Day of the Assault: Morning
At The Fore
When you exit the siege tower, you can get your first taste of combat. Foltest’s heavily armored men can easily win the day here, but you can join in to end things more quickly.
After this skirmish ends, you find the way ahead of Foltest’s men blocked by archers firing a wall of flaming arrows down from a tower. You’re tasked with seizing control of a ballista in the courtyard below and using it to eliminate the archers. This task battle can serve as an excellent opportunity to improve your skills in combat.
Barricade
This may sound a bit obvious, but once you have control of Geralt, do not walk directly forward after you descend the ramp. Your witcher powers cannot save you from flaming arrows. Instead, look carefully around the left-hand side of the battlement you’re standing on for a way to safely climb down into the courtyard. You should find an area where the battlement crumbles, with a series of wooden scaffolds below it.
Don’t immediately set foot in the courtyard. The moment you do, Geralt is going to be under attack. Instead, pause at some point during your climb and meditate. If you’ve been collecting herbs diligently, you should have enough to brew some Rook, Golden Oriole, and Petri’s Philtre potions in addition to the Lapwing and Swallow potions you should be already carrying. (You’ll also have some Cat potion, but this isn’t one you want to use in a fight.) You can also use alchemy to create extras of certain bombs, oils, and potions you’re already carrying.
At the very least, drink a Swallow potion before you step into the courtyard. At your Inventory menu, make sure you’ve equipped your bombs, traps, and throwing daggers to your pockets and selected one for immediate use. Bombs and traps are particularly useful here, since you can use them to affect multiple enemies at once. If you use the conflagration traps, be careful not to set yourself on fire. If you do, you can use the Quen sign to quickly put yourself out.
Make sure a sign you want to use is also set to your active slot. While you can switch signs in battle, time only slows down slightly while you’re in the menu that lets you do so. It’s generally easier to assign a sign you want to use to your active slot before a battle, then stick to using that before the fight ends. This guide recommends Quen for this fight (and most others), but you can try using whatever works for your personal play style. Axii can be particularly useful when fighting groups of enemies like the soldiers here.
Finally, you should be carrying some hanged man’s venom that you can use to oil your steel sword before the fight begins. Once you’ve applied all of your buffs, drop into the courtyard and be ready to start fighting. Three soldiers in mail are waiting for you. With all of your buffs up, you should be able to dispatch them rapidly with light attacks. If you get surrounded, use Geralt’s dodge roll to get clear. Even with buffs up, Geralt can be quickly killed if he gets trapped in a knot of enemies.
There’s a group of four soldiers in mail lurking behind a pile of lumber, but you can mop them up later. Instead, after you dispatch the first group of enemies, head toward the ballista. This triggers an attack by another group of enemies—one carries a tower shield and another wears plate. Pick off the lightly defended enemies first, then work on the heavier ones. If you can catch the whole group with a samum bomb, you can easily roll around to your foes’ backs and hit them with heavy blows. You can also defeat the heavy foes more methodically by blocking their blows, then counterattacking. If you’ve used hanged man’s venom, a handful of blows can take down even the most heavily armed foes in this part of the game.
Two archers remain between you and the ballista. Use your signs to help take them out, either directly with Aard or Axii, or by tossing on Quen and rapidly dodge-rolling toward them so you can take them out at melee range. Once the archers are cleared, you need to take out another knot of soldiers, one of whom has a shield, before you can crank the ballista. After you do, a few more soldiers attack. Take them out quickly, then aim the ballista. Two more soldiers, one in plate armor, attack.
After you’ve defeated them, you can fire the ballista—but first take a look around. Not too far from the ballista itself, you should find a white-clad would-be assassin who died trying to leap from an impossible height into a pile of hay. Finding him gains Geralt the surprisingly useful Assassin attribute.
When you hear King Foltest tell his men to charge, you’ve almost cleared the mission. Gather up any drops your defeated foes have left behind and then go to mop up the soldiers hiding behind the timber. Behind them is a stone stairway you can use to make your way to some scaffolding. Climb the scaffolding to reach the battlements again. Head toward the tower to rejoin King Foltest and complete the quest.
At The Fore
Join Foltest and his knights in battle against the La Valette soldiers. You won’t be in much danger here, but one of the enemies does have a tower shield. Follow Foltest until his way is blocked by a wooden barricade. While his axemen chop it down, prepare yourself to fight in close quarters. Since Geralt’s dodging options are limited, this fight can be surprisingly dangerous to you. Prepare yourself to use Yrden or Quen to help you thin the number of enemies quickly. You can conserve your buffs for later battles. Once the battle’s done, follow Foltest’s men up the ladders.
After the cutscene ends, quickly get Geralt to cover. You might level up here, but you won’t have a safe place to meditate to spend your talents. Bring up the Quen sign and activate it, then dodge-roll across the bridge while the Temerian archers give you cover fire. Quickly defeat the La Valette archers stationed at the other side. In addition to the ones behind the wooden blinds, you need to take out the ones standing on a nearby section of scaffolding. Head toward the top of the tower, where Aryan La Valette and his men are waiting. You can meditate before you approach Aryan, so if you intend to fight him or his men, you should prepare yourself with potions.
Once you enter dialogue with Aryan, he immediately challenges you to a duel and you receive dialogue options. If your response is “As you wish,” Geralt immediately enters a pitched battle with Aryan and all his men. This can be a very challenging fight, since this early in the game you have only basic skills at your disposal. If you intend to do this, you should make sure you enter the dialogue fully buffed.
When the fight begins, first focus your energy on taking out all of Aryan’s archers, who fire on you from the left edge of the tower. Quen is essential for this phase of the fight. Once the archers are down, focus on eliminating the lightly armored soldiers with Aryan (there are about four). Bombs and traps are invaluable here to act as crowd control and deal damage. Once you’ve whittled the numbers down to Aryan and his two knights, switch to the Yrden sign. Aryan’s knights are probably close to death, so you can finish them off when they set off Yrden or pick them off while Aryan is stunned. Once it’s just you and Aryan, you can finish him off with Yrden or simply by blocking and counterattacking.
If you say “Surrender and save your men,” you initiate a chain of dialogue options that can lead to a much simpler resolution. Aryan responds to you by giving a speech to his men. After that, if you say “Drop your weapon, fool,” Aryan relents and surrenders. This makes it possible for him to survive the Prologue, since you don’t fight him.
If you say “Let’s settle this between us,” Geralt fights Aryan in a one-on-one duel to the death. Aryan hits much harder than any enemy you’ve faced so far, but he’s not especially difficult to beat when you face him alone. You can stagger him with Yrden or simply block and counter his blows as you’ve done with other armored foes. If you want Aryan to remain dead in your game, but don’t want to spend time on the challenging battle against all of his men, take this option.
If you choose to save Aryan, then when Geralt’s flashback ends Roche comments that Aryan is also in the La Valette dungeons. If you kill Aryan, Roche comments on his death. At this point, you get another dialogue choice that determines what the next segment of action in flashback will be. You should continue to make your selections in order if you’re playing for the first time.
Note that Aryan La Valette being dead is one of the conditions required for Geralt to obtain the Executioner character attribute much later in the game. That said, you can only obtain Executioner if you side with Roche at the end of Chapter 1. If you side with Iorveth, you won’t be able to kill the other NPCs who must be dead for the attribute to unlock. If you think you may side with Iorveth, it’s best to save Aryan La Valette so you can obtain the Strong Back character attribute instead.