I like to do a short introduction section to help people figure out whether my guides are worth reading or not. In this case, this guide is worth reading if you recently finished the game or if you're playing through the game and feel like you want that extra edge against some of the harder enemies. As you go through this guide, I recommend you avoid trying to learn everything at once, but instead focus on one technique at a time. Learning one trick, practicing with it during actual gameplay (either levels or Cybergrind), and then moving to the next one will give you much better results than half-learning all of them and implementing none.

This guide assumes you have all five weapons, all three arms, and all three alternate weapon versions. My load out typically looks like the following list (in order), but you're welcome to build your load out as you see fit. On certain techniques I'll also point out when they determine my weapon order, as that is the case in multiple areas.
Slot 1: Alternate piercer, alternate sharpshooter, default marksman
Slot 2: Default core eject, default pump, alternate sawed-on
Slot 3: Alternate attractor, alternate overheat, default jumpstart
Slot 4: Electric, malicious, screwdriver
Slot 5: Freezeframe, SRS cannon, firestarter

There are several skills to know with the revolvers and revolvers tend to be my most-used weapon for their sheer reliability. I use the alternate versions as often as I can, as they can one-shot several weaker enemies without needing good aim, but I use the default marksman revolver for its ability to split coins.

The first and most basic skill to learn is called splitshotting or splitcoining. To perform a splitshot, shoot a coin in a timing window after throwing it, specifically the timing window where the glint (shown below) is visible. This will cause the coin to split in two, effectively doubling its effectiveness. I most often use this when dealing with swarms or drones, soldiers, strays, or streetcleaners.

Bonus tech: Streetcleaners have fuel tanks on their backs that are targeted by coins. I typically kill streetcleaners by throwing a coin while walking backward and shooting during the splitshot window for an instakill.

This is the last revolver tech I'll mention that relies only on one weapon variant but it's an extremely powerful tool. By shooting some of the first few red orbs in a malicious face projectile burst, the last few will be sent back to it by the explosion, typically resulting in an instakill. For this one, remember that the projectiles come from his mouth, so aim there while holding alt fire and release as soon as you see red. This is one of the reasons I use the alternate sharpshooter, the faster spin up time makes these instakills easier and more fluid in regular gameplay. As a bonus, you can also perform a chargeback by throwing a coin into his malicious beam attack, though almost nobody does this in regular combat. I do this by aiming below the face while standing somewhat near it and throwing the coin as soon as I see the parry flash.

The alternate revolver is often called the slab revolver (I have no idea why) and the alternate piercer is used for this technique. The most popular boss fight openers are saw traps and slabcoins. To perform a slab coin, jump in the air and throw all four coins straight up. Then, as quickly as you can, charge up and fire the alt fire of the alternate piercer for a ton of damage. Try to throw coins while moving upward before the peak of your jump to allow yourself the largest timing window. This is the reason I have the marksman in the third position on my pistol slot, so that I can switch to the piercer with only one button press.

Railcoins and coin adds are techniques I almost never use, but I highly recommend them anyway. The railcannon acts exactly like the revolvers do when shooting coins (except no splitshots) and these techniques rely on coin targetting priority. In short, when a coin is shot the bullet will look for another coin before looking for an enemy. The railcannon is infinitely piercing, so by throwing coins on either side of an enemy you can make the railcannon go through that enemy multiple times. Coin adding works similarly, except the goal of coin adding is to throw coins directly inside the enemy's hitbox so the raincannon shot is guaranteed to stay in. There are several of these to know and they all need a little practice, so I recommend a you watch the following video (around 10:38) for a better tutorial there. It's not my video, but I can't fully explain railcoining without showing you.

Shotguns are maybe the most versatile weapon in the game, especially with a hard-hitting alternate version. Shotguns are home to several instakills and quick kills, as well as some more basic tech that can be applied anywhere.

You can parry your own shotgun pellets. This is a tip shown on one of the Prelude terminals, but most people ignore it thinking the terminal is talking about enemy shotguns only, so I need to be absolutely sure you know how to do it. Press the parry button immediately after firing, this will create an explosive pellet centered on your cross hair, making it not subject to pellet spread RNG. This is a great way to deal with groups of filth or strays that are far away. Also, you can parry your chainsaw from the sawed-on shotgun, which is more powerful than it sounds, try it out on some tanky enemies sometime.

