Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is a gargantuan game and it has a skill tree to match. If you’ve played the more recent Assassin’s Creed games like Odyssey and Origins, you’ll be pretty familiar with how skill points are earned and spent. If you’re a newcomer to Ubisoft’s RPG series, then fear not, because we’ll be getting you up to speed on everything you need to know about skill points, as well as the best skills you can purchase on the multiple skill trees of Valhalla.
How to Earn Skill Points Quickly – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Skill Tree
Skill points are earned through XP gains in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Whenever you gain any XP at all, whether it’s through killing a poor sheep or butchering an army commander, a square will appear in the upper right corner of the screen, and fill slightly depending on the amount of XP you just earned. When this bar fills, you earn additional skill points.
Generally speaking, the harder the feat you’ve just accomplished in Valhalla, the more XP you’re going to earn. So if you managed to slay a boss character in one of the many forts dotted around England, you’ll earn more XP than if you hunted deer and foxes in the wilderness.
Without a doubt, the fastest way to earn skill points in Valhalla is through completing story missions. The XP gains from story missions will continue to increase as you venture further into Ubisoft’s giant game. The XP earned from these main plot quests will frequently number in the thousands, giving you a massive boost towards the next character level for Eivor.
The second biggest source of XP gain in Valhalla is simply exploring. It might sound odd, but you’ll earn XP every time you discover a new location in England. Go and crack open one of the hundreds of treasure chests dotted around the map or fulfill a side quest for a character. It might sound a bit aimless, but exploring the wilds of England through uncovering the vantage points represented by eagles on the map really does pay off.
Best Skills to Buy First – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Skill Tree
Tabbing over to the Skills page on the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla pause menu, you’ll be confronted with the screen above, where there’s two skill trees beneath your cursor and one above. The red skill tree denotes melee combat skills, while the blue stands for stealth skills, and finally the gold represents assassination skills.
The vast majority of the skills you can see on this page are actually passive upgrades for Eivor. For example, the first five nodes on the melee skill tree will increase Eivor’s melee damage, melee resistance, ability damage, stun, and heavy attack damage. It’s the larger, less frequent nodes that will grant you new skills for you to put to use.
It’s these skills that will change the way you play the game. The Stomp skill for example lets you stamp on an enemy’s face while they’re down, effectively giving you an execution move in the heat of combat. Likewise, the Backstab skill lets you inflict increased damage on an enemy when they turn their back to you.
Just below, we’ll outline the skills you want to purchase first, as well as the respective skill trees that they belong to, before delving into greater detail on each skill further down.
- Stomp – Melee Skill Tree
- Stealth Recon – Stealth Skill Tree
- Advanced Assassination – Assassination Skill Tree
- Sprint Attack – Stealth Skill Tree
- Chain Assassination – Assassination Skill Tree
The Stomp skill can be a gamechanger in close quarters combat. If an enemy doesn’t have a shield, a really good way to down them for a quick Stomp finisher is to hit them with a heavy melee attack. If they’re a weak opponent, they’ll fall over onto their back, leaving you ample time to stomp their faces in and leave them for dead. Lovely stuff.
The Stealth Recon skill is basically a must-have no matter if you’re a stealth player or prefer to run in screaming at your foes. When you’re crouched and undetected, enemies will automatically show up as red outlines. This means you no longer have to constantly scan the environment; a great little skill for planning the perfect attack on an enemy stronghold.
As you progress further into Valhalla, you’re going to come up against some really tough foes. In many cases, a simple stealth attack won’t’ be enough to finish off a powerful foe, so if you purchase the Advanced Assassination skill for a quick time event-based stealth attack, you can silently kill foes that are stronger than you.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has a lot of raid missions. When you initiate a raid mission, Eivor and their crew charge headlong into battle, dropping all pretenses of a planned attack. For these instances, the Sprint Attack skill is paramount, letting you unleash a devastating attack as you’re sprinting toward an enemy.
Chain Assassination is a little harder to reach than the aforementioned skill, requiring you to unlock a skill tree two paths deep into the Assassination skill tree. It’s an excellent one though, letting you take out an additional enemy with a throwing axe right after you’ve assassinated an enemy using the Advanced Assassination technique.
