SPOILER ALERT: Warning, this article contains spoilers from God of War. Proceed at your own risk.
Listen here, boy. This is spoiler territory. You’d do best to watch your step around here if you are new to the game.
There are tough fights lurking in God of War. Battles you’ll struggle to win. When it wants to knock things up a notch, it’s a brutally punishing game tied to systems that can leave you reeling from every shot you take from an enemy.
It’s the sort of combat that has earned God of War comparisons with Dark Souls, and like From Software’s masterpiece series, God of War is entirely beatable — in fact, like Dark Souls, winning at God of War will often come down to a state of mind.
Road to Runes
We’re going to be straight up with you — attacking like normal is for chumps. Kratos‘ regular attacks are powerful — you’d hope so, considering — but Runic Attacks are the bread and butter of how Kratos can demolish anyone in his way.
By holding L2 and R1 or R2, Kratos unleashes a devastating attack. You can equip different ones as you find them, and each of Kratos’ weapons can equip different attacks, which means you can tailor them to your preferred playstyle, and even the enemies you’re facing.
Some attacks are single target, others have a very wide area of effect — and there are some that are in between. Finding the attacks that work for you is key, and experimenting is a great way to keep the game feeling fresh as you play it.
Still, once you’ve found your preferred options, upgrade them as soon as you can. They ramp up in effectiveness as you spend XP on them, and because of the way the game works you needn’t worry about not being able to unlock skills down the track because of ‘wasted’ XP.
With your Runic Attacks upgraded, it’s simply a matter of target selection — focus on your meanest target, Runic attack them, hammer them with Atreus‘ arrows, pop the alternative attack and they should be stunned and waiting for a grapple attack.
If they’re not, then here’s the beautiful trick — switch weapons, and runic attack again. The Blades of Chaos (you heeded the spoiler warning right?) Runic Attacks don’t share a cooldown with the Leviathan, so you can effectively pop four runic attacks on an enemy if you need to.
Advanced ‘God of War’ Builds
Initially you’ll just want to make sure your equipment is upgraded at all times, as per our other tips guide, but eventually you’ll want to think about your build.
Damage type resistances never really become *critical* in God of War outside of the insane God of War difficulty — with one major exception being Niflheim Mist Resistance.
When you’re in Niflheim, you’ll want to build your Mist Resistance by farming mist echoes. You get back mist timer for every chest you open, but you’re still sometimes better off just running through an area — there’s no point having thousands of mist echoes available if you die before you can bank it. Your build in Niflheim should be whatever gives you the best mist resistance — it’s otherwise inconsequential.
Outside of Niflheim, you should build Cooldown first and foremost. As we explained, Runic Attacks are crazy powerful, and they only become more powerful as you stack damage into them. Atreus’ summons benefit too, so those wolves become more potent — and it means you’ll get to see Ratatoskr more often (and he’s the best summon in any game ever).
Look I've been patiently waiting to share this with you but Ratatoskr is the freaking best summon in the game. Recorded this after I finished it so I'm in all late game stuff hence the dad of war pic.twitter.com/RY6jXv8cRF
— Joab Gilroy (@Joabyjojo) April 19, 2018
Your gut might tell you to stack Runic, because you’re focusing on runic attacks right? But over the course of the game you’ll get ample opportunity to acquire runic damage — cooldown is comparatively hard to come by. Even if you focus on CDN as your primary stat, you’ll find your Runic numbers are naturally way higher anyway.
The Valkyrie armour is a great source of cooldown with some Runic to boot — and you can upgrade them to a full allotment of sockets.
With that in mind — sockets are more important than almost any other build option in the game, and if you have a choice between a Talisman with a powerful ability or something with a garbage ability and many sockets, you should go for the sockets.
The rest of the build is largely up to you, but we prioritise Defence, Strength, Luck, and then Vitality in that order. It’s a glass cannon build — the idea being that things die fast enough that we don’t take any damage. If they don’t die, we just have to not get hit.
Taking A Stance
Now we’re hitting some advanced techniques. As you make your way down the Skills list, you’ll eventually find Kratos is able to switch stances.
It took us ages to actually pull off, until we watched the demonstration video — what you need to do is attack, pause for a full beat until Kratos shifts on his feet, and then attack again.
Kratos already has some fantastic combos, detailed in the Skills themselves, but you can really start to create your own with the stance system.
A particularly showy one is with the Leviathan — R1 attack, pause, R2, R1, R2. It’s a great option for when you’re surrounded, as the axe will twirl around Kratos (although you’re still usually better off just using the Blades of Chaos when facing enemies from multiple directions).
What’s a God to a Non-Believer?
Going in with a clear mind is more important than you might think. God of War is different to Dark Souls, because generally in Dark Souls you won’t die ‘unfair’ deaths. Without the burden of troublesome story-telling, Dark Souls has managed to refine its combat systems into something near flawless.
God of War on the other hand weaves a complex tale of paternal growth, utilising the Tend and Befriend drive to create an emotional attachment between you and the characters within.
What we’re saying is there are some goofs in God of War that will see you die in ‘unfair’ ways — especially if you build a glass cannon style Kratos (and you almost certainly should).
The camera is probably the biggest issue — it has trouble tracking enemies that leave the ground. Some enemies can forcibly break target locking and the the target locking itself is inconsistent. So keep a healthy attitude! Heck, this is good advice even in Dark Souls. If you remember Happy Hob beating Dark Souls, you’ll know that a good outlook is critical to success.
Valk Kil(m)ler
The Valkyries aren’t like every other enemy you’ll face in God of War. They can’t be stunned and grappled, most of them spend far too much time in the air and they all have different movesets you need to learn and deal with.
They’re our favourite enemies in the game, and the Valkyrie Queen is the best of them all — she’s the closest you’ll get to a Dark Souls battle. She has the moveset of every other Valkyrie in the game, and she can pull any of them out at any time.
Like Dark Souls, these moves all have tells, and you can actually dodge all of them if you know what to look for. Having beaten all eight other Valkyries, you’ll know what to do already — just stay vigilant, play it conservatively and you’ll beat her. She hits like a truck, but she can be beaten — and if you can defeat her, you can beat literally anything God of War throws at you.
Good luck, and know that the Dad of War believes in you!