Warrior builds in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon revolve around using overwhelming force and unrelenting power in melee range to destroy enemies before they have a chance to counterattack.
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While warriors can wield both one-handed and two-handed weapons, this list covers skills that are mainly suited for the two-handed, all-in playstyle. This is because a lot of the one-handed skills lean heavily towards nimble, in-and-out, dash-heavy combat, which is not in line with the warrior archetype.
10 Agility
- Skill Tree: Dexterity > Movement
- Effect: Dash costs 20/40/60% less stamina.
In the two-handed warrior build, closing the distance between the player and the enemy is half the battle. The most straightforward way to achieve just that is by using dashes. Due to the incredibly high stamina cost of heavy weapons, warriors are always starved for stamina.
Reducing the dash stamina cost means that the number of times they’ll find themselves unable to dodge because their green bar has bottomed out will be significantly less. This skill is more useful the earlier it is obtained because as players level up over the course of a playthrough, their stamina problems will become less and less severe.
9 Toughened By Pain
- Skill Tree: Practicality > Armor
- Effect: Gain up to 10/15/20% damage reduction based on your missing health.
Toughened by Pain pairs extremely well with the berserker playstyle, allowing warriors to put their lives on the line and treat every battle like a free-for-all melee where all they need to do is bash some heads.
However, this skill really shows its true value when combined with Last Stand (+30% melee damage at below 30% health) and Reckless Frenzy (+30% attack speed when below 30% health). Together, these three skills form the core basis of this style of combat and are must-haves for anyone planning on going this route.
8 The Best Offense
- Skill Tree: Practicality > Armor
- Effect: Deal additional 20/40/60% of your armor as damage when attacking with melee weapons.
The more the game progresses and the more good armor players obtain, the better Best Offense gets. In the early game, white armor pieces that provide 2 or 3 armor per piece aren’t very impressive, which might put a lot of players off of the idea of this skill, as with that tier of armor, it doesn’t seem worth it.
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Once players start obtaining high-tier heavy armor that can really stack their defenses and combine that with skills from other nodes in the Armor tree that boosts armor even more, they form a virtuous cycle of defense turning into offense.
7 Dominating Presence
- Skill Tree: Strength > Two-Handed
- Effect: Each enemy within a radius of 5m increases your physical damage by 10%.
It’s only natural for a warrior to be within melee range of their enemies in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. With Dominating Presence, doing so is further rewarded by a direct increase in combat ability. Even in the very worst-case scenario, when players are only fighting against one enemy, this skill will give them 10% increased physical damage. But in front of hordes of enemies, this skill turns a melee brawler into a straight-up killing machine.
A key reason why Dominating Presence is especially useful to warriors is because it shores up their one weakness: being swarmed by mobs. Melee weapons are naturally weak against multiple enemies, but this skill turns that weakness into a strength instead.
6 Godly Physique
- Skill Tree: Strength > General
- Effect: Increases melee damage by 5/10/15/20/25%.
When players aren’t sure which build they want to go for in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, whether they want to go with one-handed weapons or two-handed weapons, choosing Godly Physique is the easy answer. It provides a direct increase to melee damage that applies to all weapons and is a part of every up-close-and-personal build in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon.
If a player does know which route they want to take, however, Godly Physique should be left for later on in the game when all the primary damage nodes from the corresponding skill trees have been chosen.
5 Deflecting Parry
- Skill Tree: Dexterity > Parry
- Effect: You can parry projectiles to deflect them.
The Parry skill tree is a two-handed warrior’s primary mode of active defense. While two-handed weapons can block with middling efficiency, they’re much better suited for a hyper-offensive playstyle, a playstyle that’s augmented by parrying.
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By default, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon allows players to only parry melee attacks. Projectiles like arrows can only be dodged. With Deflecting Parry, however, even these projectiles become a non-issue for players with quick reflexes and good situational awareness.
4 Endurance Training
- Skill Tree: Practicality > Armor
- Effect: Increase armor weight threshold by 5/10/15%
The armor pieces that provide the best defenses are also often the heaviest. And since warriors in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon want to go all-in on offense, this means they’ll always be at risk of getting killed by swarming enemies, especially at higher difficulties.
Having the ability to dodge at a crucial moment is the difference between life and death in this game, which, coincidentally, is an ability hampered by wearing overly heavy armor. Directly increasing the armor weight threshold allows players to go from Heavy to Medium, giving them two dashes instead of just one.
3 Crushing Blow
- Skill Tree: Strength > Two-Handed
- Effect: Heavy attacks with two-handed weapons deal 15/20/25% weapon damage in a 4m radius around the enemy hit
By default, melee weapons have no ability to deal area-of-effect damage in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. Other than a few special uniques, the only way to change that is by taking points in Crushing Blow.
This allows players to convert a portion of their damage from single-target to AoE, addressing the issue of mobs swarming the player directly. While 25% doesn’t seem like all that much at first glance, it’s important to remember just how high the base attack of two-handed weapons really is.
2 Parry King
- Skill Tree: Dexterity > Parry
- Effect: Your parry window is increased by 0.1/0.2/0.3 seconds.
Parrying in Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is one of the game’s most unforgiving mechanics. Even in optimal conditions like a one-on-one duel, pulling off a successful parry is almost impossible without a little bit of luck involved.
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For warriors who rely on parries to negate incoming damage, taking Parry King allows them to drastically increase the success rate of their parries in active combat. 0.1 seconds may not seem like much, but the difference is night and day in practice.
1 Brutish Fighter
- Skill Tree: Strength > Two-Handed
- Effect: Attacks with two-handed weapons are stronger by 10/15/20%.
Brutish Fighter is the most straightforward way for a 2H warrior build to shine through. A direct percentage increase to damage might not be the most interesting skill, but it’s a crucial one to get. The earlier, the better.
Two-handed weapons already have a really high base attack and benefit quite a lot from an increase. The first three levels of any warrior using these weapons should be spent getting Brutish Fighter to level 3 in order to get off to a great start.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 77 /100 Critics Rec: 71%
- Released
- May 23, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, Use of Drugs
- Developer(s)
- Questline
- Publisher(s)
- Awaken Realms
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Action, RPG, Open-World, Survival Horror
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
