I love Okatsu destroying William there, like damn. He respawned at a shrine after that cutscene, for sure.
Mechanical talking points of today, our new Spirit pal, Nurikabe, Ninjutsu, Onmyo Magics, and a breakdown of the Elements.
First off, Fuse-Ushi! Life +200; Guard Ki Usage -20%; vs. Poison +20; Recurrent Damage from Poison -25%; Life Recovery From Amrita Absorption +30
Summary
This Bull Found One Weird Trick to Ward Off Poison! Antidote Salesmen hate him!
Joking aside, Fuse-Ushi is there for Blocking types. Guard Ki Usage is less Ki spent to block and 20% is big. vs. Poison is just poison resist and +20 is A Lot. Recurrent Damage reduces the damage ticks of ongoing damage effects like Fire and Poison, here only applying to Poison to cement Fuse-Ushi’s hatred of poison. The last passive is neat if unimpressive, healing William for 30 Life every time he absorbs Amrita, which is when he checks a deady body, opens a chest, kills an enemy. Really the Passives worth considering is Guard Ki Usage and early on the bonus Life. If you’re in a poison-rich area that’ll come in handy, if you aren’t it’s two empty slots. Good thing Fuse-Ushi’s Living Weapon stats are good. +15% damage with Earth, higher Might, than the three starters. High Action and Recovery, balanced by average Tenacity and bad Gauge Rate. It’s a build up but once the Bull is loose you’ll start bowling over your opposition. Fuse-Ushi’s summon attack is Kato, but good. Coming down at the same angle, instead of doing a short spin on landing Fuse-Ushi hits the ground running and keeps going, doing good Earth damage and battering aside anyone he hits. Bigger enemies can get hit multiple times, making it good against enemies like the Ogres showcased in the video. Does less damage before hitting the ground but once he’s charging he goes on a fair distance. Outshone later on, solid beginner Spirit with a good summon attack. 12/10
Nurikabe (the Wall yokai)
Summary
They have a trick to it poorly hinted at by that Amrita memory from the corpse Tolvo picked up before Nekomata rudely interrupted. More helpful is the graves (revenant summon points) as each Grave, player and NPC, list their cause of death. Deaths caused by nurikabe read “killed for their _____ behavior”, with word like friendly in the blank, with a color. Friendly is Blue, Neutral is Yellow, and finally is Aggressive or Hostile, I forget which, that’s colored Red. Eagle eyed viewers will note when Tolvo pulls up the emote menu each has a color associated with this and you might see where this is going. Emoting the correct type of gesture at Nurikabe will have the yokai peacefully leave, dropping loot (but not Amrita) as if they were defeated. The first time you incorrectly gesture or hit them, their eyes will narrow and glow fiercer. A second incorrect gesture/strike leads to a tussle. The specific gesture doesn’t matter, just the color associated with it. So if you see graves near a nurikabe, check what killed them, and then use the other types of Gesture until you hit the correct one and you won’t need to fight a wall.
Ninjutsu; How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Mega Horoku-Dama
Summary
Here’s the trick to Nioh, everything is viable and cool. Ninjutsu, like Onmyo, runs off its own point pool that putting points into the related stat increases, with non-passive skills having a Ready Cost with your Limit being based the related stat, Dexterity for Ninjutsu. You can’t ready Ninjutsu than your Ninjutsu limit, can’t have more Onmyo than your Onmyo limit.
Jutsus readied work like spells from Dark Souls, you have a number of uses that refill with a stop a shrine. However they occupy the Item slots in the lower left, to be assigned as you like. They can even be used from the menu if you have a long duration low impact buff.
At the start of Isle of Demons you have a tiny amount of Ninja skills open, but immediately after Isle of Demons you unlock the mission Way of the Ninja:Novice which is largely a tutorial on Ninjutsu and some of the skills you unlock the ability to purchase after completing it. This is how all the skill trees work, you have a section immediately available and unlock Dojo Missions as you go through the game that you need to complete for access to the rest.
