2e:Hungry Ghost

A chilling caress down the back. An icy breath on the neck, and then the blow that steals away your very soul. Hungry ghosts are feared by many, and not without reason - their shadowy powers conceal them from sight even as they wreak havoc on their foes. Masters of the silent step, and artists with the uncanny curses of their gravs, the enemy of a hungry ghost is living on borrowed time. Spectral eyes watch from the rafters, and soon enough the blade will fall.

How to play a Hungry Ghost
Hungry Ghosts are, for the most part, exceptional duelists and assassins. Packing a wide array of single-target condition application and heavy damage options as well as a primary defensive mechanism that allows them to simply avoid the vast majority of singular attacks outright, paired with the mobility to largely dictate engagement on their own terms, most Hungry Ghost builds are best served as anti-Elite hunters that can disable and eliminate singular strong enemies with pinpoint precision.

This single-target specialization and focus on assassination also comprises their major weakness. Their options for dealing with multiple targets at one time are limited, and many of them require marking enemies with conditions beforehand. While they are capable of doing this on their own, it adds much more setup time, and as such they often prefer to have an ally capable of outputting conditions over a wide area rather than doing so themselves. Furthermore, their primary defensive mechanism in their Evasion skill is not an infinite resource. While it can handle a few attacks, swarms can overwhelm it, or Unerring attacks can penetrate it. And without Evasion, they tend to be rather fragile. This fragility is highlighted by Hungry Ghosts' Capacity score - the lowest of any class in the system. Though Abyssal Womb lets them outright ignore their size at the fight's start, they are forced to heavily pace out their gravitas expenditure in order to keep ignoring it. Once a Hungry Ghost starts taking on Fatigue, it slows them down immensely and severely limits their options.

That said, Necromancy-type Hungry Ghosts are oddities among their class. Their primary resource is corpses, not conditions, and they prefer fights with lots of Minions and Standards, both of which are usually swarm-type enemies that would be the bane of a Hungry Ghost. They can be somewhat fragile if one doesn't take the additional competition over Sudden actions into account, but between reviving fallen enemies to fight for them, launching bodies at enemy groups to deploy bursts of Blighted, consolidating the essence of the fallen to bring back one of their allies, or simply instant-killing Standard and lower enemies outright, Necromancy-type Hungry Ghosts have more tools for dealing with the lower end of the enemy rank spectrum than most of their class. It comes at the cost of a reduced ability to deal with stronger foes, especially without low-ranking backup to use as ability fodder, but it is a viable path nonetheless.

How to hybridize a Hungry Ghost
Hungry Ghosts are a strange beast on the Hybrid front. With the lowest base stats of any class, they make for an awkward primary, while their skill set that doesn’t particularly like gaining size clashes with setups that love that sort of thing. That said, their ability offerings have relatively low connections to their Basics, and most Basic combinations as a secondary class are possible, with the only exception being Abyssal Womb paired with Dirty Trick due to the one-passive-Basic limit on the secondary class.

As far as pairings go, Hungry Ghost benefits builds that will not be regularly exceeding their Capacity, or those that are in need of additional mobility and range, with the former being able to make use of Agility charges effectively and the latter enjoying what Shadow Dance and Spectral Chains have to offer. Their active options can be esoteric in some places, but that esoteric nature also opens up a lot of possibilities if only they have the right partner class, something that makes many of them good picks for the Exotic racial ability as well.

Blink works well with glass cannons that can deal out powerful damage or other effects but have trouble taking it in return, allowing them to skirmish and do their job while exposing themselves to minimal risk. Harvest Moon might enjoy the massive gravitas pool potential of a Primal to let it smite as many enemies as possible at once. Meditation is a friend to gravitas-expensive backline types, offering a full gravitas refill if they can avoid taking damage until their next turn. Reaper's Kiss on a healer can give those temporary friends a lot more than 1 Vitality to work with. Vampiric Veil can offer a huge boost to sustain on heavy damage units by letting them refill their own Vitality pool by hitting things. The list goes on.

In turn, Hungry Ghost benefits from things that help it be more self-reliant. Rage Bearer and Predator both offer components that pair with its own for a terrifying sniper build, using Enkindle, Hunter's Eye, or Hawkeye to offset the Hungry Ghost's usual Battle die issues while making use of Elusive Sniper to turn this heavy firepower into personal safety by Vanishing after the shot.

Attribute Advances
Any maiesta can purchase the following abilities. Additionally, they gain one of their choice for free upon reaching thresholds of 200, 500, 1000, and 2000 total XP spent on advances.

Basic Abilities
The hungry ghost begins the game with these abilities, without requiring the expenditure of any XP.

Novice Abilities
Any hungry ghost can purchase the following abilities.