Robb, The Archer

This page may contain spoilers regarding Broken Aether.

Robb serves as a utility-driven character focused on applied status effects, turn manipulation, and reactive trap mechanics. His role emphasizes strategic control rather than direct damage, offering tools that enable long-form enemy disruption and multi-target pressure.

Robb specializes in inflicting persistent damage and negative conditions, including Poison and Toxic, and he has the ability to spread existing status effects across multiple enemies. This makes him especially effective in encounters where damage-over-time strategies create sustained advantage.

These traps can apply damage or additional debuffs, allowing Robb to influence the battlefield reactively. Certain equipment options can enhance this mechanic by increasing a trap’s chance to persist after activation, enabling longer-cycle setups.

Robb contributes to encounter pacing through abilities that reduce enemy speed, helping manipulate turn order and create openings for faster allies. This supports strategies that revolve around keeping momentum and limiting enemy action frequency.

His Ultra Move provides team-wide utility by removing debuffs from allies, boosting their resistances, and lowering resistances on enemies. This makes it a useful tool in encounters that rely on managing debuff pressure and creating coordinated damage windows.

Strengths

• Can cripple enemies with a variety of status effects.

• Traps are very useful when used in tandem with a tank.

• Ultra Move is loaded with utility.

• Can deal very high damage with Charging.

• Has skills to cure status effects.

• One of the few characters with the Increase Drops passive.

Weaknesses

• Mediocre to poor stats across the board.

• Very low damage outside of Charging.

• His niche as can be filled by other characters by using status effect Crystals and multi-hit attacks.

Baseline

• Leg Shot: AGI is the most important stat in the game, and crippling your enemy's means less turns for them. This should always be the very first skill Robb uses.

• Explosive / Ailment Trap: this former can deal surprisingly high damage when maxed (multiplier of 3x) while the latter can inflict up to 3 random debuffs that cannot be resisted.

• Poison / Toxic Shot: while both are damage-over-time effects, they actually stack! So having both Poison Shot and Toxic Shot is very useful, especially with Pandemic.

• Herbal Medicine / Naturopathy not many enemies can inflict debuffs, but it's useful to on demand cleanses.

• Nature's Mirror: this is potentially one of the most powerful buffs in the entire game, granting stat buff whose potency increases the more debuffs enemies have. Great to use after Glenn's Ultra Move against multiple enemies.

• Soul Parasite: reduces the enemy's resistance to all elements. The beauty of this skill is that it stacks with other resistance down debuffs.

Class Abilities

• Suspicious Darts: from Gambler. When maxed this skill has 100% chance of inflicting Poison, Paralyze, Blind or Silence on ALL enemies. This skill works on any character, but it's a great filler skill on Robb and frees more slots for him.

Crystals

• AGI Up: ideally you want Robb to drop all his detrimental debuffs and swap him for someone else, so having high AGI is key.

• Status Extender: at max level, all the Extender Crystals have a 100% chance. Sleep / Paralyze Extender are amazing on Robb, for instance.

• HP Drain: very straightforward. Hit enemy, get HP. The amount seems to scale with damage done, so the harder you hit, the more you heal. Useful on pretty much all characters.

Early Game

Robb begins the game with access to core status-inflicting abilities such as poison-based attacks and skills that spread existing conditions across multiple targets. These tools allow him to contribute utility early on by applying damage-over-time effects and supporting strategies that focus on weakening enemies over time rather than dealing burst damage.

Because his role relies on acting ahead of opponents to apply debuffs efficiently, improving speed-related attributes can support his functionality in the early stages of the game. Meanwhile, investment into defensive attributes helps stabilize his performance in encounters where he may be targeted after applying threat-generating effects.

Robb can also make use of early trap-based abilities, which provide reactive options when enemies target specific party members. These skills contribute additional damage opportunities and condition application in situations where enemies repeatedly focus on frontline characters.

Mid Game

As Robb advances into mid-game skill tiers, he gains access to additional tools that expand both his damage potential and ability to apply crowd-control effects. New abilities introduced at this stage enhance his capacity to inflict status conditions and increase his output through setup-based mechanics, allowing him to contribute more consistently to longer encounters.

Mobility and speed-focused growth continue to support his role, since acting early in the turn order allows him to apply debuffs before enemies execute key abilities. Improving durability during this stage can help stabilize his performance, particularly in encounters where repeated status application draws aggression from enemies.

Robb also gains access to higher-tier poison-based abilities that deepen his specialization in damage-over-time builds. Combined with skills that spread debuffs across multiple targets, these upgrades allow him to shift from single-target disruption to multi-enemy control.

Class Emblems available during this progression phase offer different developmental paths: some emphasize agility and survivability, supporting his role as a fast debuff applicator, while others provide more balanced stat growth for hybrid playstyles. Selection depends on party composition and how prominently he features in a given strategy.

End Game

In the late stages of progression, Robb gains access to advanced skills that further expand his status-focused toolkit. These abilities reinforce his role in sustained damage and debuff-based strategies, enabling him to apply effects more efficiently and contribute to longer encounters where incremental damage accumulates over time.

Additional crowd-control and utility effects become available at this stage, giving him more ways to disrupt enemy actions or create openings for the party. These skills scale particularly well in battles where managing enemy behavior is more valuable than dealing immediate damage.

Advanced Class Emblems unlocked late in the game provide new options for refining Robb’s specialization. Depending on chosen progression paths, these upgrades can enhance his ability to apply conditions, improve attribute scaling such as agility, or expand access to additional utility abilities that support strategic playstyles.

Late-game equipment choices allow players to tailor how Robb functions - either by enhancing poison and other damage-over-time effects, improving agility for faster turn cycling, or supporting trap-based mechanics. These options enable multiple viable configurations depending on party direction and encounter requirements.