How to find new upgrades, improve your stats and unlock rare armour sets.
By Jack Yarwood
6 min readPublished on
The new God of War switches the series formula up quite a bit, with the armour system being one of the most obvious examples of this. The game takes more of an RPG approach to both the gear and upgrades, letting you mix and match different combinations and increase certain skills to find the playstyle that is right for you.
To help you get better acquainted with the new system, below you’ll find some tips that explain how everything works. These will inform you on how to find new upgrades in the game and improve certain stats, as well as clue you in on the location of some key items, too.
Probably the best place to start is to explain the different attributes you can improve and what they actually do. Most of these are pretty obvious. For instance, increasing your strength and runic abilities improves how much damage you can do, and altering your defence and vitality gives you more staying power in battle. It is the cooldown and luck attributes, however, that require a bit more explanation.
In the game, you can perform runic attacks to do more damage. These are incredibly powerful but are followed by a brief cooldown period where you are unable to use them. The level you are at will determine how quickly the attack will recharge, so if you rely on runic attacks quite heavily you should put some consideration into what gear you are using.
The luck attribute, meanwhile, impacts how much hacksilver and XP you will collect from drops, as well as the activation charge on certain pommels and enchantments. This can be incredibly useful, especially when farming enemies for the money to buy new skills and equipment. What equipment and upgrades you have selected will decide the numerical value of each skill.
After meeting with the witch, you’ll find yourself in the Lake of Nine, a central hub with plenty to do and see. It is here you can find blue-looking items, known as Yggdrasil Dew Drops, hanging from branches breaching the water.
Collecting these will increase your stats, so make sure to keep a look out for any while exploring the area. There are a few drops for every stat, which makes them well worth the effort.
Hacksilver is the currency in God of War that's used to upgrade and purchase gear. You will need a lot of it to get the best gear in the game, but luckily you can farm it in a number of different ways. You can smash into barrels and chest while rowing on the Lake of Nine to fill your coffers or find treasure maps in the game’s world, which allow you to locate and dig up hidden caches. Of course, there are always enemy drops and chests, too.
4. Complete side missions to unlock rare armour sets
Probably the best way to get new gear is to complete side missions and favours. Brok and Sindri, the two Dwarven Blacksmiths, will give you new quests almost every time you come across them, and this will often set you in the direction of some hidden loot.
Sindri’s quest Ivaldi’s curse is one example of this. It puts you on the right track for getting three of the best armour sets in the game: The Deadly Mist armour, The Cursed Mist armour, and The Endless Mist armour.
You can find these towards the end of game, after you’ve reached Niflheim, and have entered Ivaldi’s Workshop. Here you need to collect the nine pieces of rusted armour within the walls of the maze, before handing them over to Sindri or Brok to craft the different armour sets.
Another great armour set that you can obtain simply from completing a favour is the Valkyrie armour set. This is retrieved from beating the different Valkyries situated around the world. Something we have covered in more detail here.
5. Find raw materials to upgrade weapons and armour
There are a bunch of different ways to find materials in-game. You can do this by finding objects in chests or from beating bosses and completing story missions. These allow you to upgrade your weapons at Brok and Sindri’s shops and can help boost your overall level and stats.
You can also craft new resources at the shops. In fact, this is actually a pre-requisite for getting one of the last frozen flames necessary for upgrading the Leviathan Axe. After grabbing the chill mist from the central area of Ivaldi’s Workshop (it’s in the chest that takes 5000 mist echoes to open), take it to either Sindri or Brok and exchange it for the last frozen flame in the resources tab. Now you will be able to fully upgrade your axe and inflict some further punishment.
Runes are also incredibly important in God of War. They can be applied to items to change their effect and are found in chests and are dropped by high-level enemies.
Like to play defensively? Then pick the corresponding rune that increases your vitality or defence the most. Prefer to go in swinging? Then choose a rune based on its strength or runic stats.
The game doesn’t spell this out for you, but runes are a necessary step for getting the most out of your equipment.
You can find Nornir chests spread throughout the world. They contain two different items – Horns of Blood Mead and Idunn Apples. These expand your rage meter and health if you collect three of each kind. In otherwords, they are extremely helpful.
Opening a Nornir chest isn’t a simple case of walking up to it and pressing a button prompt however. Instead, you have to solve a puzzle in the surrounding environment to make the runes on the chest disappear.
Variations on how to open these chests include hitting three bells in close proximity with your axe, turning three different contraptions to show the runes depicted on the chest, and destroying a bunch of runic statues in the environment. Whenever you spot a chest, do a quick survey of your environment and look for these puzzles. The rewards are well worth it.
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