There are three skill trees to choose from in Horizon Zero Dawn and each plays an important role in Aloy’s survival. Prowler skills improve stealth, Brave skills enhance combat effectiveness, and the Forager tree cuts down on grinding for supplies and loot.
Which skills you want are often determined by your personal playstyle, but there are some skills that are considered essential for everyone. If you want to have an easier time in this game here are the skills you should strongly consider prioritizing.
Updated by Benjamin Baker on March 7th 2020: Over the course of a single playthrough you’re more than likely to have most, if not all of the skills available to Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn, especially when you dive into the expansion Frozen Wilds. Because of this it seemed appropriate to include a few more skills that Aloy should be focusing on to improve her stealth, combat, and resource gathering abilities.
15 Combat Override
Starting a battle by overriding one of the machines in the pack is a great strategy, especially if the one you turn is something powerful like a Sawtooth or a Scorcher. While this machine is busy keeping the enemy distracted you can take down machines safely from a distance.
Combat Override is a skill that increases how long that machine will remain on your side. This is very useful when you’ve managed to turn a strong machine and it’s running around fighting a pack of humans or other strong machines that might take some time to defeat. With this skill, you also have the time to lure a machine from a distant area to where the fighting will take place.
14 Quiet Sprint
Whether you’re getting into better positioning or just trying to traverse a dangerous area having the ability to remain stealthy while sprinting is handy. Quiet Sprint gives you this ability by reducing how much noise you make, ensuring that nearby machines will have a harder time noticing you.
Granted this isn’t foolproof, so if you blitz through a pack of Stalkers don’t be surprised if they see you. This is more for the times you’re darting from cover to cover or rushing an opponent from behind to get a stealth kill.
13 Low Profile
On a related note Low Profile is a highly recommended skill if you spend a lot of time using stealth. Some players like to rush into the fray firing arrows, but others prefer the tactical approach, picking off enemies one by one or avoiding certain fights altogether.
If you find yourself in this latter camp then definitely pick up Low Profile. It makes it that much harder for enemies to see Aloy when she’s crouched in the grass or behind objects.
12 Expert Carver
To improve Aloy’s gear you’re going to have to do a fair bit of shopping and crafting which means spending a lot of time farming the relevant Lenses, Hearts and other parts of both machines and animals to buy the things you need.
Expert Carver is a skill that increases the odds of more rare and valuable items dropping whenever you loot a downed machine or animal. It’s not a dramatic improvement, but you’ll see a noticeable drop in the number of opponents and creatures you have to down to get what you need.
11 Mounted Pickup
The Mounted Pickup skill is really more of a quality of life improvement, but it’s so handy it bears inclusion on this list. Basically it allows you to gather resources and loot down enemies while on the back of a mount.
This saves you the headache of having to hop off your mount every time you spot a medicinal plant or when you’ve downed a Watcher while riding. It may not seem like a critical skill at first, but you’ll be glad you picked it up going into the Frozen Wilds.
10 Call Mount +
Call Mount + is a skill that allows you to summon a new overridden Strider to your location if yours is too far away or was killed in battle. This ensures that no matter where you are you are merely a whistle away from having a mount for increased movement speed without using fast travel.
In addition to being convenient for travel it can also serve the player well in combat. If things are going sideways and you feel outnumbered or outgunned, summoning a mount to your location can give you a much needed distraction and an extra set of hooves to knock some heads.
9 Herbalist
You’re going to be doing a lot of healing in this game and maximizing how much health you can regenerate is always a priority. Herbalist doubles the size of your medicine pouch giving you double the health recovery.
This does mean you’ll have to pick twice the flowers to fill your medicine pouch which can get tedious, but you’ll be grateful you have it when your out of health potions in a fight and have a much deeper pouch to pull health from. It can also minimize how many health potions you use to save on resources.
8 Gatherer
Speaking of that bigger medicine pouch, Gatherer is a great skill to complement it as you now obtain more resources when foraging. That means those health flowers you pick will now fill your medicine pouch faster, offsetting how long it takes to fill up your larger bag.
It also increases the resources you obtain from animal kills and the flowers and plants you pick for crafting purposes. This is handy if you find yourself crafting a lot of potions and don’t want to go tracking down an absurd number of plant life to harvest.
7 Disarm Traps
Traps are handy when you strategize your attack plans as they can trip up the enemy, cover your retreat, whittle down difficult machines, or enable you to focus on one enemy while the other is writhing on the ground from a nasty shock.
But you’ll notice that sometimes things don’t go according to plan or the fight was easier than anticipated and you’ll have traps and tripwires strung about that were never triggered. Having the Disarm Traps skill allows you to go through and gather those items to be reused later, saving you the crafting and foraging it would take to replace them.
6 Scavenger
This game has a lot of crafting and most of the best weapons and armor are all obtained from merchants for sometimes hefty prices. Having the Scavenger skill gives a 10% for the Machine Scavenger Box to drop when looting downed machines. This box contains a number of resources related to that machine and increases the odds of rare items like Coils dropping.
It doesn’t sound like much but you’ll quickly find yourself accumulating resources at a much faster rate than before and it significantly cuts down on the grind time needed to obtain things like Machine Cores required to buy better gear.
5 Tinkerer
Perhaps the most powerful foraging skill in the game is the Tinkerer skill. With Tinkerer the player can now remove weaves and coils from armor and weapons without damaging them. Instead of having to scrounge for new mods or agonizing over which ones to destroy to fit a new mod in you can just pop them out and stick them in something else.
This is great for experimenting with different mod setups, if you get better armor and want to transfer your old mods, or if you find yourself switching out mods to give you an edge in an upcoming fight. You’ll also find yourself building up a stash of old worthless mods that can be sold for a decent price.
4 Critical Hit
Critical Hit is a must have skill for when you down an enemy either through traps and tripwires or with your spear. Once the enemy is prone on the ground Critical Skill enables you to perform a high damage attack.
This is great for knocking out weaker machines and humans in one hit or doing some serious damage to stronger foes when you manage to stun them. You always want to capitalize on an adversary’s mistakes and this skill lets you do that.
3 Double Shot
Most of your combat will be done with the bow whether you’re sniping enemies silently from afar or trying to down a charging machine. Double Shot is a skill that enables you to fire two arrows with each shot.
This instantly doubles your DPS and makes applying status effects or stripping away armor much easier. This does mean you’re burning through arrows at twice the rate, but if you have the Scavenger skill then this wont be as painful. You should also work on getting the better Triple Shot skill as quickly as possible.
2 Concentration
Concentration is an absolute must have skill and there’s a reason it’s offered at the beginning of the game for one skill point. When Aloy aims her bow time will slow down for the player making precision shots much easier.
This is an excellent skill to have if you’re downing humans from afar with headshots, firing arrows from the back of your mount, targeting a blaze canister, or if you’re running low on arrows and need every shot to count. Trying to fight with a bow without this skill is a lesson in frustration, do yourself a favor and get this essential skill as soon as possible.
1 Silent Strike
Perhaps the best skill in the entire game is Silent Strike. The game emphasizes stealth for a reason and you will find yourself frequently outnumbered and needing to even the score a bit before the arrows start flying. Silent Strike gives you the ability to do that.
It unlocks a stealth take-down that lets you sneak up on an enemy, be it a small machine or a human, and run them through with your spear without anyone or anything around you noticing. With this skill you can pick off an entire squad without anyone noticing before it’s too late. On larger machines or heavily armored humans this wont kill them outright, but it deals significant damage.
