9 Black Myth Wukong tips we wish we'd known before playing
Aug. 20, 2024These tips and tricks for Black Myth Wukong will help players master their destiny
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Our Black Myth Wukong tips and tricks will help players adjust to the frenetic martial arts combat and spellcasting that makes the Destined One so powerful. In some respects, Black Myth Wukong is a curious creation - not quite open world, but not quite linear either. A power fantasy, but still very challenging in sections. A soulslike, but also more narrative focused. Ultimately, while a lot of fun to play, it’s something that many might need to come to understand a little - which is where we come in to help. If you want to get the most out of Black Myth Wukong, our tips and tricks will help you out - they’re the ones we wish we knew before we started playing, after all.
1. Resting at checkpoints isn’t automatic - or necessarily a good idea
Can you replay chapters in Black Myth WukongBlack Myth Wukong Black Bear GuaiHow to sober up the drunk Black Myth Wukong pigBlack Myth Wukong Man-in-Stone
Finding a checkpoint shrine for the first time activates it as a respawn point and somewhere you can fast travel to, but you won’t get your health and gourd refilled until you choose specifically to rest at it from the checkpoint menu. However, this also causes all enemies to respawn.
There’s two factors here - namely that it’s easy to forget to rest after activating the checkpoint and progress at reduced health. On the other hand, if you’re searching an area and trying to clear it out, you might not want to rest and bring them all back. Remember the option, but use it wisely.
The Black Myth Wukong Skill tree is massive, and will only get bigger as you progress through the game and unlock new spells and abilities that can be modified and enhanced.
However, as a rule you want to start off by working on skills in the “Foundational” and “Martial Arts” brackets - the sorts of skills that you’ll use throughout the entire game. Your spells and stances may become redundant when new, better ones replace them, but the stuff that’s Foundational will always be relevant. if you want some further pointers, we’ve got thebest Black Myth Wukong skillslisted here.
YourBlack Myth Wukong manabar is not especially substantial and there’s very few ways to refill it - especially early on in the game. But that’s sort of the point - your spells aren’t something to be cast liberally, but special powers to be used at strategic moments.
In fact, I found they were more useful not as offensive powers, but as defensive ones. When a boss is beating you up, using the Immobilize spell is usually more useful as a means to heal and consume medicines rather than do some free damage, with Cloud Step working similarly.
Focus points are largely used to perform high-power strikes, but there’s two significant versions: Varied Attacks, which are mixed into ongoing light attack combos, and standalone Heavy Attacks which can be charged.
To be blunt, it’s the latter that do HUGE damage, and the ones you should be trying to do more often, especially in boss fights. Varied attacks are quick to use, but if you can fully charge a heavy attack in the Smash Stance, you’ll do an unbelievable amount of damage: it’s just the better investment in combat.
Your first move in any boss fight should be to start triggering every special skill you have - your spirit powers, your shapeshifting transformations, your Vessels, all of them. Not only are they effective, but the cooldowns on them are generally to the degree where you can get two uses out of them only if you trigger them early on.
New recipes for crafting weapons and armor in Black Myth Wukong usually unlock along with certain milestones for defeating certain bosses, getting some key crafting component from them that can forge new equipment or upgrade existing stuff. However, unless you’re willing to spend a while farming Will and components, you probably don’t want to craft everything that’s put before you.
This isn’t even about specific builds - you just get these pieces slightly more often than it’s worth replacing them. A new set of gear every chapter should generally suffice for most players - it’s economical and allows you to spend Will elsewhere.
Black Myth Wukong undersells the importance of Medicines, the consumables that grant temporary buffs, but these unassuming potions are game changes when used right. You can buy potions from the fox merchant that appears in chapter 2, but also craft them yourself from many of the plants you find around. Keep in mind that certain plants are limited to certain regions, so you may want to head back to the locations of previous chapters to stock up on the necessary materials.
Black Myth Wukong introduces several stances that determine the nature of what Varied and Heavy attacks you do - and the best of them is the first one the game gives you, Smash Stance. The fact it can be charged while moving, is straightforward, and integrates fluidly into combat with few upgrades means that while the other Stances work, there’s rarely anything as effective as bashing an enemy’s skull in.
The different chapters in Black Myth Wukong have secret or hidden side quests that ultimately lead you to find a Vessel, a special item that can be triggered for a temporary buff, like damage reduction or immunity to fire.
These Vessels areincrediblypowerful, and not only that, some of them have contextual abilities that hamper specific bosses - using the Wind Vessel, for example, can take away one boss’s ability to summon tornados, on top of all the other effects. If you haven’t found a Vessel in the chapter, go back to find it - you’ll be happy you did. And if you want some starting advice, go ring all theBlack Myth Wukong bellsin Chapter 1.
© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Joel Franey is a writer, journalist, podcaster and raconteur with a Masters from Sussex University, none of which has actually equipped him for anything in real life. As a result he chooses to spend most of his time playing video games, reading old books and ingesting chemically-risky levels of caffeine. He is a firm believer that the vast majority of games would be improved by adding a grappling hook, and if they already have one, they should probably add another just to be safe. You can find old work of his at USgamer, Gfinity, Eurogamer and more besides.
Cyberpunk 2077 dev offers temporary beta branch so that Update 2.2 doesn’t make your mods explode
Path of Exile 2 is dropping loot more generously, but Early Access players are still being bankrupt by the action RPG’s high respec costs: “Why am I being punished for trying out things?”
Untitled Goose Game publisher is back and weirder than ever with a bizarre FMV game called Blippo+, and no one’s even quite sure what exactly it is: “video is no game™”
