Best perks in The Blood of Dawnwalker

Perks in The Blood of Dawnwalker are broken into three skill trees: Witchcraft, Swordmastery and Vampirism, each one offering various advantages.

However, unlike in many games, it's not just about levelling up normally: in Dawnwalker, players will have to spend time segments on certain perks that represent time spent training, so some perks will end up pushing the clock forward. Still, that can be worth it, as these usually mark the better skills and abilities that will have the greatest impact on gameplay going forward.

Still starting the game out and planning ahead? Check out our guide on what to do first in The Blood of Dawnwalker!

All the best perks in The Blood of Dawnwalker

Below we've laid out all the most essential skills and perks for players to get in Dawnwalker, broken up into the three main trees. Keep in mind that some of these may be more or less important to you, depending on your preference for playing in the day, night, or if you have certain strategies you prefer.

Best Witchcraft Perks

Witchcraft is focused on spells, resource gathering, crafting, and the bonuses gained from items. Most of these powers are locked to daytime use.

• Mercurial Fervour. A fast moving sprint will make daytime exploration far more tolerable.
• Frugal Witchcraft. Allowing you to heal when you kill an enemy with a Witchcraft spell helps negate a lot of the dangerous health sacrifice that comes with casting these spells.
• Forbidden Sigils. Unlocks new Witchcraft Ability Slots for more options in combat.
• Amalgam. Allows you to stack buffs from multiple long-term consumables, meaning you can bolster multiple stats at once.
• Life Lock. An Active Ability that lets players reflect the next few instances of damage back at the dealer, with comparatively little health sacrifice.

Best Swordmastery Perks

Swordmastery focuses on weapon combat, stamina carry capacity and armor use, as well as direct combat abilities. These perks all apply whether it's day or night, and it's arguably the most important of all three skill trees for that reason.

• Sustained Focus. Unlocks more activation charges. Essential for pretty much all builds, as all active abilities draw off these.
• Second Skin II. Reduces the penalties associated with heavy armor by granting armor proficiency, a massive advantage for your equipment in the late-game.
• Perfect Block. With how much this is going to come up, maximising the bonuses to Stamina and Activation Charge restoration on perfect parries is a worthwhile investment.
• Sharp Eye. Debuffs enemy defense and damage after a perfect block, which is hugely helpful in all encounters.
• Master Fencer. Increases Swordmastery Ability Slots, allowing for more useful powers and abilities.
• Endless Effort. A basic stamina enhancement that's effectively essential once you're out of the early game.
• Broad Swing. An AOE sweep that hits all enemies nearby. Very good for camps of foes.
• Swiftness. Increases attack speed after a perfect block, giving you longer to exploit their weakness with a riposte.

Best Vampirism perks

The Vampirism skill tree is all about mobility, damage dealing, health restoration and bolstering your associated claw attacks. All of these Perks are exclusive to night, of course.

• Shapeshift. The nighttime answer to long-distance travel, this allows you to transform into a wolf and gain Haste.
• Death From Above. A stealth kill power that allows you to jump on enemies beneath you, killing regular foes and badly wounding bosses.
• Voracious Bite. Upgrading your basic bite attack is essential, as it allows you to both damage and heal, with buffs for later upgrades.
• Endless Hunger. Increases your max health at night by a seriously high amount, as well as making it less likely for you to lose control and give into the hunger accidentally by extension.
• Nourishing Blood. Increases the healing received from drinking blood. Useful both in and out of combat.
• Hastened Corruption. Increases the speed at which you gain Corruption, before eventually bolstering your health too when upgraded further. This effectively acts as an XP multiplier, so you'll want to get it early.

Best Ultimate Perks

Each skill tree in The Blood of Dawnwalker has three ultimate perks (for nine in total), but you can only unlock one of these per skill tree, effectively blocking you out of the other two for the rest of your playthrough. Here's our choices for the best Ultimate Perks from each one:

• Runic Bulwark (Witchcraft): Grants a 15% chance to put a random Hex on an opponent when you Perfect Block them. At the point in the game where you unlock Ultimate Perks, you should be Perfect Blocking more often than not, so that makes this incredibly powerful.
• Last Stand (Swordmastery): It's a close call between this and Tactical Mastery, but doubling all weapon damage when on 30% health or less is a huge bonus, especially if you're playing as a vampire and given more control over your health.
• Renounce Death (Vampirism): Instead of dying, once per combat you come back with 10 seconds of lifestyle and immortality. Considering that everything you do comes down to not dying, this is the most direct way of handling it.

Ultimate Perks in the Witchcraft and Swordmastery trees require you to have spent 35 Perk Points in each of their respective trees. To unlock the Ultimate Perks in the Vampirism Tree, you need to increase your Corruption to 15.

How to unlock new perks in The Blood of Dawnwalker

Perks in The Blood of Dawnwalker or bought with perk points at road shrines, and perk points are unlocked when you level up. However, there are a few more factors to keep in mind.

• Most perks require some time to learn, usually between 1-3 time segments. Check the time cost before committing to learning them.
• Some perks, or their upgraded versions, require you to find Manuals. These are items in the world that are consumed from your inventory. Manuals are sold by merchants, found as rewards, or spawn randomly in bookshelves that you search.
• Some Vampire powers are gated behind Corruption, which increases every time you drink blood from any source, be it human, animal or monster.
• Other powers in certain skill trees are gated behind quests or boss fights. For this reason, not every player will unlock even the chance to buy every Perk in the game.

For more info on how Coen works within this world, check out our explanation of the Blood of Dawnwalker time mechanics, or find out whether you should use claws or swords in The Blood of Dawnwalker!

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