I have finished two of the Divine beasts and am working on a third and I'm getting absolutely destroyed by every monster I encounter. Every fight uses almost all of my weapons, and then some. I've leveled up my armor as much as I can and am always cooking. Any pointers? Maybe things I missed?

How many hearts do you have? I don't remember the game ever being that difficult really, and I'm the type to play most games on easy.

My first playthrough was incredibly tough until I got the suit of knights armour in one of the towns(Hateno possibly), and upgraded it. It's not the best in hindsight, but it helped a bunch in the early game. You can break the game pretty early farming spiders and getting the ancient set. You should take a note and put it on the map when you find the effective weapons laying around because they all respawn after the blood moon. I remember the sword behind the shrine in the fishpeople town being a good disposable weapon. And obviously the master sword is a good all round regenerating weapon.

@nicksgreen: Are you playing on Master Mode? Your experience seems somewhat normal for that mode, but very unusual for the normal mode.

Either way, the way the game’s difficulty works is a little convoluted, but skipping past what increases it, the way it increases is uniform AFAIK. As the game difficulty increases, the enemy tier (normal-blue-black-silver) starts to increase as does the kind of weapons that enemies/chests have (low damage weapons like basic traveller’s sword or boko club are quickly phased out). Also as this difficulty increases, the weapons/items you find start to increasingly have random bonuses on them like “+durability” or “+damage”. The weapons you find tend to match the difficulty of enemies, so it’s strange to hear that every fight is depleting most of the weapons you’re carrying. It’s good to hear that you’re trying to boost your HP and armour rating to match the increased difficulty, but usually your weapons should match enemy difficulty automatically.

My only two guesses:

-Are you mostly carrying low durability weapons? The skeleton weapons (literally an arm made of bone) and bokoblin/moblin weapons (made of wood/bone) are plentiful because many enemies carry them, but I don’t think they’re really worth carrying or using. They break like 30 seconds into a fight. Sadly, the durability of items is never shown numerically to the player, but all wood/bone weapons have dramatically lower durability than any weapons made of metal/ancient Guardian technology. The weapons carried by Lizalfos or Lynel have good durability, but most other weapons named after enemies break very quickly.

-Is your number of inventory slots the same now as when you started the game? I guess this might be one of the only truly critical things you could’ve missed. There is a broccoli-looking big plant man NPC that you talk to who will expand your inventory size if you give him Korok seeds. This is the only purpose of Korok seeds. You’re meant to find him if you just follow the normal trail from the Great Plateau to Kakariko Village (he is on the trail just outside the village). But if you instead did some crazy hill climbing to get to the village, it’s possible you never encountered him, and just have dozens or hundreds of Korok seeds sitting on your collectibles screen. Expanding your inventory lets you carry a larger set of decent durability weapons with you and still have weapons left over even after fighting a tough mini boss enemy. If you haven’t found this NPC, go to him immediately, you were meant to encounter him way earlier in the game than you currently are.

When at all possible try to use your weapons to FINISH a fight rather than actually use them to deal most of the damage. Obviously this depends on what exactly a given encounter is but a pack of moblins or a lizalfos don't need to waste weapon durability when you've usually got a powerful weapon in your bombs and the environment.

@efesell: This is true. Also headshots with arrows do solid damage and are fairly easy on unsuspecting enemies, plus almost every dang merchant in the game sells more arrows.

Sneaking up on enemies to do a behind-the-back weapon attack is harder but also very effective, since I believe it only counts as a single strike for durability purposes, but it does 5 times the weapon’s damage.

Have you been capturing fairies? They can help a lot if you're struggling and dying, though obviously so can potent foods (though you need to be somewhat selective in what you cook to avoid having a lot of low utility stuff in your inventory.)

I'm another person who never really struggled that much with the game, despite not being great at games and never learning the perfect shield block or perfect dodge mechanics (you should definitely learn those.)

Also, are you using your Divine Beast powers to help you out of a jam? If you've defeated two of the beasts that means you have two powers. They're all useful in combat in various ways and can help in difficult encounters.

Obviously the same is true of the stasis/bombs/magnetic powers that can either directly affect enemies or be used in the environment. If you haven't upgraded your stasis power yet I highly recommend that. It's a really useful tool.

Overall I'd say that the game rewards thinking outside the box. It doesn't have to be some super fancy speedrunner trick that's difficult to pull off. Something as simple as starting an encounter by using a fire arrow to detonate explosives, or smacking enemies with environmental objects can make a big difference. If you use all the tools you have available you should be able to get through most fights without too much trouble, but if you just try to attack with your weapons straight on without using the perfect dodge and block mechanics then you can get beat up pretty bad.

I asked a similar question in these same forums a while ago. See my post and some super helpful responses here.

In addition to the things mentioned in that thread, if I had to put my finger on one cooking item that made things less frustrating, it would be hearty durians. You can cook several in one dish to give yourself a ridiculous amount of bonus hearts and you become waaaay harder to kill. I usually collected them in ebara and bronas forests near lake floria if memory serves. Good luck!

This was the entire game for me. My solution was to quit and play Stardew Valley instead. Good luck. I salute you.

One thing I completely missed until AFTER I finished all divine beasts was the armor upgrade system via Fairy Fountains. I kept wondering why basic monsters and temple combat challenges would just chew through all my hearts. So definitely upgrade your armor if you haven't already.

