In Lords of the Fallen, battles during map exploration are much more difficult than boss battles. While many souls players are familiar with the latter, developing an exploration strategy is a new concept. If we want to master this game, we need to make changes. Therefore, in this guide, I will share with you my understanding of exploration combats.

Exploration Combats

Now let us first explain the basic principles of exploration combats. We know that map exploration is a long-term activity. To make it last longer, we should avoid taking unacceptable damage during combat.

What I mean is, you don’t have to avoid getting hurt. You can take some damage as long as you accept it. Through synergy between builds and certain gear, you can get some health regeneration or damage reduction to make taking some damage acceptable.

On the other hand, with better strategy and combat skills, you can take fewer hits. These are the two major ways to master exploration combats. This guide will focus on these two methods.

How To Improve The Survivability Of Your Build?

Let’s start by building better survivability. All components of the build include: A melee weapon with three Runes. A shield or another melee weapon, also with three Runes. If you have more budget for LotF Vigor, you can also choose Ranged weapon, Accessories, Umbral Eyes, and possibly consumables.

A typical builds rely heavily on the synergy between Runes, Accessories, Umbral Eyes, and Supporting Sorceries. Let’s look at some examples of different builds.

If you play Radiance, you have a lot of Supporting Sorceries. Since Radiance builds tend to enchant weapons and engage in melee combat rather than using destructive Sorceries. So you will have enough mana to always maintain Supporting Sorceries. That’s how you gain survivability.

If you play Inferno, the key is Runes. Using Inferno Runes, you can heal yourself when you hit an enemy and kill them. It can also give you extra maximum health or ongoing health regeneration when the shield is plugged in. Even if you’re playing a purely physical build, you can find some throwable weapons that can give you aura buffs.

The Umbral build is probably the only one that doesn’t care about survivability at all. You can literally spam Sorceries and destroy everything.

Finally, no matter what lineup you play, Umbral Eyes is always useful. It makes you nearly invulnerable when performing charged attacks. Overall, there are many builds that can provide you with great survivability.

Strategy & Combat Tips

Next, let’s turn to strategy and combat skills to help you reduce your attacks from the get-go. We have two basic goals. The first is to reduce enemy units as quickly as possible, which will allow us to prioritize neutralization.

Another is to avoid being attacked by other enemies while fighting one enemy. I simply assume that as long as you act alone, you can take on all enemies. So the only problem here is the “external enemies,” the ones you’re not currently focused on.

Combat Priority

The most threatening enemies are ranged enemies. So that’s our top priority. You can usually do this without actually engaging in combat. This is probably because you can kill them from a distance with ranged attacks. Or because you can draw melee enemies out of their range, so ranged enemies don’t bother you.

However, when you can’t do either, you’ll have to deal with ranged enemies in combat. You can draw other enemies away from them and take advantage of this opportunity to eliminate ranged enemies.

The second priority is mobs. As we said before, our primary goal is to reduce enemy units. Since the monsters are easy to kill, that’s why I chose to deal with them after the ranged enemies.

When mobs exist as external enemies, they are easy to deal with. They are reluctant to attack, making them easy to lure away, leaving you with a safe space to fight other enemies.

Also Read: 3 Best Starting Classes In Lords Of The Fallen

After killing the mobs, I chose to suppress the elites who were prone to losing control. When they exist as external enemies, such as when you’re primarily focused on clearing out adds, you don’t necessarily have to lure them away. You can use AOE attacks to stagger mobs and easy-to-stagger elites with the same hit.

We’ll save the hard-to-stagger elites for last. You first fight other enemies by luring elites away from the battlefield. When it’s all said and done, ideally you can single out the elite, which is the trivial situation we’re all familiar with.

To sum up, our kill priority order is: ranged enemies, mobs, easy-to-stagger elites, and hard-to-stagger elites. You may find it helpful to lure non-targets away from your target and use AOE attacks. So if you have ranged or AOE magic, use them promptly. Don’t rely solely on melee combat.

Example

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we’re facing some ranged enemies, a few dogs, and two hard-to-stagger elites. I will deal with ranged enemies first and eliminate their threat. I would then use melee or AOE magic to draw the dogs out and destroy them.

When there are only two elites left in the end, let’s see if there are any high-damage long-range magics. If we do this, we can quickly kill one of them and return the fight to single player mode.

Conclusion

Overall, in order to make Lords of the Fallen more interesting, you first need to accept the fact that in this game, combat during exploration is to test your abilities, not boss battles.

So how to enhance this ability? One approach is to rely on building and getting health regeneration or damage reduction so that some damage is acceptable. The other thing is to plan your killing priorities and improve your combat skills so that you will be less hit.