Best Valby build in The First Descendant: Skills, Weapons, Reactor & Modules

Valby is a character in The First Descendant whose offensive strategy relies on blasting enemies with water for massive AOE damage. This water witch is ready to make a splash and is ideal for players who want to use the power of the elements to wash away their competition.

Unlike other characters, their skills are primarily focused on her water abilities and less on traditional gunplay. We currently have Valby sitting in A-tier in our tier list of best characters.

Here’s the best Valby build you can craft in the First Descendant to dominate your opponents – and leave them drenched to the bone.

The First Descendant Best Valby Build – Recommended

Best Valby Skills

After experimenting with Valby, we found the best way to play was to not stick to one Active Skill but to utilize a selection of them.

However, we found ourselves mostly alternating between Bubble Bullet and Laundry Bomb for our primary offense. Both abilities involve blasting enemies with water and then punishing them more with AOE damage.

Her passive, Water Intake, reduces the MP cost of her skills when she’s on water, so you’ll want to wait until you’re standing in a puddle to start spamming abilities.

Valby’s Plop Plop and Clean Up abilities are most useful when used as utility skills to outmaneuver enemies while dealing damage at the same time. Use these strategically when the situation calls for them, but use Bubble Bullet and Laundry Bomb as your primary attacks.

All Valby Skills

Here are the full skill descriptions for all five of Valby’s abilities to get you up to speed:

• Bubble Bullet: Fires a bouncing Bubble Bullet. Where the Bubble Bullet impacts, it creates a small puddle at the point of collision. Enemies who touch the small puddle take continuous damage and are inflicted with Laundry. The Bubble explodes either on the first enemy hit or at the max amount of bounces, and its damage scales based on how many times its bounced
  • Laundry is a status effect that decreases Electric and Non-Elemental resistance by 20%.
• Plop Plop: Forms a big puddle at a designated location. Valby emerges from the puddle, inflicting knockdown on nearby enemies. Enemies standing in the puddle receive continuous damage and are inflicted with Laundry.
  • Plop Plop’s cooldown decreases in proportion to the number of enemies knocked down.
• Clean Up: Activates Liquefied state. While Liquefied, Valby does not collide with enemies and creates a waterway on the ground.
  • Enemies standing in the waterway take continuous damage and are inflicted with Laundry. Valby cannot jump or use skills while Liquefied.
• Laundry Bomb: Equip a Unique weapon. It will be unequipped when the duration ends or all bullets have been used. The projectile impact of the Unique weapon creates a Laundry Bomb, dealing continuous damage and inflicting towed on nearly enemies with Laundry.
  • Continuous damage increases based on the number of enemies afflicted with Laundry. This weapon gets 3 shots before it is unequipped.

Best Weapons for Valby

The best weapons for Valby are:

• Thunder Cage (SMG)
• Enduring Legacy (Machine Gun)
• Executor (Shotgun)

The Thunder Cage is a fantastic option for Valby as also causes defeated enemies to occasionally emit an Electric Shockwave that does further damage to others in the vicinity.

Of course, you’re going to be infusing your attacks with water damage through your Bubble Bullet and Laundry Bomb skills, so a fast and reliable gun like Thunder Cage works wonders.

This is enhanced further if it’s within one of Valby’s AOE puddles thanks to the Laundry status effect – after all, water conducts electricity!

This also makes other weapons that synergize with Electricity like the Executor and Enduring Legacy top picks for Valby.

Best Reactor for Valby in The First Descendant

One of The First Descendant’s more fun features is Reactors, powerful modifiers that allow you to tweak the damage you do and add some elemental damage or a status ailment. When selecting your Reactor, it’s important to add one that gives you the most benefit based on your Active and Passive Skills.

As Valby is a Non-Attribute character, pick a Materialized Phase/Mixture to maximize Valby’s Active Skills. It’s also worth adding any Reactors with the Tingle skill, as this will add more electric damage to Valby’s attacks, making her AOE attacks even more deadly.

Best Descendant Modules for Valby

The best Descendant Modules available to Valby are:

Slot	Module	Description	Quality
1	Tidal Wave	Clean Up Skill Conversion: When moving through a monster, inflicts damage on them. No longer leaves watery trail while moving.	Transcendent
2	Technician	Skill Power Modifier increased	Standard
3	Skill Extension	Extends Skill Duration	Standard
4	Technique Manual	Skills do extra damage	Ultimate
5	HP Amplification	Significantly improves your Max HP and slightly reduces Max Shield	Rare
6	Skill Range Mastery	Skill Critical Hit Damage and Skill Effect Range	Rare
7	Shock Punch	Turns your Sub Attack into a Shock Punch	Standard
8	Nimble Fingers	Reduces your Skill Cooldowns	Standard
9	Increased HP	Improves your HP	Standard
10	Skill Expansion	Improves your Skill Effect Range	Standard
11	Increased Shield	Improves your Shield	Standard
12	Increased DEF	Increases your Defence	Standard

For the Skill Conversion, Tidal Wave is the absolute best one for clearing missions with ease. Valby’s up there with Bunny as one of the fastest Descendants when it comes to crushing dungeons at record pace with this skill conversion.

Against bosses, the Supply Moisture skill conversion gives Valby a much higher chance of proccing attribute status effects at the cost of her MP cost reduction from the Water Intake passive. Against bosses or tough enemies, this Skill Conversion will give you a lot more mileage.

Best External Components

External Components help keep you safe and allow you to boost the attributes most important to you.

As Valby’s main value is in doing AOE damage, we recommend using these four defensive Components to ensure that aspect of your build isn’t ignored – no need for Valby to be a soggy glass canon:

• Max Shield
• Max HP
• HP Recovery
• DEF

This will make sure you’ve got your health, defense, shield, and HP recovery bases covered. So much of Valby’s skills are based on doing damage, so using these Components ensures your build is protected.

How to unlock Valby

You can unlock Valby by collecting different crafting materials and items in The First Desecdant, and then speaking to Magister Anais to research her for 400,000 Credits.

The items you’ll need are:

• Enhanced Cells
  • Repton x422
  • Superfluid x571
  • Data Processing Neural Circuit x48
  • Valby Enhanced Cells Blueprint
  • Gold x200,000
• Stabilizer
  • Monad Shard x246
  • Compound Coating Material x239
  • Murky Energy Residue x40
  • Valby Stabilizer Blueprint
  • Gold x200,000
• Spiral Catalyst
  • Metal Accelerant x519
  • Hardner x386
  • Encrypted Neural Circuit x32
  • Valby Spiral Catalyst Blueprint
  • Gold x200,000
• Code
  • Intercept Battle: Devourer (Amorphous Material Pattern 032 required)
  • Intercept Battle: Pyromaniac (Amorphous Material Pattern 036 required)
  • Sterile Land: Void Fusion Reactor – Sterlie Land Rockfall Zone
  • Sterile Land: Abyssal Void Fusion Reactor – Sterlie Land Repository

That’s the best Valby build you can use in The First Descendant. For even more builds, check out our guides for Bunny, Ajax, Jayber, and Lepic.