Cal Kestis has some new tricks up his flowing sleeves in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor: new powers, new movement techniques, and new combat stances. The game mercifully avoids stripping away your abilities so you can unlock them again — granting you new ones instead — meaning that Cal has gone from three saber stances to five. These, in combination with the added force powers, may leave you feeling overwhelmed for choice on how to take on the Empire. I’m here to help out with a personal take on which saber stance in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the strongest, and which leave a little more to be desired.
Our Picks for The Strongest Saber Stances in Jedi: Survivor
While I’d like to come out with a definitive best option for the unlimited power-gamers among you, it’s all down to your personal playstyle. That’s augmented by the fact you can equip two stances at any time, and switching between them is quite simple. Respawn did a fantastic job at making each stance feel unique with its own strengths and weaknesses. Still, some of the stances stood out: here’s my top three.
Blaster Stance
The Blaster stance ranks highly for style points alone, turning Cal from Jedi hero to Wild West gunslinger. While other stances are limited in their ranged capabilities — needing to spend Force to throw their sabers or create shockwaves — the Blaster’s ranged attacks come out quick, violent, and Force-free.
A star of this rootin’-tootin’ show is the Point Blank ability, which lets you execute a Bloodborne-style parry on grunts to blast them back and deal a hefty chunk of damage. The only downside to the Blaster stance is that you cannot “regenerate” its bullets by hitting enemies in another stance, and its lightsaber swings — while serviceable — leave a lot to be desired.
Crossguard Stance
The Crossguard is an excellent heavy-hitter. While its cumbersome swings aren’t great for dealing with swarms of enemies, I enjoyed using it in one-on-one encounters thanks to its high damage and useful shockwave ability. Rending Strike, in particular, can even stagger some bosses, helping to shore up its slow nature by permitting the pummeling of Cal’s foes.
Double-Bladed Stance
Jedi: Survivor has a habit of throwing ever larger groups of enemies at you, and the Double-Bladed stance cuts through hordes like a vibroblade through space butter. While we found this stance hard to control at times, it’s completely overloaded with crowd-clearing abilities like Double Orbit, Repulsing Burst, and Controlled Throw.
The only real downside is that, at the point where the Double-Bladed stance becomes the most effective, you’ll have already unlocked force abilities in the telekinetic tree such as Howling Push, which makes crowds less of a threat. Still, the Double-Bladed saber is the best at what it does.
The “Weakest” Stances In Jedi Survivor
These stances aren’t necessarily bad — they just failed to make my personal cut. If you feel like I’ve slammed your favorite style here, it’s likely that they just didn’t click with me in the same way.
Single-Saber Stance
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this stance; it’s just a jack of all trades. The Single-Saber stance doesn’t have any stand-out abilities, though it’s a solid choice for dealing with lone foes if the Crossguard stance is too slow for you.
It does, however, provide some great mobility. Abilities like Dash Strike and Aerial Dash Strike let you loiter outside an enemy’s reach, then zip in when they’re open. Other than that, it feels like bread and butter: serviceable, filling, but forgettable.
Dual-Wield Stance
This stance feels like it should be stronger than it actually is. Its main drawback comes from its piddly stamina bar, which causes Cal to stagger when an Imperial so much as breathes on him. This means that the Dual-Wield stance has a high skill ceiling with precious few upsides.
Dual-Wielding Jedi will need to hit those perfect parries or precision evades to make good use of the stance. The most confusing ability is its specialized parry, which massively drains your Force when you could just parry or precision evade normally.
Ultimately, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor does a solid job at expanding Cal’s toolkit with new combat options, making him far stronger — and far more versatile — than he was in Jedi: Fallen Order. Pick your weapon of choice for this uncivilized age and continue your search for Tanalorr!
