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Steam Community :: Guide :: Horizon Zero Dawn | Beginner Tips, Upgrade Guides

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First Priority:Silent Strike: Without a doubt, this ability should be your first buy. The stealth move lets you instantly and silently kill a nearby enemy when you are hidden, which is of great help for clearing out bandit camps and taking down early, but formidable, machines. Later robots will not be killed by the attack, but it will knock them down for a period of time.Concentration: Another must-have, activating Concentration temporarily slows down time when aiming one of Aloy's weapons. Like Silent Strike, this ability is vital for a stealthy approach, allowing you ample time to line up headshots, or target specific components on mechanical foes.Lure Call: Aloy can use the rocks she collects to distract patrolling enemies, but the Lure Call is far more efficient for stealth kills. The ability allows you to whistle at a specific enemy (whoever is closest to your center view), who will then come to investigate without fail. Find a patch of tall grass to hide in, whistle, and take them down with a Silent Strike attack. Piece of cake.Second Priority:Gatherer, Scavenger, Disarm Traps, Tinker: The first three skills you bought provide the basis for Horizon's stealth combat, and will serve you well for the opening hours. After that, I recommend making a beeline for the Tinker ability, which allows you to remove the stat-boosting mods that you slot into your weapons and armor. Tinker is a heavy investment; it's located at the end of one of the Forager lines, requiring you to buy three other abilities before you can unlock it. However, it's definitely worth it. You will only acquire a handful of weapons in the game, but will consistently be finding better and more powerful mods to boost them. Having the ability to experiment with different combos or effortlessly move your best mods to a different weapon is a big help. Additionally, the abilities you need to unlock first are also helpful: Gatherer and Scavenger provide more resources from plants and downed foes respectively, and Disarm Traps lets you pick up unused or misplaced traps.Third Priority:Precision, Precision +, Knockdown: Thanks to weapon mods and the myriad different arrow types you'll be unlocking, you won't have to worry about your ranged capabilities too much in the early hours of the game. That's why we're focusing our next group of skill points on melee abilities instead. Precision and Precision + will boost your light attacks and help knock off armor and components, while Knockdown will – surprise! – knock down foes, leaving them vulnerable to follow-up attacks. Which leads us to...Critical Hit, Critical Hit+: These two abilities allow Aloy to stick a downed enemy for major damage. Thanks to their position in the skill tree, they are also cheaper – you can pick both of them up for the price of a single skill further down the tree. That said, you may want to check how much damage the standard Critical Hit attack is doing; if it's consistently killing off the enemies you're up against, you can put off buying the bonus damage until you need it.Fourth Priority:Heavy Lifter, Double Shot, Triple Shot: At some point, your standard bow damage won't be cutting it anymore – precision arrows will no longer pack enough of a punch to take down elite bandits, and bigger machines shrug off standard arrows. That's where the Double and Triple Shot arrows come in. Aloy can notch up multiple projectiles before letting loose, which will once again boost your stealth game back into one-hit-kill territory. Like Critical Hit, see how Double Shot does on its own – if you're already happy with the amount of damage it's doing, hold off on the final upgrade until later. As for Heavy Lifter – it's a rather useless upgrade, but necessary purchase to get to Double Shot, so you'll just have to eat the loss.Concentration+, Fast Reload: What good is having the ability to rack up multiple arrows if you don't have enough time to fire them off? Concentration+ gives you a few more seconds to line up a slow-mo headshot, and Fast Reload will help mitigate misses by taking less time. If that isn't an issue for you (either you've boosted reload speed via mods or you're the type of braggart that never misses), then ignore this upgrade.Fifth Priority:Silent Drop, Low Profile, Dodge Prowess, and Quiet Sprint are quality-of-life upgrades that will let you move around more freely without alerting enemies.Healer and Herbalist are cheap health upgrades that will keep you alive longer (if you're dying a lot, you may want to consider purchasing them earlier).Ammo Crafter and Scavenger+ will help alleviate resource gathering.  Combat Override and Combat Override+ will keep allied machines fighting by your side longer.