Those cursed (or, indeed, blessed) with the power of a vampire have no shortage of options when it comes to dominating their enemies. There are those fangs, of course, with the power to drain a creature of their life-giving blood. Or those knife-like claws, or the ability to transform into a powerful beast. If you were to count up all the ways – and you can, thanks to The Blood of Dawnwalker’s detailed Vrakhiri skill tree – you’d have 10 different abilities and 20 perks to consider.

But vampirism is just one part of The Blood of Dawnwalker, and just one side of protagonist Coen. Rebel Wolves’ RPG features three different skill trees: witchcraft, swordmastery, and vampirism, each with their own unique collection of active abilities and character-boosting passive perks. And as part of this month’s IGN First, we’re going to dive deeper into each to examine the many different ways you can build your own Coen - either a skilled employer of all three of those aspects, or a dedicated disciple of just one school.

“The rule in the industry is always the same, that a good skill is a skill that actively changes something in the game,” explains game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz when I ask about Rebel Wolves’ approach to character development. “On the other hand, you cannot create a skill tree which has so many skills and all of them change something actively. [You have to create a] mix of skills which allow you to boost your character with the skills which actually give you [active abilities]. We try to find the balance between them and find the synergies between those skills to create the particular builds.”

This approach is not just about finding synergy between perks and skills within a single tree. Because of Coen’s curse, those trees are defined not just by their abilities, but by their restrictions – witchcraft can only be used in the daytime when Coen is truly a human, while vampiric abilities are only deployable at night when his Vrakhiri curse truly takes hold. Only your swordmastery abilities are time-agnostic, and so they are both your only constant and the bridge between magic and bloodsucking. A good build takes all this into consideration, and the final shape dictates not just your combat style, but your character’s life; a warlock-focused Coen is best suited to the hours of sunlight, which potentially impacts the way quests play out and the storylines available to you.

If the occult speaks to you, then you’ll want to pay close attention to the Witchcraft tree. It features 31 individual nodes, split into 21 passive perks and 10 active abilities, with the vast majority allowing for multiple upgrades each.

As with most depictions of magic, Coen’s witchcraft can be used offensively or defensively. Ravenous Flock, for instance, summons a gang of vicious birds that both deal damage to and stun opponents.

Creative director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz explains how best to approach the spell: “You summon the flock of birds to circle one of the enemies, and every time they get damaged, the birds will cause AOE damage. They will flock around them and hit the other [enemies] as well. So you want some way to consistently inflict damage on the target so this AOE triggers as often as it can.”

That next burst of damage could be triggered by another spell that inflicts consistent pain, or perhaps by getting stuck in with your own sword strikes. Engaging in melee carries the classic risk of injury, of course, but that can be mitigated by further synergies – the Unholy Vitality spell regenerates Coen’s health after using active abilities, so casting Ravenous Flock while Unholy Vitality is active will top up your HP in preparation for the AOE-triggering brawl.

It’s important to note, though, that magic comes at a cost. Coen is meddling with mysterious, supernatural forces, not your D&D variety fireball summoned with just a tiny ball of bat guano and sulfur. And so several of the Witchcraft spells demand blood – Ravenous Flock, for instance, costs two activation charges and 40% of your health to cast.

Going all-in on the Witchcraft skill tree is a completely viable build, and one that Mateusz enjoys himself. “It's a lot of synergizing curses and occult-themed damage-dealing spells,” he enthuses. But, while a witch build depends on magic to do the heavy lifting, he recognises that you can’t keep your sword sheathed forever: “You have to block, since in order to cast spells, you need to gather these [activation] charges that fill up during combat. But you don't have to be as dexterous when playing this way [compared to a Swordmastery build].” Speaking of which…

The Way of the Sword

If you’d rather avoid the biological tax demanded by magic, you can rely on trusty steel. The Swordmastery skill tree features 22 perks and seven abilities, all focused around Coen’s physical abilities. Some deal in pure, brute force, like Charge, which sees you run towards a target to deal a burst of damage and inflict stun on everyone who gets in your way.

Others, meanwhile, are more about the finesse of swordplay - Walking Fortress rewards you with a portion of an activation charge for each perfect block you score. Even at its most basic 20% charge level, you’re only five perfect blocks away from completely filling an activation charge, and improved versions of the skill not only increase the rate a charge builds up, but also discount the number of them needed to cast an active ability if they’re used within a few seconds of a perfect block.

