Should You Play Fighter or Scout in Stardew Valley

Professions are the way you build your character in Stardew Valley. Each skill has two professions with different playstyles. For a Combat skill in Stardew Valley, you get to choose from Fighter or Scout. Here’s which one’s best.

The Combat skill will be essential for your adventure in Stardew Valley because of the mines. It is a location filled with valuables and monsters. Let’s just say don’t want to miss out on that.

Is Fighter or Scout Better in Stardew Valley?

Combat professions

In short, Fighter is better because of its higher immediate bonus. Fighter’s further upgrades are also easy to put to good use. Choosing a fighter will allow you to focus on other things, especially if you are new to the game.

You start out as a fighter when you level up Combat to level 5 for a flat attack bonus. When you reach level 10, choose the Brute specialization for even more overall damage.

Scout, on the other hand, is more niche. It is built on critical chance and critical strikes. That means you will have to focus on building that critical chance on your different items.

Which certainly will give you a massive power spike in due time.

Fighter Profession

The Fighter’s strength is that it gives you an all-around buff. Regardless of what you are doing or plan in the future, Fighter will be a solid pick.

When you pick Fighter on level 5, here are the bonuses you get:

• +15 HP
• Attacks deal 10% more damage

Not only do you get a flat attack increase but also extra HP. This is something Scout does not offer, making it another reason to go for a Fighter.

Fighter’s specializations

Specializations for the Fighter on level 10 offer to double down on one of the level 5 stats:

• Brute: Attacks deal 15% more damage
• Defender: +25 HP

It is a general recommendation to go for Brute here. It will arm you with high damage potential as it stacks with the Fighter’s initial bonus (25% total damage boost).

The extra 25% HP from the Defender is okay, but not enough to justify the choice. If you want to increase your survivability in Stardew Valley, we still would recommend you go for Fighter into Brute.

You can then aim to increase your defense with other items like the Protection Ring.

Scout Profession

As we mentioned before, Scout is a niche profession. It is deadly but requires you to have a specific build to fully take advantage of that. This is one of the main reasons Stardew Valley players choose Fighter over Scout.

When you pick Scout on level 5, you only get one bonus:

• Critical Strike Chance increased by 50%

That may sound great, but it isn’t. Because what it does is increases your existing critical strike chance by 50%. So if you had 3%, it is now 4.5%.

This will get better as you start building critical chance. But the question is if you want to invest in that. Obviously, consider your 50% bonus when building crit to not overinvest.

Scout’s specializations

Your level 10 specializations are much more interesting and are integral to building a Scout:

• Acrobat: Cooldown on special moves cut in half
• Desperado: Critical strikes are deadly

Acrobat is an interesting specialization and theoretically could be useful. If you have a decent weapon with a special move you enjoy, you can definitely make it work.

But Desperado is too strong to miss out on. What Desperado does is makes your critical strikes a one-shot attack. And we don’t think there’s any need to explain why that is a must-have.