Deciding which of The First Berserker Khazan’s weapons to pick is more important than you might think at first glance. Any weapon technically works. However, the game doesn’t hand out skill points quickly–nor do they carry over between weapon skill trees. Our First Berserker Khazan weapons guide explains which ones are worth your time and why.
Dual Wield
Dual Wield is what you start Khazan with, and this weapon type is much more than just the standard hack-and-slash device it resembles at first glance. Once you start investing skill points in the Ruthless tree, you unlock some exceptionally useful abilities. Frenzy and the Breeze skills let you string together dash attacks to perform a series of slashes that only stops when you stop pressing the attack input. It overwhelms standard enemies and smaller guardians, and it can take a chunk out of a boss enemy as well, or at least their stamina meter.
Dual Wield also has some excellent upgrades for your basic attack, including one that lets you create chain combos with different effects depending on when you press certain inputs. There’s one that flings you into the air and has you crash onto an enemy’s head, though attacks with faster, more fluid animations tend to be safer and more effective in this game.
The Potent Blow tree is a bit underwhelming compared to the spear’s, but the Penetrate tree–oddly named, since it’s tied to evasion skills–rewards you for successful dodges by powering up your basic attacks and the chains you build with them.
Greatswords
Greatswords are a bit awkward in Khazan. They hit hard and can easily take down standard enemies with one blow, but they’re also very slow. Slowness isn’t what you want when you’re surrounded by enemies or struggling to find an opening against a speedy boss. However, the payoff comes as much from taking a large chunk out of a guardian’s HP bar as it does from quickly reducing their stamina.
The Greatsword takes more practice to use effectively than the other two weapons, in other words, but many of its skills are also more underwhelming. You can charge the sword to deal more damage, block while charging strong attacks, and deal more damage if you take damage while you attack. That’s all fine enough, but unlocking Greatsword skills feels more like mitigating the weapon’s issues and not giving yourself new ways to use it.
Spears
The spear is a versatile weapon that combines the best parts of Dual Wield and Greatswords. You get longer reach like with the Greatsword, along with Dual Wield’s faster movement, plus the ability to catch multiple enemies with your attacks and some flashy, fun combos as well. Spear skill categories have a lot going on. The swift attack branch creates duplicates of Khazan that attack immediately after he does, essentially doubling your damage, while the strong attack branch channels some fighting game energy by encouraging you to chain different combos and inputs to end up with a few unique finishing moves.
All of these are designed to overwhelm enemies and keep them from attacking, while also pushing them back. It’s useful for crowd control and, in areas with cliffs and ledges, for shoving foes to their doom without having to actually fight them. That doesn’t work on boss guardians, though.
Further down the skill tree, the spear lets you learn attacks that change depending on whether you’ve broken an enemy’s stance, for example, dealing additional damage or instantly repositioning you behind them. While it takes some time to learn heavy-hitting skills that work against bosses, you do eventually get access to those as well. It’s a brilliant weapon whose only downside is that it scales with Proficiency and Willpower. Those are stamina-influencing stats that do little for Khazan’s strength, so you won’t deal quite as much damage as you might with Dual Wield or Greatswords.
What is the best weapon in First Berserker: Khazan?
We recommend specializing in two weapons, so you can change your approach depending on what situation you’re facing. Spear is the easiest to learn and has the most potential for strong combos and crowd control. Dual Wield is our second pick thanks to its speed and versatility, even if it doesn’t have quite the range of options you get from the spear.