Most of the early tools are things you can get from consumable items you just find, one of the immediately available skills is just being able to prepare 3 Kayaku-Dama (Firebombs) whenever you visit a shrine, which are uncommon items you can find as loot or just buy in the shop between missions. The Novice skills open up some of Ninjutsu’s unique abilities, the Sneak Attack Tolvo shown being one but also Anti-Toxin Pills and Shikan-gan Pills. These are Antidote+ and Anti-paralytic Needle+, clearing the same effecting and also giving a hefty boost to resist their specific element (Notably enough to require Hino-Enma a second blast to paralyze you.) They’re also really cheap in Ready Cost and you get the three pills for free every shrine visit.
There’s other self-buff items such as the Power Pill which is just a good reliably way to get a damage buff and importantly every item skill has multiple ranks, each rank costs more skill points to buy but gives you an additional package to ready, usually for 1 less Ready Cost than the previous ranks. You can in fact stack multiple packages so you can Ready Power Pill three times to have 6 Power Pills to use between shrine visits, and even if you don’t need 6 power pills, the third rank costs 2 less to Ready than the first rank, letting you slot in more tricks. And boy howdy does Ninjutsu have a lot of tricks, ranging from even better Firebombs, caltrops, bombs that leave caltrops, throwable poison gas clouds, mines, mines that also leave paralyzing gas, bombs that leave caltrops, and the Mega Horoku-Dama mentioned at the top that is a torso-sized bomb that William has to heft and throw before it explodes into Horoku-Dama, the black firebomb equivalent, making it a big cluster bomb.
For the more personal, self buffing types there’s things to let you move without noise and become invisible, dramatically reducing the radius enemies will detect you, increased ammo capacity for your ranged weapons, a way to negate terrain effects like Fire, and culminating in this type of Ninjutsu are Touch-Me-Not and Quick Change. Touch-Me-Not is incredibly cheap in point cost, Ready Cost, and gives a fair amount per package, the rub being it makes you explode when you die. Not useful unless you’re Visitor, acting as a summon ala Souls-series, until you bring Quick-Change into the mix. While you have the Quick-Change buff active, after a short delay when you die, you reappear above where you died with 30% of your max HP. This resets all buffs and debuffs and you’re dropping, which can leave you vulnerable to getting hit again and dying for real, but Touch-Me-Not still triggers and will knockback and buy space for you having cheated death to heal or just apply another Quick-Change, because you can 100% do a dropping attack from a Quick-Change death.
Long story short, if you want to do Ninja bullshit, invest in Dexterity and by all means do it, it’s right there for you to become the next Hokage. Believe it!
Onmyo Magic; The Arcanist’s Cookbook
Summary
Onmyo is like Ninjutsu in terms of working of a separate point pool, Ready Cost, and Limit. Uses the Magic Stat instead of Dexterity. However it lacks anyway to inflict or cure Poison or Paralysis, and only has a single Talisman that increases resistance to both. Onmyo deals with the five elements, there’s some skills to debuff your enemies and buff yourself, a few things to enhance your ability to deal with Yokai, and a few odds and ends like sacrificing your weapons Familiarity (Each individual weapon gets XP as you use it, eventually increasing all of it’s numbers, to a maximum based on its rarity. This is separate from your Proficiency which is how much you’ve used a weapon type. Have I mentioned there’s a lot to Nioh?) to deal non-elemental damage or do a large AoE knockback.
All five of the elements get a weapon enchantment, making your weapon deal that element based on your magic. These are largely the only things available to you until you do Way of the Mage Novice, which isn’t unlocked after Isle of Demons. Later you unlock a projectile shot for an element, a damage resist for the element, and culminates in a big flashy unique attack spell for each of the five elements. Elements are important but we’ll cover them separately.
Other things include reducing a specific enemy’s damage (more effective than you might think), reducing an enemy’s defense, this line culminates in the Sloth Talisman, the debuff so powerful every boss in all three DLCs are set so the debuff duration is like five seconds. All it does is slow down the enemy affected. By half. This includes attack animations. Sloth is incredibly powerful and is a reason to be a Mage in and of itself. And there’s more and while it’s not as ridiculous it’s still very good, like Ninjutsu where there’s a lot and it’s all good.
