Homebrew Martial Arts

A simple guide to the inns and outs of the new feature for combining your external and internal arts.

Intro

Welcome to my guide to making your own homebrew martial arts.
If you are a longtime player of this game or have a penchant for theory-crafting then you probably won't benefit much from this, but if you are new to the game or have recently suffered a head injury then you have come to the right place.

The basics and the obvious.

Now let us begin with what you need in order to get started on your journey to be the very best there ever was.... at smashing two martial arts together to make yourself your own personal brew of face punching to which you can proudly declare "I Built It" to all those people who didn't ask.

So in order to get started, you will first need access to your homestead with LVL5 Steles, just in case you have no Idea what I am talking about, once your fame hits the third rank a bird will deliver an invitation to you for a certain venue in a certain city (trying to avoid spoilers) after visiting said venue and finishing the event you will unlock access to your homestead.

Once you have access to your homestead, and level up your Steles you need to enter that facility through your homestead menu and walk up to the little platform in the middle with a cushion on it.

This is where the magic happens, here you can combine any two arts of the same type (external/internal) and tier (rare, epic, legendary) that you have learnt to max level on one character in order to make your own, this will remove the two from your learnt arts while prompting you to name your new home-brew and you will automatically receive a manual for your new art at the same time your character will comprehend it at lvl 1.

Your home-brew will be 1 tier higher than whichever arts you used to create it.
Your home-brews will inherit all the External/Internal skill effects of their parent arts.
The main External/Internal stats will be based of one of the two you combined to make it, it is completely random as to which art is chosen for this, so make a save before combining so you can use you save-scumming super power to ensure the result you want. Just make sure to move around a little after re-loading in order to advance the RNG (thank you Darkshintos for pointing this out).
You CAN NOT use home-brews to create more home-brews.
You can Imprint your home-brew onto Steles for use on your future play through.
Top Quality externals that you create will all have an increased area of effect/coverage, with the exception of People's Palm assuming that it was the art chosen as the base of your new external, if it is used as the secondary art (just passing on the extra effects) then the new attacks area of effect/coverage should still see an improvement.
As fist externals tend to see some variation in area of effect/coverage and power, keep in mind which external you want your home-brew to inherit as its base when combining.

The slightly less basics

So after experimenting a little by combining various arts, I found that when you combine two arts together be they internal or external, they will be slightly weaker than regular arts of the same tier, now obviously if you are combining two legendary arts together this is not an issue as they will make a beautiful new Top-Grade Art of which there are none appearing in the game outside of what you make yourself, so naturally combining two legendary arts together is always the best choice as you can make something a fair bit stronger than anything you would be able to find, provided you have not just crammed two garbage tier legendary arts together.

When combining Externals below legendary tier together, the external stats for weapon
(fist, sword, long, etc) and the power will all be slightly lower than what you would find on normal arts of the same tier, attack and knowledge will be the same, the learning requirements of your
home-brew will however be much lower, in the case of legendary tier the weapon stat requirements for learning will be 30 (the same value as the epics you combined to create it) as apposed to the usual 70, and the mp cost of using it will be slightly lower.

With Internals, the hp, mp and defence values will all be lower, but the medical, toxicology and knowledge values will be the same as any equivalent grade internals, and the max mp requirement will be significantly lower (the same value as whatever arts you combined to create it).
I am uncertain whether values like throwing or qinggong scale appropriately, i will update regarding those once I have done further testing.

External skill effects and Main Internal effects will remain unchanged when combining, and all will be applied onto the newly created art, this allows for some pretty powerful combinations when creating Top-Grade arts, and also (at least in my opinion) makes certain combinations of epic into legendary quite viable.

When combining externals, you can combine them from different weapon types, so as an example you can combine a fist art with a sword art, or a spear art with a long art, it is just recommended that you save before combining to ensure that you resulting home-brew matches the weapon type that you want.

When combining externals of any tier, the resulting home-brew will have an area of effect matching its new tier and weapon type. For example, if you are making a new legendary sword art, then it will have the same are of affect as any regular legendary sword art.

Effective Combinations

Ok, so you are finally ready to start producing your dream home-brew, now just to help get you started I will give you some examples and walk you through the general reasoning.

Now let us say you have chosen to go with swords for this run, now lets take Nameless Sword and combine it with Dragon Sword to make Nameless Dragon Sword (patent pending).

Nameless Sword like most legendary Externals have 3 External Skill Effects, the first is a guaranteed crit if your main internal is legendary yang, which kind of sucks to be honest, the second is +80% damage if your sword stat reaches 200, and the third is +100% damage when equipped with a legendary sword. So from the 2nd and 3rd External skill effect you have +180% damage provided you meat the requirements.

With dragon sword, its first effect causes internal break (disables their internal) on the enemy for one turn if your main internal is legendary or above. The second causes Disable technique (disables their externals i think) for 1 turn If equipped with a legendary sword, the third is to increase your damage by 1% for ever 2 points that your sword stat is higher than your enemies up to 180% max or 230% if you have a specific weapon equipped.

So Nameless Dragon Sword (patent pending) will have higher stats all around than its ingredients, have a greater area of effect/coverage and it will also inherit all of the previously mentioned
external skill effects, if you add them all together that is a potential +360% to +380% bonus damage while also applying two great debuffs on hit.

Now, notice the overlap in requirements, 2 effects require a legendary sword equipped 2 require a large sword stat and two require a legendary or above main internal. So here you have a great external art that requires minimal effort to maximise the damage and other effects.

