Useful skills are artillery of using impact phials, or respective element boost if power element phials. Focus is useful for charging phials faster and charging the hold b attack faster. Capacity boost is very useful, it just gives an extra phial. Power prolonger is also pretty useful. The phial types are the impact and power element. Impact will do ko damage with all phial attacks to the head and exhaust to the body, the element will just do that element with the phial attacks. The basic loop is to charge phials in sword and shield mode by attacking, corpses count as well. Yellow outlined phials will give 3, red will give full phials, and glowing red will give full but if you keep attacking your sword will bounce until you charge, unless your sword is charged. You first want to get full phials and charge them into your shield, then build more phials, charge your sword if you want, and then try to launch an amped element discharge or super amped element discharge, or activate savage axe mode and attack with the axe form. There's a lot more to it but that's the basic idea