PlumeBuild and Guide

Plume is a Disorder Affinity Debuffer who excels at progressively increasing the damage your team inflicts to enemies while crippling their own damage and speed over time.

Skill 1

Plume’s Skill 1 is an AoE attack that hits all enemies at once and inflicts a stack of [Curse Quill] on each of them with 100% base chance, even at skill level 1.

[Curse Quill] is Plume’s unique Debuff, a powerful affliction that cannot be purified or transferred and which slightly increases Damage taken while decreasing SPD by a small fixed amount for each stack present on the enemy, up to 10 times. The application of [Curse Quill] with the S1 does not trigger Plume’s passive to add another stack. 

Leveling Plume’s S1 upgrades both her [Cursed Quill] Damage and SPD reduction, while also being the skill that contains her base SPD increases. All this definitely makes targeting it first an enticing choice for your lattices.

Skill 2

Skill 2 is a passive ability with multiple effects:

• When an allied Animus applies one or more Debuffs with the use of an active or passive skill, 1 additional stack of [Curse Quill] is applied to the enemy per different Debuff applied. There is one caveat, however, being that only Plume can stack more than one [Curse Quill] per skill use/trigger, while other Animuses are limited to 1 per activation regardless of the number of Debuffs applied beyond the first one. 

• Anytime an enemy ends their turn, the Turn Meter of all living allies is increased by a small amount. This effect only triggers while Plume is still on the field.

To sum it up, Plume’s stacking Debuff can be snowballed much faster by adding more Debuffers into your formation, and Plume’s presence is enough to drastically improve your team’s Turn Meter generation, especially in content where it’s hard to prevent enemies from taking their turns.

How valuable leveling this skill will be for your Plume depends on the content you intend to use her for. If amplifying her turn meter increase is the difference between moving before enemies and defeating it, it can be worth the investment, and if consistently ramping up additional quills is also a high priority, its value rises even higher. If neither is a top priority, though, this skill can take a back seat until you have lattices to spare.

Skill 3

If the previous two skills were already impressive, Plume's S3s synergy with her passive takes her to a higher level entirely.

Plume attacks all enemies with a 3-hit ability, where each hit has a base 30% chance to Dispel 1 Buff, apply DEF- for 2 turns, and apply the new [Weakness] Debuff for 1 turn, which decreases the damage dealt by the enemy by 25%.

After factoring in her S2’s Quill application effect, this ability can also apply up to 2 [Curse Quill] stacks on every enemy for even more potency.

Combined with CD reduction/resets from the likes of Codex of Magic or Halloween (since Plume does not have another skill with CD, any Halloween trigger is guaranteed to apply to the S3), Plume can accumulate stacks of her passive far faster than you may expect, while breaking through the defensive Buffs of the enemy with ease.

Levelling up S3 offers great quality of life and consistency boosts. The improvements from Lvl2 and Lvl 4 to Plume’s chance to land her most potent debuffs are welcome but not mandatory unless you’re seeking absolute consistency. The debuff extension from Lvl 3 is great in extended fights or when not using Codex or Dark Moon, but it isn’t a requirement when using Plume in burst content. Finally at Lvl 5 the one turn cooldown reduction is definitely strong but outside of longer fights where Plume takes many turns it isn't mandatory.

PVE

To the surprise of no one, Plume is an incredibly efficient PVE Debuffer who covers both offense and defense and who has no issue synergizing with existing debuffers thanks to the fact that many of her debuffs are unique.

The combination of causing enemies to take more damage, have less defense, deal less damage, and be meaningfully slower, all on top of buff removal, positions Plume as a “has it all” support for most encounters. There are very few scenarios where bringing Plume is “the wrong call,” making her one of the most universal characters in the game, a fact only driven home by her Disorder typing, allowing her the ability to side-step a lot of the elemental lockouts of the Inferno difficulty.

To top it all off, even though Plume’s level-ups are nice and offer a meaningful power boost, she works perfectly fine out of the box.

PVP

In PVP at the time of her release, Plume is the fastest character in the game, boasting an incredible 144 base SPD. On top of this, she has absolutely everything you’d want from a debuff-focused character, in both cleave, control, or bruiser compositions. Her damage amplification capabilities, combined with her buff removal, more than tick the box when it comes to offense, while her turn meter manipulation, plus enemy SPD and Damage reductions, make her a defensive force to be reckoned with as well. Fitting within all PVP archetypes isn’t a common thing, but Plume certainly achieves it, making her one of the hottest PVP units.

Conclusion

With great versatility comes great responsibility… and Plume has decided to accomplish her duties regardless of game mode, enemies, and even allies. It can be said without a shadow of a doubt that Plume solidly carves herself a spot amongst the most sought-after Animuses in the game right from the time of her release.