One of my personal favorites is Guardian Talisman. This skill gives you a refilling version of the item Moment Talisman, which when used has your Guardian Spirit do its Summon Attack, which means this Talisman entirely depends on what your Spirit’s summon attack if it’s useful, but means it’s more flexible investment than say, Fire Shot because I can be more than a single projectile of fire, and how Daiba-Washi got abused to hell and back before patches rolled in.
Long story short, Onmyo magic is powerful because debuffs are powerful and the Elements are even more powerful and Onmyo’s how you really leverage them.
The Elements; By the gods, fear them, Laurence.
Summary
The five elements are Fire, Water, Lightning, Wind, Earth. Each has their own unique color for damage and their own unique status effect they can apply if you or an enemy take enough damage of that type. Being resistant to an element makes it much harder for that element’s status effect you hit you. Each buff and debuff shows on the health bar of the affected as an icon, if the icon is bright it’s in effect and counting down, if it’s dim it’s showing a build up, like for the five elemental effects or Poison and Paralysis.
Fire’s status effect is Scorched, which means you’re on fire. You rapidly take low fire damage (that doesn’t refresh the status) for the duration. Dodging while Scorched reduces the duration by about 1/4th of the max duration, three dodges of any sort will clear the effect, which is about how fast the ticks of damage come and how short the duration is. Poison comparatively does its damage much slower, in larger chunks, and lasts longer. But Scorched comes from dealing fire damage, while poisoned weapons don’t deal the upfront Fire damage like a Fire Enchant does. A target can be poisoned and scorched at the same time. Scorched is still the weakest of the five elemental status effects.
Water’s status effect is Saturated. Saturated targets take significantly more physical damage. Want to hurt a boss more with stabbing? Use water damage to Saturate them. This stacks with Weakness Talisman, meaning apply both and the boss is in for a world of hurt.
Lightning’s status effect is Electrified. It’s mini-Sloth. Electrified targets move and attack and do everything slightly slower. Not as slow as a target affected by Sloth but guess what, they stack. Both at once are incredibly rare to deal with as a player. Luckily for enemies and you, being resistant to Lightning makes it REALLY hard to apply Electrified. Easily the scariest elemental effect to be facing.
Wind’s status effect is Blustered. It reduces physical damage dealt by a good chunk. Stacks with the Devigorate Talisman meaning with both up a boss does way less physical damage. Less good if they really only do elemental damage, and overall not as useful as making something die easier. Still better than Scorched by itself.
Earth’s status effect is Muddied. It increases Ki costs and reduces Ki regen. While it does slow their Ki regen in Yokai pools, the second part isn’t super good against Yokai. However the first part is pretty significant against hearty enemies across the board. You can break through a guarding enemy’s Ki and Grapple them much faster if they’re muddied, and while Yokai pack Super Armor with any amount of Ki, when Ki-less any hit staggers them out of animations. Watch out since every Yokai has a panic move it’ll do if you wail on it too long that it can’t get staggered out of and spawns a yokai pool. Muddied is good against humans and really good against Yokai, by itself.
Now, that’s all well and good, but none of the explains why Elements are so, so good. It’s because there’s a Sixth elemental effect, one without an associated Element. Discord (Or confusion, it’s translated different between regions.) is applied when a target is under two different elemental status effects at the same time. Note Poison/Paralysis/Every Onmyo-specific debuff are not elemental at all and do not count. While Discorded, Human Enemies (or you) lose dramatically more Ki and take dramatically more damage, stacking with every other debuff under the sun so Weakness Talisman, Sloth Talisman, put Lightning on your blade and hit until they’re Electrified then activate a Water Living Weapon and apply Saturated and you can vanish a boss’ health bar while he moves in super slowmo.
Discord works differently against Yokai. They also take the same massive increase to damage received, but rather than taking more Ki damage, their Ki is SET TO ZERO FOR THE DURATION OF THE DISCORD. Refer back to earlier when I noted Yokai without Ki are Staggered by every hit they take. Yokai’s desperation attack is way less effective under Discord, since while it can hit you and knock you out of combos, they still can’t have Ki, even in a Yokai Pool so you can just resume slamming into them at your leisure. A yokai enemy who’s Discorded is at your mercy for the entire duration of the effect and it lasts a good while. Here is what you can do fresh off the Liefde and some point investment.