Managing your Skills, Attributes, and Talents in GreedFall is important, and understanding what they do is vital to building the character you want to play.
In GreedFall, your character gets defined by their selection of Skills, Attributes, and Talents. These dictate their abilities and how they can interact with the world around them.
GreedFall – How Skills, Attributes, And Talents Work, and How To Increase Them
The first thing to understand is that leveling up does not mean you can increase one of your Skill, Attribute, and Talent trees. Instead, upgrades to these stats come in more staggered deliveries.
If you open up the Character Development screen, you can see your Skills trees, and you can navigate to see the Attributes and Talents trees. Beside each one there’s a counter showing your current available unspent points, your total spent points and the Level you receive your next point. They line up all for that particular tree. If you even want to know what’s coming up next check that part of the menu.
Skills
Skills dictate which weapons you can use, provides a bonus to certain aspects of the weapons (damage amount, armor stripping, stunning, etc.), or opens up the ability to do things like apply magical or poisonous potions to your weapons. To plan your build, scroll over each node to see what benefits you’re going to receive.
For example, if you wish to use Two-Handed Heavy Weapons, you need to start with One-Handed Heavy Weapons and purchase all the nodes between it to the Two-Handed Heavy Weapons node. Only then can equip Two-Handed Heavy Weapons and begin using them.
When you are out in the world exploring, you should keep an eye open for Skill Altars — discovering these give you a free Skill Point. From a distance, they appear on the map as question marks, but when you get closer, you can see if they are Skill Altars or some other point of interest.
Attributes
Attributes can be considered to be the mental and physical abilities of your character. Things like how strong they are (Strength), their hit points (Endurance), how light they are on their feet (Agility). Each one ties to a particular type of item or weapon. You need the highest score in these Attributes to wield the best items and weapons in that class.
- Strength – Best one-handed and two-handed blunt weapons.
- Endurance – best heavy armors.
- Agility – best one-handed and two-handed swords.
- Accuracy – best firearms.
- Metal Power – best rings.
- Willpower – best amulets and necklaces.
You might be able to use some types of weapons and armor based on the Skills you purchase. However, to use the best ones in those classes, you need to sink some Attribute points into those relevant areas.
Talents
Talents dictate your ability to craft, take part in diplomatic conversations, and other similar areas.
- Charisma – reduces cost with merchants and opens up potential dialogue options with NPCs. The higher your Charisma level, the better your chances of success with these dialogue choices.
- Science – allows you to break damaged walls, and craft consumables. The higher the level, the higher the tier of consumable you can craft.
- Vigor – this will allow you to make difficult jumping or climbing routes that you otherwise would not be able to traverse.
- Lockpicking – self-explanatory, allows you to pick locks and is worth having early in the game.
- Craftsmanship – allows you to craft armor and weapon upgrades.
- Intuition – unlocks unique dialogue options that are often extremely useful during the missions.
Which talents are actually the best will depend entirely on your own build. Charisma and Intuition can be extremely strong, but you probably only need to build into one of them. I would argue that Intuition is the better option, as the dialogue options that open up offer guaranteed results, and are not a skill check like Charisma options. Science is a must for almost all classes, just because the various tiers of potions can all be so useful. Craftsmanship is also vital, if you wish to upgrade your weapons and armor to get maximum results.
Talents are interesting because you can use certain pieces of armor to give yourself a little boost in a specific area. A pair of gloves might provide a +1 buff to your Craftsmanship, or a torso piece might give you an increase to Lockpicking. It is worth holding onto pieces that do this, as you never know when they might prove useful.
One useful hint here for the start of the game. Your companion Kurt will have a piece of Torso Armor that will give +1 Lockpicking. It is a good idea to switch armor with him if you can, because there are a lot of locked chests you will then be able to open in Serene.
