God of War Ragnarök takes you on an epic journey across the Nine Realms alongside Kratos and Atreus. It builds on the foundations of the 2018 God of War reboot, delivering fluid combat, stunning visuals, and a gripping narrative.
With so much to see and do, Ragnarök can feel overwhelming at times, especially for newcomers. To help you make the most of your experience, I‘ve put together this comprehensive guide covering beginner tips, general gameplay strategies, and advanced combat techniques. Follow these essential tips and tricks to upgrade your skills and gear, take down tough enemies and bosses, find hidden items and secrets, and fully experience everything Ragnarök has to offer.
Getting Started: 12 Tips for Beginners
If you‘re new to the God of War series, these tips will help you get up to speed:
1. Experiment with armor sets – Each armor set provides unique bonuses tailored to different playstyles. Try out a few to find one that complements your preferred weapons and runic abilities.
2. Don‘t worry about skill points early on – You‘ll earn more than enough over time to unlock most abilities, so don‘t fret about maximizing certain skills early. Test out different moves to see what works for you.
3. Destroy everything in sight – Smashing crates, pots, and other destructible objects often reveals crafting resources, hacksilver (in-game currency), or health/rage stones.
4. Equip useful artifacts – These special talismans provide helpful effects like slowing down time after bare-handed kills. Keep them active at all times.
5. Search bodies of water – Sparkling areas may contain lost cargo with crafting materials or hacksilver inside. Also look out for dangling tree branches dripping sap water to permanently increase your health/rage meters.
6. Listen for raven screeches – Destroy Odin‘s green ravens whenever you hear their distinct cries to unlock chests in Niflheim containing exclusive gear.
7. Use Mystic Gateways to heal – Step through any gateway then immediately turn back around to replenish your health and rage meters before big battles.
8. Upgrade your primary weapons – Funnel resources towards your Leviathan Axe and Blades of Chaos to increase your strength and elemental damage output.
9. Review the accessibility options – Customize your HUD, traversal mechanics, combat difficulty, and other options to best suit your playstyle and abilities.
10. Time your parries – Get good at parrying yellow and red attacks with your shield to create openings for big damage. It takes practice, but mastery will carry you far.
11. Scan for breakable walls – White scratches indicate weakened surfaces that you can smash through to discover hidden rooms and items.
12. Let Atreus handle distant enemies – When surrounded, focus melee attacks on closer foes while commanding Atreus to pepper distant ones with arrows using directional button prompts. This divides and conquers.
General Gameplay: 16 Helpful Hints
Once you‘ve got the basics down, applying the following universal tips will take your skills to the next level:
13. Fully upgrade your armor – Enhancing armor pieces to max level requires lots of resources but unlocks powerful bonuses that are 100% worth the investment.
14. Memorize color-coded difficulty cues – Enemy health bars indicate challenge levels relative to your strength (green=easy, orange=moderate, purple=hard). Avoid purple enemies if you want to survive!
15. Always be crafting – Maintaining sufficient stocks of enchantments, armor upgrades, talismans and other gear boosts is essential down the line when enemies hit harder. Craft often!
16. Shop with the Huldra Brothers frequently – Check their inventory after major story beats to refresh upgrade materials, armor sets, enchantment slots and other rare merchandise.
17. Experiment with combos and runic attacks – Unique combo chains with alternate sprint, dodge and runic abilities can catch opponents off-guard while dealing massive damage. Get creative!
18. Search for Nornir Chests – Destroying the three seals to unlock these special chests grants permanent stat boosts to strength, defense and other attributes. They’re worth hunting down.
19. Practice parrying – Time your shield blocks against yellow-ringed attacks for maximum damage and crowd control. Landing parries consistently takes patience and precision.
20. Listen for audio cues – Clanging metal and tinkling glass often betray breakable objects hidden from view. Follow sounds to uncover valuable treasure.
