Why is fighting worth a hale steer ? Because the most important separate about learning to play For Honor ( let alone getting good at playing For Honor ) is understanding its weird controls. Trust us : Investing the time to learn how to block, contrivance, guard, battle, parry, hold and attack keeps you from spending your first respective hours mashing buttons and throwing controllers .
In this lead, we ’ ll explain it all — and show it with videos that turn the delirious battle into easily digestible demonstrations. After you put in the work, then you can play the proper game — and dominate those who have n’t wrapped their minds around For Honor ’ mho unique controls .
Understanding combat
Fighting in For Honor is … different. You ’ ve seen pieces of it before — stances, light up and heavy attacks, parrying — but the way those pieces fit together is new. From the push button map to the time, fight in For Honor can seem, honestly, baffling. It certain did for us.
But then we broke the code .
This guide gives that code to you .
And if you ’ re distillery struggling, we ’ ll give the crash course that finally helped us turn the corner .
Guard mode
When you ’ rhenium mowing through one-hit-kill minions, there ’ s no proficiency to speak of — just swing idle and heavy attacks to your heart ’ mho capacity. It ’ s when you find another bomber that things get interest .
You do not control the camera
Entering guard mode locks you onto an opposition. At this point, you nobelium longer control the television camera. We ’ ra going to say that again, in italics, because it was the first firearm that needed to fall into station for us : You do not control the camera in guard mode .
The right thumbstick is lone for switching your guard between left, right and top stances. If you try to move the camera, you ’ re going to change your guard alternatively, and the fight will not go good .
Stances
Those three guard stances — left, right and lead — are spread around the right thumbstick in thirds. In early words, guard stances don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate map directly to left, right and up. If you find yourself missing blocks, adjust your aim .
photograph a clock. Guard up is at 12, left is at 8 and right is at 4. Don ’ triiodothyronine merely twitch straight in a guidance. Adding a little down to the left and correctly guard helped us a fortune .
Attacking
There are merely two options when attacking in For Honor : light or heavy attack .
- Light attacks are quick, but don’t deal much damage.
- Heavy attacks are slow, but deal a lot of damage.
You credibly already know this. We ’ re pointing it out again because it plays a large ( but not obvious ) function in battle : A ignite attack will land before a heavy attack. If your opponent starts a heavy dangle at the same meter you start a light swing, your attack will land first, dealing price and interrupting their swing .
How to think about combat
This was going to be a tilt of bash ’ s and don ’ metric ton, but we realized as we wrote it that learning combat in For Honor was more about breaking habits than reinforcing them. then this list is about the things not to do .
- Don’t think about any other game while you’re playing. Your fingers will drift to the wrong buttons and the fight will go sideways in a hurry.
- Don’t think about the camera while in guard mode. You can’t control it (seriously, we struggled with this a lot). Just remind yourself to assume that the camera is fixed — like a fighting game — and focus on your guard stances.
- Don’t mash buttons. This one kind of goes without saying, but it’s an instinct we all have. You have to keep your head if you’re going to keep your head (#sorrynotsorry). Combat is fast and challenging, but it’s Bop It, not Pie Face. Mashing won’t help. Being deliberate will.
- Don’t anticipate. React. If you try to guess, you’re going to guess wrong (roughly 66 percent of the time). You have the time to react to an attack and switch your guard to block, so don’t commit yourself to a guess. For Honor show a convenient chevron above your opponent, telling you which way their attack is coming. Wait for that, and then switch your stance.
- Don’t try to plan ahead. Treat each attack individually. If you’re thinking about what you’re going to do two swings from now, you’re going to miss a guard and take a sword to the face.
- Don’t try to do too much. One-on-one combat is all about timing. Despite what Mick Jagger would have you believe, time is not on your side. Find your opening, attack, then regroup. You’re not going to be stringing together some 20 hit combo here. You’re going to land one attack (but not much more), and and then you’re going to be back on defense and stamina regeneration.
- Don’t forget about your stamina. It drains slower than some other games, but when it runs out, you’re in all sorts of trouble.
For Honor boot camp
The first step in our boot camp is to play the tutorial. Yes, you ’ ve played it already. Go play it again. immediately, play the advanced commit. possibly play it doubly. Got it ? OK .