With the core eject shotgun, you can launch your core into a group of enemies for some decent explosion radius and damage. By shooting this core early using a pistol, it will explode for more damage and size, however shooting it with a malicious railcannon will cause a massive explosion. This is the biggest non-environmental explosion in the game and is called a core nuke. It's worth practicing, but you can throw a coin and shoot that coin to redirect your railcannon toward the core if you're struggling with the aim, just know the timing on this is WAY more strict and nobody does it this way.

When you overpump a pump shotgun, it turns into an explosion that deals a lot of damage to yourself and enemies, however this can be avoided using the immunity frames of a dash. Dash immediately after shooting, almost at the same time even, and you can get enough free damage to instakill a virtue.

I love the jackhammer and it works extremely well with whiplash. Whiplash, however, only gets up to the yellow bar for damage, so the tech here is to cancel the whiplash by either clicking the button again or punching right before reaching an enemy in order to get enough speed for the red bar. This allows for more damage in the hit, enough to instakill several enemies (including a malicious face) but causes the weapon to overheat temporarily. For an instakill, I feel an overheat is a small price, since that only means you do damage with your other weapons in the downtime, I treat it like a railcannon.

Full honesty here, I almost never use the nailgun. The only tech worth doing is overheat swapping, but even that gets outclassed by so many things. This section will focus on saw traps and conduction instead, as those are far more common.

Put down a magnet, shoot some saws at it. This will create what's called a saw trap and is practically a blood fountain. It's almost always worth having one of these up. For large bosses you can stick the magnet directly to them, for grounded bosses like V2 you can do a regular trap and hang out around it during combat, Gabriel is really the only boss that is a pain to hit with these. Something you can do to boost these even more is to put an overheat saw in the saw trap. The best way to do this is by putting down the magnet, shooting some regular saws from the attractor saw blade launcher, and then (without releasing left click) swapping to the overheat launcher to do the alt fire and shoot the overheat saw blade. I use these constantly, but they give very little style so be careful when going for P ranks. This is also why I have the attractor before the overheat when ordering the saw blade launchers.

Again, you'll need a YouTube video for this one, so I put it below here. The short version is that a conductive enemy gives off an electric charge to all grounded enemies, shocking them for some damage. Magnets can extend the range of this and it works in water too. A conductive enemy is an enemy stuck with either nails or a magnet or an enemy that's underwater. The easiest way to perform conduction is to shoot some nails into an enemy and then electrify it with either the jumpstart nailgun or the electric railcannon. For the electric railcannon, conduction occurs when you hit the conductive enemy, for the jumpstart nailgun, it occurs after having the cable on the enemy for five seconds or when you kill the enemy, whichever is first. I usually use conduction by shooting the electric railcannon underwater (in 5-1) or by sticking the jumpstart cable into an enemy and shooting it with nails until it dies, however you can take out entire Cyber Grind waves with conduction if you're good at it.

For this quick kill you have three steps: stick the jumpstart cable to the chest, stick the magnet to the chest, and shoot some saw blades. Be quick if you can and try to get the magnet level with the mass's arms so the saws hit more times. If the mass is in scorpion mode, you can attach the cable to its tail, the magnet to its head or torso area, or even the ground, and then shoot for a similar effect. This is why I have the jumpstart nailgun in third position, so I can switch to the attractor in one button press for hideous masses.

You already saw railcoining and core nukes, so there's nothing to add for this section. You may like to know that the screwdriver stops mindflayers from teleporting, which can be helpful. Additionally, you can parry a screwdriver out of an enemy, which sends it in the direction you're looking and can stick to a second enemy. This does some neat damage, but is generally seen as a bad thing because it can block you when you try to parry that first enemy and it usually loses your screwdriver instead of sending it to another enemy, so watch out for that.

Rocket launchers are home to the best movement in the game, some boss prep, and a few good instakills. There's also that one thing with tripping gutter tanks, but it's honestly not helpful so don't worry about it.

