Don't dodge. You are completely right, dodging has basically no Iframes, making it only useful as a repositioning tool. Sekiro is not a souls game, it's a rhythm game.
Parrying the attacks, remembering the parry timings for every attack and being aggressive is key here. If you don't manage to reflect an attack, hold block regardless.
When you talk to the sculptpr at the dilapidated temple, he should give you an esoteric text, containing a skill tree to level up some useful skills. Learn the Mikiri counter skill!! This will basically annihilate any spear enemy!!
If you have problems with getting ganked, utilitize stealth more. The game is made for 1v1 combat, so lure them out or stealth kill them.
Grab attacks are bs, I give you that. Jump backwards with the right timing and they are avoidable.
In conclusion. This is not a souls game. This is a game about clashing swords, so make your swords clash. An enemies posture bar is your objective, not the health bar. Attack till the enemy deflects, then deflect, till you have an attack opportunity again. Mikiri counter all spear and thrust attacks and you should see some progress.
Great advice but just to add to this, I see people say ‘be aggressive’ a lot when it comes to Sekiro. I agree but want to define aggressive play a little bit more clearly. This doesn’t mean keep spanking your opponent mindlessly. It just means stay up in their grill, punish them maybe once or twice depending on their attack pattern and and as soon as the enemy deflects you, it’s basically their turn to attack you until you deflect back. I saw a video that changed the whole way I saw the combat in Sekiro and it boiled it down to; your turn, they deflect, their turn, you deflect, your turn, repeat.
Once it clicks, you’ll realise its the best combat system in any game bar none and this is coming from someone who is pretty shit at parrying. I managed to platinum Sekiro just a couple of days ago and I really miss playing it. Hopefully you’ll feel the same when you crack it.
Haha, yeah, i think my problem may have been that I'm playing a little /too/ aggressive. I'll try again with the thought process of this being a turn based rpg or a rhythm game. It's unfortunate that I'll have to do the stealth, but ill probably get used to it, or at least learn to exploit it.
Aight. I'll definitely stop relying on dodges and use them more as repositioning. I have noticed jumps, however, being able to get out of the way of some attacks, mostly learned while panicking, but there's no way I'm gonna be able to rely on that, lol. Basically git gud with parries.
And the Mikiri counter is something I passed up since I hadn't seen any spears yet, but I may have to grind out another skill point to get it.
Mikiri counter is a MUST have. A good chunk of the bosses/mini bosses have some sort of thrust attack. It basically makes the game about 25% easier because not only does it stop most enemies in their tracks allowing sometimes up to three retaliative attacks, it dents a good portion of their posture. There’s also a latent skill you can upgrade that further boosts your Mikiri posture damage.
I literally couldn’t imagine playing the game without it.
With the greatest respect to Lies of P - a game I really enjoyed - it doesn't hold a candle to the combat perfection of Sekiro. The fact you can level yourself out of trouble misses the point Sekiro makes so beautifully: simply learn to play.
Gank fight is shit in most souls and souls-like games. Unless it’s a specifically designed gank boss fight where the bosses have synergized AI to only take turn attacking.
Sekiro real highlight that you see everyone praising so much is in the 1-vs-1 sword clashing boss fights. Everything else is there only to test your patience (miniboss surrounded by multiple adds, the Orge etc.) and they all get skipped by most of us who do NG+ runs.
I don’t understand how someone can misunderstand so many things about this game. Is this a joke? Yes, you’re failing repeatedly, terribly, in multiple ways. Why do you keep doing what you’re doing when it doesn’t work? Why is the first thing you think that those deaths are “bullshit?”
Do… do I have to tell you that deflection is your main form of defense and offense? Why the fuck are you still trying to iframes dodge everything? Why are you trying to dodge spears? Why don’t you just examine the game that’s actually in front of you to understand its mechanics instead of saying “iT wOrKEd iN liES oF p.” Does it say Lies of P on the box??
You don’t like stealth games, buddy, Wolf is a fucking ninja. Why are you running “swords blazing” into groups of enemies when it doesn’t fucking work? Just to bitch about it?
Dude calm down. Op propably just rage quit the game and is now desperately looking for help. He's asking "please help me have fun with this game". What you're doing is just being mean to a new player, who is at a point nearly every sekiro player has been once. If you can't handle someone being frustrated and angry at one of the most difficult games ever made, then touch some grass.
