Ever spend dozens of hours with a game only to discover something so blindingly obvious yet critically helpful that you can’t help but kick yourself in a fit of despair? Yeah, me neither. On an unrelated note, after I hit the 40-hour mark in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, I learned something essential about the skill tree. Turns out, you can defog the entire thing with minimal effort.
To be clear, this advice will not help you unlock every individual combat ability or stat boost in Ubisoft’s latest multiplatform Renaissance Faire. You’ll have to do that the old fashioned way, by going a-viking and earning experience points, which translate into skill points. You then use those skill points to unlock nodes in a skill tree, which is more of a skill star chart. Every node you unlock increases your power level by one. Each individual constellation contains a cluster of nodes: one combat ability and a handful of stat bonuses. As you make your way to the outer rim of any given constellation, you’ll unveil the adjacent one.
Once you reveal a constellation, you can freely reassign any skill points you’ve assigned to that cluster of nodes. The uncovered skill—and its surrounding stat-boost nodes—will remain revealed.
Here’s a snapshot of my level-up constellation, with some nodes in the Bear tree still clearly shrouded in fog:
And here’s me revealing them:
And then unassigning the skill points for use in the more practical Raven and Wolf trees:
After removing the points, the Sprint Bash and Arrow Volley skills are still there, free to be unlocked whenever I desire at some point in the future.
The strategy is this: Take a good chunk of skill points—say a dozen or so—and carve out a pathway through your skill star chart, unveiling constellations as you go. Then reset all those skill points, and repeat the process through a different string of constellations. (On Xbox consoles, you can reset skills wholesale by pressing Y, or refund them piecemeal by hovering over an individual node and holding X. If you need to return a whole bunch of skill points to your bank, undoing an assigned skill point at the base of a pathway will also return all the skill points assigned beyond it.) Just repeat this until the whole star chart is clear as a summer night.
Someone better at math than me would have to crunch the numbers as to what power level you’d need to pull this off. My guess—a writer’s guess, not a mathematician’s guess, so take that as you will—is that you could pull this off when you’re around level 50 or so. (For what it’s worth, my power level is 140. Wish I knew this trick 90 levels ago.)
Of course, part of the fun of leveling up in Valhalla is in the mystery. Uncovering a new node is exciting. Short of some Googling, you never know what you’ll get; the bummer of turning up a useless ability (Explosive Corpse) is far outshadowed by the thrill of turning up a killer one (Battleground Bolt). Still, if you’d rather lay out the entire suite of abilities before you—so as to accurately plan out and shape your toolkit without having to go through the hassle of a respec—know that this trick is at your fingertips.