Dune Awakening: Best Early-Game Builds - The Mentat

In Dune: Awakening, the Mentat character class is focused on tactical gameplay, using mines and turrets to control areas, and long-range weapons to assassinate your enemies.

One of the great qualities about the skill tree system in Dune: Awakening is the ability to play each class in a variety of ways and create your own unique build and playstyle, and the Mentat class has some extremely powerful options.

Not only can The Mentat be built as a lethal marksman for optimal camp-clearing efficiency, but you also have the option to incorporate some fantastic support abilities to help your allies stay in the fight when you’re playing with friends.

You’ll start the game off with the Sentinel ability, a powerful turret that will shred your enemies, but from there, the decision is yours, and you’ll allocate your skill points to three different Mentat skill trees.

Mental Calculus: Increased ranged weapon damage and weakpoint exploitation
Assassination: Poison, headshot damage
Tactician: Crowd control, support abilities

Clear camps quickly and level up fast by increasing your headshot damage, outsmarting your targets with turrets and gravity mines, or by empowering your team with a Mentat support build. The Mentat is for gamers who love strategic thinking, and I’ve personally been having a blast with this character class so far.

In this guide, I’ll be highlighting what I believe is the best early-game Mentat build, focused around optimizing one of Mentat’s core strengths: Ranged Damage and Weakpoints.

I’ll also be outlining a Mentat support build centralized around crowd-control and utility.

The great thing about Dune: Awakening is that there’s already a ton of content, so your early-game experience is going to last for quite a while.

You’ll be vanquishing bandits for loot, gathering resources to build your base, locating mentors from other disciplines, and completing their training. This is why it’s important to optimize your build to not only survive Arrakis but thrive on your way to the endgame.

The Mentat: Ranged Assassin Build

When I started playing The Mentat, I experimented with a few different ability and technique sets, but ultimately found that a Mentat build focused around increased ranged weapon damage and exposing weaknesses was too powerful to pass up.

As you can see by the screenshots, my early-game skill points were allocated between the Mental Calculus and Assassination skill trees, while leaving the tactician tree untouched. This is an aggressive early-game Mentat build that focuses on turning you into a lethal headshot hunter. Here’s a breakdown of the build:

Abilities:

Poison Capsule: You have a hidden dart dispenser that fires off a specially prepared capsule filled with poisonous spores. On impact, a cloud of poison spores appears, building poison on all who remain within.

Sentinel: You deploy a suspensor-buoyed dart projector that uses motion detection to cover a field of fire. Trigger a second time to activate.

Techniques:

Exploit Weakness: You have learned to observe your enemies and predict their weaknesses based on a thousand minutiae. When you damage an unshielded enemy with a ranged weapon, the hit location becomes a weak point that you can target to increase the damage of subsequent attacks. Only one weak point may be visible at a time.

Poison Tooth: Installed by a Suk Doctor, you can activate this poison tooth when downed in combat, causing a cloud of poison mist that damages and poisons anybody nearby. The downside, of course, is that it damages you as well.

Marksman: You are an expert at focusing on the most vulnerable part of the human body, the head. However, your training to hit smaller targets has actually made you worse at putting darts into the center of gravity. Your headshot damage is increased, but your body shot damage is decreased.

Passives:

Garment Keeper: You are able to spot the flaws in any garment and see where it is most likely to tear first. This allows you to reinforce it, preventing wear and tear. Your garments maintain their durability for longer.

Tailoring: Your skills with a needle are legendary. Every time you repair a garment, you reduce the maximum durability damage the repair would cause.

Pistol Damage: Handfired weapons are usually less lethal the further away they are, but you have used your mental training to optimize your shots. All damage with pistol-style weapons, such as the Maula Pistol and Rafiq Subnose, is increased.

Rifle Damage: Learning to overcome the drop in trajectory that occurs when firing rifles at long range, you have increased your lethality with rifles such as the Karpov 38 and JABAL Spitdart. All damage with these weapons is increased.

Ranged Damage: You use your considerable mental prowess to calculate the most impactful trajectories for your darts, increasing your damage with all ranged weapons.

Headshot Damage: As you train with ranged weapons, you become more proficient at shooting the vulnerable parts of the human body. Your headshot damage is increased.

Assassin’s Shot: You do not squander an advantage in battle. Ever. You deal additional damage to your enemies when shooting them in the back.

What’s great about this build is you’ll still have the utility of turrets, and your damage output with ranged weapons will be extremely high.

When approaching an encampment of enemies, I like to start by planting my sentinel in a good position without activating it. I’ll then fill the area with poison using a poison capsule and look to quickly land a couple of rifle headshots. At this point, the remainder of your foes will be running towards you and returning fire—the perfect moment to activate the sentinel.

With a little recon of your targets, some prime sentinel positioning, and a few rifle shots to the head, you’ll be breezing through camps and cashing in quickly. I found this build very powerful, effectively giving me a sentinel/sniper combo that has me in-and-out of camps in a couple of minutes.

The Mentat: Crowd-Control & Utility Build

Another powerful build I recommend is focused on the Mentat’s Tactician skill tree. Using gravity mines to slow down enemies or launch them into the air, decoys to cause confusion, and shield walls to provide cover for you and your allies. This build is a lot of fun to play, and will allow you the opportunity to fill a vital support role when playing in a group.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the strongest skills you need to include in this type of build:

Solido Decoy: You use a miniature solido projector to project a near-perfect image of yourself onto the battlefield. Triggering it again will force the projection to move forward, fooling enemies into attacking.

Anti-Gravity Mine: This mine, when triggered, uses a modified secondary phase Holtzman field to negate the effect of gravity in a spherical area. You can use the sphere to life enemies or prevent fall damage during traversal.

Gravity Mine: This mine, when triggered, uses a modified secondary phase Holtzman field to amplify the effect of gravity in a spherical area. You can use the sphere to slow enemies and drain their power, or decrease the speed of projectiles.

Shield Wall: You deploy a half-height Holtzman shield that provides cover during combat for you and your allies. It will also slow enemies who attempt to pass through it, giving you time to take them down.