Ghost Recon Wildlands is as much an RPG as it is a tactical 3rd-person shooter. With an XP system, skills, and loot to collect, you may be looking at ways to maximize your abilities early on. This guide will walk you through the best skills to get early on in Ghost Recon Wildlands, broken out by each skill tree.
Let’s get started!
Wildlands Weapon Skill Tree
The weapon skill tree in Wildlands focuses mostly on your combat ability when it comes to firearms. While nearly all of these have some degree of usefulness, there are a few that stand out as critical, depending on your playstyle.
Vehicle Destruction
This skill boosts your damage against enemy vehicles, and will be incredibly valuable at every point in the game. You can’t go wrong tossing extra skill points here.
Grenade Launcher
This one unlocks the underbarrel grenade launcher as an attachment for assault rifles. If you need to lob an explosion at a longer range than you can throw, this is going to be your best option!
Stable Aim
If you plan on engaging at longer range this will help reduce scope sway. Snipers, take note!
Adv. Suppressor
This removes the damage penalty from suppressors. Unless you’re playing a more immersive “realism” style, you should be using a suppressor on everything you can, and this is essentially a damage boost at that point. Note: This does NOT negate the impact suppressors have on muzzle velocity.
Wildlands Drone Skill Tree
The drone tree is quite possibly one of the most critical skill trees in the game; nearly every skill here is critical, and the only ones I’d not concern myself with are noisemaker and armor. Out of all of the others, though, here are the ones I’d grab first.
Battery Increase & Range
Both of these are your most important skills in this tree: Max these as soon as possible.
Night Vision & Thermal Vision
Grab both of these early too; they make scouting out your targets much easier.
Stealth
Wildlands does rely on stealth mechanics, so making your drone stealthy is pretty important.
EMP
While explosive drones are nice, EMP allows you to just disable vehicles rather than explode them, making capturing targets that are escaping super easy.
Wildlands Item Skill Tree
The one absolutely critical skill in Wildlands is in this tree, but there are a few others I’d strongly recommend you get as early as possible.
Parachute
Whether infiltrating a base quietly, or getting out of a helicopter targeted by a SAM launcher quickly, you’ll need a parachute when plummeting from the sky. This should – hands down – be your first skill unlock.
Thermal Vision
Ever want to feel like the Predator? This is how you do it. At night thermal vision can help you isolate targets even better than night vision can, so grab it early!
Wildlands Physical Skill Tree
Much like the Drone tree, all of these are going to be useful in your career as a ghost. The only one I’d consider to be less than critical is Stamina, but you might as well max it, too. Below are a few that I recommend boosting over others if you have to make a tough decision.
Quiet Running & Detection
These two skills are critical for stealth. Quiet running allows you to dart from cover to cover without alerting your foes, and detection .. Well, makes you harder to detect. Pretty much a must-have in any stealth game.
Car Shield
While you may think Aircraft Shield is more important, in most cases you’ll be running into other cars and taking more fire in a car than you will in an aircraft. Max this one quickly.
Wildlands Squad Skill Tree
While all of these are useful (especially the full-tree unlock “Last Chance”), there is just one that I’d say is a must-have.
Extra Sync Shot
If you want to eliminate groups of enemies without alerting the base, you need to make use of all your sync shots. Fully maxed this allows you to eliminate 4 targets at once (including your own shot) easily.
Wildlands Rebel Support
While these aren’t unlocked with skill points, since they live under the skills tab we’ll call them skills here. All of these are useful, but here are the ones you’ll want to max out sooner, rather than later.
Spotting
When fully maxed out you can get all the enemies marked within a large base easily.. But this skill’s real claim to fame is the fact that it’ll reveal enemies behind cover or inside buildings!
Diversion
While you can certainly use this one as a diversion, my favorite use? Flanking maneuvers. Just summon them at an alternative entry point and use them as the anvil to your hammer.
Vehicle Drop-Off
Need a specific kind of vehicle? This will give it to you. Whether a fast car, armored vehicle or helicopter, the rebels will be able to supply you.. Well, most of the time. Unfortunately, you can’t designate WHERE it’ll be dropped off, and sometimes the location is a little.. Inconvenient.
That’s it, ghosts! Good luck, and happy hunting!