Best Equipment Engravings In Assassin’s Creed Shadows

You may be the greatest assassin or samurai in these lands, but in order to vanquish your enemies, you still need the right tools for the job. Assassin’s Creed Shadows offers you a variety of gear that, for the most part, isn’t super relevant. You can just upgrade the one you like the most, and it’ll be useful from level one to 60.

However, your weapons and armor may have engravings, and you can also add those to them. These engravings can make you hit harder, break armor, assassinate better, heal more, and other options, and unlike the base stats, these can change the game significantly. Thus, here are some recommendations for you.

7

Assassination Engravings

Many Options Here

Enemies’ health bars are divided into segments, and your assassination skills determine how many of these segments you can take away when assassinating someone. While you can upgrade how many segments you can take away by using your mastery points, you can stack a few extra health segments with engravings.

You have a generic engraving that takes an extra health segment with any type of assassination. Still, there are engravings for specific types of assassinations, such as double, air, assassinations while running, assassinations while on the ground, at night, hidden in the shadows, and even through your kunai. They can all stack with each other and with your mastery skills.

6

Healing Engravings

Take Care Of Yourself

Rations are what you use to heal yourself. There’s one problem, though; their healing is weak, to the point where you may need to use a couple of rations after a single hit. So, an engraving that increases the healing you get from rations by 20 percent is a nice bonus.

There are other engravings that heal you in small percentages when specific actions are performed. You can get healing by hitting enemies, killing them, dodging attacks, landing critical hits, or parrying attacks as well. See which of these things you do more often and let them heal you in battle.

Healing engravings are a fun mix with a special engraving Yasuke has that increases his damage by 75 percent at the cost of making his maximum health ridiculously low.

5

Armor Damage

Lots Of Folks Wear Armor These Days

To hit people’s health bar, you have to break their armor first. Similar to assassination engravings, you have a generic engraving that increases the damage you deal on armor by 20 percent, but there are other engravings that boost your damage under specific circumstances.

You have engravings that increase the damage based on consecutive hits, by hitting multiple people with the same attack (good for a kusarigama), or by how much adrenaline you have. If you stack some of these throughout your gear, you can easily break armor with one or two hits.

4

Decrease Cooldown From Ally Abilities

Let Them Help You More Often

Speaking of allies, some of them have powerful abilities, from helping with your assassinations to joining in combat. However, there’s a nasty cooldown after summoning them, which is annoying, to say the least.

Luckily, there’s an engraving that decreases the cooldown by a third, which might not sound much, but it is the best you’ll get with engravings. Still, being able to summon them faster is worth an engraving.

3

Parry Unblockable Attacks

A Yasuke Engraving

Yasuke is trained for combat, and to be fair, he’s a beast on the battlefield without any engravings already. But there’s nothing stopping you from making your enemies’ lives worse, so why not give yourself the ability to parry every attack?

Thanks to this one, you don’t need to worry about avoiding attacks; instead, you can plant yourself like a tree and prevent enemies from touching you. Add an engraving that damages enemies whenever you parry them, and they’ll stack up nicely, too.

2

Naoe’s Weapons

Fight Like A Shinobi

There are many engravings available for the weapons in the game, so we’re going to focus on our main recommendations for each. Starting with the assassin Naoe, she has at her disposal a katana, a tanto, and a kusarigama.

• Katana: Simple damage buffs against armor go a long way, but katanas have a powerful engraving that causes area-of-effect damage whenever you hit someone with an attack after a dodge. They also have a powerful engraving that causes a lot of damage to an attacker when you deflect their attacks.

• Kusarigama: The kusarigama is great for hitting multiple people at once, so any engraving that has an extra bonus when hitting multiple people with the same attack is welcome. That said, there’s a special engraving that quadruples the damage from making enemies collide with something when you pull them around with the chains, which is very handy.
• Tanto: We recommend extra damage to tagged enemies since tagging is an easy thing to do. You can also do the ones that increase damage on consecutive hits (the tanto causes little damage, so you’ll do multiple hits anyway) or the engraving that makes the Shadow Piercer ability deadlier by removing extra health segments.

Naoe also has a fun engraving where each attack has a three percent chance of taking a health segment. Three percent sounds like little, but because she causes little damage per hit, Naoe hits her enemies a lot of times, boosting the chance of triggering this engraving significantly.

1

Yasuke’s Weapons

Fight Like A Samurai

Yasuke packs a bit more heat compared to Naoe: You can use katanas, naginatas, kanabos, teppos, or bows – though you can only carry two weapons at a time. Still, all of these can be significantly improved.

• Long Katana: The engraving where Riposte leaves enemies vulnerable is very powerful, and you can finish someone quickly with it.
• Naginata: Defense is a good offense here. You can use an engraving that increases your damage for every attack you block before attacking, and you can also use another engraving by turning blocks against regular attacks into parries. Great for creating openings and striking back.
• Kanabo: Kanabos can turn enemies’ armor into a weapon against them, making them explode when destroyed. There’s also an engraving that makes your attacks immune to being interrupted, so you can strike people even if you’re hit.
• Bow: The best option for being stealthy as Yasuke. We recommend the engraving where shooting people on their legs knocks them down, since ground attacks cause massive damage. There’s also one that guarantees arrows when looting, so you always have ammo to spare.
• Teppo: The engraving for quick reload is a blessing since this gun can take a while to get ready. Ricochet bullets or firing multiple bullets at once is also nice, and there’s also an engraving where you can shoot twice before needing to reload.

Don’t forget, each gear can only have two engravings at a time, so you’ll have to choose which best suit your playstyle.