Nioh Guide: How To Use Skill & Prestige Points

As you get the hang of Nioh you’ll eventually come to realize that there’s a lot of things you can tinker around with to make your character better. Things like getting better gear and accumulating Amrita to level up stats will go far in making you a more competent Samurai, but there are points that you can get beyond those that can improve your character even further. This guide will give you a rundown of the game’s Skill and Prestige points.

Skill Points

Leveling up at a Shrine gives you the chance of acquiring skill points, which will either be Samurai skill points, Ninja skill points or Onmyo skill points. Acquiring these skill points will allow you to unlock new abilities in either of the aforementioned skill areas, giving you more methods for taking down your enemies. The following gives a brief overview of each category:

Samurai: These skill points will be the most frequent and useful ones that you will get, as they go towards unlocking new abilities for each of the game’s many weapons. To get an understanding of how many weapon skills there are, each of the game’s weapon types has 45 skills for you to learn.

Ninja: These skill points will be more suited to those who like to play a bit more stealthily and quickly. You’ll be able to use throwing weapons to take out your enemies from a safe distance, as well as add buffs to your weapons in order to more easily take down enemies.

Onmyo: These skill points are for the magic users out there, which will allow you to create talismans. These talismans can then be consumed in order to add elemental buffs to weapons or armor, such as fire or water.

Prestige Points

These points work differently compared to the others, as you have to perform specific tasks in order to earn them. You’ll earn titles throughout your adventure for doing things like killing a certain amount of a particular enemy type or getting a certain amount of kills with a particular weapon, and earning the title will get you reputation points. As you earn more and more titles you’ll get more and more reputation points, which will eventually earn you prestige points.

While it sounds a little confusing, you’ll find that you’ll rack these points up easily enough throughout regular gameplay. There are two lists that your prestige points can be spent on, which are Agyo and Ungyo. These stats work similarly to how the stats do in regular leveling up, as they’ll increase things like health, Ki and attack power.

The fact that you have skills you can learn and stats you can upgrade outside of the traditional leveling up system is confusing to some, but don’t let that be an excuse for ignoring these features. You can get significantly stronger if you regularly learn new abilities and improve your stats with prestige points, and you can do these things whenever you want as you can access them from the in-game menu.