Article GoW Ragnarok, enemies drop like rags if you remember to use the rocks!

[Frag Maniac]

As you may have guessed this is yet another game I am making videos of, but is also not surprisingly fraught with growing pains for me. I've never been the best at precisely timing a parry or dodge, but here what seems to cause me even more trouble is forgetting to use certain environmental features, despite them literally being plain as day. By this I mean there are big gemstone looking rocks scattered about on Alfheim (called Twilight Stones), which are literally a bright purple color, which bounce your axe at enemies if you're standing in a relatively appropriate angle. They also tend to amplify the strength of your axe blows. It's not always that I forget to use them, sometimes it's my having been through a section where the layout of stones and enemies made it difficult to get a good angle on them. Plus you really need to charge the axe first even with the stones to do a good amount of damage to the higher ranking elves, and that charge time is risky, especially since you can't move whilst charging.

Despite my lack of parry finesse, I've chosen the Dauntless Shield, which is high risk but high parry reward. My goal is to get better at parrying rather than doing dodge rolls all the time, which can lower stamina faster. I often forget to use it against groups of enemies, but against single difficult bosses, I've had a fair degree of success with it. I've also got the Rond Expedition attachment for this shield, which decreases it's cooldown time when you successfully parry a double blue circle attack. This type of attack seems to also be fairly easily avoided from certain enemies, as if you move just a bit as they start it they will miss you.

I am playing on Give Me Balance mode, the middle difficulty. I was surprised at one point to see certain enemies buffing their weapon with Bifrost, which makes their weapon turn purple. GoW 2018 had enemies that would buff, but only on the hardest mode called Give Me GoW. Granted though, just about ANY enemy on that mode can buff, vs the buffs here being far and few between, and easier to deal with than the enemy itself buffing.

At any rate, I'm still learning how to play this game, so what you see here is more noobish than polished.

Alfheim - Dreki

This is a boss fight with a sort of dragon looking crocodile creature. I started out trying to beat it with ranged attacks, but ranged hits are too little damage unless charged, and even when charged not as powerful as heavy melee attacks. Plus it kept rushing and pouncing at me while charging. So I grew a pair and switched to heavy charged melee strikes, and trying to parry it's attacks. Surprisingly I got in some pretty good parry stuns, and was able to pretty much stun lock it at certain points. I didn't even have to use either of the two health on the battle field, so I topped off with them after.

Svartalfheim - Entering the Mine

This is basically the start of The Quest for Tyr, which I started capturing a little ways into. Thus I broke that quest in two parts, entering the mine, and rescuing Tyr. It's got a cinematic train ride scene with QTE, some puzzle platforming in between a few fights, and a battle with a Bergsra Mother, a monster that that pops Wretches out of big pores on it's body.

Svartalfheim - Rescuing Tyr

As Mimir says, this is a big mine, and there are many paths/treasures you can find, but I unfortunately didn't see the angles to toss the axe at a few fire bombs that would have opened some of them. It's painfully easy to see things you missed in a video. It's got some pretty good nav puzzles via water troughs that spill onto water wheels, requiring you to freeze certain spots with your axe.

Combat wise there's an optional battle with a fire creature call The Hateful, and waves of Einherjar. Some Einherjar use the Bifrost attack, not the least of which is the Einherjar Brute. Before escaping, there are several Grim and Cursed (poison spewing) Grim, and this was another spot I forgot to use a couple enviro attacks, which are small slabs of rock on the ground you can toss which explode.

Midgard - Old Friends

This is a main quest where you play as Atreus, and have Sindri tag along with you to try to talk some sense into Freya. Along the way, as suggested by Sindri, there's a stop to talk to our old pal Jormungandr. I was a bit surprised here how capable Atreus is in battle. I already knew that from him having survived a tough battle of waves of elves in the last game when Kratos got enticed into the light of Alfheim, but you really don't grasp the full scope of it until you get to play as him.

Alfheim - Groa's Secret

This is a long, epic journey to find some vital information about the prophecy of Ragnarok. If you don't want that secret spoiled for you, just fast forward through the scene near the end where Atreus opens the shrine that shows a prophetic pictogram at the 57:45 mark. This is Elf territory, and despite Tyr's long imprisonment taking the fight out of him, he cannot convince either light or dark ones they are only seeking information.

Certain Light and Dark elves are very tough unless you use the aforementioned Twilight Stones. There are also some Twilight Stone nav puzzles here and there. At some point after the halfway mark, there is a very tough battle with a Light Elf called Alva. It's rather embarrassing and emasculating to be killed several times by a female Elf, but it DID inspire me to find a MUCH better way of fighting her!

On the way out, it's a mad dash through several Dark Elves.

Alfheim - Secret of the Sands

This is a fun quest with Kratos and Atreus to free an innocent creature in the desert, who's been trapped by the hive. Here there are MANY nav puzzles using Twilight Stones to destroy hive growths.

Alfheim - The Hateful

Just a diversion before leaving the desert to take on yet another The Hateful. Here I found an easy way to cheese it this time though.

 

[Frag Maniac]

I have 6 vids here. These are comprised of exploratory ventures with another The Hateful boss fight, and a couple mining rigs, as well as two very long main quests, one about Atreus, one about Freya, and finally, two favor quests in one vid.

Alfheim - The Hateful Part 2

A very short video where I took a more aggressive melee vs ranged approached, which netted twice the hacksilver as the first at 1000.

Alfheim - Althjof's Rig

Of the three mining rigs in this area, this one took me the longest due to the puzzle solving required to get to it.

Alfheim - Modvitnir's Rig

Though the puzzling is far shorter and easier on this rig, and there are mostly just Wretches to kill on the way to it, there's a Bergsra Mother guarding the mining rig you have to get through. I thought I'd lure it toward an explosive device, but that didn't work as intended.

Ironwood - The Lost Sanctuary

This is easily the longest quest so far for me at a little over 2 hrs. It's a journey Atreus takes where he meets Angrboda, a young gal close to his age. This one definitely has some spoilers, so if you don't want to see those parts, tread carefully where they start talking about Giants (Valley of the Fallen), and murals (Rock slabs in Angrboda's camp with paintings on them). This quest is also deceptively easy, but it has a surprise boss fight against a Valkyrie. I died twice at the end making two stupid mistakes at the points where it fades out then back in. I actually tried replaying both those parts from checkpoints, but ran into a problem where the only suitable checkpoints wound up getting overwritten, hence the fades.

Vanaheim - The Reckoning

This is that main quest for Freya I mentioned, she wants you (Kratos) to help her defeat the magic that has her bound to Midgard. It's another pretty long quest at about 1 hr 50 min, and has a very tough boss fight against a nasty beast called Nidhogg, which has a lot of attacks and sequences to remember and quite a bit of health. This is also a 3 phase battle that takes Freya's help to beat. Fortunately here I had the luxury of being able to manually save just before the fight, and make several attempts to beat it without dying. After failing several times, I finally got all it's attacks in my memory. This is a fun fight not only after memorizing it's attacks, but also learning what can be blocked. Blocking it's attack where it spews projectiles at you right after it closes it's stomach can only be done if your shield is raised before the spew, which is about the only glaring mistake I made. Nidhogg took me roughly 9 min to beat on my successful try, and as you can see, the 3rd phase though much shorter, is every bit as dangerous.

Vanaheim - The Mysterious Orb/Garden for the Dead

As mentioned, there's two favor quests packed into this 1 hr vid. This required a fair bit of puzzle solving and route finding, and along the way, I had to replay a couple sections due to two CTDs that happened. I have found via a video I saw, that you can minimize the few crashes that can happen in this game if you go to the game folder's properties after launching it and uncheck read only. For best results this must be done each time launching the game though, as it resets to read only every time you launch it. Thus there are several edits in this one, but it still shows everything that need be done in a clear enough manner.