier list

These options are solid as well and go toe-to-toe against our S-Tier picks with the right upgrades.

Valby

Valby is a slippery DPS character, with strong constant damage opportunities, and an interesting take on survivability. She’ll cheapen her skill costs via her water bubble puddle mechanic, and summon more bubbles. She can throw bigger bubbles for AoE and when she needs to relocate, head to other puddles and avoid threats closing in. Throw in another DEF skill that allows her to flow through enemies and she evades most confrontations. Supply Moisture even buffs your Firearm Critical Chance, letting you deal more damage.

As for her ultimate attack, she has a strong Crowd Control skill, which is excellent for those oh-no moments. However, it’s a panic button skill due to its heavy mana cost. If you want an engaging character to play with solid DPS over time for all scenarios, Valby is worthy of your attention.

Ajax

Ajax is the dedicated tank in The First Descendant. Your allies will thank you when you’re holding areas down with your Orbit barriers and bubbles. There’s not a single mode in Operations where you won’t find use for his defensive capabilities. They’re even better in public dungeons or Void Intercept boss fights where you can mitigate a lot of damage when working together with allies. The only downside to Ajax is damage is lacking from his skills. It requires some enhanced reflective walls, so focus on ATK buffs for your weapon mods if you want to kill things yourself.

Lepic

Lepic is one of the starter characters and offers decent damage, strong crowd control, and a unique cheat death mechanic on his passive. While his damage eventually falls off compared to more DPS-focused Descendants, you’ll find his CC potential excellent for open-world play and countering elites, especially those with riot shields. You can even use his kit to CC enemies to help Freyna and Blair dish out more damage. Don’t overlook the crowd control and burst DPS potential this character has.

The clear downside however is his single-target damage. The amount of mana you spend on his Overdrive skill to get the burn active is costly. Avoid it when you have more dedicated damage dealers, and focus on CC with Traction Grenade to clear mobs effectively.

Viessa

Viessa is another starter character, that, when you play, specialises in debuffs and crowd control. Her value shines most when slowing harder-to-kill enemies and large packs of hostile for various objectives in Operations. When tougher enemies are slowed, it means everyone else has an easier time landing those weak shot hits or getting away from danger. If you’re looking for damage, she does fine with her icicle effects. But, for her role as a farmer and pusher, it’s all about the crowd control effects.

B-Tier list

While these characters are capable, a drawback or two keeps them from competing in the meta.

Enzo

Enzo is a niche support class character. The unique skill for ammo placement, Magazine modifiers and ATK buffs make him a decent support for challenging content. He also has some decent AoE and burst DPS windows with his ultimate and other base skills. The clear downside is that his passive is very dependent on Encrypted Vaults for the bonus loot. Your magazine ability is ideally best used for allies who are heavily reliant on the higher-tier weapons while facing hard bosses. Supply Firearm Enhancer is still a good reason to keep him around as you can make any weapon critically hit.

Jayber

Jayber is a support character with decent DPS options. Yet, he is not a master of either. You can place turrets, offer tactical advantages with placements or your Assault turrets to enemies, and your allies via your Medical turret. If you can play well, you can get more turrets and enhance them with your ultimate.

But turret placement and ally coordination are important as Jayber. So be careful and plan ahead to get a better support-DPS mix in harder content. If you’re looking for a solo character, Jayber is a decent pick but you’re better off with more DPS-focused characters like Gley.

Sharen

Sharen has the most cool-looking kit of all the characters in the game. Her chain stealth mechanics, executing enemies not hitting you with more burst damage and refresh stealth makes her an enjoyable open-world character to play. She has a fantastic CC spread, allowing her to stun several enemies, go invisible, and then chain-slash them all to death. It’s easy to see how her combos work for group and solo play out in the Operation zones. But while these are great visually, slow animations and wind-ups make her a bad pick overall.

The main downsides are her nerf to damage potential in the endgame and her inadequate DEF. If you want the rule of cool, Sharen is awesome. She won’t scale as high as other damage dealers who specialise in AoE or single-target. But if you like infiltrating outposts, no one else does it like Sharen.

Esiemo

Esiemo plays a similar role as Lepic but with less control over his ultimate. If you’re all about explosives then Esiemo is a strong choice, but don’t expect too much in terms of utility. But if you aren’t stacking your grenades right, this character can feel like a chore to play. We’d recommend picking Lepic instead.

Luna

Luna is the first post-release character in First Descendant. She launched to mixed reception. Yet, she is certainly undervalued. Her playstyle is largely supportive, with her kit designed for using spells at the right time to grant powerful buffs. Most of these buffs are skill damage or skill cooldown-related, which can be huge for a variety of groups. Large skill damage is perfect for Bunny, Blair, Fryena, and Valby.

Her cooldown reduction is perfect for tanking characters, along with other high-damage and long CD burst characters. We’ll likely see the most out of Luna later on in the mega-dungeons coming out or the very hard content. We’ll rate her B tier as her value is not so obvious right now. But, support Descendant are likely to see an increase in value in the coming patches and content.

C-Tier list

These characters are highly situational and can’t compete with the others on this list.

Kyle

Pros

• Unique bruiser playstyle at launch.
• Decent damage and survivability.
• Solid movement effects and crowd control.

Cons

• Magnetic Force resource hard to manage via being a damage mitigation and damage dealing resource.
• Reliant on communication with barrier and fly ultimate in group play.

Kyle is a mixture of a support DPS and tank, giving him a bruiser role. If you want the benefits of the tanking tactics for your reflective wall like Ajax, they offer it too. However, his Magnetic Force passive ability makes him different, with that resource used for damage, and reducing damage taken. You can use this to tank for the team, get more defensiveness, or engage with your ultimate skill to fly into battle and nuke entire battlefields. His value in groups falls off compared to dedicated tanks or support DPS characters. Avoid Kyle for now, because while he’s decent, he’s hard to recommend unless you really like his playstyle.

Blair

Blair’s combat style is all about crit chance. With proper skill planning, your abilities will pump out massive damage numbers. His mobility is impaired by his flamethrower move and you’ll need a near-perfect build to use him well. Blaire also lacks CC or defensiveness. If you group up with CC characters, you’ll find great value in assisting them with your crit chance. But we’d still recommend trying more reliable characters first.

Yujin

Yujin is a dedicated support healer character, the only one of its kind at the time of writing. If you’re looking to support your allies with buffs, healing, and DEF, then Yujin is the one. But their abilities aren’t as simple as simply swooping up health pickups. Pair that with their lack of survivability and you can see why you’d become a liability with this character. Avoid Yujin if you want to solo play, as other characters can breeze through the campaign and its bosses.