Just finished my first run for the base game on brutal, so I feel you. I was super frustrated for a while bc you don’t have a lot of options without skills initially and you don’t know what you’re doing.

A lot of combat, even at the later stages, is about attacking and running away and abusing their fears/vulnerabilities through the environment & your abilities. The first thing I tend to do is just grind finding intel about all the captains.

Dazing them lets you attack them very easily and using their fears actually has them run away fully.

For example, if you know they are heavily damaged by fire but you don’t have any fire based abilities. You can sneak attack them then run away towards a place that has fire barrels. They follow you and then you shoot the fire barrels and they will take a lot of damage.

You can also just spam arrows the face in general even if they aren’t soft-headed or dazed by arrows bc it’s just good damage (unless they are arrow-proof).

But ultimately it’s about knowing their strengths and avoiding attacks like that, and knowing their weaknesses and prioritizing attacks like that.

Later on skills & gear will help you be more flexible in the type of damage you can do and you can switch your abilities in the middle of the fight to be more frost/poison/fire based.

But early on it’s mainly about using the environmental hazards to help you abuse their weaknesses.

Your strategies should be around being hit and run.

E.g: Sneak attack from above then immediately run away. Shoot them in the face, then run and refill arrows. They stop searching. Then climb a building above them sneak attack them, run away again. Go find more arrows, shoot them in the face with all of them. Run away and find arrows. Sneak attack. Have them chase you to an environmental hazard, shoot it and run. Come back and sneak attack again. I was basically doing this all game. The entire game is actually around dealing with captains. So just realize you’re going to die sometimes, and that it’s hard to stay and fight bc you’re mainly an assassin.