There are many elites in Lords of the Fallen. You may find them difficult to deal with, but at least some of them can be easily overwhelmed if you know how.
Stagger Elites
Now let’s dig a little deeper. We begin by analyzing the stagger behavior of elites and identifying the necessary characteristics we require. No impact knockdown can easily defeat the toughest enemies. But the good news is that they are indeed rare.
Well, most of the elites we usually encounter may be knocked down by impact, but will never be truly defeated. Only some of the simplest enemies can be knocked down by huge impacts, but they are strong enough to withstand multiple hits.
If you have enough LotF Vigor budget, you can also choose a weapon with high critical hit like Executioner’s Blade to defeat them quickly.
Note that most elites temporarily gain powerful super heavy armor when attacking or dodging. Meanwhile, when the staggered animation ends, they will actively look for opportunities to counter-attack or dodge. This way, it’s impossible to link interleaved animations together.
But if our target is of the easiest elite type, we still have a chance. By knocking them down, we increase the duration of their stagger animation. This allows the next attack to be made before the stagger animation ends. This is our key.
Technique
Let’s look at the whole technique. First, wait patiently for their attack to end. Seize the opportunity and start our attack with a heavy blow from two-handing weapon. After that, just use the charged attacks one by one. This will bog them down and deal a lot of damage at the same time. However, your stamina will soon run out.
If your target is still alive when you run out of stamina, it’s time to switch to our second combo. Take a small step back to cancel the post-attack animation and regain a bit of stamina, then start Sprinting and Dash to attack again. This allows you to unleash more attacks almost endlessly, guaranteeing you a kill.
When elites are present as external enemies, you can focus primarily on clearing out adds, you don’t necessarily lure them away. You can use AOE attacks to stagger adds and easy-to-stagger elites with the same hit.
And then we’ll leave the hard-to-cross elites for last. You can lure the elite away from the battlefield first to give them more space to fight other enemies. When we’re done with everything, ideally you can single out elites, which is a tactical situation we’re familiar with. So if you have ranged or AOE magic, use them and don’t just rely on melee.
Example
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say we have some ranged guys, several dogs, and two hard-to-stagger elites. I will deal with ranged enemies first and eliminate their threat.
I would then use melee attacks or AOE magic to draw the dogs out and destroy them. When there are only two elites left in the end, we will kill them with high-damage long-range magic. If we do this, we can quickly kill one of them and return the fight to single player mode.
Summarize
Now, this is our overwhelming skill against certain elites, including but not limited to: Infernal Enchantress, Hallowed Knight, and Bringer of Stillness.
More powerful elites are beyond the capabilities of that technology, and for that, you usually need to combine your skills with a powerful build. So just remember to clearly identify which enemies are suitable for our new technology and which are not.
The other thing is to plan your killing priorities and improve your combat skills so that you will be less hit in the first place. Overall, as long as you follow this guide, you will overwhelm most of the elites in the game!
