Becoming Stronger (or how to ‘get gud’)
Stumbled on an area with bullet sponge like enemies? Come across enemies that are blocking your exploration progress because you’ve killed too many bosses with your weak gear? Sounds like you’re suffering from badstat-itis, but dont worry – we know just the cure.
Gear Upgrades
The Most obvious way to improve your gear is to use your handler. This red lady hangs out in the main hub on blok 6174, and can upgrade the rank of your gear (will increase gear stats by a noticeable amount). In order to unlock her ability to rank up gear to a higher rank, you’ll need to find “handler echoes” that can be found among non hub levels.
Gem Socketing
The main reason you want to rank up your gear is to socket gems, this is where your real power comes from. Your character has stats (strength, agility, intelligence, constitution) which can be vastly improved by socketing gems with stat gains. Just one stat gain has a massive effect on ability (+1 gives an extra 50 attack!), however there are diminishing returns past 10 levels and it’s not worth going over 34 in any stat.
If you’re struggling with “enemies have too much health” I strongly suggest you socket a bunch of strength and const gems onto your armour. Stat debuff gems can be added to your weapons to give them a chance at doing some extra damage.
How NOT to Fight
This isnt dark souls, there are no iframes to protect you while dodging. Either dodge/step out of the weapons attack range, or learn to block and parry. You can get the “shield mastery” perk which adds an extra stamina bar specifically for shield blocking, alternatively parrying if you have perfect timing is a good way to disable stronger enemies (or using the echo slam ability). Finally, DONT button mash – your mouse clicks need to be restrained and reasonably well timed to do melee combos. Try hitting attack once your first hit lands to keep up a nice chain.
Now go kill those invaders forsaken!
from Alpheus:
Having beaten the game, I’ll add a few notes to this already excellent piece of advice:
1) Overcapping is still useful, even with the diminishing returns. I ended my first playthrough with about 50 Int, and boy did I shred. So it can be worth it if you want to go all in on one thing. Just realize that like the OP said, it’s probably not optimal.
2) Your armor is where you upgrade your base stats with gems, but your weapons are how you can do other things…most importantly, applying extra penetration with gems.
3) Use your weapon abilities as much as you can afford to. They’re massively impactful and can drastically affect the game.
Fun Bonus Tip: Using the Dash ability while crouched makes you ZOOOOOOOOM , which is great for covering long distances, getting way out of danger, etc.