Franco Abrina
Black Myth: Wukong is finally out, and it offers a thrilling action RPG experience that kind of dips into the soulslike genre, even though it isn’t considered to be one. As such, it places a lot of emphasis on exploration and mastering its surprisingly deep combat mechanics. In this guide, we will be giving you a few tips that will help you get a head start whether you are new to this type of game or not.
Easiest Starter Guide | Everything to Know
Before we get started, this game has definitely gotten a lot of people hyped up over the years since it was first revealed quite a long time ago. As such, a lot of you have probably pre-ordered the game.
If you did, you should check out our article on how to get your pre-order rewards first. These are stuff that you can claim right at the start, and they provide a substantial boost for the early game.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the actual tips. We’ll be starting off with a few combat-related ones, as there are a few mechanics unique to this game that you must keep in mind!
Combat Tips – Focus Points, Stances, and More
There is a lot of room for skill expression and varied playstyles in Black Myth: Wukong, and most of this boils down to how you make use of the game’s unique mechanics.
One key thing that you should learn early on is how to stock up and use focus points. These are mainly accumulated through attacking or charging up, and you can check how many you currently have at the bottom right corner of the screen.
You only start off the story with a single focus point, but you can unlock more as you progress through the skill trees. Having more than one maximum point available is highly recommended for any build. Check out our skill tree guide for BMW!
Once you have saved up focus points, you can then spend these on heavy attacks that can deal massive damage. These are affected by the stances covered in the next section.
Skill Trees + Stances
On the topic of skill trees, there are a whole bunch of them for you to check out, and you should take the time to do so. We don’t want to force you into any specific playstyle, but there are some nodes that are worth considering early on.
As a new player, check out the nodes under the Stamina and Survival skill trees. These will have upgrades that will increase your health and also reduce your stamina costs for both dodging and running.
Aside from those, there aren’t really too many ”essential” nodes. I suppose Crash and Stagnation for the Immobilize ability might be worth the sparks early on if you plan on spamming it in boss fights. It is essentially free damage.
Stances, on the other hand, have their own skill trees. There are three stances, and each of them has unique heavy attacks. This is another thing you’ll just have to explore on your own, as you are likely to favor one over the others. Here is a summary of each:
- Smash Stance – The starter stance. It has a fairly short range, but it can hit hard and can stagger enemies. This will likely be your most used one by virtue of being the default.
- Pillar Stance – This stance has some decent area of effect capabilities and is also for more defensive playstyles.
- Thrust Stance – This stance has long range attacks and excels in single target combat.
SIDE NOTE: Unless we’re mistaken, you can reset your sparks at pretty much any shrine at any time for free. This means that you can freely experiment with other builds until you find one that best suits you.
There are also spirits and transformations, but we’d be treading into spoiler territory for those. Just know that there are even more ways to personalize your build as you progress further into the story.
Explore, Explore, and Explore!
Although Black Myth: Wukong isn’t really an open world game, there are a lot of things you can miss if you don’t check every little corner of each area. This ranges from secret areas to just general crafting resources that you can find scattered all around.
You basically just want to loot anything and everything that you find. Whether it be plants or flowers off the ground, or chests and pots that you stumble across throughout your adventure.
On the topic of exploration, the game pretty much shows you where most of the shrines are, and you should go and unlock these as soon as you can. Doing so will give you more places to rest up, fast travel, self-advance, and craft stuff throughout your playthrough.
One major thing to keep an eye out for are these shiny gold containers, as they will often provide you with Celestial Medicine items. These are important, as they will permanently increase your health, mana, or stamina.
Upgrading Your Gear and Gourd
All of these seemingly random resources that you collect throughout each area can be used in various ways, including upgrading your gourds. This will be crucial to your success later on, unless you are insanely good at avoiding damage.
At some point early on in the story, you will meet the Shen Monkey NPC. He will have various features, including the ability to upgrade your drinks and gourds. You see, there are different types of healing items that you can collect in the game.
On top of this, you will also eventually have a collection of soaks that can add bonus modifiers to these healing drinks. This can include stuff like extra mana regeneration or better healing when health is low.
Weapons and armor, on the other hand, can be acquired by defeating enemies or crafting them yourself. Early on, you won’t really have a lot of choices. There is one powerful option you can unlock, though.
The Bronze armor set is an early game choice that massively buffs the Immobilize ability, allowing you to deal significantly more damage with it and reduce its cooldown by a lot.
It is an optional unlock that you can unlock very early in the game, and it can carry you pretty far as a new player if you find yourself relying on Immobilize in most fights. To get it, you first have to beat a secret boss.
For this, follow our guide on how to find the three bells and enter the Ancient Guanyin Temple. This will lead you straight to the secret boss that you have to defeat. After finishing it off and claiming your rewards, the Bronze armor set pieces will now be craftable!
There are a lot of other secrets like this in the game, and people are still figuring out how to access them. Remember, the game just came out, so even the completionists are still in the learning phase!
Don’t Be Afraid to Die!
Finally, our last tip for you is to simply stop fearing death. Although the game isn’t exactly a soulslike, it does borrow a lot of elements from the genre. Heck, the shrines are basically just bonfires.
Trial and error is something that you will have to do for a lot of fights in this game, especially as you progress further. This is because bosses will eventually start having more complex attack patterns and multiple phases.
Even as early as the first few hours, start experimenting with your build and try to at least have a bit of experience with all three stances. Learning how to be flexible early on will significantly increase your chances of success in later fights.
Switching up your build is actually something that the game heavily encourages. Again, respecs are free, so if you hit a wall with a certain boss, try a new build and see if that works out for you! Who knows, maybe a thrust stance-focused build is actually better for you!
And those are pretty much all of the tips we can give you as a new player, and there is a lot more to learn as you progress further into the game! With that said, you might also want to check out our guide on where to farm during the early game phases of Black Myth: Wukong. That will help you get started once you finally hop in too!
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