Custodian/Strategy

Custodian Strategy

Ship specific Strategy

Arbalest

For the Arbalest, keys are to have enough resource generation to play all your weapon cards, accomplished by upgrading the reactor / resource cards + augments, and stacking enough +damage to make your Lasers efficient at breaking the bosses. Arbalest already comes with +1 damage on the PDC equipment and +1 damage from Catalyst Pulse. Then you add something like Weapon Stabilizer augment (+1 damage to weapon), Cascade Event (+1 damage when enemy shields broken by ion), or Attack Forge equipment (+1 damage upkeep no hull damage taken). You also want to bring an efficient answer to the shields, in this case Ion doubles as both a shield cracker and defensive tool. If you're relying on Ion missiles, crack the enemy PDC first.

The most common Arbalest build, Laser / Ion / Missile locks down the boss with a combination of breaking equipment + Ionize effect, and is fairly consistent as both missile launcher and the Ion family of weapons are interchangeable. There are absolutely other ways to beat the boss, but defanging the boss makes for fairly straight forward decision making.

Example videos:

Arbalest vs Custodian YT Playlist