When combing externals that belong to different weapon types. you just need to keep in mind the weapon type that you plan on using, so let us say you will be using fists, so for your first external you pick Breakthrough Fist for that sweet +60% damage when equipping an epic or higher grade fist weapon now add Cloud forest staff to the mix as it has +5% damage per 10 points of Propriety and +7% damage for every 10 points of benevolence, that is +50% and +70% at max, plus the 60% from breakthrough fist is +180% all up on the new external, Breaking Cloud Fist (patent pending).

Home-Brew Legendary Arts

When I first began experimenting with making my own legendary externals I was a bit disappointed as their power and external stats were a bit lower than regular ones, but after giving it a bit of thought I came to have the opinion that they are completely viable and quite comparable to regular legendary arts, there are several reasons for this.

First of all, the decrease in power is not very much, for swords it is a difference of 45 power, and the sword stat is only three points lower.

Second, it will have four additional effects as opposed to two, now granted it will probably take 3 effects to bring its damage bonus to the same level as some normal legendary arts, but lest us use
my Heavenly Cloud Sword (Heaven Sword + Cloud forest Staff) as an example, it will have 180% bonus damage and apply 15 points of internal injury to the enemy, the damage bonus alone is the same as Nameless Sword which is one of the better legendary sword arts, and its 15 points of internal injury only requires you to have a sword stat of 50+

Third, even if your home-brew legendary is slightly weaker than a regular legendary, it is still much better than an epic, you can consolidate some of your epic arts into legendary arts in order to tie you over until you are able to obtain something better.

Fourth, aside from fist, sword and blade the other weapon types tend to have a pretty underwhelming number of legendary arts, so if you wanted to go with daggers or spears or what have you without relying on perfect adaption, or simply wanted to give your companions some decent external arts, your home-brews are an excellent way to achieve that..

A quick mention regarding home-brew legendary internals, generally they are only good for the short term in order to boost your stats as the effects of a good legendary internal greatly surpasses that of any two epics. However a home-brewed medical internal could be good (for the stats, not as your active internal) if you want to run a healer companion as to my knowledge there are not any regular medical internals at legendary.
(someone please tell me I am wrong, followed by where to find one).

Now as far as making home-brew epics goes, it is simply not worth it, the additional effects on rare externals are simply too pathetic to allow them to compete with any half-decent epic external, and the stats and effects on the internals are just too poor.

Outro

OK, so just a few quick closing remarks.

First of all, it is actually possible to keep combining the same two legendary arts together over and over again for example after combining Nameless Sword and Dragon Sword simply remaster those arts on a character and then combine them again and then repeat the process as many times as desired., but please don't, just don't, or do because I won't judge you, because I won't even know you are doing it.

In future I may create a sort of home-brew recipe list complete with my patented names, or at least a list of notable arts that are great for combining with most other arts.

Lastly, just want to say thank you to anyone who makes use of this poor attempt at a guide, I hope you have found it at least somewhat helpful and i thank you for taking the time to read it.. On a side note, if you did read it and didn't find it even slightly helpful, I am not sorry for wasting your time, not even a little bit.

Kind Regards, Toriaz

[Urist Ozsitmafol]

Very helpful, thank you!

[aimi4s1]

sorry my bad.. need to have dlc..

[aimi4s1]

Im sorry, where can i create the home brew skill? ive lvl 5 stele but no cushion to click...

[Avenging Angel]

my Heavenly Cloud Sword (Heaven Sword + Cloud forest Staff) as an example, it will have 180% bonus damage and apply 15 points of internal injury to the enemy, the damage bonus alone is the same as Nameless Sword which is one of the better legendary sword arts, and its 15 points of internal injury only requires you to have a sword stat of 50+

Regarding this. Nameless Sword doesnt have a 180% multiplier but rather a 260% one

[Rancelot6969]

With people's palm, you can create top-grade external which give damage multiplier to two weapon skills since people's palm itself scales with fist. IDK how effective it is in free mode but you can get pretty high number of skills with effective learner perk. 110 to every weapon skill is kinda funny. the attack pattern don't get wider unlike most other external tho. i think the weapon skills gives you damage increase/reduction too(iirc max 4% increase to damage deal and max 8% decrease
to damage received or something) which it is kinda nice. i think specific external effect on top-grade still triggers if the internal is correct(which means limiting yourself with legendary internal i guess).

[McDawn]

I think it would be nice that the game limited players from combining the same manual over and over, basically I would find it fair that the original martial arts manual was destroyed in the combination.

[Toriaz]

Yeah, I am pretty sure that home-brews won't trigger any of the "requires x internal learned or if attacking with x external trigger x effects" same with events that trigger from having a specific art equipped.
Also, thanks for letting me know about the update, I will update my shiddy guide when I have some free time.

[mythvapor]

With the Aug 20th update, thankfully you don't need to save-scum anymore. You can choose which arts will be your main.

[mythvapor]

So for effects that requires specific base arts, I take it a home-brew made from the base arts won't cut it to fulfill the requirement? Example: Vairocana Godly Palm needing Holy Brahma Technique and Vairocana Solar Sutra as main internal to activate two of its effects. I'm assuming you can't home-brew Holy Brahma Technique and Vairocana Solar Sutra to activate the effects?

[Toriaz]

yeah, fists type attacks have all sorts of different area of effects, i think with the one-tile fist attacks you should still see an increase in the range that you can attack from, just that it will still only affect the one tile.