Three skill trees, one orb budget

✚ Checked 2026-11-15 · PS5 1.005.000 / PS4 launch build · 3 sources

Three trees, one purse

Kratos has three primary skill trees: offensive, defensive and movement. All three are paid for with red orbs, and red orbs are also the crafting currency — and the Jewel of Ziteo Gouri costs 7500 of them.

That is the entire decision. It is not "which tree is best", it is "which tree do I fund, and do I fund it before or after the detector".

What each tree is for

Movement deserves a note. In a Metroidvania, mobility is not a combat luxury — it is progression. Traversal upgrades are what let you reach the collectibles you walked past in hour two. That makes movement the only tree with an out-of-combat return on investment.

The order that wastes the least

1. Buy depth in the tree you are already using. If you fight with the spear at mid-range, fund offensive until its behaviour changes. A shallow spread across three trees gives you nothing at any of them.
2. Hold 7500 red orbs before you push a second tree. The Jewel of Ziteo is a one-time purchase that changes how you find everything else. Buying it late means re-walking regions you already swept.
3. Fund movement exactly where a collectible is visibly out of reach. Not preemptively — you will know it when you see a ledge you cannot take, and that is the cheapest possible signal.
4. Fund defensive only when a specific fight demands it. Parry windows matter enormously in Erebus Mode and much less in a standard run where you can absorb a mistake.

The Jewel of Ziteo decision, isolated

The Jewel is bought in The Gallery for 7500 red orbs, and it pings every secret and collectible around you. Whether it is worth 7500 depends on one thing: are you going to 100% the game?

Notice that no row says "buy it first no matter what". The pages that tell you to rush it are assuming you are chasing 100%, which is a reasonable default but not the only way to play.

Skill points versus orb spending

The game's progression has two layers that are easy to conflate: techniques learned through the trees, and attachment upgrades bought at campsites with blood orbs plus materials.

• Trees = new abilities. Paid in red orbs.
• Attachments = better versions of existing behaviour. Paid in blood orbs plus materials at a campsite.

They compete for orbs but not for materials, which is why a sensible plan funds one tree deeply and one attachment path deeply, rather than spreading across both dimensions at once.

Builds for the two new modes

Hermes Mode (speedrun) rewards movement and reach. You are optimising travel and kill speed, not durability, because a route that gets hit is a route that is already slow. Fund movement early and offence where it shortens a specific fight.

Erebus Mode (one hit kills both ways) inverts the value of offence. Everything dies in one hit anyway, so extra damage does almost nothing — but extra reach means hitting without entering the enemy's attack range, which is a defensive upgrade in disguise. Fund movement and defence first.

A concrete early sequence

That sequence reaches 7500 without starving the early game, which is the actual balancing act.

What this page is not

It is not a node-by-node tree map. Publishing exact node costs and prerequisites would require a data set the game does not expose, and a guessed tree diagram is worse than none. What is here is the currency logic and the ordering — the part that is stable regardless of which node you pick next.