To unlock Infinite Arhat: Kill Sima Ying, last boss of Chapter 2

This guide is for [Sword Rain], currently. Sun Piercer might get added if I ever find a build that's worth the extra effort.

Infinite Arhat can rapid-fire Flying Swords by holding down the ranged attack button.

Any sect can rapid-fire melee attacks by holding down the melee attack button.

Now here's the kicker: You can do both at the same time. And you can also flicker while you do it.

You can do <20m White Ash clears without melee-attacking even once, so your top priority should be surviving. Don't waste your health/gourds unless you're confident you won't be needing them for the boss.

That said, some bosses, like Lu(CH1) or Zhao(CH3) have phases where it's very easy to melee them without getting hit.

In the Gap Pawn Shop, you might be tempted to focus on the red (Death) upgrades first, but the yellow (Forge) upgrades make you a LOT more likely to get a strong build going, so I suggest you focus on it first. Here are the must-picks, in order of availability:

Elixir Distill: For those wondering, Elixir means RELIC. You can "recycle" a relic on the ground and gain 1% HP or ATK from it. This is awesome and gets even better.

Heal Distill: Helps you keep up with chip damage and save your gourds for bosses. Also means you can focus on damage/utility tomes/relics.

Reserve Elixir: Random relic starting out, very good. Two important tips, 1- The quality is determined by the difficulty setting, so you should always restart @ White Ash, even if you're going into Nightmare mode. 2- You can press ESC and Restart the game until you get a relic you want.

Phoenix Spirit: Decent relic for Core/Power slots, that gets stronger with every distill.

Efficiency Distill: Gives chance to get 2% instead of 1% stats on each distill. Can go up to 100% chance.

Master of Elixirs: Lets you choose the stat you want to increase on distill. All aboard the MAX ATTACK train, baby!

Crazy Luck: More legendary relics, including starter relic.

Study: You get to re-roll Sect Tome choices, once per tome. Absolutely priceless.

Relic Mimicry: The best. This is what we're truly after. Lets you pick a legendary relic from the relic book at the start.

Tome Remnant: Free tome after you pick your sect. Second-best upgrade.

So after you got everything on the list, you can either:

Make your way back to the red(Death) tree, focus on the right+center paths, ranged/sheath upgrades.

-or-

Put 4-7 points on green(Life) for extra gourds

By the time you unlock White Ash, you should already have unlocked all of the Forge tree and part of the other two trees.

Meaning you'll be starting off with a RESERVE ELIXIR which appears on the ground, and a legendary RELIC MIMICRY that you pick out of the relic-book.


RESERVE ELIXIR (ground relic starter)

The ground starter relic can come in either Epic or Legendary quality, as long as you're on White Ash difficulty when you restart.

Keep restarting until you get one you're comfortable with. My picks are as follows, in order of preference.

S-Tier
Yellow Charm (Skill) <- Best in slot, priority
Millenium Ice (Core)
Ink Fire Crystal (Power)
Mechanical Nozzle (Power, Core, Skill)
Mechanical Casing (Power, Core) <- It's a crutch for learning and doing difficult challenges, avoid as you get better

A-Tier
Phoenix Spirit (Power, Core) <- Becomes S-tier if you find it mid/late game with a bunch of distills
Hydrargyrum (Core)
Ambrosia (Skill)
Heart of Hatred (Skill)
Berserker Blood (Core)
Blood Fungus (Core, Skill)
Thunder Stone (Core)
Spirit Jade (Core, Skill)
Lightning Lock (Power)

The fear/doom/bleed/poison relics are ok, but not usually worth the extra hassle to build around them.


RELIC MIMICRY (relic-book starter):

Windchaser Herb (WCH) should be your relic-book starter legendary. We're saving the book legendary for WCH for 3 reasons, 1- It has to be legendary for the Sheath reset, 2- Starting without it is awful, and 3- You're extremely unlikely to find a better option for the Agility slot.

If you got lucky and found a legendary WCH from the ground starter, then pick Yellow Charm as your relic-book starter.

WCH + Yellow Charm is usually enough to carry you through the game, even if you don't get particularly good rewards along the way.

