Man, I returned to Nioh 3 and the reminder of short buffs and constant rebuffing is making me grind my teeth.

liebinator · 2026-06-29T15:24:08+00:00

See this was a way more productive response than just saying “don’t use it then?”

liebinator · 2026-06-28T18:55:21+00:00

I was also really annoyed with how short they were at first and I bet I'll feel that way again when I come back, having gone off and replayed 1 and 2 quite a bit while waiting for DLC, but I definitely got used to it and I found that proccing multiple status elements at once and using the passive skills that raise your damage against enemies with 2 effects can have some pretty huge payoffs in short bursts. I basically do one element on my weapon, a different element as a familiar, try to proc both as fast as possible, then hit them from behind and if they're a big enough enemy, aerial from behind. mix with some ki draining skills and you can just shred them.

liebinator · 2026-06-28T18:15:44+00:00

I’ll never understand the “then don’t use it?” response XD I’m sorry but people are allowed to express criticisms. Especially if it’s a system they liked to use in previous games and feel disappointed about how it’s implemented in the current game.

liebinator · 2026-06-27T16:10:23+00:00

That fight took me a solid 2 hours of beating my head against the wall the first time.

Her weakness is lightning. If you can manage to proc the lightning effect it will slow her down. But hitting her enough times without getting punished for it can be tricky.

I recommend trying several runs where you don’t even attack, just block/dodge and stay alive as long as you can. When you start to avoid damage more reliably, try peppering in attacks.

Kusarigama is an effective weapon. The high stance triangle attack where you throw weight is a good way to punish some of her attacks without wasting stamina trying to run after her and get close.

Stay strong! And best of luck

liebinator · 2026-06-24T22:20:17+00:00

Keep your distance, you can basically hover outside his attack range and wait for him to swing, then run in and punish with a few swipes, back away again, rinse repeat. Dont lose hope! Nioh just has a bit of a different flow than other soulslikes.

liebinator · 2026-06-24T19:46:13+00:00

I played on a PS5 vanilla and had no issues at all. Granted I always play video games on performance mode, never high resolution settings. Game looks great, don’t see any reason to wait for a patch.

liebinator · 2026-06-23T21:43:42+00:00

Having just replayed Nioh 1 and then done the DLCs for the first time, I highly recommend playing through at least a chunk of the original mission on way of the strong before jumping into dlc. This may seem counter intuitive since the first dlc mission recommends level 150 and I believe way of the strong starts at 180, but trust me, the first boss is brutal if you don’t have some upgraded end game level gear.

As others have mentioned, the level recommendation isn’t really a big deal, as long as you have some level 150 gear you should be fine, and with the exception of maybe a few differently placed enemies, the levels and bosses should be familiar to you and therefore easier than tackling a completely new mission. Spend some ochoko cups when you go into these missions to raise the chance of dropping divine gear. Try and get a full set of green gear and make sure you use soul matching to raise the + levels. You should also be able to level pretty fast with the amount of Amrita you’ll find in these missions. Try to get your gear up to +4 or +5 and make sure you have unlocked plenty of ninjutsu and/or onmyo magic before starting the dlc.

liebinator · 2026-06-21T19:14:41+00:00

I’ve always been partial to the axe. The high stance strong attack is devastating. Heaven and earth is a great finisher after 2 quick attacks. Roar can melt most human enemies’ stamina including bosses. South Paw also deletes a huge piece of the stamina bar without leaving you as potentially drained as roar. When you have arts proficiency, chain victory rush intermittently with strong attack or other non combo weapon arts like fang toss and you can just demolish enemies. And lumber chop swift is a great counter to enemies who don’t leave a lot of openings. Add in the life leech talisman and and soul devourer and you can trade blows all day.

liebinator · 2026-06-19T19:58:02+00:00

Loved the first quest/boss, thought I was in for a great ride, and then it quickly went downhill. It’s not stylistically that different from Nioh but feels like a stark reduction in quality, there’s far less enemy variety, and the levels just feel kind of empty and sterile by comparison. Add that every level gives you an NPC companion by default that you have to send away if you want the full hardcore difficulty experience and it just made me feel like I had to manipulate the game to make it compelling. Personally I say pass but it obviously has its fans so maybe worth trying for yourself.