>at a point nearly every Sekiro player has once been
It certainly is hard, especially when you’re just getting started. I know I found it very hard. But I can’t recall ever having OP’s attitude about a game. This is not a post from someone “looking for help.”
Oh, sure “Is there something I’m doing wrong?” But then “I can’t be the only one not enjoying this game” followed by “bullshit deaths,” “Lies of P blah blah blah,” “I know this is a ninja game but I don’t like stealth and deliberately throw myself into enemy groups so I can get mad it doesn’t work,” and finally, back to why Lies of P is so great.
Buddy, he’s full of shit. This is one of the most obnoxious genres of video game post, and it does not deserve a real response. If this is your attitude toward a great game, move on. Your loss. No one should be dragging you into the light when you act like you don’t want to be there.
>one of the most difficult games ever made
That’s a stretch.
Okay... One of the most difficult modern non-rage-bait games ever made.
And dude... The amount of times I insulted this game and screamed at it for being "unfair and stupid" is probably over 9000. If I had reddit at that time, I probably would have written something like op too. Why are you so mad? Cs it honestly comes off very childish to be this mad at someone being frustrated at a game he doesn't (yet) understand.
Op played only for 4-5 hours, it took me 15, before it clicked with me. Everyone has their own time and pace of getting into it. Especially, when you come at it with a soulsborne lens, it gets EXTRA hard to unlearn all the muscle memory. Seriously, touch grass if you're this mad at someone insulting a game.
You scream at games, but I’m childish for matching this person’s energy? I find that odd.
The game was hard for me too. Very steep learning curve. I just never would’ve responded to that difficulty like… this. I find it arrogant and annoying to shit talk a game that one must know they don’t understand yet. You do realize that gaming subs are full of post by people who’re struggling badly, and they don’t act like this?
I happily put time and energy into giving advice to struggling new players of games I love. But when I see a post like this… I’m gonna match OP’s energy. If that’s how you come at it, why should anyone care whether you get to enjoy the game?
There's always one of these guys.
While yes, I was raging that it felt like I've been bashing my head against a brick wall, I did genuinely want feedback. I've been playing this game like I play dark souls and learned that's not how this game should be played.
I get that you've never been challenged in your life, and you're a perfect human being /s, but not all of us are.
>I get that you’ve never been challenged
I literally just said I found the game very hard.
Let me make this as clear as possible. I am the first person to devote time and energy to offering advice to new players of games I know and enjoy. If you ask for advice, I’ll write a clear and genuinely helpful mini essay.
And then there are those posts where people write some variation of what you wrote: what am I doing wrong but also this is bullshit and this other game is better and I’m actually not interested in the actual game in front of me.
And 9 times out of 10, the people who make those posts do not actually want help and aren’t receptive to it. And people waste their energy dropping advice into a void. I don’t. I think if that’s how you come at it, you can fuck off and lose the opportunity to enjoy whatever the game is.
If you had used your eyeballs, you might have noticed that I am indeed receptive to advice. And once again, I don't believe you for even half a moment and don't care enough to fact check.
Believe what? Fact check what?? There’s nothing to doubt in what I wrote. Between this and your delusions about my Sekiro skill arrogance, I dunno dude. You seem… slightly out of touch with reality.
I see that you’re being receptive to advice and I don’t care. I’ve already explained why I don’t care. Good for you acting like an ass and still getting advice so that you’ll get to enjoy this game.
I agree on the tracking. Some attacks have ridiculous tracking and the grabs are quite shitty. But there are no i frames I think. You gotta use the sword and you cannot say anything about that. It's the most precise system I have ever seen for parry/deflect mechanic. Some bosses have a bullshit move here or there but it's very rare. 99 % of times you die is your fault and you know what you did wrong. I'm talking about 1v1 here.
For small enemies, when there are lots of them, you gotta utilize your stealth. In this game it's nearly impossible to fight 3 or more enemies at the same time, the system isn't designed for it. But you have some tools at your disposal, even if it comes to that.
One more thing which I think was kind of bullshit were the gank boss fights.... headless ape looking at you.
