Physical prowess is a crucial quality for characters in medieval settings; after all, duels and extended adventures are common occurrences. In , the Athletics skill represents this facet. High skill in this category can improve your character's durability, damage, and speed.
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This skill also has some of the most specialized perk choices among others in the game. Each perk has its uses for certain play styles, and you need to pick and choose which ones fit your gameplay best.
10 Well Built
A few perk choices in the Athletics perk tree come down to your preference between speed or durability, and the choice between Morning Exercise and Well Built is one of them.
Morning Exercise gives a nice bonus to your and your troops' movement speed, which can be useful on certain playstyles where you pick multiple speed perks. But Well Built is a more generally valuable perk, as the extra hit points are always helpful.
9 Fury
The second perks in this tree are slightly less impactful. Form Fitting Armor reduces your armor weight, which can slightly improve your movement speed if you are wearing significantly heavy armor. But it doesn't have a noticeable effect on your own.
Fury gives a ten percent increase to weapon handling for your character and the troops in your formation. While weapon handling is one of the less critical weapon stats and is only useful for more experienced players, it still directly impacts your gameplay more than the other option at this level.
8 Imposing Stature
The third choice in the Athletics tree is an easy one. Imposing Stature gives you a decent bonus to your persuasion chance, but more importantly, it increases your party size by five. Both these bonuses make this the better pick for almost all situations.
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You can only consider the Stamina perk if you are solely focusing on smithing to max out that skill and get rich. Even in that case, you are better off changing it to Imposing Stature while you get to the late game.
7 Powerful
As its name suggests, the Powerful perk is a powerful and effective option as it increases your damage with all types of melee weapons. It's the better option even if you focus on ranged weapons, as you occasionally have to switch to melee.
Sprint, on the other hand, is so restrictive that it's not worth the speed bonus that it offers. You shouldn't have a shield or ranged weapons equipped for this bonus to take effect, and giving up on these will leave you vulnerable or ineffective in many situations.
6 Braced
If you focus all the perk choices in Athletics and other weapon skills on your speed, then Surging Blow can become a powerful perk to reward your high movement speed with an impressive speed bonus to your damage.
It requires a lot of commitment to a specific playstyle to make Surging Blow effective, but the Braced perk is useful for any character not on horseback. The biggest threat to foot troops is charging cavalry, and halving the charge damage can help your survivability greatly.
5 Walk It Off
A Good Day's Rest and Walk It Off have similar effects but in different conditions. A Good Days Rest boosts your healing and increases your troops' experience gain if you are waiting in a settlement, and Walk It Off does the same if you are traveling.
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While Walk It Off has less experience bonus, it does offer the same healing increase, and in most playthroughs, you are likely to spend more time traveling across the map rather than waiting in one settlement.
4 Durable
There are a handful of perks in Bannerlord that give you extra attribute points, and durable is one of those, giving you one extra point in Endurance. Attribute points are extremely valuable for training your skills faster, making Durable an excellent pick for maximizing your experience gain in Endurance skills.
Energetic can be situationally useful for trading large amounts of goods between settlements, but even considering the governor perks at this level, Durable is the better option as it gives your settlement daily loyalty increase.
3 Strong
Steady and Strong are both great perks as they increase one attribute point each. Steady increases your Control, which is more valuable to characters who focus on ranged combat, and Strong increases Vigor, focusing on melee weapon combat.
If you don't have a particular preference between ranged and melee combat, Strong's secondary benefit can be the deciding factor as it increases your party's travel speed. Steady, on the other hand, offers a governor perk as its secondary benefit that is not as useful for the player character.
2 Strong Arms
Strong Arms is a great perk if you use throwing weapons, and it even increases the throwing skill for your troops. It's not as useful as some of the other perks in the Athletics skill tree, but its counterpart, Strong Legs, is even more useless.
Strong Legs reduce your fall damage and increase your kick damage, both niche effects. You rarely fall from heights in Bannerlord, as most battles take place in open fields, and kicking deals so minor damage that even doubling that amount wouldn't make enough of a difference.
1 Ignore Pain
The final perk choice in the Athletics skill is between Ignore Pain and Spartan. Spartan increases your stagger threshold and reduces food consumption by your party. The stagger threshold in Bannerlord is considerably low, and even increasing it by 50 percent won't make too much of a difference, and food consumption is rarely a concern once you reach the later stages of the game.
Ignore Pain is an incredible perk in the late game once you gear yourself with the best armors in the game. The ten percent increase to your overall armor can make you an unstoppable force on the battlefield, making Ignore Pain one of the best late-game perks in the entire game.
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