Disco Elysium: Best Build & Skills to Get First

Because it’s a role-playing game, Disco Elysium features quite a few options for you to dive into and really make your character your own. There are four major skill categories, and within them are a variety of stats you can level up individually as well. Here are the best builds and skills to get first in Disco Elysium.

Best Build and Skills in Disco Elysium

Not to sound like a cop out, but there really isn’t a definitive best build in Disco Elysium; it really comes down to your play style and how you want to approach the game. By and large, the best way to approach the game and leveling up your character is to focus on two stats.

When you first start the game, you can either choose from the three preset builds offered to you, or create a completely custom character. The latter choice will allow you to spread out 12 points across whatever skills you want, and we recommend this. The golden rule here is to have four points each for your two primary categories, and dumping two each for the remaining ones.

As for which two categories you want to prioritize, that’s where things get a little trickier in Disco Elysium.

Intellect

• Logic
• Encyclopedia
• Rhetoric
• Drama
• Conceptualization
• Visual Calculus

The Intellect category in Disco Elysium makes your character extremely logical and analytical, which can be supremely helpful in solving a murder case. This category allows you to become a good traditional detective –someone who can analyze clues effectively and draw logical conclusions from them.

The skills you’ll want to keep an eye on here are Drama, which makes it easier for you to tell when people are lying to you, and Logic, which lets you absorb information and break it down properly.

Both are incredibly useful and can help you progress easily, but can also turn your character into a paranoid mess later on down the line.

Psyche

• Volition
• Inland Empire
• Empathy
• Authority
• Esprit De Corps
• Suggestion

By far my personal favorite category in Disco Elysium, Psyche skills are highly focused on the way you interact with other people, and how well you can influence them.

Pretty much all of these skills are worth investing in –Volition acts as your moral compass, Inland Empire is a trip and lets your imagination run wild inside your head, Empathy lets you empathize with people, allowing you to understand and relate to them better, Authority gives you strong willpower, allowing you to assert yourself when necessary, Esprit De Corps lets you establish deeper relationships with police characters, while Suggestion lets you charm people.

If you want to play a build that lets you talk your way out of situations and get into people’s heads, Psyche is definitely the category to go for.

Physique

• Endurance
• Pain Threshold
• Physical Instrument
• Electrochemistry
• Shivers
• Half Light

The bruiser build of Disco Elysium, if you want to punch your way through the game’s events, you can’t go wrong with Physique. In fact, if you pair this with Motorics, you’ll be a total physical powerhouse.

All of these stats increase your health in a sense, allowing you to be a bit more reckless with your stat checks, and gives you more room for error when you want to force your way through certain obstacles.

Motorics

• Hand/Eye Coordination
• Perception
• Reaction Speed
• Savoir Faire
• Interfacing
• Composure

Finally, think of Motorics as the Dexterity category in Disco Elysium. Regardless of your play style, it’s highly recommended that you consider this for one of your primary categories.

Hand/Eye Coordination and Reaction Speed are crucial for pulling off delicate actions in the game, which will come in handy in a lot of situations. Savoir Faire is kind of like a charm stat that goes well together with most of the Psyche skills.

In our playthrough, we got through the game fairly effective by focusing on Motorics and Psyche. Our focus was on creating the best build possible for talking to characters and getting them to divulge more than they want to, while also having the capability to get out of dicey physical situations when the need arose.

However, you can certainly focus on the other two categories as well, or any combination of any two to beat the game. That’s all you need to know about the best build and skills to get first in Disco Elysium. Be sure to search for Twinfinite for more tips and information on the game.