The First Descendant: Basic Guide to Viessa (All You Should Know)

Important: If you are looking simply for some advice go to the
Tips, Tricks and Synergies part. Hopefully you find it helpful.
Viessa is one of the eleven playable characters currently in the game. She also has an ultimate version and is one of the three choices new players have when selecting a character in the beginning.

Her role is based around debuffing enemies by freezing them to death or long enough for you and your team to take them out. Her kit allows provides her with some decent baseline effectiveness in form of crowd control no matter the strength of her abilities nor that of her enemies. It makes her an ideal starting character with enough utility to be useful in high level as well.

Viessa lacks support, high damage dealing and survivability characteristics in form of tanking, nevertheless she synergizes well with teamplay and coordination. Her fast shield recovery allow to quickly get back into action, if you manage to successfully disengage with her.

Choosing you fights is important with her.

Disclaimer: Some of the tips can be useful for other characters as well or even all of them. This game is in an early stage, therefore this guide provides a lot of basic, but also advanced knowledge, however it is limited by the game’s current lack of content.

After a smuggler band that she was part of was disbanded by the Albion Posse, Viessa was forced to toil as a digger at the Snowfield of Dawn. She had to serve her sentence there to be reinstated as a citizen.

Her job was to dig up the Colossi buried there, but disaster struck not long after she began her sentence. A Collossus buried everyone in a deluge of snow. Viessa was barely rescued, and her Arche was triggered during the treatment that followed.

Then on the condition that the sentence be commuted, she began her service in the Descendant Corps.

Viessa didn’t use to belong anywhere but is now considered a capable Descendant. If her face looks flushed, it means that a teammates has just complemented her.

Viessa tends to give others the cold shoulder, because she has lost everything that once meant something to her.

Viessa’s abilities are cold themed. The status effect of frozen enemies is called “Ice Shackle”. Do not confuse it with “Frostbite”, which happens when you get frozen. Viessa is not immune nor resistent to Frostbite.

Viessa’s only defence is her high shield capacity.
However high is in this case relative as her shields are still significantly lower than her health pool. Making this advantage closer to being irrelevant when playing aggressive. Her shield recovery bonus is noticable however and is the main reason why her shields are so helpful for her survivability. Even in combat the difference is noticable and it is recommended to disengage for a moment with her to recover her defense.

Getting to her abilities. Viessa has four abilities and one passive skill. 3 Fusion and 2 Tech classified abilities. All of them help with Debuffing and crowd controlling the enemy, while providing decent damge output. Especially in combination with her passive skill. Every ability deals damage, the only exception being Frost Road.

Launches Frost Shards towards the direction, which inflicts stage 2 Ice Shackles on direct hit and stage 1 on an AoE hit.
-By far not her fanciest ability, but useful for priming your enemies with Ice Shackles. The damage is only significant against cannon fodder.

You gain 30% more movement speed and 10% more max shields. Additionally you leave a path of ice sheets behind you. The ice sheets inflict stage 2 Ice Shackles.
-This ability provides a lot of utility and helps you if you find yourself about to be surrounded looking for a quick way to escape. The 10% shield increase is useful to tank incoming chip damage on your retreat.

You throw ice sheets in front of you. Inflict stage 2 Ice Shackles.
-Due to its short range, this ability is essentially another melee attack with a wider hit zone and slowdown. However it has a lot of synergies and because of her fast casting speed it fits good into Viessa’s gameflow

You create a snow storm that freezes everything in its zone. Every frozen enemy has a zone around them that deals damage to nearby enemies. The AoE inflicts 3 Ice Shackles and the final explosion inflicts 4. The Ice shackle cap is 4 which means 90% slowdown.
-High damage potential and good crowd control. Only limited by its range and cooldown and.

Every time you create Ice Shackles you gain Ice Spheres that fly around you and deal damage as well as Ice Shackles to enemies.
-This passive provides additional damage and crowd control rounding up Viessa’s role as debuffer.

Important: Your Ice Shackles slow down bosses as well. However at a much reduced rate.

Foresight should be your biggest ally. You should always plan your engagements, as well as coordinate with your team.
Knowing enemy spawn patterns and being quick high on your toes heels will keep you alive, where others will go down even with Viessa’s squishyness in mind.
Not only will this greatly increase your survival rate, it will also help you with your CC abilities.

Have at least one hard hitting handgun. Mod on high damage, high critical damage/chance and weakpoint damage. I recommend Assasins’s Edge. However the choice is yours. For the reason why read the next tip.

Your grappling hook is a great tool on Viessa. More than on the average Descendant. Besides the obvious mobility aspects it can be used for fighting and espcially stunning as well. Combine this with your CC and you are very effective at stunning elite versions of your enemy.
To execute this you will have to look on an enemy and be in grappling hook range. With these conditions met you will now grapple on to the enemy and perform a melee or sub attack. Congratulations you stunned (or killed) the enemy (with style). Now besides the obvious style points this way you will always guarantee a stun with your melee attack. This is perfect for fighting f.e. enemies with shields. However to get the most use out of it, you should use Frost Shards before the attack and afterwards Cold Snap. The combined Ice shackles from these attack guarantee a freeze on the enemy allowing to line up easy and quick headshots.
Not important for the execution but I recommend using the Kicking Module, as it feels and looks pretty good on her and this form of use.
Important:This does not work on Boss type and Commander type enemies.

Fire Frost Shard at the invincibility granting orbs of the commander. You will usually hit all four of them.

Valby’s Laundry Bomb synergizes really well with Viessa’s Blizzard. Look out for Valby players and together you can get some crazy damage.

While not as fast as Bunny Frost Road gives you a decent boost and is best used as an escape or utility ability, be careful when using it early, as it could have been your or your teammate’s lifesaver.

While perhaps not incentivized by her lack of defensive capabilities besides her shield stats and rather glass cannon like performance sometimes, because of that you should try to stay in a Close Quarter Combat like zone.
One reason is because of your abilities, the other is because of their melee synergies.
Adaptive and nimble behaviour will be more rewarded with her than static gameplay.