Blocking
now start a duel rehearse against a flush 1 bot.Lock on to your attacker to enter guard mode, then take your left hand off of the accountant. seriously. You ’ re not going to move at all. Let the bot come to you. only use your exit hand to lock on to the bot .
For the first few minutes, switch your guard to block attacks. Don ’ triiodothyronine competitiveness second. You ’ re going to take damage ( you might even get killed ), and you ’ ll credibly screw up a few times. Just take your lumps. Your alone goal here is to teach your thumb to block .
once you ’ re comfortable forget, add in a counter swing every once in a while. only do light attacks. heavy swings take way excessively much time and will throw you off. And wear ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate pay back carried aside. Just one swing, then it ’ s back to blocking.
After you ’ rhenium comfortable, you can dive into For Honor ’ s menus to learn the button presses that hand over chains ( For Honor ’ s condition for jazz band ). For nowadays, equitable keep blocking and occasionally swinging until one of you is dead or you ’ ra confident that you know what stop is all about .
Parrying
now it ’ south meter to parry. A successful counterpunch will throw your adversary off for a irregular and leave them open for an assail. This one took us the longest to figure out, so preceptor ’ triiodothyronine get discouraged. Put in the work .
There are three steps to parrying, and it ’ s authoritative to remember that they ’ rhenium discrete steps .
- Match your guard direction to the incoming attack direction.
- Wait for the attacker’s chevron/arrow icon to flash red.
- Hit attack to parry. (Stick with heavy attack for now, because the timing is easier.)
This takes a beat longer than you ’ re probably, used to and it ’ sulfur going to take a fortune of practice to get down .
Hitting the button early will launch an fire and leave you wide candid to your attacker ’ randomness baseball swing, already afoot. Hitting the button late won ’ t actually do anything. Focus on learning to wait that extra beat .
once you ’ re comfortable with the clock and can ( relatively ) systematically parry, add in that light attack again. possibly switch your guard management before you attack since you have a beat while your opposition is staggering. now you ’ re actually fighting back !
Guard breaks
Keep up everything you ’ rhenium doing already — by and large blocking, sometimes parrying and counterattacking — but add in a guard interruption whenever you feel you have meter for one. At beginning, don ’ t tied worry about following through on it. Just land the guard break and disrupt the flow of the contend .
Dodging
Dodging was another difficult aspect of combat for us to get used to. A contrivance works like you ’ d expect — it ’ s a outburst of amphetamine in whatever commission you ’ re moving the left thumbstick — but adding that extra button iron in the center of blocking makes our have with dodging strike or miss at best ( normally hit, in that we get hit immediately after dodging ) .
How frequently and when you choose to dodge besides depends on the hero you choose. Assassins like the Knight peacekeeper, for model, can turn dodges into counter-attacks. And, since assassins don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate hold their block the way early heroes do, dodging can save your liveliness. Larger heroes, like the samurai shugoki are merely more difficult to get out of the way .
While dodging, you have to consider the focus of your opponent ’ s swing. If you dodge away from your attacker ’ sulfur swing, you ’ re however going to get hit on the postdate through. If you dodge into the swing, you ’ ll avoid the hit. Pepper dodges into your fight practice, but try not to get discouraged if it ’ randomness not angstrom useful as you expect. Tailor your use of it to the hero you ’ re using and your personal style .
Throwing
There is one view of combat that we haven ’ metric ton talked about so far — throwing. There ’ s a cause for that. It ’ randomness tied to the hero you ’ ra playing rather than the core fight you learned about above .
Following up a ( successful ) guard break with the same release will perform a throw. For some heroes, like the viking plunderer, this will perform an elaborate harness that carries your enemy and tosses them. For others, like the samurai orochi, this is a more tame complain that creates some distance between you and your opponent .
Throws are utilitarian — we ’ re a big fan of tossing enemies off of bridges with the viking raider — but remember that it ’ s not going to work the same for every bomber you play.
Read more: The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4
Bringing it all together
once you ’ ve got all of that incorporated into your vocabulary, it ’ mho time to put it all together. You can even move around with the leave thumbstick if you ’ d like. The model that finally made us feel like we understood fighting was : block, parry, attack, block, crack, attack, then back to block .
You ’ re however going to lose fights. But you ’ ll startle winning more and more much. You won ’ thyroxine win every one, but you ’ ll understand better why you lost. When you move on to the report missions, you ’ ll be so well disposed, you might be bored. But bored is infinitely better than baffled .