Tips for New Game Professional?

[Cam]

Googled around and searched the forums, but too many results popping up with crappy listicles or people complaining, so

I'm going for Professional on a new game. I'm a little into chapter 2 and I could describe this as... "Not easy." My first run was on hardcore, and I didn't get to play around with much of the weapons because of the limited ammo, so I didn't get a sense for what was good and what I should skip over.

I was wondering what others going for professional on new game have been doing so far. There's the obvious, like better aim, better parrying, but I'm curious about weapon selection others have made for NG pro.

[CigO_SmokeO_DoggO]

dont bother killing every enemy in an area if you can avoid it. my 2c

[Faded]

If you beat hardcore on a new game you should have a good idea. You have to just push through.

[Denoloco]

SAVE, SAVE AND SAVE.
Unless you are going for S+, always save. Sometimes you can clear a bunch of enemies, go back, save and keep going. There is no autosave so abuse this as much as you can and it's basically just hardcore with perfect parries only.

[Necrilem]

unlock chicago sweeper, armor costume for ashley, focus on upgrading pistol and shotgun, do requests up to chapter 7, get upgrade ticket, upgrade chicago sweeper, gg. Also a few skips you can use, like the cannon shortcut, sun/moon skip, gallery room skip, garrado skip, wrecking ball section skip (HUGE TIMESAVE).

[Salvatore Incarbone]

Originally posted by CigO_SmokeO_DoggO:

dont bother killing every enemy in an area if you can avoid it. my 2c

Yeah. Screw everything. Screw Ashley. Run until Ada offers you a copper ride and say yes.

[svoulzor]

Starting pistol and first rifle are the best normal guns in the game, use them. Get all the spinels you can in the village to buy the exclusive upgrade for the pistol (5x crit, it's op) when get in the castle. If you want to cheese with op weapons get the tommy gun

[DilTinman]

Depends on if you're wanting this to be as pure of a new game as possible or not.

If you're going for purity, running past alot of encounters can be helpful, but you'll also want to balance that will getting as many treasures and supplies as you can while avoiding combat. You can also skip a few sections with rocket launchers such as the blockade in the mines and the anti-air gun in chapter 15.

I hear any of the pistols are good, it's just preference based. Shotguns i hear Riot Gun is actually the way to go this time around, and i always preferred the Broken Butterfly to the Killer7 but you can probably interchange these. Not sure on other weapon types myself on what's better overall.

Also flash grenades are incredibly useful not only for plagas, but you can also get a massively damaging knife stab attack on enemies when they're flash banged. Instantly kills low-level enemies and highly damages Salvadors, Bull-Heads, and such.

If you're not caring about it being as pure as possible, unlock the Chicago Sweeper and you can use that in a fresh new game. Trivializes the game when you get to chapter 7 if you do enough requests to get 30 spinels for the exclusive ticket, but the first 6 chapters are still going to be hard.

And as for going for S+ I would not recommend doing this without the Chicago Sweeper, but if you do want a pure challenge run without bonus weapons this video might have some strats for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HKvcQkNhF0

[Cam]

Thanks for the help so far. I should've specified I didn't want to use any bonus weapons, but I didn't even know that the new game professional challenge would let you use 'em.

Rank isn't important, I just want the clear on this one, but I do wanna do it without any bonus stuff.

[Shrinkshooter]

Originally posted by svoulzor:

buy the exclusive upgrade for the pistol (5x crit, it's op)

It's not OP on Pro. You hardly notice a difference. Enemy heads and limbs pop off a bit more often, but that's it. It especially becomes less meaningful when you're on the island. A maxed out starter pistol can pop a normal trooper right in the leg 4-5 times without blowing it off or making them drop to a knee, most of the time. I seriously debated whether it was a mistake not taking the Blacktail because I thought things would be much better once I got the crit; they're not.