Dealing and taking damage | Combat The Banner Saga Guide

While attacking stronger enemies, weaken their armor first, then focus on their strength bar.

Every participant of the battles (either from your or enemy's party) is described by two important factors that affect their effectiveness in attack and defence, i.e. Strength and Armor. In offence, Strength affects the power of attacks, so characters with high Strength deal more damage. In defence, it works as a health bar. That means that losing all strength points causes death (enemy) or faint (ally). Armor in offence affects the enemy's ability to avoid losing strength points, while in defence it works like that for your unit.

A really important fact is that before attacking you always have to decide if you want your attack to affect strength or armor of the enemy unit. In case of stronger enemies, you should start with weakening enemy's armor at least to half of the initial points. After that, you may start attacking the strength bar, the attacks will be more effective when armor is already weakened. While dealing with weaker units, you might want to begin with attacking the strength bars. Additional skills are also useful, Arc Lightning used by Eyvind is a great example - it weakens the strength bars regardless of armor points.

Try to replace the heroes that have recently been wounded.

A bit earlier I mentioned that the members of your party faint when they lose all strength points, so you won't pay attention to them as much as to enemy's side. If you play on normal on hard difficulty, you should keep in mind that if your units get seriously wounded (Injured), their damage will take a few days to heal. Replacing them to different, healthy heroes is the best way to deal with this condition. You may choose the same character before the healing is complete but they won't have their full strength so it will be even easier to lose them.