General overview

Shalem is a great hybrid utility unit. His has one of the most powerful nuke skills in the game, but he's also a general-purpose blocker that offers both damage and survivability. Like the other Arts defenders, he lacks the pure defensive bulk of a regular defender. On top of that, he's a lot more offensively-tuned, with no damage mitigation outside of a max HP buff. As a result, he requires a bit of team support to withstand hard-hitting enemies, but if you can give him that support, he's practically unstoppable.

E2? A good idea if you like to use him. He gains a lot from masteries, and talent 2 offers a rare RES debuff.

Talents

Talent 1 (Land of Memories) is an IS2-exclusive ATK/ASPD buff. It's a pretty noticeable power bump that gives you a good reason to use him in IS2.

Talent 2 (Proclamation of Doom) gives his attacks a 20% chance to reduce his target's RES by 25% for 3 seconds. RES debuffs are rare, and this one is a pretty strong one. It doesn't stack with itself, but it will stack with RES debuffs from other operators.

Skills

S1 (Rapid Onslaught) reduces Shalem's attack interval, increases his max HP, and allows him to attack all enemies he's blocking. It doesn't come with an attack multiplier, but this is compensated for by the Arts damage (remember he does Arts damage with his skills) and attack interval reduction. He has no damage mitigation outside of the HP boost, which won't help as much against hard-hitting enemies. However, it's more than enough for him to survive long enough tear through hordes of moderately tough enemies that other melee operators may have difficulty with.

S2 (Self-Immolation Carnival) is a defensive recovery skill that expands his range to the 3x2 rectangle in front of him and changes his attacks to 6 hits on random enemies. He also loses 5% of his max HP per second (the duration is 20 seconds, so he will die at the end without a healer). The main drawback of this skill is that it's defensive recovery with no initial SP, so it can't be used as an easy helidrop. It also attacks random targets, which can make it hard to target a specific enemy. However, players who can look past these drawbacks will find a ridiculously powerful skill that rivals or even outdamages Surtr in the right conditions. If there's only one enemy in range, he can do thousands in raw damage (even if you don't account for the RES debuff from his talent, which has a very good activation chance with this skill).

Masteries

S2M3 is basically mandatory if you want to use it. There's a pretty steep SP cost reduction along with a large increase in damage. (The multiplier doesn't look big on paper, but remember he's hitting 6 times per attack.)

If you like using Shalem as your main tank, you might also want to look at S1M3 because it gets some good increases in DPS and uptime.

Modules