Assassin’s Creed Shadows has all sorts of skills for players to unlock and master. If you want to level up your Samurai and Shinobi, you’ll want to earn XP as fast as you can. Here’s how to do just that.
In Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you can earn XP to level up from a wide variety of actions and activities. Killing enemies, assassinating targets, completing quests and engaging with all sorts of side content will award XP. However, the amount of XP each quest and activity awards can vary widely, so you’ll need to prioritize specific types to make the most of your time.
You can check how much XP a quest or activity will award by hovering over it in the map or the objectives tab. By far, the two activity types that award the most XP the fastest in Assassin’s Creed Shadows are castles and the optional assassinations.
There are many castles throughout Japan in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Each castle is heavily guarded my basic and elite enemies, and has a certain amount of Samurai Daisho who must be killed. Once the required amount of Daisho are killed in a castle, you can grab the area’s chest, which rewards high tier loot.
Castles in Assassin’s Creed Shadows are in incredible source of XP. Each castle awards a few thousand XP for completing the activity alone, but there are many other ways to get XP at them. Killing each enemy in the area awards XP, with the elites and Samurai Daisho awarding big bonuses, which can be around 250 XP. Many of these castles also house a high point the protagonist can synchronize on. Synchronizing awards some XP as well (usually a few hundred) and these can also be used as fast travel points if you need to swap between characters.
The downside to using the Castles as XP farms as that they can be a bit difficult. Here are our tips to make the process easier so you can get more XP even faster.
Which protagonist you choose to play as when attacking a castle is important. Naoe has the Eagle’s Vision ability, which she can use to scan for enemies and tag them to find the castle’s Samurai Daisho fast. Using stealth and assassinating a Daisho is a much faster way to kill them then engaging them in open combat. However, you will need to build your mastery and engravings around improving the amount of damage Naoe does from assassinations to guarantee they’ll kill a Daisho instantly every time.
When you’re at a low to medium level, it’s better to play as Yasuke to clear out a castle fast. Simply run into the castle and get detected on purpose, and start cutting down enemies in open combat. Let an enemy NPC ring the castle’s alarm bell, and most of the area’s enemies should come right to you.
A skilled player who employees these tactics can get insane amounts of XP fast. Castles can award up to and potentially beyond 4,000 XP in just a few minutes when done efficiently.
Beyond the required assassination targets to complete the main quest, Assassin’s Creed Shadows also has many groups of optional assassination targets. You can discover these quest chains by talking to specific NPCs in the world, and use your scouts to track a target’s location. If you populate the map with fast travel points like Kakurega, you can often teleport near a target’s location. Then, take your mount for a short ride, and kill the target as fast as you can.
Each time you kill an assassination target, you’ll be awarded an XP bonus since that counts as completing a quest. This is typically around 2,000-3,000 XP. The act of killing that enemy will also award some XP around the values awarded for killing elite enemies. Assassinating every target in a group and visiting the corresponding quest giver will also reward a large XP bonus, which is typically around 5,000 XP.
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