If you love mining in Stardew Valley, you’re going to spend a ton of time fighting monsters. As you fight monsters, your combat skill will improve and at level 5, you are presented with the choice of two professions: Fighter or Scout. Fighter focuses on dealing more damage consistently, while Scout boosts your critical hit chance. Here’s which profession you should choose.
Fighter or Scout
At level 5 you get to choose a profession, which changes your options at level 10.
In most cases, it’s generally better to go with the fighter profession, since the more consistent damage allows you to reliably defeat monsters. Fighter grants 10% more damage and an additional 15 HP. Fighter also leads to the two level 10 options of Brute and Defender, with Brute increasing your damage by 15%, stacking with Fighter. Defender gives you 25 more HP. Going with Fighter into Brute gives you a massive damage output and you can still land critical hits, which take advantage of the boosted damage.
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Scout increases your critical hit chance by 50%, with no additional HP. Scout leads into either Acrobat, which reduces the cooldown on special moves by 50%, or Desperado, which doubles critical strike damage. While building Scout into Desperado does make for some high damage critical hits, the extra 25% damage and 15 HP from going Fighter into Brute does more damage consistently.
There are also plenty of weapons and rings that can boost critical hit chance and damage, which can allow you to build the extra damage skills and get extra crit. If you find yourself unhappy with your choice, you can change skills for 10,000G per skill at the Statue of Uncertainty in the sewers.