@nicksgreen: Are you using all the systems in the game? like parry and back flip/ slow-mo ? I found using that stuff made a lot of fights pretty easy.

Thanks for the pointers, all! I really want to like this game but it keeps grinding my gears in little, very Nintendo, ways. Like last night I did the three brothers shrine quest and had an absolute blast with it. Also, I'm almost to the boss of Vhas Rhuda (sp?). So I'm still making my way through.

@masscreed: I definitely need to work on my execution of those. I play games so irregularly that I always find myself forgetting little systems like that.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Now you're talking!

@casepb: I think I'm at 10 total now. Should I be grinding these out more? I'm trying to do a healthy mix of main stuff and side stuff.

@nicksgreen: 10 hearts is pretty good as long as you’re also upgrading your armour at the Great Fairies. Ultimately the defense on your armour is more important than your maximum number of hearts; for the people that didn’t understand how to upgrade armour, they can have all the hearts in the world but it doesn’t matter because their defense is so low that every enemy does 8 hearts of damage.

I still wasn’t quite clear from your original post. Is the game hard because enemies are actually just beating the crap out of you in fights, or do you find that finishing fights consumes most of the weapons you’re carrying, or both?

@bisonhero: I guess both. Like any enemy that isn't the lowest level seems to take most of my hearts with a single hit, and along those lines every time I stumble upon a sentinel I can't even escape without getting ruined.

@nicksgreen: I don’t know your familiarity with past Zelda games, but in retrospect, I think this game probably tutorializes combat the least compared to most of them. I’ve seen some streamers struggle with things that seemed second nature to me having played other 3D Zeldas before.

In case it needs repeating: use the left trigger to lock on to enemies once they are aware of you. I really do mean always do this. If you’re locked onto enemies, anytime an enemy looks like it is winding up for any sort of attack, just back away from the enemy while hitting the jump button and you’ll do the backflip dodge which is extremely safe (very few enemies do overhead chops). The other big benefit of locking on is if you’re using a one-handed weapon, your shield will always be blocking except when you’re attacking. In general, that should minimize a lot of the damage you would take in combat, though make sure to stay on the move if archers or whatever are also shooting you.

My other basic bit of advice is always respect enemies with 2-handed weapons. Just like it shows in your inventory, those weapons deal almost twice as much as spears and 1-handed weapons. In your hands, 2-handed weapons have slow swings, but in the hands of some enemy types they still have very fast swings. Be extra careful about shield blocking/back flipping in those fights, as those are often the enemies that will suddenly do 8 hearts of damage out of nowhere because their 2-handed weapon has a high damage value.

As for sentinels/Guardians, I can’t give much advice other than flee them on horseback while weaving, find some way to break line of sight while weaving if you’re on foot, or as a last resort if you’re exposed and about to be lasered you can always open up the map and teleport away to the nearest shrine/tower.

@bisonhero: Honestly I'm the opposite of Jeff on this one. I think all 3D Zelda games are trash except Majora's Mask, so I'm not the most proficient in their combat mechanics. So I definitely needed the reminder.

@nicksgreen: The 3D Zeldas definitely got stuck in a rut after a while. They seemed obsessed with just making small incremental improvements on a game that still basically looks and plays like Ocarina of Time. Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword suffered the most from this. BotW isn't perfect, but at least it broke them out of the cycle.

It sounds like your armor rating is too low. Head to a fairy fountain and see what materials you need to upgrade, then go explore to find them. You have a myriad of options in combat that aren't just standing still and hitting things, so make sure to abuse the bow, bombs and elemental effects. Keep in mind enemies get harder the more shrines you complete or bosses you kill.

Also, as with most things in BotW, you can completely break the difficulty with cooking. Cooking with durians can make food items that fully restore health + add like 20 additional hearts to your total health pool.

I've noticed when people run into difficulty issues in BotW, it's because they are just trying to run up to every enemy they see and beat them with any weapons they have, then inevitably run out of durability and have nothing. There are very few encounters in this game that are actually necessary, almost everything can be circumvented or strategized, that's the beauty of it.

There will come a point where enemies and the world itself will start dropping weapons with a hell of a lot more durability than the first 30 hours of the game. For now, I would use the bow, bombs and the environment. Creativity in combat separates BotW from all the other Zelda games, and makes it the reason why it's far and away my favourite out of the entire franchise.

@nicksgreen: I remember, when I played for the first time, It was a challenge. There was a point for me...early on, where I hit critical mass; Things snowballed and I felt the flow or loop that they where teaching me.

A big thing for me was finding that first good weapon. For a long time the weapons break very fast and the best one you can find is still pretty weak and also breaks quickly. But then I found a large two handed sword that had a Diamond icon on it and it was vastly more powerful and lasted much longer than anything else (but still pretty sad compared to the really good stuff).

I used that thing to adventure and explore places I was to afraid to venture into because I was too weak. I was rewarded with more and more weapons like it and better just for doing that.

There's a hidden ladder in breath of the wild. A gear ladder. You can only climb the next rung of the ladder by risking all your weapons in service of getting better ones. Each rung naturally spurs you to the next difficulty( new places and combat encounters), rewarding you with new gear each time as well.