WCH goes on Agility slot, meaning you'll be flickering around constantly and resetting your [Sword Fairy] like an airborne gatling gun that fires swords. This will improve your [Sword Fairy] uptime drastically, allowing you to keep firing >90% of the time from the get go. It takes one or two upgrades to make it reliably 100%, but we'll get to that later.

WCH on Power slot would work too, but it's less reliable, and the Power slot has much better alternatives than the Agility slot.


TARGET BUILD

Your late-game relics should look something like this:

Millenium Ice (Core)
Ink Fire Crystal (Power)
Windchaser Herb (Agility)
Yellow Charm (Skill)

As long as you have a Yellow Charm, the other two damage relics can be substituted with Tricolor Crystals. If you don't have YC, you can sub the missing ones with Mechanical Nozzles, or something slot-appropriate from A-tier.


SEALING RELICS

At some point you will gain the ability to SEAL relics and excaliburs at the cost of 5 red crystals each.

Sealed items don't appear in your games any more. Once enabled, you can toggle the seal on or off, for each item.

You can only have a maximum of 26 relics and 26 excaliburs sealed at any given time.

This is my relic seal list, still a work in progress:

STATS:

The first stat type on every Excalibur is fixed. The value changes, and has higher numbers on higher rarity versions of the same Excalibur.

Also, in my experience, the other stats are random, but tend to go in the same direction. So an Excalibur with a melee first stat is more likely to have other melee stats. [Unclear, needs more testing]

Once you get the ability to seal them, start sealing the ones with melee-only triggers and stats.



ABILITIES

Until you can find a Sudden Rain, the idea here is to pick something that either works with everything, or works with abilities that you're likely to pick regardless.

S-tier

Sudden Rain: Best Excalibur. Exclusive to Arhat sect. Sword meter becomes infinite, and [Sword Fairy] turns into a 100% damage buff while it's active.

A-tier

Trinity: Decent but not a reliable choice. I've yet to find one with worthy stats while I'm holding a Tricolor Crystal.

Truly Ordinary: Not much to see here.

Extermination: Pretty good ability, the skills are usually worth it on their own.

Butcher: Keeps a lot of the damage from Damnation, but gets rid of the defense penalty. Decent ability, but I keep finding them with melee stats.

Great Ancestor: Stacking damage bonus for each Common skill you get from Sect Tomes. In my experience you don't really get that many Commons in any given run, especially after you unlock the ability to re-roll tomes.

Hawkeye: Same issue as above, but it also benefits Unerring Aim which is pretty decent, albeit rare.

This one is a pretty big list, so I'm also going best to worst.


S-tier

Damnation(R): Just pick it. If you're afraid of the penalty, just get a Mechanical Casing.

Many Souls(R): Damnation's safer cousin. Limit's 300% @ 12k, a lot easier to reach in higher difficulties and active challenges. Excalibur with blue gem bonuses helps a ton.

Arc Light Blade(R): Strong, scales with Sheath cooldown.

Unerring Aim(R): Very strong and straightforward.

Piercing Blade(U): Best uncommon. Makes non-boss levels a breeze.

Fearless Warrior(R): A very big stat-stick.

Warrior Born(U): Huge bonus, not hard to maintain.

Escalation(U): Stacks quickly, melts bosses.

Fleet of Foot(U): Pretty good, especially when you're still getting used to the Arhat playstyle.

Composure(U): Solid boost, easy to maintain.

Berserk(C): Solid boost. Stacks quickly.

Erratic (U): Good, tends to get better late game as bonuses pile up.


A-tier

Sword Mastery(C): Decent boost for a common.

Critical Strike(C): Same.

Sword God(R): Very good early/mid game. Tends to get trivialized by Sheath cooldown reduction.

Blademaster(U): Decent, but becomes a wasted skill after you get Sudden Rain, or a bit of Sheath cooldown reduction.

Minor stat bonuses(C): Only pick if you can't reroll.

I'm going to wrap it up for now, let me know in the comments if you have any doubts or suggestions, I'll edit as we go along.

Disclaimer: The rankings are just from personal experience, not everything has been thoroughly tested/calculated. I'm interested in seeing where people disagree. I didn't list B or C tiers because frankly, I just reroll/seal most of the stuff I didn't mention, and it's just going to clutter the guide.

Thanks for reading!