How to Get the Gold Medal¶

Trial of the Bear Objectives¶

To earn the gold medal for the Trial of the Bear at Templebrough Fort, you need to earn the following points for each objective, which amount to the perfect score of 1,000 points combined.

Prioritise Parrying¶

To ensure that you get the highest mastery points to earn the gold medal, you’ll need to prioritise parrying incoming enemy attacks first. Technically you can do this with just a handful of guards, but since you inflict damage to an enemy each time that you parry, it’s safer to do it with as many guards attacking you as possible in the area of the fort that you first encounter. This is also a good way to practice your parrying skills to be as precise as possible with the timing.

How to Stay Alive¶

You’ll need to be precise in your parrying to avoid taking any damage in the process. You won’t be able to heal yourself with rations here, so the only way that you can regenerate health is by killing enemies, parrying and blocking incoming attacks. You might want to find an area away from a cluster of enemies so that you can use just one or two enemies to farm health from with parries and blocks.

Aside from killing, parrying, and blocking enemy attacks to restore health, you can also gain health passively if you have the Idunn’s Heart (Way of the Bear) skill, which allows you to passively regenerate health from a recent hit. You’ll need to run around or dodge / roll away from attacks as you regenerate health, since the regeneration will stop if you get hit, and your maximum health will be lowered.

How to Parry Effectively¶

As you parry attacks from different kinds of enemies, you’ll notice that each one has a different window of time between the initiation of their attack, and the time that it hits you. You’ll need to become familiar with the different times for different enemies so that you can eventually anticipate each attack with precision.

The spearmen and dual dagger wielders are particularly quick, but once you get used to their combat animations, you should find that parrying most of their attacks is relatively easy. A good method for ensuring that you parry most attacks successfully is to look for the orange aura to appear around the head of the enemy, then wait a brief moment before you initiate the parry.

However, some incoming attacks from enemies won’t be indicated by an orange aura, or any aura at all. These are usually the quick jab attacks, often used to push Eivor back. In this case, you’ll need to pay attention to the movement of the enemy as it begins the attack animation. For the dual dagger wielders, you’ll notice that they begin to move their feet and arms quickly just before a swift attack. The spearmen will draw their spear back before performing a quick jab attack.

For the slower enemies such as yeomen and defenders, you’ll often find that their attacks land only after a fairly cumbersome animation, as they draw their weapons back, hurl them through the air, and then land the hit. There are exceptions to this, as with the charge attack from those wielding flails. You’ll find it difficult to parry this, so you might as well just dodge out of the way until they’re done with the charge.

How to Perform Melee Kills¶

Once you’ve parried enough incoming attacks, this is one of the easiest objectives for any mastery challenge. However, there are some circumstances in which you might ruin your chance of scoring a melee kill. The main and perhaps most obvious one is the presence of the fire pits, which could result in you indirectly killing an enemy if you bring them to low health but then push them into the fire. For this reason, you should try to initiate chain attacks away from the fire pits, or be sure that the killing blow comes from your melee weapon if the enemy does happen to catch fire.

Another important thing to remember when you’re in the process of killing the targets, is not to kill the last marked target before you’ve killed enough regular enemies with melee attacks. The marked enemies have a teal quest icon above their heads, so they’re easy to keep an eye on, but you’ll need to avoid killing them too soon if you want to earn the gold medal. If you kill all the marked enemies before killing enough regular enemies with melee attacks, you won’t complete that objective, which will result in fewer points.

Utilize the Dive of the Valkyries Ability¶

You probably won’t find yourself using the Dive of the Valkyries ability too much for this mastery challenge, but that doesn’t mean that it’s completely useless. You’ll find it particularly useful when a bunch of enemies are about to overwhelm you with attacks from multiple directions. In this scenario, a quick Dive of the Valkyries will knock them down and disperse them, allowing you to escape from a tight spot while inflicting some damage. However, you’ll need to be careful to ensure that you don’t accidentally knock one of the enemies into a nearby fire pit, which could result in an indirect kill from fire, thereby removing the opportunity to perform a melee kill.

After you’ve completed both of the main objectives in terms of parrying incoming attacks and killing enemies with melee attacks, you can finish off the remaining targets which are marked by teal quest icons. Doing so will complete the challenge.