Soulframe Best Garren Rood Build

Welcome to our Garren Rood Build Guide for Soulframe. In this guide, we’ll explain how you can create a powerful Garren Rood build that deals high damage. This build works well in both solo and co-op play.

Garren Rood is an unlockable Pact in Soulframe. It gives you very high healing potential and can stagger enemies, summoning herds of deer spirits to stampede enemies.

This Garren Rood Build is up to date with Soulframe Preludes 15. We will continue to update it as Soulframe evolves in the run-up to its full release.

Table of Contents:

• Garren Rood Overview
  • Arcanics
  • Playstyle
  • How to Unlock Garren Rood
• Best Virtues
• Best Equipment
  • Best Armour
  • Best Weapons
• Best Runes & Totems
• Combat Arts Upgrade Priority
  • Short Blade
• Garren Rood Upgrade Priority

Garren Rood Pact Overview

Royal tines thus graced in blue, Skyward bent to Mora true. Take ye the pact of Garren Rood, the great spirit stag of the Andurin Glades. Bare blessing and burden of the Dendrit herds through bounty of seedtime and hollow of frostfall, both. By grace’n crown and cloven pride, charge noble as Mora from horizon to rise.

Garren Rood is very prolific at staggering and stunning enemies. Behest stuns all enemies around you for a very long time, or until they take damage. This is one of Garren Rood’s most powerful abilities, allowing you to fight enemies one at a time. Garren Rood has decent survivability; it allows you to heal yourself with the Torment arcanic. The healing from Torment can also spread to nearby allies if you are playing in a group.

The Garren Rood Pact has affinity with the Spirit virtue. Increasing your Spirit makes your Arcanics last longer and boosts the damage of your Spirit-attuned weapons. You could build into a different Virtue if you want, but it will be less optimal because Garren Rood has an innate boost to Spirit, so it can attain a higher maximum with Spirit than any other Virtue.

Garren Rood Arcanics

The Garren Rood Pact has the following Arcanics:

Garren Rood Playstyle

Garren Rood works well as a support build when you are playing with others. This is thanks to its huge stagger and stun potential from Behest and Stampede, and Torment, which allows you to absorb health from an enemy and distribute it among your team.

This Pact often feels a little weaker in solo play, but the Torment Arcanic helps a lot in this situation, as it deals quite a lot of damage and heals your entire health bar. At low levels, you may find it easier to play more defensively and make plentiful use of Torment to deal damage and heal yourself.

Your Behest Arcanic can also be very helpful in solo play, particularly when you are heavily outnumbered. It applies a very lengthy stun to enemies. The stun ends when the target takes damage, so you can use this to stun a large group and take them on one by one instead of all at once, evening the odds.

Stampede deals a little bit of extra damage and can apply a small amount of stagger to enemies. It works best against a large group of enemies or one enemy with a large hitbox. Note that the small amount of damage from Stampede is still enough to cancel any ongoing Behest stun, so these two arcanics don’t work very well together. I only use Stampede when Behest is on cooldown.

How to Unlock Garren Rood in Soulframe

You can unlock the Garren Rood Pact by completing the Torment Stag fable. This fable is currently quite early in Soulframe’s story (which is not finished, so later on it might take longer to unlock).

Once unlocked, you can craft Garren Rood with the help of Tuvalkane in the Nightfold. You must have a Level 3 Bond with Tuvalkane to craft Garren Rood. To level up your bond with Tuvalkane, keep crafting weapons and armour.

Garren Rood Build Best Virtues

The most important Virtue for the Garren Rood Pact is Spirit.

I recommend putting about 60% of your points into Spirit, and 40% into Courage. This split assumes you have a weapon that is attuned to Spirit and Courage. A Spirit/Grace alignment is also decent if you have a weapon that matches it. Just ensure that Spirit is your primary focus.

Garren Rood Best Equipment

In this section, we will explain the best armour to wear as Garren Rood and the best weapons to equip.

Garren Rood Best Armour Setup

Currently, the armour system in Soulframe isn’t very complicated. There are three armour stats – Physical, Magic and Stability.

• Physical reduces the damage you take from physical attacks, such as ordinary weapon strikes and arrows.
• Magic reduces the damage you take from all magical attacks, such as lightning and fire spells.
• Stability improves your resistance to stagger effects, making it harder for enemies to stun you or knock you to the ground.

All three of these stats add up to give you a total armour rating, which is visible in the top-right of your character menu.

There are currently no armour pieces or sets that grant special effects, so you should keep crafting better armour until you have the highest possible rating in each armour stat.

Note that it is sometimes better to have a balanced armour distribution that is a little lower on your overall armour stat. For example, having 5 points in each armour stat for a total armour of 15 is better than having 18 points all in physical armour.

