Sup everyone. So this is going to be a pretty short guide of lessons learned. There are several more comprehensives guides out there, and I'd strongly recommend reading through them if you want more in-depth info into most aspects of the game. Also, I only play on normal, so if you want to go full try-hard I recommend spending some time with the guides for playing on Chaos.

That said, here are the things I wish I'd known in my first couple play throughs.

This is probably the most important info in this guide honestly. If you screw up character creation, it can make certain parts of the game really frustrating later.

There are really only 3 things you should care about at character creation: Insight, Charisma, and Luck. I'll explain why in the description for each.

Insight: This is the single most important stat during character creation. It governs your ability to re-roll the bonuses provided by skills using the "comprehend" feature. There's only one way to increase this permanently after starting the game, and it's by using a rewrite destiny slot. You ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT DO THIS. You only get 50 insight out of it, and those rewrite destiny abilities are critical to your build. My recommendation is to get this as high as you possibly can during character creation, but you want it to be 120 at a bare minimum. On mythic skill rolls, that gets you 1 roll back. When you're rolling 12 skill perks, that's not super helpful, but it's better than nothing. Skills that are tied to your martial arts and spirit roots will pump that number higher, but there are plenty of times you'll be using skills that have no associated martial art or spirit root and those rely 100% on insight for re-rolls. When you're trying to RNG your stats, you want as many things working in your favor as possible, and this is critical in that regard.

Charisma: Charisma actually gets increased via your mount items, and by a pretty significant margin too. There's a whole bunch of guides about managing this stat so you can steal from people. If you're using this guide though, I don't recommend stealing. It's a real quick way to make enemies that will constantly attack you and suck the fun out of the game. The stat itself is for social interactions. The higher your Charisma, the more likely an interaction will go your way. It also makes people interact with you more between months, which is super important for grinding your skill points for equipping Mind skills. It also makes running a sect a bit easier, as you'll be able to recruit the talent you need more reliably. Given that you can only increase this with mount items, having it as high as possible early is advantageous. I'd recommend at least getting it to beautiful, but obviously divine is better. It's based off your character's look though, so I understand if sacrifices have to be made here. After all, you have to look at your character the whole game.

*side note* There is a rewrite destiny that's tangentially associated with this stat, two actually: Killer Vibe and Irresistible. Irresistible seems to double affinity gains when interacting with NPCS, at least based on what I've seen. Honestly though, I haven't found it to be worth the rewrite destiny slot. Affinity goes up SUPER fast when you're working with like minded NPCs or sect members, especially once you start feeding them gifts to rank them up. All in all, better ways to use those rewrite destiny spots.

Luck: The only reason this stat is on this list is because you can't permanently raise it after starting the game. I'm not really sure that matters. Based on the description, it seems like it only effects RNG rolls for the quality of items you make, but I haven't code dived to see what all it effects. I've played with a character with 80 luck and 170 luck though, and I can't honestly say I noticed a difference. This might be a better stat to find another guide on, but based on my observations, you don't need to go out of your way to raise it.

Some honorable mentions here include your mood, health, and stamina stats. Nothing else will raise those, but that really doesn't matter. It might limit how many actions you can take per month, but ultimately, you're barely going to notice these.

Literally every other stat will be raised by skills, spirit fruits, or ranking up. So don't bother trying to get a good spirit root score, attack stat, etc. early on. Don't even pay attention to your highest skill when starting the game (which governs your starting attack skills) as you can very quickly change it with spirit fruits once you join a sect.

Short one this time

1. Don't use shotgun skills. They're garbage and you never want to be close enough to the bad guys to make them the most effective. Plus they're slow and slow is bad.

2. Don't sleep on mind skills. You should definitely be using them, and keep them as maxed out as you can. (unfortunately that means grinding mats to upgrade them)

3. Red skills are great, but as soon as you rank up you need to get skills from that rank. Rank has a multiplicative effect on damage, so green or blue skills from the next rank are actually better than Red skills from the previous rank.

4. There's only one motion skill type you should care about: Wind. You're invulnerable during it and can still attack. There's a whole chaos build that focuses on this, but it's useful no matter what difficulty you're playing on. I've personally found ways to make the water motion skill useful, but it still doesn't hold a candle to wind.

