Best Talent Upgrades

Your protagonist, Dylan Faden, can become a much stronger Parautilitarian with upgrades in Control Resonant. Some of these are the Talent Upgrades, which work as the character’s skill tree. However, they won’t add new moves or abilities, but rather passive effects, new states, and stat boosts. That leads to the question: which are the best Talent upgrades?

There are many Talents to unlock, but it will take some time to farm Talent Points. That’s why this IGN guide features a selection of the best Talents that you can purchase during the early, mid, and late game in Control Resonant.

• Cleansing Rush
• Retribution
• Sanctioned Retaliation
• Decisive Step-Up
• Extended Retaliation
• Restorative Dominance
• Enduring Ally
• Command I
• Crowd Conversion
• Extended Dominance

Best Talent Upgrades

Before jumping into the list, some important bits of info: to unlock one Talent, you need a Talent Point, and you unlock these by increasing your Zone Level. You increase this by earning Zone XP, completing battles, and other activities in every location.

Then, we will ignore some substantial upgrades, such as Dominance and Perfect Dodge, because you will have to purchase them anyway as you expand your Talent tree.

Cleansing Rush

• Effect: Rush removes status ailments twice as fast.

You might not find many utilities for this during the initial hours of your playthrough, but this will easily change when you start facing Mold enemies. These creatures can infect you with a status ailment that will slowly drain your health while active.

To remove it entirely, you need to use Rush for some seconds. With this Talent, you will require even less time, which will become quite useful.

Retribution

• Effect: Retaliation deals +25% more Falter.

Retaliation is a status effect that you get when you use Perfect Dodge. Your Falter and Raw Damage are improved for a bit. With Retribution, you increase your Falter Damage even more, and we will always want as much as we can.

A big part of Control Resonant’s combat involves stunning enemies so you can execute them and enter Dominance, so let’s increase the rate of these moments.

Sanctioned Retaliation

• Effect: Retaliation recovers +50% more Power.

Combat Abilities are an essential part of your kit, but you need to spend Power to use them. You recover Power by attacking with your Aberrant (weapons), but you can give it a significant boost with this upgrade. Just practice your Perfect Dodges.

Decisive Step-Up

• Effect: Activates Keen after an Execution. Keen: +20% Critical Chance to all Melee attacks for a short duration.

Once you are comfortable with the amount of Falter Damage that you inflict and you execute enemies frequently, it’s time to earn some benefits from that. Decisive Step-Up will add Keen to your repertoire, which will be a great addition if any of your Aberrant Forms attack quickly or multiple times in a row.

Extended Retaliation

• Effect: Adds an extra charge to Retaliation, making it boost the next two attacks within 5 seconds after a Perfect Dodge.

A simple boost, but once that will increase the utility of Retaliation, which is always welcome.

Restorative Dominance

• Effect: Hitting Enemies while Dominance is active causes them to drop a Health Element.

Something that you realize from the very beginning of the game is that enemy mobs, no matter the creature type, are pretty aggressive. Even the most basic Hiss will try to take out some of your health, and with how chaotic the battles can get as you make progress, your health bar will take some shots.

That’s where Restorative Dominance comes into play, letting you have a guaranteed source of Health Elements after your executions.

Enduring Ally

• Effect: Increases the lifetime of all Summons by +50%.

Skip this Talent if you don’t use any Summons, and you don’t plan on changing that. But if you do, from all the Summon Talents, this would be our pick. It will help you make your Summon stay for longer, which is always desirable so they can deal more damage and apply more effects over time.

Command I

• Effect: Adds +1 Command Charge.

Commanded is a status that you’ll learn by the late game, when you kill the last optional Resonant and select one of its Combat Abilities. Increasing this resource will let you use said abilities more frequently, and since they can become a pretty important leg for your last hours, we should focus on this.

Crowd Conversion

• Effect: Drone enemies killed by Commanded enemies revive as allies.

A dream. After using your ability that inflicts Commanded and earning kills from it, you’ll be able to gather new forces and have allies. Sure, the Drone enemies are the weakest of the bunch, but having more characters that can take your bigger enemies’ aggression will let you breathe and have more freedom in what you want to do next.

Extended Dominance

• Effect: Increases the Dominance duration to 15 seconds.

Dylan’s Talent Tree starts with Dominance, so it’s appropriate that we also end it with something that improves it. Being in Dominance after an execution will improve your damage and make enemies drop Health Points when defeated (or just by hitting them if you have the other Talent we mentioned on this list). Let’s improve Dominance’s default duration so you can be in that state for as long as possible.