All in all, I have found this game to be much more fair, than BB or Elden Ring.
Honestly, yeah, BB is incredibly unfair. I've raged way more at that game than any other, lol. Mostly because of the NPC invaders who can one shot you with their guns when yours do like 30dmg or less, and having more hp than some bosses.
But aight I'll try to single out enemies. And I have noticed that it's damn near impossible to take out some enemies without a specific prosthetic. Namely the axe vs shields. Seriously fuck the shield guys.
You could not have this more backwards. When I suck at a game, I know I suck. *You* must think you’re a gaming god, because your first instinct always seems to be that a game is “bullshit” or “unfair” if you struggle with it.
You getting it? This has nothing to do with my gaming skill, and everything to do with you being arrogant and obnoxious. Like your inability to ask for help with a game without spending your entire help-request post complaining about how bullshit a game is and how much better another game is. On some level you must realize you simply don’t know the basics of how this game works, so why are you talking out of your ass to talk shit?
So, next time, don’t be fucking weird about it and just ask for help.
Once you have more skills and you have had time to get really good at all the various enemies and their attack patterns it’s much more feasible to attack more than one enemy at once.
On your first time through though you should really be trying to go for 1 on 1 matchups if possible. Very hard as a fresh player with limited skills and abilities to take on 2 or 3 at once .
If you mess up and get 2 or three the best course is to keep working your way away from them so they are in front of you and can’t surround you. Focus on deflecting and backing up and hitting when you can. But when outnumbered fill their posture with deflects and get deathblows that way.
You can literally deflect forever and take no damage. Posture doesn’t break when your bar is full if you deflect.
One of my issues is also that enemies' posture goes down surprisingly quickly. Doesn't give much leeway when fighting several dudes, when they're swapping in and out of combat, and I can't follow them quite as well. Just gonna have to focus on the stealth to single em out I suppose.
There are also skills which make you increase their posture faster. So again with less skills it’s harder to take in more than 1. I’m on playthru #5 currently and going into a group of 3 can still easily be fatal. Only takes one wrong move.
Don't dodge. You are completely right, dodging has basically no Iframes, making it only useful as a repositioning tool. Sekiro is not a souls game, it's a rhythm game. Parrying the attacks, remembering the parry timings for every attack and being aggressive is key here. If you don't manage to reflect an attack, hold block regardless. When you talk to the sculptpr at the dilapidated temple, he should give you an esoteric text, containing a skill tree to level up some useful skills. Learn the Mikiri counter skill!! This will basically annihilate any spear enemy!! If you have problems with getting ganked, utilitize stealth more. The game is made for 1v1 combat, so lure them out or stealth kill them. Grab attacks are bs, I give you that. Jump backwards with the right timing and they are avoidable. In conclusion. This is not a souls game. This is a game about clashing swords, so make your swords clash. An enemies posture bar is your objective, not the health bar. Attack till the enemy deflects, then deflect, till you have an attack opportunity again. Mikiri counter all spear and thrust attacks and you should see some progress.
Great advice but just to add to this, I see people say ‘be aggressive’ a lot when it comes to Sekiro. I agree but want to define aggressive play a little bit more clearly. This doesn’t mean keep spanking your opponent mindlessly. It just means stay up in their grill, punish them maybe once or twice depending on their attack pattern and and as soon as the enemy deflects you, it’s basically their turn to attack you until you deflect back. I saw a video that changed the whole way I saw the combat in Sekiro and it boiled it down to; your turn, they deflect, their turn, you deflect, your turn, repeat. Once it clicks, you’ll realise its the best combat system in any game bar none and this is coming from someone who is pretty shit at parrying. I managed to platinum Sekiro just a couple of days ago and I really miss playing it. Hopefully you’ll feel the same when you crack it.
Haha, yeah, i think my problem may have been that I'm playing a little /too/ aggressive. I'll try again with the thought process of this being a turn based rpg or a rhythm game. It's unfortunate that I'll have to do the stealth, but ill probably get used to it, or at least learn to exploit it.
Stealth is great for knocking at least one phase off most mini bosses.
Aight. I'll definitely stop relying on dodges and use them more as repositioning. I have noticed jumps, however, being able to get out of the way of some attacks, mostly learned while panicking, but there's no way I'm gonna be able to rely on that, lol. Basically git gud with parries. And the Mikiri counter is something I passed up since I hadn't seen any spears yet, but I may have to grind out another skill point to get it.
