Dying Light 2 Stay Human Beginner’s Guide – Ultimate Survival Tips

by Mike Alexander / Articles, Dying Light 2 Stay Human / 29 Jan 2022

Dying Light 2: Stay Human is finally out and in gamer’s hands. Once the excitement of booting the game up wears off and you’re thrown into the gritty, unforgiving world that Techland has created for you, all of the options and content that you’re presented with can be a little overwhelming. I’m here to help you through the opening hours of this apocalyptic adventure with the Dying Light 2: Stay Human Beginner’s Guide. Let’s get started! The night is quickly approaching, and if you’re playing Dying Light 2, you know what comes out at night…

Get Your Skills Up!

If you hope to make any progress in Dying Light 2, you’re going to want to take advantage of the awesome skills you can obtain through the skill tree. Early on in the game, Aiden, the player character, can’t really do all that much. He will take crazy fall damage, lose his grip on ledges, and all he can basically do in terms of combat is swing a pipe around. To remedy this, the skill tree is broken up into two sections: Parkour and Combat, each with 24 skills to unlock. To unlock them, all you really have to do is play the game! You gain points for each side of the skill tree just by completing actions that correspond with them.

For instance, jumping from rooftop to rooftop and maintaining your momentum will grant you a parkour skill point, and engaging in combat with either the infected or rival gang members will grant you a combat skill point. And, if you’re brave enough, completing these actions at nighttime will grant you a bonus to those points as they accumulate, allowing you to unlock skills faster! Another bonus, each unlock only requires a single point, unlike many games that require you to stockpile points to unlock the good stuff at the end. Once you have a few points, here is what I would recommend unlocking.

Parkour

On the Parkour side of the skill tree, you first have to unlock High Jump, which is exactly what it sounds like. It just allows you to jump higher to reach ledges that were initially out of reach. It’s only slightly helpful, but it is a good place to start. From there, I would recommend unlocking Active Landing, which allows you to keep your momentum and reduce fall damage after a jump, and Firm Grip, which will allow you to keep your hold on a ledge and pull yourself up after a risky leap. These two early unlocks go a long way towards making parkour safer and more fun. Once you have those, you should work your way down the list until you can unlock Stealth Movement. This skill increases your speed and mobility in sneaking mode, which is crucially important when exploring at night and will make it easier for you to collect those skill points thanks to the nighttime bonus.

Combat

To begin unlocking the combat skills, you first have to unlock Vault Kick. This is a very cool and useful move that allows you to hop over a stunned enemy and kick another one. For rooftop combat, this can mean sending that second enemy flying off the roof to their doom! I hope the fall kills them rather than the infected. Once you have Vault Kick, the list opens up for you, and I would recommend Perfect Dodge because it mixes a little Bayonetta “Witch Time” into your Dying Light 2 experience. By that, I mean that Perfect Dodge will slow down time and stagger your enemy if the timing on your dodge is just right, allowing you to get out of the way and set up for another attack. This skill feels great to use and looks even cooler in action. The next skill should be Perfect Parry, which has the same effects, except for when the timing on your block is just right. It is important to note that some enemies will have unblockable attacks, making Perfect Parry only useful on smaller enemies. After those, your goal should be to unlock Stab and Stab Followup. These moves are essentially stealth takedowns, with Stab Followup letting you throw a knife at another enemy for a silent double kill.

Collect Those Shots!

While each skill only requires a single skill point to unlock, later skills do have health and stamina requirements for you to be able to unlock and use them. You start out with 100 Health Points and 100 Stamina Points, and in order to increase those for the skills that require higher levels of each, you will need to scavenge for inhibitor shots. These GRE (Global Relief Effort) created injections are vitally important to your progression through Dying Light 2, so you’ll be doing an awful lot of scavenging to look for them. Especially since it takes 3 of these shots to increase either Health or Stamina just one time. The shots can be found in crates that are scattered around the City, but they are most commonly found in GRE buildings.

Unfortunately, these are the same buildings that the infected hide in during the day. So, in order to collect these shots without a high probability of being eaten, you’re going to want to explore these buildings at night while the infected are out hunting. But! If you followed my recommendation and prioritized unlocking those stealth skills, it should be a breeze! Outside of the GRE buildings, inhibitor crates can be found in many of the ruins you will come across on your adventure, and a handy notification will let you know when you are within 50 feet or so of one. You should prioritize grabbing these early in the game, even if you are on a mission. This will ensure that you have enough health and stamina to unlock any skill fairly early in the game!

Be Prepared For Anything!

In Dying Light 2, you will be faced with all kinds of threats, both infected and human. While running and jumping away is certainly an option, often you will want to stand your ground and fight, whether it be for the experience points or a boss battle. So, in order to survive, you are going to want to make sure you have enough equipment that you can be prepared for any kind of encounter. First, you will need your set of weapons, and then you can focus on your gear, which acts as your armor and also gives you buffs to your various skills.

Weapons

Melee weapons are your primary form of zombie smashing implement in Dying Light 2. They can be either one or two-handed, which will determine their damage output, and they can be either found around the City, or purchased from vendors. I recommend that you pick up as many good weapons as your inventory can hold, because after a while, the durability of every weapon will go to zero and you will have to use something else. While this can’t be avoided, you can install mods to the Tip, Shaft, and Grip of your weapons that will add a certain amount of durability while also adding another benefit. This is how Dying Light 2 handles weapon “upgrades”. The Tip and Shaft mods will usually add some kind of elemental quality (typically electricity or fire), while Grip mods can make your weapon heavier, increasing its raw damage output.

Gear

As far as your gear goes, Dying Light 2 has 4 different categories: Brawler, Tank, Ranger, and Medic. While most RPGs would lock you into one style of gear with a choice at the beginning of the game, Dying Light 2 handles this differently by allowing you to mix and match all of your gear however you like, depending on your playstyle. However, whether you go in with all of the same gear or mix and match, I recommend having multiple different gear sets that you can switch out depending on your predicament. For instance, you wouldn’t want to be wearing all Tank gear when you’re sneaking at night when you could be buffing your stealth with Ranger gear, and you wouldn’t want to have mostly Ranger equipment on when you’re fighting a mob of infected. Again, this will all depend on how you play, but you can’t go wrong finding a few different sets of gear that works for you and switching between them. Also, your gear can’t be damaged and lost as your weapons can, but it similarly also can not be upgraded.

The tips in this guide should be enough to get you going in your Dying Light 2 experience. I hope you’re enjoying the game as much as I am, and I hope my recommendations help you come to the end of Aiden’s mission. Happy smashing!

Mike Alexander

Mike has been playing video games since he was able to hold a controller, having been fascinated by Sonic 2 on his mom’s Sega Genesis. That fascination and passion for the art form has grown exponentially nearly 30 years later, and he doesn’t see that fading away anytime soon.
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