Cassia Orsellio is a powerful combination of Psyker enemy debuffs and Officer ally boosts. She’s an excellent addition to any team. She can even be the face of your party with her various Fellowship skills like Persuasion or Commerce. Here’s our Cassia build guide for Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader.
Tips and Tricks for the Best Cassia Build in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
To capitalize on both her Origin and Archetype, our build will blend debuffing crowd-control powers with ally damage buffs. We’ll be able to give extra turns both to our Cassia via Talents and to our allies via Officer abilities. I’ve found great success with Talent choices that allow our debuffing Psyker powers to impose massive disadvantages on our enemies. Examples include granting extra critical chance on targets and reducing their resistance test for future powers for a vicious cycle.
Speaking of Talents, we’ll make use of both Navigator and Officer, which means our characteristics will be slightly split between Fellowship, Perception, and Willpower. I tried tinkering around with various ways to balance this and have found that increasing Fellowship to a certain amount early and then focusing on Perception works great. This is because Perception will fuel various offensive (Crit Chance) and defensive talents (Dodge Chance) so we’ll prioritize it in the first 15 levels.
The reason we can take a few extra options is that Cassia doesn’t require you to take Psy Rating Talents for her powers. All we need is a great staff. Luckily, that arrives right out of the gate when we recruit her with Felek’s Navigator Staff.
This will be our core offensive gear choice for a while since our powers reduce enemy characteristics, of which is Willpower saves. I love this staff for this exact reason, as it scales with some of our imposed save reduction Talents, allowing Cassia’s offensive powers to easily stun and immobilize groups of enemies. Lastly, I recommend pairing Cassia in formation with single-shot damage builds like Sniper Operatives (Yrliet) and frontline tanks like Abelard or Ulfar (later on).
Best Cassia Talents in Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader
Before we dive into the talents, let’s mention skill choice. I recommend building Cassia as the social front of your party with Persuasion, Coercion, or Commerce. I’ve found that the former two are more common than the latter but it’s down to preference.
As for Talents, they’ll be centered around imposing debuffs on enemies affected by our Lidless Stare ability and also our Held In My Gaze power, which we’ll pick up at Level 7. Without further ado, let’s go Level by Level through a Talent combination that I highly recommend for AoE CC and ally buffs:
- Level 2: Persuasion, Coercion, or Commerce (Each social skill is useful, so pick your favorite and stick to it. It’s better to max one out than to spread them too thinly).
- Level 4: Inspire Courage (Pre-selected).
- Level 5: Fellowship + Ebb and Flow.
- Level 6: Threads and Faults + Fellowship (TaF will increase your critical chance on enemies affected by your powers).
- Level 7: Held in My Gaze + Open to the Warp (A single target option to proc TaF and a Talent for reducing enemy saves).
- Level 8: Seize the Initiative + Persuasion, Coercion, or Commerce (StI gives you a free turn to buff your allies before you unleash Psyker powers on enemies).
- Level 10: Persuasion, Coercion, or Commerce + Fellowship or Perception.
- Level 11: Pass Unscathed + Perception or Fellowship (PU allows your dodge to scale with Perception).
- Level 12: Take Aim + Eye of Oblivion.
- Level 13: Steady! + Persuasion, Coercion, or Commerce.
- Level 14: Perception or Fellowship + Undam the Sea of Souls.
With our choices outlined, let’s talk about our Cassia game plan in combat.
How to Best Use Cassia in Combat
Use Lidless Stare for crowds and Held in My Gaze for single target lockdown. Any enemy affected by any of these powers will suffer higher chances of critical hits, reduced resistances, and various other debuffs from our talents. This means that as soon as you drop either power on an enemy, I would have your allies focus fire them for massive critical hits.
You can exploit this by granting extra turns to your allies with Bring It Down! or buffing them with Take Aim after you affect an enemy with your powers. This is why Operatives work wonders alongside Cassia.
At the beginning of combat, Seize the Initiative gives you an extra turn to buff your allies with Voice of Command and Take Aim. Then, with your regular turn, drop down LS or HiMG. Ebb and Flow will buff you in various ways depending on the round, either granting you more action points or Perception, which boosts your critical chance with Threads and Faults and dodge chance with Pass Unscathed.
Since LS and HiMG powers apply powerful status effects like stun, Open to the Warp will reduce enemy resistances so that your powers will eventually take hold. Once they do, unleash critical strike chance-boosted shots and your enemies will even have reduced armor thanks to Undam the Sea of Souls.
Best Cassia Advanced Archetype
I would highly recommend picking up the Master Tactician Archetype. It synergizes perfectly with our Cassia. We can gain a lot of Tactical Advantage stacks with our AoE abilities and then boost them with more damage on key targets.
Furthermore, this Archetype has some excellent supportive talents I would take that fit our buff/debuff Cassia like Suppressive Fire and Nerves of Steel, but also action economy ones like In the Hero’s Footsteps and Heroic Inspiration. As for the best Exemplar class talents, check out our favorites here.
That’s my Cassia best build guide for Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader. Unlike other Archetypes who focus on damage or tanking, she’ll plague your enemies with massive enemy debuffs that buff your allies’ damage output. You can also empower your teammates with extra turns, characteristics, and almost guaranteed critical hits. This makes Cassia one of the best support companions by far. For more guides, like our best Argenta build, Top 10 Operative talents, or general combat tips, click the links or check out our WH40K: Rogue Trader library.