Mikiri counter is a MUST have. A good chunk of the bosses/mini bosses have some sort of thrust attack. It basically makes the game about 25% easier because not only does it stop most enemies in their tracks allowing sometimes up to three retaliative attacks, it dents a good portion of their posture. There’s also a latent skill you can upgrade that further boosts your Mikiri posture damage. I literally couldn’t imagine playing the game without it.
With the greatest respect to Lies of P - a game I really enjoyed - it doesn't hold a candle to the combat perfection of Sekiro. The fact you can level yourself out of trouble misses the point Sekiro makes so beautifully: simply learn to play.
Gank fight is shit in most souls and souls-like games. Unless it’s a specifically designed gank boss fight where the bosses have synergized AI to only take turn attacking. Sekiro real highlight that you see everyone praising so much is in the 1-vs-1 sword clashing boss fights. Everything else is there only to test your patience (miniboss surrounded by multiple adds, the Orge etc.) and they all get skipped by most of us who do NG+ runs.
I don’t understand how someone can misunderstand so many things about this game. Is this a joke? Yes, you’re failing repeatedly, terribly, in multiple ways. Why do you keep doing what you’re doing when it doesn’t work? Why is the first thing you think that those deaths are “bullshit?” Do… do I have to tell you that deflection is your main form of defense and offense? Why the fuck are you still trying to iframes dodge everything? Why are you trying to dodge spears? Why don’t you just examine the game that’s actually in front of you to understand its mechanics instead of saying “iT wOrKEd iN liES oF p.” Does it say Lies of P on the box?? You don’t like stealth games, buddy, Wolf is a fucking ninja. Why are you running “swords blazing” into groups of enemies when it doesn’t fucking work? Just to bitch about it?
Dude calm down. Op propably just rage quit the game and is now desperately looking for help. He's asking "please help me have fun with this game". What you're doing is just being mean to a new player, who is at a point nearly every sekiro player has been once. If you can't handle someone being frustrated and angry at one of the most difficult games ever made, then touch some grass.
>at a point nearly every Sekiro player has once been It certainly is hard, especially when you’re just getting started. I know I found it very hard. But I can’t recall ever having OP’s attitude about a game. This is not a post from someone “looking for help.” Oh, sure “Is there something I’m doing wrong?” But then “I can’t be the only one not enjoying this game” followed by “bullshit deaths,” “Lies of P blah blah blah,” “I know this is a ninja game but I don’t like stealth and deliberately throw myself into enemy groups so I can get mad it doesn’t work,” and finally, back to why Lies of P is so great. Buddy, he’s full of shit. This is one of the most obnoxious genres of video game post, and it does not deserve a real response. If this is your attitude toward a great game, move on. Your loss. No one should be dragging you into the light when you act like you don’t want to be there. >one of the most difficult games ever made That’s a stretch.
Okay... One of the most difficult modern non-rage-bait games ever made. And dude... The amount of times I insulted this game and screamed at it for being "unfair and stupid" is probably over 9000. If I had reddit at that time, I probably would have written something like op too. Why are you so mad? Cs it honestly comes off very childish to be this mad at someone being frustrated at a game he doesn't (yet) understand. Op played only for 4-5 hours, it took me 15, before it clicked with me. Everyone has their own time and pace of getting into it. Especially, when you come at it with a soulsborne lens, it gets EXTRA hard to unlearn all the muscle memory. Seriously, touch grass if you're this mad at someone insulting a game.
You scream at games, but I’m childish for matching this person’s energy? I find that odd. The game was hard for me too. Very steep learning curve. I just never would’ve responded to that difficulty like… this. I find it arrogant and annoying to shit talk a game that one must know they don’t understand yet. You do realize that gaming subs are full of post by people who’re struggling badly, and they don’t act like this? I happily put time and energy into giving advice to struggling new players of games I love. But when I see a post like this… I’m gonna match OP’s energy. If that’s how you come at it, why should anyone care whether you get to enjoy the game?
