Common misconceptions about Valhalla stats: You cannot build for stealth..

–at least, you can't build for stealth in ways that you may have thought you could. I have done some testing, and wanted to share my findings to clear up some misconceptions about stats in Valhalla.

1. You cannot reduce detection speed

Even though it would ostensibly seem that stats such as Stealth and Evasion would make it so you get detected slower, neither of these stats (whether you get them through the skill tree, equipment stats, or runes*) make you harder to detect.

*Even though the weapon shadow rune says it increases "Stealth," rather than "Stealth Damage," it only increases stealth damage. You can check this in the overall stats menu.

• Stealth only affects the damage you do while undetected.

  
  
  

• Evasion only affects how frequently an enemy's attack will do significantly less damage on you (think of it like the critical hit stat, but reversed).

2. Weight does not affect how quiet you are

From my testing, your armor/weapon Weight has no discernible difference to how much noise you make. It doesn't matter if you are wearing the lightest armor and slap on weight reduction runes or if you are wearing the bulkiest, heaviest gear you have–enemies will hear you at the same distance if you jump down/run by them. This is actually pretty annoying, since enemies can hear you drop down from surprisingly far away, and back in AC Unity you could wear stealth-oriented gear that made your movements quieter.

• Weight only affects how much stamina is consumed while dodging.

3. You can still build for stealth damage

You can increase your Stealth Damage, Assassination Damage, and Ranged Damage to ensure that you defeat enemies while in stealth more reliably. However,

• TL;DR: you cannot modify your stats to make you harder to detect or quieter.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.