Dealing and taking damage | Combat The Banner Saga 2 Guide

When attacking opponents, first focus on their armor and then on their health bars

All of the characters present in the battlefield have been described with two key statistics that affect their attack and defense. The parameter of strength governs two things that are key to the battle. The first one is attack itself, which is the capability of dealing damage. The other one is health bar. Therefore, strength determines your health and it is a good idea to invest into it as many points as possible. If your health/strength bar drops during the battle, you will start to deal less and less damage. Therefore, this is a interdependence that governs combat value of your characters. However, this is not an interdependence that is constantly at work, because active abilities of certain heroes ignore it completely (in some cases). This means that regardless of how much strength you have, you will often deal comparable damage if you use active abilities. It should be noted that especially enemies use this. Therefore, try to eliminate enemies that are low on health, because they can often have powerful skills.

An important thing during the battle is to decide whether you want to damage the opponent's armor or his health bar. If an opponent has a high armor statistic and low health statistic, it is better to damage the armor first. This is important because an armor-less opponent can usually be eliminated in one attack (charged with willpower or regular). Especially archers will take advantage of damaged armor. This is thanks to their passive ability - Puncture that allows them to deal massive damage to opponents with damaged armor. However, keep in mind that Puncture ability activates only if the archer has not moved by a field, for one turn.

Mage Eyvind, with his Arc Lightning ability is a complete opposite. His ability deals the same damage regardless of whether the opponent has 20 points of armor or has no armor at all. Therefore, it is a good idea to consider which opponents you want to eliminate by damaging their armors and which ones you want to leave intact.

Try replacing recently-wounded heroes with other ones.

It may happen that your character loses all health/strength points during the battle. This eliminates such a character from further battle. However, you do not lose them. In fact, such a character is only wounded, which you can learn about by accessing the tab devoted to heroes. Usually, the "Injured" status lasts for several days. After that time, the hero can return to participating in battles. There are two things that you can do in such situation. You can either wait for those several days, until he gets well, after which he is ready to use again. The other way is to replace him with another character and continue your journey. The former is the worse solution, if you have a replacement, because you lose your resources this way, and you will have to buy them for renown points.