Skills

Skills are going to be the way in which you define your character as you play Dark Messiah. There are no classes to choose from (at least not in the single-player portion of the game), so all of your character’s abilities will be determined by what skills you pick. This chapter will be dedicated to the various character archetypes and descriptions of the key skills for each.

Combat Skills

Melee Combat

Level One: At level one of Melee Combat, you’ll unlock Flurry of Blows, which will allow you to button mash a bit with your standard attack key, resulting in more strikes. Most melee enemies will have their parries up, making these strikes useless, but if you get close to an archer you can quickly wear them down with these.

Level one also unlocks Charge, a handy attack that can be used by combining your sprint key and any power attack. When you unleash it, it’ll stun your enemies, leaving them vulnerable to a follow-up power strike or to Disarming.

Level Two: At level two, you unlock Disarming. When an enemy is stunned, either by Charge or from getting kicked around too much, you can target them with any power strike to fling their weapons out of their hands. In practice, this is sometimes more annoying than useful, since you deal no damage on a disarm, and sometimes all you really want to do with your enemy is finish them off. That said, a disarmed enemy is pretty harmless, but they will track down any nearby weapons and use those after picking them up. Also note that disarming will allow you to automatically disarm any opponent when you win a locked-blades contest with them.

More importantly, perhaps, is the ability to use shields. Shields will block more attacks than simply parrying will, such as arrows flung your direction, but they will degrade over time as they get beat on.

FATALITY!

Level Three: At level three, your Flurry of Blows will sometimes be capable of breaking enemy parries. By the time you get up to level three, though, you’ll probably be fairly well used to using power strikes for that purpose. Still, every little bit helps.

In addition, you’ll unlock a leaping attack that can be performed by jumping and letting go of a power strike. Not extremely useful, in our experience, but it looks neat. Lastly, you get a Whirlwind attack that can be busted out when you’re at full Adrenaline. Hit crouch and let go of a power strike, and you’ll swirl around, chopping everyone within melee range on any side of you.

Archery

Archery is a powerful ability, letting you hit enemies from far away, when they often won’t have any way to strike back. While magical bows aren’t as common as magical swords or daggers are, you’ll still find enough of them to lay the hurt down on your foes. You do need a supply of arrows to work with a bow, but there are enough of those around to let you never run dry.

Level One: You’re allowed to zoom in when you notch an arrow. This will give you an extra amount of precision, but you won’t be able to fire at distant targets unless you keep the arc that the arrow travels in mind.

Leve Two: Steadies the aim of the bow, completely eliminating what in another context would be called scope drift. This is more or less required before you can start hitting difficult shots, such as for using the bow to cut ropes at long distance. Again, the dip of the arrow will still make it difficult to accurately place them until you practice with them a fair amount.

Level Three: Decreases the amount of time required to reload an arrow after firing. If you’re solely using archery as support, to try and take down enemies from afar with headshots or to use it to set off traps, then this likely isn’t a necessary upgrade for you, but if you plan on using archery for most of your killing, it’ll be required.

Strength

The three levels of Strength, although expensive to purchase, will make a huge difference for your character’s experiences in melee combat. They’ll add two, four, or eight points of damage to each of your attacks. Strength is also a requirement on some of the advanced weaponry you’ll be finding, especially the Sword of the Dragonbane and the Souldrinker, the latter of which will be an important weapon for melee characters. Heck, the former will be important as well, but you won’t be able to use it until late in the game, even if you max out your Strength.

Critical Hit

The two levels of Critical Hit add either 2% or 4% to your chance to get a critical hit when you swing your weapon. In our opinion, consistently getting high damage is more helpful than adding a small chance to get a critical hit, so we’d generally go with Strength before adding to this skill. That said, Critical Hit is also a requirement on some of the weaponry you’ll find, so you’ll want to pick up both skills eventually.

Adrenaline

Although expensive, Adrenaline will be worthwhile for any advanced warrior, as it will allow you to recharge your adrenaline more quickly and perform two killing attacks when you have full adrenaline. It has no impact on which weapons you can use in the single-player game, though, so by the time you unlock Strength and Critical Hit, you may want to spend your extra points in Endurance to let yourself wear some of the higher-end armor that you’ll be finding.