Garren Rood Best Weapons

I’ve been having a lot of success with the Short Blade weapon type. With a Short Blade equipped, your character will dual-wield shortswords or daggers, allowing for rapid, high-damage attacks with a very generous Smite chance. After sufficient upgrades, your Smites will absorb HP from enemies.

Short Blades have a surprisingly decent amount of cleave, so you can hit several enemies with a single attack. The downside is that these weapons have low stagger, so you’ll need to use your Arcanics to help you control groups of enemies.

Make sure you obtain a Spirit Attuned Short Blade weapon; otherwise, your damage output will be quite low.

Reforge your Short Blades with Verite: Blessed by Iridis, which will grant extra scaling with Spirit (increases your damage).

Garren Rood Best Sidearm

Sidearms are small weapons, usually in the short blade category. They can be equipped in your Sidearm weapon slot, allowing you to swap to that weapon at any time.

You can choose any Spirit-attuned Sidearm. I think it is best to choose a Flyblade or a Magickal Sidearm, giving you a ranged option. But it’s up to you.

Remember to Reforge your Sidearm with an Iridis-Blessed joinery.

Obtaining Thrice-Blessed Joineries

Thrice-Blessed Joineries are rare upgrade materials required to get the maximum possible attunement scaling on your weapon. They have a small chance to drop from most world bosses, or to be found in treasure chests or crypt sarcophagi. You can also buy them from your Faction Favours shop, but this requires rank 4 or 5 with your faction and a whole heap of faction favour to buy one.

Don’t worry if you don’t have Thrice Blessed Joineries yet – they are quite rare, and the build still works fine without perfect optimisation, so just use the once- or twice-blessed version until you find some.

Also, note that Verite currently has no Thrice-Blessed version, so for weapon types requiring Verite, the best you can get is Twice-Blessed.

Garren Rood Best Runes & Totems

For your Short Blades, I recommend slotting the following Runes and Totems:

Your Sidearm setup is less important. The Rune will depend on which weapon type you decide to use, but you can use the same Totems as your primary weapon in most cases.

Important Note: If you have the same Totems but attuned differently to ours (for example, if your Hare Harms totem is attuned to Spirit instead of Courage), then rearrange them accordingly. The most important thing is that each totem is in the correct coloured slot.

If you are playing with friends, you may want to change the Dabble Dredge Totem to Heal Preens (a Duck totem), which will heal nearby allies (including yourself) when you Pull Smite an enemy. Remember to upgrade your Runes and Totems to increase their effects!

Please note that Runes aren’t guaranteed drops. You might need to defeat bosses several times before you obtain a Rune.

You can learn more about these upgrades in our Runes & Totems Guide.

Combat Arts Upgrade Priority

As you use the weapons mentioned above, you will gain XP towards upgrading the Combat Arts for those weapon types.

In this section, we have some advice for levelling up your Combat Arts for this Garren Rood Build.

Short Blade

Short Blade is the most important weapon type for our Garren Rood build. Here is how I recommend you level up your Combat Arts for this weapon:

1. Smitten
2. Perfect Throw
3. Momentum
4. Riposte
5. Swift Parry
6. Vaunt
7. Spectre Strike
8. Misdirection
9. Affright
10. Smitten 2
11. Smitten 3
12. Misdirection 2
13. Vaunt 2
14. Misdirection 3
15. Vaunt 3

Momentum is a great Combat Art for Short Blades. It builds up bonus damage on consecutive attacks, which plays very well with the rapid attack speed of daggers. Besides that, we want to get a high Smite chance to deal more bonus damage. Remember to press the Spirit Vision button when Smite procs on an enemy (look out for the glowing soul).

You can instead move some points into the middle branch if you find yourself throwing the Sidearm often. But if, like me, you mainly use it for melee, it’s better to stick to the top and bottom branches of the Short Blade tree.

Garren Rood Upgrade Priority

We recommend upgrading your Garren Rood Pact in the following order:

1. Healheart
2. Rooted
3. Wingspan
4. Stalwart
5. Righteous
6. Iridis’ Favour
7. Mora’s Pride
8. Saphene’s Gift
9. Stalwart 2
10. Iridis’ Favour 2
11. Mora’s Pride 2
12. Iridis’ Favour 3
13. Mora’s Pride 3
14. Righteous 2
15. Rooted 2
16. Healheart 2
17. Righteous 3
18. Healheart 3

Our main goal with these upgrades is to gain a baseline amount of stagger and knockdown resistance, boost your damage scaling with extra Spirit and Courage, and then use Healheart and Righteous to gain faster cooldowns on the Behest Arcanic and your slotted Rune.

More Soulframe Guides: