Horizon Zero Dawn Guide: The Best Skills to Grab Right Away

Horizon Zero Dawn is a world filled where giant mechanical beasts freely roam the land and bandits are ready to strike at anyone who disturbs them. In addition to numerous weapons, there are 36 skills that you can unlock to help make your battles against these enemies a lot easier. Some of these skills demand more than one skill point (points you get every time you level up) in order to be accessed.

It’s best to prioritize skills that have a large impact on the battlefield early on. We’re going to list the top 10 skills that we think are the best skills to unlock right away. A few of these skills require you to unlock another in order to be accessible, but these skills are definitely worth getting as soon as possible.

Horizon Zero Dawn: The Best Skills to Unlock

In Horizon Zero Dawn, skills are broken up into three sections: Prowler, Brave, and Forager. Prowler is all about your battle skills, Brave increases the impact of your skills, and Forager focuses on crafting and looting.

Prowler

Silent Strike – This ability allows you to perform a silent takedown on smaller machines like Watchers, Chargers, and Striders in addition to humans, as well as to deal high damage to larger enemies. You’re likely going to be using this skill the most to take down enemies. Go into cover, use Lure Call, Silent Strike for an extremely easy kill, and loot away. This is a must have skill from the beginning, especially since it allows you to conserve ammo because you’ll use Aloy’s spear to execute it.

Silent Drop – Once you acquire this skill, you won’t have to worry about alerting enemies when falling or jumping from a platform. It makes your fall completely silent, letting you get away without alerting any enemies that aren’t already aware of your presence.

Dodge Prowess – You’re going need to do a lot of dodging in this game to stay alive – especially with unpredictable and fast monsters like the Ravager and Trampler, which will actually run in circles around its target when it’s threatened. Be prepared to keep your finger on that circle button for all the short and long dodge rolls you’ll be doing!

Quiet Sprint – This is another incredibly useful stealth ability. With this skill, you’ll be able to run quietly and reduce the chances of getting discovered by enemies. If there’s an area filled with monsters that are too tough for you, just run through it – chances are, you probably won’t alert many enemies thanks to this skill.

Brave

Concentration – It’s probably the first skill you should get in this game, especially if you have a not-so-great aim. Concentration will let you slow down time while aiming with your bow, which will not only help you be more accurate, but it’ll let you get in more shots. It’s incredibly useful against enemies that hide their weak points or have them in places that are difficult to aim at.

Fast Reload – This skill will let you get in even more shots when using Concentration! It increases your reload speed while using the ability. Again, extremely handy when dealing with fast enemies and enemies that have hard to hit weak spots.

Critical Hit – Pretty simple: Down an enemy and you’ll be able to land a critical hit. This skill is especially effective against bigger enemies. You won’t be able to kill those in one hit, but the critical hit will deal a good amount of damage and make a tough fight faster.

Forager

Lure Call – This skill is key to getting some easy kills. Through a quick whistle call, you’ll be able to lure one enemy to your position – which is usually the closest enemy or the one that is most centered in your view. Combined with Silent Strike, getting loot and EXP will become an easy task.

Herbalist – This skill doubles the capacity of your medicine pouch. It’s an ability that you’ll always aim for sooner than later in every action/RPG game, but you should especially do it in this game due to the strength of the enemies. Sometimes, a few hits are all it takes for you to go down regardless of the difficulty you’re playing on.

Disarm Traps – Sometimes, you’ll lay out a good trap for a group of enemies but they’ll end up running in another direction from the one you wanted them to. You don’t want your traps to just go to waste, so having the ability to disarm your traps and preserve your crafting materials is a useful one.

Got these listed down? Then you’re set! Happy hunting in the beautiful world of Horizon Zero Dawn.