Nioh 3 patch finally makes summons useful in boss fights, brings free armour for everyone

Team Ninja continues to work on Nioh 3. The developer has been releasing regular updates for the action RPG since its launch in early February. Earlier patches have addressed major bugs like healing item use inconsistencies, and more have arrived since to tackle various balance and loot-related issues.

Today’s patch, version 1.04, is a major one, coming in at well over 1GB. There’s plenty here worth getting excited about, so let’s dig in.

To begin with, this is the patch that adds the promised free armour sets for both Ninja, and Samurai. When Nioh 3 reached one million sales, Team Ninja said it would gift every player the Thunderous set in celebration, and the set’s two variants are now available in-game.

The more interesting side of the patch is, unsurprisingly, its change log. There appears to be a focus on online co-op and AI summons in this one, with various tweaks to the make the process more rewarding, and, in some cases, worthwhile.

The amount of Glory obtained when you complete a mission in multiplayer has been increased, regardless of which player was the host. The other major change mainly affects AI Benevolent Grave summons, making it so bosses will no longer target a single player for almost the entirety of the fight.

While summoning AI helpers has always been useful in Nioh 3, they didn’t always help in boss fights, specifically because the boss tended to focus on the player who summoned them, leaving the AI to run around eating AoE hits before dying.

Patch 1.04 makes a couple of welcome gameplay tweaks to the feel of combat. Ninjutsu, and Onmyo Magic will now hit their targets more consistently in situations where there’s a difference in elevation between the player and the enemy.

In the same vein, you’ll now be able to attack (quick/strong) right after jumping, which removes the pause that previously buffered the attack instead. This could mean even more air combos that don’t specifically require Martial Arts.

You can look forward to a couple of quality of life tweaks in this patch, too, such as the change that allows the game to automatically send any Sudama Soul Cores dropped by merchants to your item box. This happens from the second one onwards, which means you won’t have to pick half a dozen each time you go to sell a batch of items.

Speaking of the item box, the limit of forging materials has been increased for some of them. If you’ve been running Battle Scroll missions and Expeditions for gear, you’ll be happy to know that you can now exit the session from the main menu directly.

There’s plenty more to patch 1.04, including fixes and balance tweaks for several weapons, such as Samurai dual swords, odachi, and more for a few Ninja weapons, too. The patch also brings several bug fixes to the game.

You can read the full set of patch notes on Steam.