While all of the ability trees are rooted in combat, Swordmastery is the one most interlinked with the battle system’s fundamentals. As mentioned earlier, even a dedicated mage build needs to use a sword with relative frequency. Swordmastery elevates those basic combat functions.

Regardless of whether you put effort into enhancing the Swordmastery tree or not, you’ll always be building up your familiarity with the blade. “[We took a] risk because we chose directional combat, but we wanted to do this as intuitively as it can be,” explains Konrad. “When I first played through the whole game, I felt a little like in the beginning it was quite difficult for me to understand how to attack from the proper direction, how to block and later parry from different directions. But this learning curve, it's not that your character is better, but you are better. You're doing stuff more fluently.”

“What is important is that your enemies are also upgrading themselves,” he continues. “They get new skills, later they start to do some special actions, you need to react to them. [Towards] the end [of the game] it's quite fast combat, which is not super hard, but it gives you the challenge and the feel that you are the swordmaster. For example, you can buy this skill which allows, after a perfect block, for your attack to always be a critical hit, which means that you are a killing machine when you're doing that.”

The Way of the Vampire

All three of The Blood of Dawnwalker’s skill trees are equally important, but the third perhaps comes bundled with a little more excitement (this is a vampire-themed RPG, after all). And when you see some of the active abilities on its branches, it’s hard not to grin with anticipation of all the grisly things you can make Coen do.

“I enjoy a build around the ability that allows you to make people explode,” says Mateusz. “There's something so satisfying about it.”

That ability is Blood Surge, and yes, it literally makes people explode (bosses not included - they just take a boatload of damage). The detonation hurts nearby enemies, making it a devastating AOE attack. Appropriately for an ability this powerful, it costs three activation charges to cast and 25% of your own health. You’ve probably already formed a synergy in your head – using Walking Fortress from the Swordmastery tree, you could use perfect blocks to build up the required charges to unleash Blood Surge.

Another option available to vampire builds is Crimson Rush, which increases the damage of your active abilities in relation to how much health you have. The less damage you take, the more you can deal when Crimson Rush is active. Just imagine the chaos you could cause with Blood Surge when cast with a full health bar. Of course, healing Coen during his vampiric hours demands blood, and lots of it.

Not that you can really avoid blood if you want to explore the Vampirism skill tree – its many nodes are locked behind the “Corruption” system. To progress further into the top branches, you’ll need to guzzle gallons and gallons of the red stuff. That’s a moral choice in itself, but you do have options.

“You can specialize into drinking animal blood or human blood, and it gives you different buffs,” explains Konrad. “When you drink humans, you fill your health bar and this corruption [meter] faster, and when you drink the animals it's slower, but you don't have this moral feeling that you've done something really bad to the human.”

You may want to opt to push that hunger deep down, ignoring the growls of your inner demon. That comes with its own risk – a desperately hungry Coen can lose control and lash out, potentially killing vitally important NPCs and thus twisting the direction of Dawnwalker’s story. But there’s rewards in treading the knife-edge of decency, because vampires get all the fun tools. It’s an interesting take on a morality system of sorts, tying some of its cooler abilities behind a bad conscience, in a way the likes of Dishonored and Infamous have done in the past.

“We wanted to give you opportunities to have these combat openers that can shift the tide of battle,” explains Mateusz. “Vampire [builds] especially can start off the combat with two cool abilities. One is you can jump [enemies] from up high, basically killing them off immediately, or wounding them heavily if they're a boss. Second, of course, you have the bite, boosting your health, brewing this vampire corruption, and also making it easier for yourself at the beginning of the battle.”

The Blood of Dawnwalker is a vampire-themed RPG, and so naturally its vampire-themed skill tree was going to feature many of the combat system’s headline acts. But it seems like there’s something exciting to unlock in all three trees, with a wide canvas to create a varied build that excels across both day and night, plus a fun challenge in a narrow-focused Coen dedicated to just one path. And with the narrative sandbox format of the campaign practically begging for multiple replays, it seems like we could play as a lot of different Coen’s during our journey through Vale Sangora.

For more from The Blood of Dawnwalker, check out our exclusive gameplay video and our preview based on playing four hours of the game.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.