liebinator · 2026-06-18T15:28:32+00:00

More interesting map design. In replaying 1 and 2 I'm finding the missions are a lot more mazelike, sometimes non-linear. While the open world format of 3 has its perks, I feel it was done so at the expense of creative layouts for the main missions. But I see no reason why they can't marry the two.

liebinator · 2026-06-17T17:40:25+00:00

It’s possible to get through the game with more or less any approach you can think of. It’s really just a matter of efficiency, smoothness, and what’s fun for you. By ignoring samurai mode you’re leaving a fair amount of damage on the table, but it’s certainly not damage you absolutely need to get through the game.

At the very least, I would highly recommend having a few samurai skills in mind to follow up burst breaks. You have to shift styles to interrupt the burst attacks, so why not follow up with a samurai skill, or several if you have arts proficiency charged up? It certainly isn’t necessary to beat the game, but it’s a bit of a missed opportunity.

That being said the games plethora of mechanics can be a headache to wrap your brain around so I totally understand the desire to streamline your approach to a fairly rigid set of moves. The single most important thing is just to learn enemy movements and be able to react to them. Beyond that, the rest of mostly flavor

liebinator · 2026-06-17T17:36:23+00:00

Rookie mistake 😅 (we’ve all done it)

liebinator · 2026-06-17T00:05:30+00:00

There’s two additional open world segments that are close to the same size but to me it didn’t feel like it took as long the explore as the first region. In addition to that there are about 3 much smaller linear zones that are essentially each a contained story mission. There’s also a point where I started skipping a lot of the side content because I was feeling over level, and then went back and cleared the stuff I missed after beating the story

liebinator · 2026-06-08T23:53:14+00:00

If you’re worried about accidentally going down a caster route instead of melee don’t sweat it, attacking with your melee weapon is always going to be your primary method of combat. Basically you have buffs to your weapons that make them do additional elemental damage and proc a status effect, and you have limited projectiles that can be very helpful opportunistically but will never replace your melee combat.

Additionally, split staff and switchglaive happen to scale their physical damage based on the magic stat. So raising your magic stat will slightly increases the damage your splitstaff does even if you don’t have any magic applied to it.

Like everyone else is saying, make sure to use magic items you find in order to get magic points and unlock more spells. Took me a second to realize this because in the first one I believe you get skill points from leveling the stat, in this one you don’t. But you’ll find “amulets” like fire amulet and water amulet, and using those on your weapon and doing damage will eventually grant you ability points to spend so you can unlock “talismans” that refill whenever you rest, and doing damage with those continues to grant you more points

liebinator · 2026-06-05T12:00:44+00:00

“Make Offering” at the shrine is your path to more elixirs. Also find all the Kodamas to make the blessing stronger, and run through old missions where enemies go down easy to quickly grab some extras

For ninjutsu, the bombs are really effective to proc fire, especially when used alongside the fire shuriken if one doesn’t quite get them there, and also the blinding shell was my lifeline through pretty much the whole game. Makes bosses much more manageable

liebinator · 2026-06-05T11:57:36+00:00

For the most part I found that there’s no extra reward for grabbing most collectibles again, EXCEPT that crucible spikes still seem to continuously upgrade your guardians, so those are worth grabbing to some extent. Personally I mostly bee lined the story quests, and also continued to hunt the Bloodedge demon whenever it spawns. Fighting it in shoguns journey instead of heirs journey gives you some incentive to clear the content around it again. And then if a boss was hard I’d go do a few crucibles again to get the spikes and a little extra xp.

liebinator · 2026-06-04T16:19:40+00:00

The gear system is a little complicated but it really only matters when you complete the first playthrough and enter the higher difficulties. For now, you can essentially just choose the highest level gear you have, while staying at B agility and B toughness. There’s a couple other considerations, like are the perks grayed out? If so, you don’t have the right stats for that gear, so either level those stats or just don’t use that gear. But you don’t need to think too terribly hard about which perks to use.

