How to Unlock Horizon Forbidden West Skills? What Are the Best Hunter Skills?

In Horizon Forbidden West, Aloy is more capable than ever. On top of her unbeatable archery and free-climbing skills, she has tons of powerful melee, stealth, and machine riding abilities to unlock.

But at the start of the game, it’s tough to know what’s the most useful and what to prioritise.

Which skills should you unlock first in Horizon Forbidden West?

Across your time with Horizon Forbidden West, you will probably accumulate enough skill points to grant access to everything you need.

However, especially in the early game, some of the skill trees are better to unlock sooner than later. Each tree focuses on one aspect of Aloy’s skillset, as well as a couple of the weapons she can add to her arsenal.

In the beginning, you should spend your first skill points on either the Hunter or Survivor tree and buy the Concentration boosts and Potent Medicine skills.

Concentration is where you can use slow motion to line up shots on weak points more easily, whereas Potent Medicine is a pure upgrade to the healing skills you will use in almost every battle through the whole game.

From there, it’s best to mix-and-match the best skill nodes from each tree whenever you feel like they will be useful.

While the Warrior and Trap trees don’t seem very useful at the start of the game, once you’ve unlocked a few nodes it really increases the power level of their respective systems.

As a rough guide, I would recommend unlocking skills in roughly the following order:

Hunter
Survivor
Infiltrator
Warrior
Trapper
Machine Master
Don’t feel like you have to unlock every single node in one tree before you move onto the next though.

What are the best Hunter skills in Horizon Forbidden West?

Concentration

Type: Passive skill – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter – best skills – Type: Passive skill

Comment: All skills in this group allow you to use your concentration for longer. This bonus is very important if you often use bullet time when aiming with your bow. You will unlock the first skill of this type early in the game.

Deep Concentration

Type: Passive skill – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter – best skills –

Type: Passive skill

Comment: This is an extension of the skill mentioned above – it extends the duration of concentration, which allows you to use it more often.

Concentration Regen

Type: Passive skill – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter – best skills
Type: Passive skill

Comment: This skill restores your concentration faster after you’ve used it for aiming. Thus, you will be able to activate bullet time more often.

Ranged Master

Type: Valor Surge – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter – best skills

Type: Valor Surge

Comment: Activating this skill grants a number of useful bonuses for ranged weapons – increased damage from normal attacks and weapon techniques, as well as health and stamina recovery and the generation of shocking explosions.

Ammo Expert

Type: Passive skill – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter – best skills

Type: Passive skill

Comment: This is an extremely helpful skill that allows you to craft more ammo from the same amount of resources. You will appreciate it regardless of what ranged weapons you use, and you won’t have to look for new ammo materials as often.

Heavy Weapon

Type: Passive skill – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter – best skills
Type: Passive skill

Comment: You will appreciate the advantages of this skill especially in the later stages of the campaign, because then you will find unused heavy weapons more often, as well as detach them from the armors of attacked machines. Virtually all such firearms have high firepower and you can attack your enemies even more effectively.

Triple Notch

Type: Weapon Technique (Hunter Bow)

Comment: This is a very good technique related to hunting bows, which are probably the most commonly used ranged weapons. Aloy can shoot up to three arrows at once, which comes in handy when attacking strong and durable enemies.

Workbench Expert

Type: Passive skill – Horizon Forbidden West: Hunter
Type: Passive skill

Comment: Acquiring this perk will allow you to use less resources to craft ammo, but the bonus will only work if you use a workshop to do so. This can be very useful in case of unique ammo types that may require rarer ingredients for crafting.

Knockdown Shot

Type: Weapon Technique (Hunter Bow)

Comment: Using this weapon technique makes you, as the name suggests, able to knock an opponent to the ground. You can use this in many ways, e.g. run up to an enemy and perform a critical strike on them, perform a powerful attack aimed at a defenseless enemy, or more easily target a component on their armor.

What Are the Different Types of Horizon Forbidden West skills?

Passive Boosts: These skills upgrade Aloy’s basic attributes and skills, improving her core abilities. For example, passive boosts can increase how quickly she can craft gear, how much health she regains from healing items, or how much damage she deals. Passive Boosts are represented by small circular symbols in each skill tree.
Active Skills: These skills give Aloy new abilities, giving you more options while playing. Some examples include new melee combos and attacks, or enhancing Aloy’s override capabilities. Active Skills are represented by rhombus symbols in each skill tree.
Weapon Techniques: These skills pertain to certain categories of weapons, making them more versatile and more powerful with new moves. For instance, a Hunter Bow Weapon Technique can be unlocked to allow for firing high volleys of arrows, while the Warrior Bow gets a Weapon Technique to fire a five-arrow horizontal spread. You perform these Weapon Techniques by holding L2 to aim and then pressing R1 to fire instead of R2.
Valor Surges: These skills are powerful new abilities that can only be unlocked by first unlocking other skills surrounding them. Valor Surges are represented by diamond symbols in each skill tree.

Can You Get All the Skills in One Playthrough?

Yes, you can unlock all Skills in all skill trees in Horizon Forbidden West. However, to do so, you will need to earn enough Skill Points. These are earned by playing through Main Quests, Side Quests, Errands, and other side activities and objectives. By playing most of the game’s Quests and other missions, you will gain enough Skill Points to unlock every Skill in Horizon Forbidden West, but it will take some time.

Can You Respec Skills or Reset Skill Points?

No, you cannot reset your Skills and redistribute your Skill Points. Once you spend Skill Points to unlock a Skill, that Skill is locked in, and there’s no way to reallocate Skill Points.

However, this isn’t really a problem — as stated above, you can unlock every Skill by playing through enough Quests and earning enough Skill Points.

Can you max all skills in Horizon Forbidden West?

Horizon Forbidden West players are currently unable to respec their spent skill points, so once a skill is unlocked, there’s no way to re-do the action and get the skill points back.

What should I upgrade first in Horizon Forbidden West?

Potent Medicine: Berries will give Aloy more HP and will heal her faster. Overshield: Aloy will be given a shield that can absorb damage. Block Breaker: This ability allows players to break a human enemy’s guard. It’ll be much easier to take them down.

Can you unlock all skill trees in Horizon Forbidden West?

Unless Guerrilla Games provides some sort of post-launch update, what you’ve spent your skill points on is what you’re stuck with. But there’s some good news! There’s enough activities and quests in Horizon Forbidden West that you’ll eventually be able to unlock every skill in the game.

Is Hzd forbidden West a DLC?

It should be noted that the game can still be played without the need to purchase such items.” Of course, if you’ve played the game, you’ll already know there’s no in-game storefront available from the main menu. That’s presumably because Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t actually have any DLC available yet.