This starter guide provides a comprehensive breakdown for players starting Ghost of Tsushima, covering key gear loadouts, combat setups, crucial exploration skills, and ideal story progression orders.
1. Early Game Gear & Charms
Armor Sets
- Traveler’s Attire: Essential utility armor. When fully upgraded, it clears 30% more map fog, revealing nearby points of interest like shrines, hot springs, and camps much faster.
- Ronin Attire: Best for stealth and melee damage. It slows down enemy detection speed, allowing you to sneak through camps easily.
- Samurai Clan Armor: A tank/combat-focused set that reduces incoming damage while increasing your maximum health and resolve gain.
- Tadayori’s Armor: Specifically built for archery, enhancing your bow reload speed and concentration (slow-motion) time.
Recommended Major Charms
- Charm of Inari: Increases the amount of supplies and materials gathered from the environment, making early-game upgrades much easier.
- Charm of Okuninushi: Provides extremely useful passive health regeneration when you are out of combat.
- Charm of Mizu-no-Kami: Increases the parry and dodge windows, making perfect parries and dodges significantly easier to pull off.
2. Combat & Techniques
- Skill Trees: The Evasion tree is highly recommended early to unlock the Perfect Dodge counter-attack. The Deflection tree should be the primary focus for players who prefer parrying enemy strikes.
- Stances: Switching stances is key. The Water Stance is the most important early-game investment, particularly the Surging Strikes ability, which is highly effective against common shielded Mongol enemies.
- Ghost Tools: Kunai are excellent for quick crowd control and staggering enemies, while Sticky Bombs are recommended for dealing high explosive damage to grouped foes.
3. Evolving Tactics & Exploration
- Essential Skills:
- Safe Landing: A mandatory traversal skill that prevents fall damage by letting you roll right as you hit the ground.
- Far Hearing: Improves situational awareness by allowing you to locate enemy leaders and patrol guards through walls.
- Organic Exploration: Instead of relying on map markers, follow the golden birds. This is a built-in game mechanic designed to lead you directly to undiscovered content like bamboo strikes, hot springs, and hidden side missions.
4. Mission Priority
- Blacksmith Chain: Prioritize these main story missions early on to obtain the grappling hook, which is crucial for navigation and survival in vertical terrain.
- Ishikawa’s Quests: Focus on these early character missions to unlock the half-bow and additional archery-related upgrades.
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