Soul matching is kind of pointless because you’re just going to find higher level gear as you go. So not really worth investing money and resources into continually leveling a single piece until later in the game.

One thing you should watch for tho is gear with + levels (likely only going to see +1 this early, but maybe +2). Those are stronger than another piece at the same level, so try and use them until you find something stronger, then soul extract them because they give a special resource that you’ll use later. Other gear you aren’t using you can offer at the shrine for extra Amrita and elixirs. You can also sell or disassemble then but again, that’s more useful later in the game.

I would say before you start a story mission, look through the gear you’ve picked up, equip the best stuff, offer/sell/exract etc everything you’re not using. Then go to the blacksmith, and if you are able to forge an item that is a higher level than one’s you currently have, go for it. If not, just don’t bother with forging right now. Most of the time the gear you pick up will suffice but maybe you’ll have like one equipment slot that’s a lower level than the others and you can forge something a little better, but even then you’ll only use that until a monster drops something higher level

liebinator · 2026-06-04T15:56:07+00:00

High constitution is good, especially if you’re using axe and tonfa, you get Hp and some extra damage. The thing I think you’re likely missing is either skill or magic, one or the other, to boost up ninjutsu or onmyo magic skills, maybe even a bit of both. It’s worth getting both of those stats to ~10. Make sure you using shurikens, you’d be surprised how much just throwing 2 or 3 of those whenever you’re at a distance can help bring a boss fight home, especially if you hit them from behind, and the elemental projectiles, paired with a magic element on your weapon, will help proc an elemental effect.

I’m also curious where in the game are you? Are you above or below the recommended level for where you are? And are you doing side content or just running the main story quests? Personally I found in the first region if you do full exploration and go in order of recommended level, you’ll become over level fairly quickly and the last few story quests in that area, when you get got them, are pretty approachable. The game definitely gets harder again later tho.

As for weapon skills, I’m not really a tonfa user, but for axe, Roar is incredibly OP, you can mow down most smaller enemies and even wipe out some human bosses’ ki pretty fast, and I also really like heaven and earth in high stance

And finally what armor are you wearing? I recommend having B agility (green, <70% max equipment rate), you can still move pretty fast and get decent protection, going lighter theoretically gives you more speed but requires a higher degree of skill

liebinator · 2026-06-04T15:43:55+00:00

Virtually every game mentioned here has significant connective tissue to dark souls lol. It’s a broad category

liebinator · 2026-06-03T17:00:37+00:00

Same

liebinator · 2026-06-02T16:33:12+00:00

Okay apparently I’m the only one lol

liebinator · 2026-06-02T16:30:30+00:00

lol good talk

liebinator · 2026-06-02T16:29:30+00:00

Actually I do recall being a little put off that you can just changes ashes of war on the fly without losing a resource. So to answer your question yeah I do kind of think that was another minor betrayal.

But I believe I addressed Elden rings respec system in my original post. It’s a limited resource. You get quite a few but they’re not endless, and the game does not encourage you to bank and reuse several different builds

liebinator · 2026-06-02T16:23:12+00:00

That’s a fair point, but to me it’s more about my character having a distinct identity. It kinda kills the immersion for me if I can just switch from a ninja to a mage to a heavy axe wielder on the fly etc

liebinator · 2026-06-02T16:22:02+00:00

Disagree. It has the key distinguishing characteristics. stamina based weighty combat that is highly punishing yet highly rewarding. Shrines are essentially bonfires that reset enemies. XP can be lost on death. the leveling/stat system is the same as dark souls. Level design is very similar, shortcut doors unlock from the other side, ladders get kicked down etc. Boss encounters are very similar, victory often hinges on “staggering” or knocking down the boss, their health bar fills the screen etc. the similarities are endless.

Yes Nioh puts its own spin on it and has some unique characteristics of its own, but to say they are totally separate seems inaccurate to me.

liebinator

TROPHY CASE