The whip, first impression.

[zmanbuilder]

Pretty fun, gotta be careful as its swings are rather long, so you can be punished buy a enemy red attack (forgot the in game name for them). The stats it scales on are a good compliment to the weapon too, wood for losing less spirit on being hit, metal for having the natural drain to be slower, and water for cheaper evades.

The whip has a really good deflect difficulty, makes evading easier with water stats too, great range, though i have not used many, the martial arts feel pretty good to use too. I still need to test how good it is with elemental weapon buffs, but seeing as it has multi hit, it will likely inflict status effects easily. The ability to damage on a deflect will come in very handy against a few bosses, (looking at you, final boss of dlc 2).

As i like to start a new save when testing new weapon so i'm not over powered, as to let me learn the ins and outs of the new weapon, i do not have access to the other whips yet, but i did get very lucky and find a 4 star whip on the second mission in the game.

Btw the whip shares scaling with the staff, and the staff is a good compliment to the whip as it can build spirit really fast.

[Lu Bu]

The whip is pretty interesting, Xiang Deities' Tear does good damage / spirit damage but takes a second to come out, it has a frenzy mode that deals damage when you parry attacks, might be useful for quick attackers...but at the cost of spirit not recovering from normal attacks

[zmanbuilder]

Originally posted by Lu Bu:

The whip is pretty interesting, Xiang Deities' Tear does good damage / spirit damage but takes a second to come out, it has a frenzy mode that deals damage when you parry attacks, might be useful for quick attackers...but at the cost of spirit not recovering from normal attacks

The thing about frenzy mode, i have many times just sat on full spirit deflecting attack after attack, so frenzy mode adds offense to your defense.

Personally i do not swap my weapons, but pulling out a staff to build spirit to then pull the whip back out to frenzy mode may work well, So far i found the whip to have an okay spirit gain, most normal enemies die before i build up one bar of spirit.

[Keagian]

Seems like a good weapon for people who prefer a more defensive style of play. My friend adores it as she is able to just stand still and spam the parry button against bosses and the reach on the weapon is good for clearing groups of enemies.

Not really for me as I prefer to just power through attacks and go for spirit break so the longsword remains my preferred weapon.

[zmanbuilder]

Originally posted by Keagian:

Seems like a good weapon for people who prefer a more defensive style of play. My friend adores it as she is able to just stand still and spam the parry button against bosses and the reach on the weapon is good for clearing groups of enemies.

Not really for me as I prefer to just power through attacks and go for spirit break so the longsword remains my preferred weapon.

After tesitng it out, i too prefer just to power through with my longsword, btw do you use the martial arts on your longsword? i tend to just go for the charge attacks after a deflect.

[kripcision]

i like the whip, its got good martial arts attacks, same with the long sword. i generally just like using the long sword the most tho but like alternating between the 2.

i got a grace set (Grace of Yuanshi Tianzun the Pure One) when you use martial arts it stacks 3 times, and you can use one stack to use a magic spell with less spirit cost. due to this i can end up going through way more magic spells while using lots a martial arts.

[GladiatorA19]

Big problem with whip is the deflect counterattack is insanely slow. If you're in frenzy mode, this is kind of mitigated by the auto attack, but it's still way too clunky imo to use vs. a single opponent