ELEX II - Early Game Combat Tips

I’ve figured out a couple of tips that may help with the combat.

Tips for Combat (Early Game)

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For starters have a companion with you, you can get a couple pretty quick and early and they help out a lot in combat. Especially when it comes to flying enemies.

One thing I learned when I got myself stuck fighting aliens with guns is that enemies in this game can in fact take fall damage, I tested on humanoids.
If you’re struggling against an enemy and there happens to be a nice cliff nearby, try luring them to the cliff edge and use a shield bash attack to drop their stamina bar (yellow bar) I think shields do more than most other attacks but if you got something better use it, just watch your own stamina.
When their bar is drained they’ll plump to the ground for a bit, letting you get a nice heavy “finisher” type attack on them.
For humanoids they go ragdoll and if they’re near a cliff they can actually slide off and splat on the ground below.
Depending on the height this can cause serious damage to the, sometimes even kill them.
It’s a nice way to cheese a bad guy you’re struggling with.

Speaking of Shields, i’ve noticed that despite taking damage when blocking in Elex 2, unlike the first game, the damage you take from blocked attacks cannot actually kill you.
So it’s safe to block even when your health is completely drained.
That said though I’ve noticed that when my health is completely drained like that, I can no longer see my stamina or my jetpack fuel bars for some reason.
Restoring any amount of health will fix that though.

General Combat Tips

Note: I pretty much only use a one handed sword now.

First is to sprint in and attack, this gives you a nice opening strike which will knock a lot of enemies down so they can’t get the first hit on you.
Secondly I’ve learned that Dodge attacking is.. to put it bluntly utterly broken and OP on most enemies.
When I say dodge attacking I don’t mean hit and dodge like your playing it safe, I mean Dodging and hitting with a heavy attack right after.If you dodge attack like this you get to use a quick heavy attack that is much faster than most other heavy attacks.
It also has the added effect that it will almost always cause the enemy to stagger after being hit, and it does a lot of stamina damage as well.
This essentially allows you to stunlock a lot of enemies in the game until you knock them down and can deal a hard hitting finisher strike on them.
It’s also a very reliable way of getting behind enemies as well giving you easy openings for backstabs which do huge damage to health and stamina as well.

Prior to learning this little dodge attack trick I was doing ok in combat, having some trouble with common enemies like Raptors and Dog types, getting hit quite often etc and generally any situations where I had to take on 3 or more enemies was a death sentence.

Now I have little trouble in fights even when i’m up against several creatures at once that the game still gives me a warning for.
Like Nightshades for example, managed to take on 3 of those at once earlier without taking any damage, despite the game claiming they’re dangerous enemies.
Going up against just 1 creature I can stagger with this tactic is a complete joke now, like Moloch’s or Canonbeasts.
Can whittle them down without any danger to myself, even if they’re strong enough to one shot me.

Have not tried this against larger creatures like Trolls though, but if I can stagger it I expect it’ll work.

UPD

Can now confirm it does work on trolls, Giants and other large sized creatures.
Though it still requires planned strikes, these creatures have a habit of doing 180 pivots and whacking you when going for backstabs.