Lords of the Fallen combat guide: How to parry and stagger enemies

Lords of the Fallen has a robust combat system with plenty of options and depth, allowing you to fine-tune your builds based on your preferred playstyle. It is obvious that developers CI Games and Hexworks took a ton of inspiration from FromSoftware's latest titles, like Dark Souls and Elden Ring, while developing the game.

Much like FromSoftare's souls-borne titles, Lords of the Fallen offers plenty of options when it comes to its moment-to-moment gameplay. Being an action role-playing game at its core, Lords of the Fallen's basic combat system is similar to other titles of the souls-like genre, featuring moves like active dodging, blocking, and even parrying.

While you will find dodging to be the most beginner-friendly method to avoid enemy attacks, parrying is a much more effective way, as it also deals a ton of posture damage.

Here's a comprehensive guide on how to parry enemy attacks and stagger them in Lords of the Fallen.

---

How to parry incoming attacks in Lords of the Fallen

The process of parrying attacks is tutorialized in the opening section of Lords of the Fallen. However, it's very easy to miss since the game doesn't force you to parry enemy attacks and only shows a small tutorial pop-up for a brief few seconds.

Parrying attacks in Lords of the Fallen is quite easy, especially if you're already experienced with the souls-like genre.

To initiate a parry, all you have to do is press the block button (LB or L1) right before an enemy's attack lands. However, unlike Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Elden Ring, landing a perfect parry does not immediately stagger an enemy. To break an enemy's posture and land a critical hit, you might need to land multiple perfect blocks.

Landing parries essentially drains an enemy's posture. Once you completely deplete their posture bar (which can be seen by locking on to the enemy), they get staggered, letting you perform the reposte and dealing a ton of damage in the process. You can also deplete the posture bar by attacking using your light or heavy attack combos.

However, depleting the posture bar using normal attacks takes significantly longer. Normal mob enemies get staggered with a couple of parries. To break a boss or an elite enemy's posture, you will need to land multiple consecutive parries. It should be mentioned that parrying attacks does not make you immune to damage.

However, the damage you take upon parrying attacks, i.e., withered damage, can be replenished with a few attacks of your own, as long as you don't get hit by the enemy.

Another very effective way of depleting the posture bar is to perform backstabs. You can perform backstabs on any unaware enemy by attacking them with a charged heavy attack, followed by a reposte.