Having said that, there are a few build styles in the game that will generally perform better than others as well as a few builds that you’ll need to consider early on if you’re going to work towards them by the time you reach the end of the game.

First off, I wouldn’t recommend trying a full melee build unless you’re willing to really commit to that playstyle or lower the difficulty setting. Melee combat is much better in Forbidden West than it was in Zero Dawn (and it’s great against those tricky human enemies), but maximizing your melee build is a slow process that doesn’t really start to pay off until the late game. It’s not impossible to play the game that way, but doing so requires you to acquire pretty much every Warrior skill available as well as a few Survivor skills. It’s just a limited style that is best pursued by those who really love the melee combat system.

Along those same lines, you’ll probably also find that it’s worth investing in your bow over your spear. Not only does the bow tend to be more useful in the long run, but certain “melee skills” benefit from weaving in the occasional bow attack whereas ranged builds rarely ask you to use your spear outside of certain stealth abilities. 

It’s also somewhat tough to commit to a full “Machine Master build.” Whereas most of the game’s other skill trees offer generally useful skills that you can weave into a variety of playstyles, Machine Master skills generally ask you to commit to overriding machines and making that your main combat tactic. That’s certainly not impossible, but it’s a relatively strange way to play the game that also makes the encounters against human opponents feel even more awkward than they already do.

Your best bet is to focus on a few key passive/resource management abilities early on (we’ll talk about those more in a bit in the section below) before evenly distributing points across a few different combat tactics. So far as that goes, I highly recommend spending those early “combat points” on the Infiltrator and Hunter tress as you’ll probably be using those skills at some point regardless of how you choose to play the game.

You may also choose to spend more points in the Trapper tree after you acquire your key initial abilities, but even with a Trapper build, you’re going to want to spend quite a few points on stealth abilities and maybe a few points on Survivor and Hunter skills. All of those skill trees softly flow into each other in ways that make it hard to get the most out of one of them if you don’t invest a little into all of them.

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