5. Blade skills on NPCS are probably the best option if you're building up a sect. Blade is the only skill set that can regularly punch above it's weight class, at least in my experience. That's entirely based on it's demon fury ult. It's also the only ultimate that you'll regularly go up against in duels, as it's trigger is based on vitality lost, not on kills or stacks. If you're fighting a blade based NPC, wait to use your damage avoidance abilities until they pop their ult.

6. On the subject of ults, combat expertise is far more useful than I originally gave it credit for. You can pop your ult at any time instead of waiting for the conditions to build up, which makes cultivator duels much easier. It should be a key part of any build.

7. This is pretty late in the game, but the abilities on Taoist Souls during the dungeon run aren't for you, they're for you enemies. All that matters for you is the elements being used. I highly recommend looking up a guide on this whole process. There are a couple really good ones out there.

8. I've yet to find death avoidance destinies useful, but I also don't play on Chaos, so might be better to find another guide for that. I tend to prefer destinies that give me automatic sources of extra damage or life steal. I'll include my preferred build in the next section. You're going to have to play around with them a bit, which brings me to my last point here.

9. You should be save scumming pretty much everything that has RNG results. Mainly your breakthroughs (you can alt+f4 out of the screen that shows your available destinies, EXCEPT ON CHAOS). You can save scum world boss fights, crafting rolls, and treasure rolls when you're trying to get to Nascent Soul (if you haven't done that grind yet, good luck). Don't bother when doing Fallen Valley runs though. You'll go through that dungeon so many times that it's just not worth the time it takes.

Main Stat: Water
Secondary Stats: Wind, Sword
Chaos Viable: Haven't tested

Skills

Martial/Spiritual: Water - Spiritual Torrent
Special: Water - Frost Blast
Motion: Wind - Any
Ultimate: Water - Heaven's Eye

Destinies (in order of selection) (Enlightenment is the highest you can go as of writing this guide so only 7 are available)

Water Burst>Blood Power 1>Blood Power 2> Blood Power 3>Combat Expertise (Water)> Jo's Flying Sword 1> Jo's Flying Sword 2

Breakdown:

Spiritual Torrent is a beam skill that does damage per second. It ticks 2-3 times per second, which is a key part of this build. Water Burst has a 10% chance to proc per attack, and each damage tick of Spiritual Torrent counts as a separate attack. Water Burst can stack, I'm not sure how many times, but it's at least 3, it can also auto-target enemies with 100% accuracy, can go through most obstacles, can also hit basically the whole map with it's range, and does pretty decent damage. The final effect is you standing in the middle of the map holding the attack button while you aim-bot any enemies that spawn.

Spiritual Torrent and Water Burst both trigger Blood Power, as it's based off damage done. Blood power 1 only has 7% damage to vitality conversion, which is fine when you're hitting 3-12 times per second. Once that gets up to 21% at Blood Power 3, you can out life steal anything in your rank or lower.

Frost Blast is just my preferred water move, but the real thing you're looking for is anything with a freeze effect on martial skill use after the special skill is used. Most of these kinds of freeze skills have around a 20% chance to freeze plus or minus 4-5%, but remember, each tick of Spiritual Torrent counts as a separate attack. So you're going to chain several freezes on your enemy before the timer runs out. This is really important with certain bosses, particularly in the Tao dungeons, as the freeze effect disrupts their attack chain. So you can lock out their abilities, while still getting your damage through.

The Heaven's Eye ult has kinda the same goal as Frost Blast, but on steroids. If you center the Ult on a boss, they'll be freeze locked for the duration of the ult.

**A note of freeze effects though, there's at least 1 boss that's immune to them on any difficulty. It's in the Fallen Valleys. So watch out for that.

The Wind motion skill is just great. I actually use the Sword Mind skills to increase motion skill duration and reduce cool down. Once it's fully built, you can just sit on top of enemies, blasting out the dps, and they can't touch you. It's cheesy as hell, but cheese is definitely fun.

The last little bit of this is Jo's Flying Sword. The first rank is ok. It's just another auto attack with middling damage, and unlike Water Burst it can miss (though it doesn't most of the time). The second rank though, starts adding debuff or control effects. It gets you some extra freezes, but also roots, dots, etc. It's a solid extra source of damage with some added control that makes cultivator fights and boss fights that much more manageable.

If done right, you're not going to take damage very often, courtesy of your motion skill, but the damage you do take is going to quickly be covered by your life steal. All the while you'll be blasting out Water Beams, locking down enemies, and dropping ults and Frost Blasts wherever needed.