Assassin’s Creed Valhalla takes the vast RPG systems of Origins and Odyssey and compounds them with the stealth-based infiltrations of old-school Assassin’s Creed. As you might expect, this results in a lot of tricky situations where it can be difficult to know how best to approach the task at hand.
If you’ve been struggling with a particularly tough string of missions, or have just gotten started and are looking for a helping hand, fret not. We’ve put together a comprehensive Assassin’s Creed Valhalla tips and tricks guide designed to give you boatloads of solid advice that will change the way you play the entire game for the better. Here are some of the best tips and tricks for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, all of which are easy, fast, and incredibly effective.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — Travel By Longboat Wherever Possible
Valhalla’s England is massive, and it will often be tempting to take shortcuts across land on horseback in order to reach your destination faster. This makes sense from a certain perspective, although it’s not advisable in the long run.
When you travel to an area via longboat, you have your entire crew with you. Often the areas you will need to attack as part of the main story will be coastal, meaning that you can instigate a raid from the water with an entire Viking horde. Because combat encounters in raid scenarios are designed for grueling battles, you’ll want as many allies as possible to help put a dent in the enemy’s defenses. As a result, it’s always worth taking the extra 30 seconds to wrap around the back of a stronghold along the coast — especially later in the game when you’ve upgraded your crew and added powerful story fighters to your squad.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — Remember To Use The Forge
One of the first things you’ll be tasked with doing when you arrive in Ravensthorpe from Norway is to build Gunnar’s forge. This is a small story beat that might seem irrelevant to some people, but it’s actually hugely important.
Although you gain access to all kinds of powerful weapons and armor as you progress through the game, some of the earliest axes and armor sets you come across in Valhalla are incredibly powerful if you take a minute to upgrade them. As discussed in our Assassin’s Creed Valhalla best builds guide, the Raven clan armour you don at the beginning of the game can be brilliant in the long run, provided you treat it with care and regularly run it through Gunnar. With the right runes and materials, you can convert even the most ostensibly cheap and basic weapons and armor into outstanding pieces of kit that will help you easily defeat entire legions of enemies.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — Remember This Is An Assassin’s Creed game
I know we’re all excited about throwing axes and wielding dual warhammers, but despite the fact that Valhalla is steeped in Norse mythology, this is still an Assassin’s Creed game. There are many occasions where stealth is the best way forward, even if it’s not the most Viking-esque approach to combat.
Particularly when you’re sent forward on scouting missions, it’s important to leverage the calm before the storm to the best of your ability. If you can pick off enemies while investigating an enemy stronghold, do it. They won’t respawn, meaning that you'll have a huge advantage in the ensuing fight. On the other hand, you can just leg it back to the safety of your companions if you get caught. Sneak around the beams above your enemy’s encampment and slowly pick off unsuspecting soldiers with headshots and diving assassinations. When you’ve cleared out a decent amount of them, head back to your allies and start the raid with the odds stacked heavily in your favour.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — Never Underestimate Rations
This tip goes beyond just collecting food. Realistically you should be upgrading your rations pouch at every possible opportunity. Aside from certain weapon abilities, this is the only real way you have of healing yourself, which is immensely important for long raids and boss fights.
You should always make sure to max out your health bar and fill up your rations pouch before launching a large assault. There are usually raspberry bushes and cooking pots in camps that you can use to heal yourself on the go in the midst of battle, but they should be reserved for last-ditch backup restoration items. The more you upgrade your rations pouch, the more food you can hold, the more chance you have of actually surviving the massive battles that await you in Valhalla. To upgrade your pouch, go to your inventory and select the prompt over the rations pouch to the left of your weapons and armor.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — You Can Always Respec Your Skill Tree
As mentioned in our Assassin’s Creed Valhalla best builds guide, the points you spend in your skill tree are not set in stone. What this means is that if you reckon a skill you’ve just unlocked isn’t actually all that useful, you can simply reclaim your skill point and use it elsewhere.
This is important for a number of reasons. For one, you don’t have to stockpile skill points or worry about wasting them on the wrong abilities. You can also change your entire build from Raven to Bear without having to start all over again, meaning that you can literally head into three consecutive battles as a fully-fledged practitioner of the Raven, Wolf, and Bear branches, respectively. Just make sure to actually experiment with skills instead of getting too comfy — if you don’t like the new ones, you can easily and quickly go back to what you were using before.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — Play All The Minigames
Valhalla has Viking rap battles, drinking competitions, and orlog, a dice game where you invoke the wrath of the gods. These are all great fun and genuinely worth engaging in. Once you get the hang of the mechanics, you’ll be able to stake high bets against NPCs and rake in the cash, which you can then spend on whatever you want. Vikings are often associated with war, but they also knew how to have fun — and how to make money.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Tips And Tricks — Remember Your Leaps Of Faith
This should be obvious, but just in case it isn’t: climb every single building that you can do a leap of faith off as soon as you spot it. By climbing to the top and pressing the button to synchronize the area, you unlock a fast travel point that could come in immensely handy later on. At one point in the story I was spared a ten-minute longboat journey simply because I unlocked a leap of faith spot about five hours prior. You also get a lovely view from the top of these buildings and get to do a front flip into a haybale from 200 metres above sea level, so there’s that, too.
If you implement the seven Assassin’s Creed Valhalla tips and tricks above, you’ll be a drengr to be reckoned with in no time at all. Skal!