Leveling in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla still happens, but it primarily occurs with how many skill points you’ve placed into your skill tree. You’ll use the skill tree to customize your Eivor breaks off into three distinct sections: Melee, stealth, and ranged. The leveling process occurs when you put your first skill point into the center of the tree, and then you can choose to go through each one.
How the skill tree works
The first base skill slot you start comes from A New Beginning, right at the three trees’ center. At the top, you have melee, on the right is ranged, and on the left is stealth. The skill points you earn goes into a slot that either increase the passive stats of Eivor, grants them an ability to use during combat, or provides a substantial passive bonus based on what you’re doing.
Each of the skills connects, so you won’t pick and choose from a tree freely. You need to work your way through them, and you can choose to pick a single tree to focus on and work through. For example, you don’t have to put points into stealth and ranged if you primarily plan only to be a melee fighter.
Melee
These are all of the melee tree skills you can earn in Valhalla, and what they do.
- Adrenaline Fiend: You gain a damage boost when having one or more of your adrenaline slots are full.
- Arrow Volley: You release a full volley of loaded arrows you have with a light bow. Each shot costs a small amount of your stamina.
- Battlefield Cremation: All enemies who die to your fire attacks continue to burn, harming other enemies.
- Berserker’s Mettle: When charging your adrenaline, a partially filled bar is not interrupted by an enemy’s attack.
- Dual Swap: Whenever you’re dual-wielding a pair of weapons, you can press R
- Heavy dual-wield: You can now dual-wield heavy weapons, but it alters their stats.
- Light bow combo: Performing multiple, followed-up attacks with a light bow does extra damage.
- Parry damage: You can now damage an opponent following a successful parry.
- Perfect attack: If you click the attack bumper at the same time you strike, the next attack does more damage.
- Sprint Bash: You can now run into enemies and push them into the ground, and destroy breakable objects.
- Stomp: When an enemy falls to the ground click the right analog stick to stomp on their face.
- Terror: After you take out an opponent with a stun finisher, the enemies left standing cower in fear.
- Warrior Takedown: You can now immediately take out an enemy with a single strike by clicking the right trigger. This alerts all enemies and gives you an adrenaline slot.
Ranged
These are all of ranged skills Eivor can learn in Valhalla, and what they do.
- Arrow reinforcement: Any arrow you release will never break and you can collect them when you walk over enemies you kill.
- Battleground bolt: Press the Y button to grab the nearest weapon, and throw it an opponent.
- Bow stun finisher: You can press the right analog stick down to take down enemy using the bow stun finisher attack.
- Bow to melee link: By choosing to between your bow and melee weapon during combat, you’ll receive extra damage with them for a short time.
- Charged shot: You can now fire two fully charged arrows with your hunter bow, but this attack cannot be cancelled by you.
- Emergency aim: When an enemy detects your presence in stealth, you can click the left analog stick button to remove your bow, and fire an arrow at them to remain undetected.
- Grit: If you have any small, red portion of your health after taking an attack, you can return it by landing melee hits against an enemy.
- Last chance healing: Just before a killing blow, when your health reaches critical, time will slow down and you can use a healing item.
- Sprint attack: You can now perform an attack when sprinting at an enemy.
- Stealth adrenaline: You can gain an adrenaline slot by looting or picking a pocket while in a restricted area.
- Stealth recon: While crouched, you can highlight enemies if you are undected.
Stealth
These are all of the stealth skills Eivor can learn in Valhalla, and what they do.
- Advanced assassination: You can now assassinate high level targets, and it’s through a timing-based attack animation.
- Assassin’s cantrip: After you successfully parry an enemy’s attack, you can throw a smoke bomb down at your feet and disappear from your enemies.
- Auto-loot: Automatically loot after a melee or stealth kill.
- Backstab: Whenever you land a successful back attack against an opponent, you can do extra damage to them.
- Breakfall: You can now perform a roll when landing from a dangerous height, and not take as much damage.
- Brush with Death: If you dodge right before an enemy attack lands, time will slow down around you.
- Chain assassination. After you perform a successful stealth kill against an enemy, you have the option to kill another opponent using and throwing an ax.
- Counter roll: When an enemy uses their unblockable attack, with runes on it, dodge towards them to perform a vault behind them.
- Explosive corpse: You can now leave a corpse for others to find and lay a booby-trap on it.
- Guided arrow: You can now adjust your predator bow’s arrow as it flies through the air, guiding it to its target.
- Miasma: If an enemy dies for your poison, they fall to the ground and release their own toxins into the air following their death.
- Missile reversal: If you can catch an enemy’s projectile that comes to you, you’ll be able to send it back to the attacker.
- Predator bow combo: Hitting consecutive head strikes with a predator bow increases your damage.