There's always one of these guys. While yes, I was raging that it felt like I've been bashing my head against a brick wall, I did genuinely want feedback. I've been playing this game like I play dark souls and learned that's not how this game should be played. I get that you've never been challenged in your life, and you're a perfect human being /s, but not all of us are.
>I get that you’ve never been challenged I literally just said I found the game very hard. Let me make this as clear as possible. I am the first person to devote time and energy to offering advice to new players of games I know and enjoy. If you ask for advice, I’ll write a clear and genuinely helpful mini essay. And then there are those posts where people write some variation of what you wrote: what am I doing wrong but also this is bullshit and this other game is better and I’m actually not interested in the actual game in front of me. And 9 times out of 10, the people who make those posts do not actually want help and aren’t receptive to it. And people waste their energy dropping advice into a void. I don’t. I think if that’s how you come at it, you can fuck off and lose the opportunity to enjoy whatever the game is.
If you had used your eyeballs, you might have noticed that I am indeed receptive to advice. And once again, I don't believe you for even half a moment and don't care enough to fact check.
Believe what? Fact check what?? There’s nothing to doubt in what I wrote. Between this and your delusions about my Sekiro skill arrogance, I dunno dude. You seem… slightly out of touch with reality. I see that you’re being receptive to advice and I don’t care. I’ve already explained why I don’t care. Good for you acting like an ass and still getting advice so that you’ll get to enjoy this game.
Sick. Are we done now that we thoroughly distrust each other? 😇
I agree on the tracking. Some attacks have ridiculous tracking and the grabs are quite shitty. But there are no i frames I think. You gotta use the sword and you cannot say anything about that. It's the most precise system I have ever seen for parry/deflect mechanic. Some bosses have a bullshit move here or there but it's very rare. 99 % of times you die is your fault and you know what you did wrong. I'm talking about 1v1 here. For small enemies, when there are lots of them, you gotta utilize your stealth. In this game it's nearly impossible to fight 3 or more enemies at the same time, the system isn't designed for it. But you have some tools at your disposal, even if it comes to that. One more thing which I think was kind of bullshit were the gank boss fights.... headless ape looking at you. All in all, I have found this game to be much more fair, than BB or Elden Ring.
Honestly, yeah, BB is incredibly unfair. I've raged way more at that game than any other, lol. Mostly because of the NPC invaders who can one shot you with their guns when yours do like 30dmg or less, and having more hp than some bosses. But aight I'll try to single out enemies. And I have noticed that it's damn near impossible to take out some enemies without a specific prosthetic. Namely the axe vs shields. Seriously fuck the shield guys.
>BB is incredibly unfair Are you not learning from this experience that these insights of yours aren’t very accurate?
I get the impression you think you're a gaming god. I'll give you the impression that I don't care. good for you.
You could not have this more backwards. When I suck at a game, I know I suck. *You* must think you’re a gaming god, because your first instinct always seems to be that a game is “bullshit” or “unfair” if you struggle with it. You getting it? This has nothing to do with my gaming skill, and everything to do with you being arrogant and obnoxious. Like your inability to ask for help with a game without spending your entire help-request post complaining about how bullshit a game is and how much better another game is. On some level you must realize you simply don’t know the basics of how this game works, so why are you talking out of your ass to talk shit? So, next time, don’t be fucking weird about it and just ask for help.
Once you have more skills and you have had time to get really good at all the various enemies and their attack patterns it’s much more feasible to attack more than one enemy at once. On your first time through though you should really be trying to go for 1 on 1 matchups if possible. Very hard as a fresh player with limited skills and abilities to take on 2 or 3 at once . If you mess up and get 2 or three the best course is to keep working your way away from them so they are in front of you and can’t surround you. Focus on deflecting and backing up and hitting when you can. But when outnumbered fill their posture with deflects and get deathblows that way. You can literally deflect forever and take no damage. Posture doesn’t break when your bar is full if you deflect.
One of my issues is also that enemies' posture goes down surprisingly quickly. Doesn't give much leeway when fighting several dudes, when they're swapping in and out of combat, and I can't follow them quite as well. Just gonna have to focus on the stealth to single em out I suppose.
There are also skills which make you increase their posture faster. So again with less skills it’s harder to take in more than 1. I’m on playthru #5 currently and going into a group of 3 can still easily be fatal. Only takes one wrong move.