Dark Alliance – How to Execute

Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is an action RPG where certain mechanics can be easy to miss. One feature you’ll want to take advantage of is executing enemies so you can deal significant damage while restoring stamina too. Continue reading our guide for how to execute enemies.

How to Execute in Dark Alliance

While it’s easy to not know how to execute, there’s nothing too complicated to it, fortunately. All you need to do is wait for an enemy to attack enough that they get tired and run out of stamina. Once they do, they’ll start panting and have a yellow outline around them. This is shown in the screenshot below.

Regardless of your platform, you’ll get a button prompt for a “Fierce Attack” when near them if they’re glowing yellow. This will trigger an execution dealing a large amount of damage, but not necessarily killing the enemy. While most small enemies with lower overall health will die from it, larger ones like bosses won’t.

Once an enemy runs out of stamina, they’ll go into a vulnerable state.

That doesn’t mean you can’t still take advantage of executions on bosses or tougher enemies like trolls. Especially since it’s a great way to restore your max stamina as well. It doesn’t hurt to use every chance you can to restore stamina since it makes a huge difference. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself running out of energy when you need to block or dodge.

Especially if you’re playing as Bruenor Battlehammer. Even if you’re playing Catti-Brie and fighting from far away, you’ll benefit from having more stamina to attack. Fortunately, you’re rarely in danger if you focus on ranged combat. But, you’ll still drain that bar quickly with charged attacks.

A quick useful tip to know is that you won’t see the button prompt for executions unless you’re close to an enemy. Instead, a lightning bolt with a cancel icon will appear on an enemy instead. To my knowledge, this just means you’re not close enough. So simply run up to them and get your hit in before they regain their breath. You’ll have a little more than five seconds to do it.

For those wondering, an enemy doesn’t have to have a certain amount of health for an execution to work. You can perform an execution even if their health bar is completely full. This is why it can be fun to block an enemy until they run out of energy for some free stamina.

If you have any other Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance questions for me, feel free to comment below. I’m currently putting together some guides to help answer common questions around the community.

Jeffrey Lerman

Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.