Pure magic build

[yds]

It's so good. I started a new character with Switchglaive and I currently have 28 magic at level 50.

There's so many advantages. Weapon scaling. Magic capacity. Magic power. I can use any talisman I need for a given situation.

I remember struggling with Magara Naotaka so much, and now I just watched his health bar drop like crazy, once I prepared a few fire talismans and barrier talismans.

I know people say ninjutsu is OP, but it's mostly ranged attacks, and I much prefer melee with buffs.

[Bloodlastx]

Who say ninjutsu is OP they clueless, only real OP in game is MAGIC

[shwarmizzle]

what's the point of creating new characters to replay irrelevant difficulties? Anything is OP on dream of the samurai/strong

[Foster]

Originally posted by AIZogerX:

Who say ninjutsu is OP they clueless, only real OP in game is MAGIC

They're both OP.
Ninjutsu allows you to literally ignore dying once per quick-change scroll, it has two different raw damage power enhancing pills that don't stack on each other, groundfire traps are comically powerful (I run paralytic groundfires along with other paralysis stuff for my rifle and cannon focused build and those groundfires are the only ones that can consistently freeze opponents regardless of their paralysis resistance outside of my dual swords) in any incarnation you use them but the regular version is just a raw damage monster landmine, you can effectively turn invisible, tiger running scrolls give you the objective fastest speed in the game for an eternity so those are the best for speedrunning levels to farm, poison is super potent given how few enemies resist it and how many are actively weak to it and it just does a crapton of DoT, paralysis as mentioned prior is really powerful since it lets you set up free mass damage hits, bombs are super potent, feathers are super potent, etc. etc.

Onmyo magic is definitely about as powerful, maybe a bit more in some ways just because of the sheer variety of things it can do if you focus solely on it or even if you just get Magic up to 30 to max cap it and then dabble in it a bit to get some sweet buffs to bolster an otherwise non-magic build but Ninjutsu itself also has many options you can use outside of a solely ninja build to really push your builds farther.

There's a very very good reason a huge chunk of the community doing endgame content will put 30 into both Dex and Magic even if they're doing a completely unrelated build, having those buffs and the ability to slap on the max number of them even without really sinking into them is still so potent that not having them just feels worse.
They're not necessary but they are sorely missed when you don't have either one of them, and in some cases you can set up really interesting builds that you otherwise couldn't do if you didn't have one, the other or both as a foundational pillar to let you do some specific things.

I say all this as someone whose first build was a Magic focused switchglaive/splitstaff build with basically no ninjutsu outside of some bombs to crap on Umi Bozus and quickchange scrolls to cheat death, and while I make extensive use of a few key Ninjutsu in my gunner build it's not ninjutsu focused and many times a boss is mobile enough that I can't really pop any type of ninjutsu or magic at all and have to just use raw skill with my swords and guns to get through so it's not like I have a bias for it.
I literally haven't even made a build for it yet.

Also in regards to what OP said about Ninjutsu mostly being ranged attacks, that's not actually all that true, if you use paralysis ninjutsus, power pills and/or last gambit pills alongside groundfires you can set up some serious melee pain on a boss because if I recall correctly poison and paralysis both count towards confusion and if you soak an enemy with water feathers you also get a damage bonus from saturation that applies to melee.
It's a little bit more setup oriented but you can totally utilize Ninjutsu for melee focused gameplay, it's not even that hard, Magic is just a lot more direct since you can pop everything you want before you walk through the boss door and just fight them raw.

Speaking of which, fully recommend you slap at least one Oni-bi soul core in your first or second guardian spirit slots, they give you a free elemental buff on cast that counts towards Onmyo Magic proficiency and they're super fast to use then get back to fighting so it's basically a free slot to cast an elemental buff of one of the 3 basic types (or 3 slots if you want to be able to just pop one and get any of the 3) without using any of your Magic allocation points.

[midori]

why not both? I'll take bombs and magic tbh