21 Enable auto-pickup – Streamline looting by letting Kratos automatically grab crafting materials and hacksilver without additional button presses. toggling this on saves major time.
22. Study the codex – Deep dives into item descriptions, bestiary background, crafting tricks and other game lore can provide subtle strategic insights that fine-tune your approach.
23. Throw enemies off-balance – Kratos’ barehanded attacks like charging shield punches can temporarily stun lock foes, interrupting unblockable combos while dealing stun damage. Well-timed disruption wins fights.
24. Mind the edges – Battles near lethal drops provide opportunities to toss enemies over cliffs with certain combos, instantly killing them to rapidly thin overwhelming hordes.
25. Solve realm puzzles – Overcome intricate environmental obstacles blocking paths using coordination between Kratos and Atreus combined with their equipment. Each puzzle has logical roots in the surrounding space.
26. Let Atreus share the load – During larger skirmishes, command Atreus to assault distant targets while you handle close-range threats. Smart delegation prevents you from getting surrounded.
27. Embrace side quests – Optional favors reward useful materials and gear while expanding lore. Seek them out between main missions to level up faster.
28. Have patience – Ragnarök’s epic scope rewards thorough exploration, strategic preparation and iterative mastery. Spend time drinking in details and learning rhythms rather than rushing. The journey is the destination.
Combat Mastery: 12 Advanced Tips
Once you’ve honed general skills, mastering advanced combat techniques will let you dominate even the toughest enemies and bosses:
29. Perfect parrying – Precise parry timing stuns foes for several seconds, enabling extended damage combos. Practice until achieving consistent parries is second nature before worrying about damage output.
30. Shield bash to break guards – Bashing with a sprint+R1 shatters protectors’ defenses, exposing them to regular attacks. This quickly dispatches otherwise tedious shield enemies.
31. Always be throwing – Kratos can hurl many objects at groups of enemies to interrupt attacks and inflict stun damage. Lob anything not nailed down to lock down dangerous foes from a distance.
32. Weaponize the environment – Look for exploding barrels, hanging hooks, ranged hazards and interactive objects during arena battles. Inflicting damage from range and cover via lanterns, brush fires and more evens odds when outnumbered.
33. Variance defeats predictability – Lead combos, projectiles and grabs with an unpredictable mix of unblockable runic attacks, riot charge shield slams and Spartan rage to exploit reactionary windows, then follow up aggressively.
34. Atreus keeps ‘em busy – Command Atreus to rapid-fire standard arrows at vulnerable enemies mid-combat. The continuous flinching lets you safely heal, reposition or line up charged heavy runic attacks on staggered targets.
35 Abilities need tune-ups too – Invest hard-won XP to upgrade preferred runic attacks, weapon skills, shields and talismans when possible to hit harder at higher efficiency. This pays long-term dividends.
36. Disarm tough enemies – Sever limbs wielding dangerous weapons using targeted axe throws and well-placed blade parries minimizes return damage from hard hitters, evening the odds.
37 Slow battles down – Equip armor and talismans accentuating cooldown reductions for Spartan Rage, Amulet of Kvasir and other time-slowing abilities. More frequent windows of slowed combat provide tactical advantage in hectic battles.
38 Perfect dodge every attack – Precision dodging grants temporary buffs in strength and runic power. With practice, darting between all attacks to activate buffs can enable you to bulldoze enemies with amplified offense during otherwise desperate fights.
39. Runic attacks rule – High damage elemental blast attacks recharge frequently, serving as flexible trump cards in challenging battles. Enhance them with skills and high luck stats for even more potent effects.
40 Learn attack tells and patterns – Every enemy choreographs attacks allowing detection of unblockable hits. Memorize these patterns through repeated battles to dodge, interrupt and counter appropriately. Victory favors the vigilant!
At the end of the day, you determine your destiny in God of War Ragnarök. Equipped with these tips and tricks, the Nine Realms are yours for the taking. Now set forth on adventure and carry the glory of the gods within you!
