Arms of God Pro Tips: 15 Advanced Tricks Only Veterans Know

The tutorial teaches you to auto-fire and dodge. It doesn't teach you half the stuff that actually determines whether you clear Act 4 or die to a trash wave in Act 2. Here are 15 things I learned from way too many hours in this game. Some of these might get patched. The game's been in Early Access for three days. Use them while you can.

Combat Tricks

Number one, the Sacred Crux mode swap cancel. Switching from aura to beam or vice versa has a brief animation. You can cancel it by swapping modes immediately after all weapons fire. The mode switch still registers but the animation skip saves about a third of a second. Doesn't sound like much until you're knee-deep in a phase 3 bullet hell and every frame counts.

Number two, the vertical advantage. Most enemy hitboxes are wider than they are tall. Standing above or below enemies instead of left and right means fewer attacks connect with your character. I position below bosses whenever possible and it's consistently safer across every fight in the game.

Number three, projectile herding. Enemies track your movement, so if you run in a straight line they cluster behind you. One AoE weapon clears the entire cluster in a couple seconds. The figure-8 pattern I use creates consistent clustering opportunities without cornering yourself.

Number four, Divine Form invincibility frames. The activation animation has i-frames. If you pop Divine Form right as a boss's screen-wide attack would connect, you take zero damage. The timing window is about half a second. I practiced this on the Act 2 final boss's phase transition until I could hit it consistently. Absolute game-changer for the Act 4 final boss.

Number five, the intentional death farm. The fastest way to earn Cathedral currency is to die on purpose. Start a run, play hyper-aggressively with no dodging, and you'll die around level 8 to 10 in about 5 minutes. This gives roughly 60 to 70 percent of the currency of a full clear in 10 percent of the time. Do this five or six times to max out movespeed and HP, then start pushing for actual clears. It's boring but efficient.

Weapon and Merge Tricks

Number six, the sixth merge reset. Merge efficiency drops with each merge into the same weapon, but the sixth merge (unlocked in Act 3) resets the penalty completely. Do your fifth merge late in Act 2 with a mediocre donor. Save your best donor for the sixth merge in Act 3 where it gets full stat transfer value.

Number seven, elemental override. If a weapon has a natural element and you merge a different element weapon into it, the donor's element overwrites the target's. This is either a bug or undocumented behavior. Merge order matters because the last element applied is the active one. You can use this to convert a weapon's element without losing its base stats.

Number eight, the donor scouting trick. When you pick up a weapon with full slots, the merge preview shows you what stats would transfer. You can check this preview and then cancel. Use it to scout whether a weapon is worth replacing one of your current five. I do this for every single weapon drop in Act 3 and beyond.

Number nine, empty slot testing. If you have an open weapon slot, equip a new weapon first instead of merging it immediately. Test it for a wave or two. Weapons in hand often feel completely different than their stat cards suggest. Better to know before you commit.

Blessing Tricks

Number ten, blessing pool manipulation. The game weights blessing offerings toward what weapons you're holding. If you want fire blessings, fill your slots with fire weapons by level 15. The blessing offerings in levels 25 through 40 will skew heavily toward fire. You can soft-target specific blessings through weapon composition.

Number eleven, the reroll exploit. If you don't like your three blessing options, close and reopen the game. The blessing selection screen reappears with the same three slots but a different set of blessings. I discovered this by crashing during a run. It's borderline exploity and might get patched, but it works in the current Early Access build.

Boss Arena Tricks

Number twelve, destructible heals. Every boss arena with environmental objects has breakable versions that drop healing orbs. The Act 2 final boss pillars, the Act 3 mid-boss statues, the Act 4 penultimate boss braziers. Break one when you need a heal. Save the rest for later phases.

Number thirteen, phase transition status application. Most bosses have a brief invulnerability window during phase transitions where they can't take damage but they CAN be debuffed with status effects. Apply burn or poison during the transition and the damage ticks start the moment the boss becomes vulnerable again. It's not much free damage but free damage is free damage.

Cathedral and Miscellaneous Tricks

Number fourteen, the hidden Armory weapon. One weapon in the Armory doesn't unlock through normal currency. It requires you to first unlock 10 other weapons, at which point it appears. It has natural piercing plus chain lightning. Worth grinding for , it's a top-three merge base in the entire game and I use it in probably 80 percent of my runs.

Number fifteen, and this sounds ridiculous but I'm serious: the music affects how you play. The DOOM-style metal soundtrack makes you play more aggressively. When I notice myself dying to stupid positioning mistakes, I mute the music and play with just sound effects. My clear rate goes up because I'm making decisions based on game audio cues instead of headbanging to drop beats. This is genuinely the dumbest tip on this list and also the one that improved my play the most.

And one bonus: the Steam Deck's right trackpad bound to mouse aim. It gives you precise Sacred Crux beam targeting during boss fights while keeping the comfort of controller movement. Best of both worlds.