Pathfinder: Gallowspire Survivors – Beginner’s Fighter Guide (Normal Difficulty)

Listed in order of importance:

Strength: Damage and block efficiency, both are vital for a Fighter.

Constitution: Max HP and regen, also crucial.

Wisdom: Faster attack cooldowns, pretty important.

Charisma: More range and area on your attacks.

Dexterity: Projectile speed, not important.

Intelligence: Spell Damage, ignore.

Suggested stat spending weights:

2 Strength
2 Constitution
1 Wisdom
1 Charisma

If you’re reading this guide you’re most likely not that far into the game so for now you need 1 point into each talent. Once that’s done, invest into ranks of ‘Vicious Swing’ and ‘Weapon Legend’.

Here I’ll discuss my choice of weapons for the Fighter any why I think they work.

Bastard Sword: Starter Weapon. While it is initially a bit janky, this weapon does a lot of cleave a and boss damage, and it will be your main DPS tool for most runs. It benefits a lot from the Furious Focus Talent and character range upgrades.

Crossbow: Very versatile weapon that deals high damage and is very useful both for boss fights and for picking off stragglers that sneak past your other attacks in hordes. It is weak on its own for wave clearing but its other strengths make up for it.

Flail: The Bastard Sword is a great mobbing weapon but it can’t always finish the job in one hit, but this might do it for you. It also does serious work when you get overwhelmed and have to engage your special shield ability, and just wade into the thick of it.

Spear: This is a flex slot, but I really like this weapon for its consistent damage against all enemy types, it helps against bosses and for keeping your back clear against hordes.

Other functional choices here are the Rapier and the Hammer, but in my runs they not as consistent.

Here we’ll go over the passive abilities I think work best for the Fighter.

Fleet: Mandatory Passive for most builds and classes. You need speed. Whether it is to avoid enemies, reach bonus chests, not get slapped by boss abilities or to counter slow spells from enemies. You always want speed.

Furious Focus: This may be my hot take for this guide, but I think this passive is crucial for the Fighter. All it does is reduce the swing timer for our Bastard Sword, but it is in my opinion a HUGE bonus. Our starter sword does serious work, and in my experience the drastically reduced swing cooldown is a massive buff that shouldn’t be overlooked both for mobbing and boss fights.

Mountain Resilience: As a Fighter, you are going to be in the thick of it and take a lot of accidental hits from enemies. In raw numbers the bonus from this passive doesn’t look like much, but especially in the late game this will provide serious damage mitigation, and you’ll need it.

Fast Recovery: Flex slot passive. I like this purely for boss battles since it allows me to fall back from melee and heal a little if I mess up boss mechanics where healing potions are usually more limited. Less useful for normal stages.

The only other option I’d consider is the max HP passive, but the fighter already benefits from Constitution stats which buff this, so its not really needed. You could go for the potions, essence, snare or armor debuff passives but I think these are all subpar.

On the first floor, stay put and farm xp for a bit. Once you’ve unlocked at least 3 or 4 of your desired weapon and passive slots, you can start running for chests.

When you’re starting out on this game, prioritize weapon upgrades over passives, unless the passives are 2 or more tiers higher. You do need all the upgrades including passives, but if you can’t kill things in an orderly fashion you will die pretty quick. When you have a few points into the Weapon Legend Talent you can choose passives a bit more liberally such as taking it over an weapon upgrade if they’re the same tier. (More weapons is of course never wrong, but sometimes you need to live as well)

On each stage, you ideally want to run and collect 3 or 4 chests. After that the game spawns each chest a marathon distance away, and even with upgrades to movement speed its simply not worth running after them. You need levels too! If you’ve picked up 4+ chests when a stage is ending, it is also often better to backtrack and collect dropped xp pickups and probably get a levelup or two, rather than running after a chest you might not reach before the stage timer ends.

Against bosses, this build relies on survival. Play it slow and focus on avoiding damage and you should have enough sustain to clear all boss phases and their add phases.

I’m sure there are more optimal ways to play the Fighter, but this route has turned out to be a fairly efficient way to churn through the monsters for my own part for my first full clear. As mentioned at the start, if I need to be corrected on anything fire away, or even better, make a community guide on your own 🙂