The SRS cannon fires a cannonball with two notable features: you can parry it and it doesn't break on the first hit (when unparried). Most of the time you see this weapon used, it'll be for instakilling a cerberus, sentry, or virtue. This is typically done by getting very close to one of those enemies, charging up a cannonball, releasing the cannonball, and then quickly parrying the cannonball after it fires. The timing here is similar to that of the overpump dash, but much more forgiving. Additionally, if you're far away you can launch the cannonball, whiplash it toward yourself, and then parry it back at the enemy for that second hit. The instakill comes from getting two hits from one cannonball, the parry itself isn't enough. Practice with blind enemies in the sandbox until you understand the timing and then start using it in game. If you miss the parry, you can always shoot the cannonball with a revolver for the explosion instead, though this won't instakill.

This is the best movement tech in the game when mastered, but for now we'll start out slow. To perform a basic rocket ride, look in the direction you want to go, freeze (right click), shoot, and jump. This will take about five seconds to perform but will get you riding your first rocket. From here there are some optimizations to make. To speed up this basic rocket ride, you'll want to minimize your air time by slamming onto the rocket right after jumping. You'll also want the rocket to move as soon as you're on it, so right click again to unfreeze the rocket. Your new button combo is freeze, shoot, jump, slam, unfreeze. This can go as fast as your hands can and you can even do this while riding a rocket to start riding a fresh one as the first one is running out of fuel. Steer with movement keys for even more mobility.

From here there are a couple more rocket riding methods, one is to shoot and then whiplash a rocket while you're falling (if you're not falling, do a dash before doing this to halt upward momentum) and the other is fast rocket riding. To perform fast rocket riding, look about 20 degrees below level (not as precise as it sounds, I'm just giving you the center of the window), freeze, dash, shoot, and unfreeze. The timing is tough but very rewarding and quite consistent. The dash fixes your momentum so you need to shoot the rocket while you're moving through the dash, I shoot immediately after pressing the dash button, similar timing to the overpump dash except reversed button inputs. The unfreeze is also similar timing, but a tiny bit slower to allow yourself to exit the dash and fall for a brief moment. If timed right, the rocket will scoop you up from behind and you'll be riding a rocket mostly horizontal, which is one of the reasons this is favored over shooting below you and whiplashing the rocket toward yourself. It's hard and takes a lot of practice, but is extremely worth it and is mandatory for high Cybergrind rounds. Here's the video that taught me how to do it:

One thing you've probably noticed is that rocket explosions are only damaging if they hit an enemy or if the rocket was shot, which means you can rocket jump. This is most often done for quick horizontal momentum when you don't want to waste a dash. The real star of the show is that rockets cause red explosions when hitting airborne enemies. This is tricky to do on its own, I rarely use it myself, but enemies affected by whiplash are considered airborne and can be used for red explosions. Whiplash an enemy and shoot a rocket at the same time for a free red explosion.

First off, here's a few parries that I constantly forget about that hopefully you don't forget too:

• Filth bite attack
  
• Malicious face charging up its beam
  
• Virtue charging up its beam
  
• Sentry charging up its shot
  
• Drone that died and is spinning toward you
  
• Cerberus apple

Find the tallest wall you can for this, it's easier to learn that way. To perform a slam storage, jump and move toward a wall, once you hear that scraping sound you're ready to go. Press your slam button and then your jump button. This will cause you to have the slam lines (those vertical yellow lines that appear around you while slamming) while in free fall. As soon as you land jump off the ground for a ton of height. You can also slide jump as soon as you hit the ground for a ton of horizontal speed, even more than what a dash jump would give you. For smaller walls or when starting from the height of a regular jump you'll need to press your slam and jump inputs at nearly the same time, but as long as you do the slam first you should be alright.

I remember hearing somewhere that diving is unintentional and a bug that might get removed, but for now it's in the game so it's fair game. I've never used it before, so I learned it in about 3 minutes just to write this part of the guide. Remember how jumping after a slam turns your downward speed into upward speed and sliding after a slam turns all your downward speed into horizontal speed? Diving gives you both, so it's not useful to do from a standstill but it's great to do after slam storage. The process is simple: jump and slide at the same time. If it helps you, think about doing the jump input one frame before the slide input, for some reason it doesn't work if you slide first. Here's the video I used to learn this.

Thanks for reading to the end. This is my second guide, but the first was a spoiler-free guide for getting all the weapons and unlocking the prime sanctums, so it was nice to be able to talk openly in this one. Since you read this far I'd love if you left a rating on this to let me know if it was useful, hopefully the videos helped on the more complicated topics. Have fun and enjoy the levels now that they'll be easy for you!