Welcome to my Lords of the Fallen combat guide. The focus of this guide is to analyze each Combat Mechanics individually and combine them to actually form some practical strategies. Now let’s dig a little deeper.
Combat Mechanics
Your character has four mechanics: Basic Movesets, Ranged Attack, Lamp and Free Combo.
Basic Movesets
Let’s start with Basic Movesets. You have the following actions: Standing, Light attack, Heavy attack, and Charged attack. Among evading moves such as Dodge, Leap, and Backstep, there are Light attack and Heavy attack. Also, you have a kick attack and a special attack.
Note that you have two positions: one-handing and two-handing. Both postures have the full motion just described. But there are still some differences. For example, when you’re two-handed, your attacks will never bounce off walls, which is an enormous advantage.
By replacing your shield with another weapon, you can enable dual-wielding. In fact, dual-wielding only affects actions that would otherwise be controlled with one hand.
From what I’ve observed, dual-wielding has little impact on damage without using any enchantment magic. The one-handed tap damage is 190, and the damage when dual-wielding is 94*2. But if you have enough LotF Vigor budget to use enchantments on the weapons, dual wielding has more damage output.
Overall, I think there are two major advantages besides higher DPS and enchantments.
First, it replaces your one-handed movement. If you feel like your current one-handed attacks are a little weak, you might consider dual-wielding.
Next, you have different rune slots. When dual-wielding, you can replace three shield slots with weapon slots. This is actually more important than you think.
Also Read: Lords Of The Fallen Update 1.1.224 Patch Notes! - NG+ Vestiges & Progression
Ranged Attack
Next is Ranged Attack, which includes physical attacks and magic attacks. They are very similar to each other. For example, if you need Catalysts, it might be a Sorcerer’s Staff, or it might be Crossbows. If you need spells, with your crossbows, the different types of arrows are your magic.
Finally, casting a spell consumes some Lords of the Fallen Items, such as Mana or Ammunition. Note that Mana or Ammunition regenerates every time you rest, suggesting that it encourages more frequent use of Ranged Attack.
Because Mana or Ammunition are calculated separately. If you’ve used up your Mana, switching to crossbows will give you full ammo. Max Mana grows with Inferno and Radiance, but Max Ammunition grows with Endurance and Vitality.
Also, there is a special Ranged Catalyst called Throwing Hand. It cannot be upgraded, but has the same damage as an upgraded Catalyst. So this is a way to save some upgrade materials.
Lamp
The third mechanism is Lamp. In the opening scene, you’ll eventually get an Umbral Lamp given to you by a mysterious character. This gives you a peek into Realm of the Dead.
As you begin to progress in the starting area, you will begin to unlock various mechanics regarding Lamp. Once Lamp is raised, you can perform various other mechanics such as Soulflay, Soul Siphoning, Umbral Rift, and Vestige Seedlings. I’ll talk about this later when I discuss the enemy Soulflay mechanic.
Free Combo
In addition, you can make free combinations. All melee attacks and even some ranged attacks can be combined together. However, we need to consider what advantages it brings and whether we have any chance of combo.
As for the pros, you can use other attacks to skip some of the weaker ones. Suppose I use a dual-spear to clear the crowd. Because the first Heavy attack is Thrust rather than Swing. So I use Light attack and Heavy attack instead. We mostly used this against staggered thugs rather than elites.
Enemy Mechanics
Now let’s turn to enemy mechanics.
Basic Interaction
The basic enemy animation design is very simple and straightforward. So remembering to attack is easy, but also boring.
Impact & Poise
Lords of the Fallen do this very well. Poise is a cumulative mechanism. By accumulating Poise damage on an enemy through multiple attacks, you can eventually stun an enemy that cannot be stunned with a single attack.
However, it has been observed that Poise is not as important and common as Impact in LOTF. So what is Impact? Here are the hidden statistics corresponding to each action.
When you hit an enemy with a specific combination of moves, the staggered animation that plays is determined by the specific enemy and the specific impact. And when the situation changes or the enemy’s status changes, the animation may also change.
When an enemy uses Dashing Thrust, normal attacks cannot knock the enemy back. But we can still distinguish them based on interlaced animation. A slight impact will cause it to wobble. But a moderate impact will cause it to recoil.
Very importantly, many traditionally non-staggerable enemies, such as big bosses, can actually be staggered with enough impact. It’s a very interesting design and very attractive to me. This really makes our gaming experience better.
Posture
Then we have posture. It’s like Poise, but harder to trigger and more valuable. I noticed that it closely related the posture in LOTF to the build. If you use enough Posture-related gear, you’ll find it easy to stagger enemies with a Posture mechanic. But without any such gear, posture is almost meaningless.
Soulflay Attack
Finally, we have a Soulflay attack. In theory, it can create a huge attack window by staggering enemies and increase your damage output. But I think this is not very practical. I mainly use it to sharpen runes.
If you deal enough blight damage to an enemy, you can trigger a special fatal attack from Lamp. This attack guarantees the drop of runes and increases the drop rate of other items.
Overall, that’s all I wanted to discuss with each combat mechanic. Hope it helps!
