In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it’s your choice which path Eivor chooses to take: the melee-brawling Viking warrior, the illusive assassin, or a cunning and dangerous mixture of the two. Where Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s Skills and character upgrades were quite straightforward, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla takes a much more sprawling approach to the system, with a celestial cosmos of minor stat increases to mull over. And that’s before you even get to the Skills themselves - powerful abilities which swing the tide of combat in your favour, alongside the regular swinging of your axe. Across the Viking invasion of medieval England - given the violent nature of your intentions - there’s a lot of battling. This means that getting the right combat Skills to supplement your favored style of character build is vital to your smooth progress and enjoyment. Here are some of our picks for the best Skills in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, as well as how to upgrade your character effectively.
Earning XP and Skill Points in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Spending Skill Points in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Skills & Character Upgrades Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — Skill tree branches: melee, ranged, and stealth Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — How Skills work with Abilities Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — How Skills work with Weapons Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Best Skills
Earning XP and Skill Points in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
You do have an XP metre in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, but it’s really just a means to an end of earning Skill Points. You earn XP from completing story missions and puzzles throughout the game. Finishing a story mission will net you enough XP to earn two Skill Points; while completing puzzles (such as Standing Stone puzzles, Offering Altars, and Excalibur tablets) will earn you one Skill Point worth of XP. XP is automatically converted into Skill Points once you fill up the metre. Spending the Skill Points you’ve earned to unlock upgrades on the skill map will in turn increase Eivor’s Power Level. Their Power Level is what actually determines their readiness to take on a combat challenge (a recommended Power Level is shown on the game’s map for each region). Note that Power Level increases when the Skill Points are spent, not when they are earned, so it’s worth checking in with your skill map regularly to distribute any Skill Points you have in the bank.
The good news is that which skills you choose for your Eivor are far less important than just continually increasing their skills overall. You can choose to have them specialise in one type of combat you particularly prefer, or build an Eivor who’s a good all-rounder: it’s up to you.
Spending Skill Points in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Shrouded in smoke and boasting more percentages than a Wall Street stock ticker, the Skill and character upgrade screen in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla can be a bit of an information overload.
The skill map in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is winding and interconnected, but it can roughly be split into three categories, which are helpfully colour coded and include an animal motif to help you tell them apart:
Yellow Raven category on the left-hand side of the screen. This branch focuses mainly on stealth and indirect engagement with the enemy. Red Bear branch in the middle of the screen. This branch focuses mainly on close-quarters combat, such as melee attacks. Blue Wolf branch on the right-hand side of the screen. This branch focuses mainly on ranged combat using the bow.
The good news is that Valhalla encourages you to be a spendthrift in this regard: each and every new skill only takes one Skill Point to unlock, so you don’t need to save up in order to get the more powerful high-end ones. The only downside (if you can even call it that) is that you need to advance through each branch or offshoot in sequence, so you might have to sacrifice a few Skill Points on some less exciting upgrades in order to unlock the skills you’re really interested in. Furthermore, there’s something vital which isn’t immediately obvious from the start of the game: you can reset and redistribute your skills at any time during your adventure - completely free - so you don’t have to agonize over every stat point you spend.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Skills & Character Upgrades
There are two types of skills in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla:
Active skills (also called main or major skills), which give Eivor powerful one-of-a-kind combat abilities. Passive skills (also called character upgrades or skill nodes), which give Eivor permanent bonuses to health, damage, resistance, etc.
Active skills have a bigger icon on the skill map, and when you hover over them you get a short description and an animation demonstrating the skill in action. Passive skills have smaller icons and just give you a brief text run-down of the stat increase. Spending a Skill Point on either type will increase your Power Level.
There are 40 different active skills in total, and in practice, there are three things which determine where to spend your skill points:
Whether you want to favour melee, ranged, or stealth skills Whether you want to make use of Abilities Which animal affinity your current and favourite weapons are
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — Skill tree branches: melee, ranged, and stealth
As we’ve already covered, the three directions on the Skill map can be very roughly divided into three categories: stealth (yellow, to the left), melee (red, up from the middle), and ranged (blue, to the right). All three directions have their own bow skills (which is why I say very roughly): the predator bow in the Yellow Raven branch, the light bow in the Red Bear branch, and the hunter bow in the Blue Wolf branch. So if you choose to invest your points into the melee-oriented skills under the Red Bear branch, for example, you’re not going to be a useless archer, so don’t worry about specialising too much. Think of each route more as a focus than the only thing you can use. This is backed up by the range of different stat nodes that you’ll acquire whichever path you choose. In the early game, there’s a lot of raiding and brawling, so you’ll probably want to go with the red melee Skills, but you won’t struggle if you don’t.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — How Skills work with Abilities
Your next choice is whether you want to make use of Abilities. Abilities work differently from regular Skills. Instead of unlocking them in the Skills map, Abilities are learned from Books of Knowledge that you find throughout the world, and they cost adrenaline to perform. There are 22 Abilities in the game: four are earned by delivering Order medallions to Hytham, while and for the remaining 18 there are two Books of Knowledge each that can be found somewhere in the game world. Check out our comprehensive guide to Book of Knowledge locations for more details.
If you like spamming these abilities, then you may want to look into building a mixed character with all of the adrenaline upgrades. There’s one at the bottom of the board underneath Last Chance Healing, one on the left next to Chain Assassination, and finally one up and to the left next to Berserker’s Mettle.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla — How Skills work with Weapons
One more thing to consider: just like the skills in the skill map, weapons have a colour coded animal affinity. When you look at your equipped weapons in your inventory, above their name is a picture of an animal: again, this is either a red bear, a blue wolf, or a yellow raven. If you find yourself particularly enamored with a certain variety of weapon, then you should consider taking your skills down the corresponding path.
For example, Varin’s Axe is a red bear affinity weapon, so if you spend stat points going up from the middle of the upgrade screen - in the melee focused tree, some of the stat nodes will be specifically geared towards enhancing your ability with bear affinity weapons. Since you can redistribute your points freely, you could change up your points to hit these nodes whenever you change weapons.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Best Skills
Muddling your way through is all well and good, but it’s much easier to pick the best Skills for you in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla if you actually know what they are. To help you start sifting through all the many skills on offer and see which appeal to you, you can check out the video below to see every single one of them in action: As a starting point to work toward, I usually go up to Stomp, then right to Parry Damage, both on the Red Bear melee branch. Then from the middle go left to Backstab on the Yellow Raven stealth branch, and on up to Brush with Death. This gives you a really capable melee character from the start, by which point you should have a grasp of where you want to go next. As you progress, other great Skills include:
Missile Reversal (stealth) - This Skill makes it really easy to cheese Zealots, because you can just run away and throw back their spears Parry Damage (melee) - Parrying is vital to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s combat, and this is a great source of chip damage Advanced Assassination and Chain Assassination (both stealth) - If you’re going to try and be stealthy at all throughout the game, you’ll want to pick both of these up. Otherwise you’ll come up against elite enemies with no tools to take them down quietly Counter Roll (stealth) - Similarly to the above, this skill gives you a more active option for dealing with a common issue in combat; otherwise you’re stuck dodging Stealth Recon (ranged) - Automatically highlights nearby enemies when Eivor is crouched undetected, greatly reducing your risk of being caught unawares Auto-Loot (stealth) - A real time-saver for clumsy and/or forgetful Eivors, especially since I can’t think of a circumstance under which you don’t want to loot the corpses of your enemies Adrenaline Slots (all branches) - I really like to spam abilities, so I usually unlock all 4 slots
Below is a full table of all 40 Skills, what they do, and where they appear on the board so you can plot your path.
