If you’re playing through Persona 5, you’ve probably heard that Yoshitsune is arguably the best Persona in the game. Everyone agrees you need to have Hassou Tobi, but beyond that, what skills do you want to put on your Yoshitsune to make the ultimate Persona in Persona 5? This guide will tell you all you need to know.
There are two schools of thought for building Yoshitsune. The first is to slap as many elemental repels and drains as possible on him to make you immune to all damage types except guns. The second is to put on Ali Dance and Angelic Grace is boost your dodge to insane levels and then focus on passive abilities.
Here are the skills you that you might want to utilize:
Apt Pupil, which increases Critical Hit rate.
Arms Master, which halves HP cost from physical skills.
Drain Ice, which makes Ice attacks heal you.
Drain Wind, which makes Wind attacks heal you.
Drain Psy, which makes Psychic attacks heal you.
Drain Nuke, which makes Nuke attacks heal you.
Repel Curse, which reflects Curse attacks.
Ali Dance, which reduces enemy accuracy by 50%.
Angelic Grace, which increases dodge chance by 50%.
Auto-Mataru, which automatically increases the party’s attack at the start of battle.
Auto-Maraku, which automatically increases the party’s defense at the start of battle.
Auto-Masuku, which automatically increases the party’s speed at the start of battle.
Regenerate 3, which restores 6% of max HP at the start of each turn.
Charge, which increases damage by 2.5x for one attack.
Victory Cry, which refills health and SP after every battle.
Now, not every skill is created equal. Out of all the skills in the game, those are the ones you may want to consider. Among those, there are a few that you’ll definitely want.
Those are: Arms Master and Repel Curse.
The reason these two skills are the most desirable are because Hassou Tobi eats up a ton of HP, so cutting that in half is worthwhile; and Repel Curse makes you immune to instant death skills which you definitely want, since getting hit with one is game over.
That leaves you with 5 slots. If you add in all four drain skills, you’ll have one slot left and you’ll be immune to everything except gun, which enemies almost never use. If you go with Ali Dance & Angelic Grace, you’ll dodge like 90% of the time and you’ll have 3 free open slots. So, circling back to those two different approaches to building Yoshitsune that I talked about in the beginning, here are your options:
Hassou Tobi
Arms Master
Drain Ice
Drain Wind
Drain Psy
Drain Nuke
Repel Curse
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OR
Hassou Tobi
Arms Master
Angelic Grace
Ali Dance
Repel Curse
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So, the question you want to ask yourself is what do you really even want in those other slots? Let’s go through your options here:
Apt Pupil is great for trash but doesn’t work on bosses, because you can’t crit bosses. Since by the time you have Yoshitsune, you also probably have a Victory Cry Persona for clearing trash, your Yoshitsune is most likely a boss killer and thus, Apt Pupil is not very useful. However, if you want your Yoshitsune to be your Victory Cry persona (which is not ideal), go with Angelic Grace + Ali Dance so you can have 2 slots of Apt Pupil + Victory Cry.
The Auto stat boosting skills. These are great skills, but there’s absolutely no reason you can’t have them on another Persona and then just switch to Yoshitsune on your first turn. I recommend you have these on your trash killing Persona for convenience, and you’d also want Victory Cry on that Persona, but that’d take up more slots than you have available even in the Ali Dance build.
Regenerate 3 is moderately useful only because it offsets the cost of using Hassou Tobi every round, but using a whole skillslot to save you the trouble of having Makoto or Morgana cast a heal spell every like… 10 rounds is not very worthwhile. Still, what you’re going to find by the end of this section is none of the skills are particularly useful so at least Regenerate 3 provides some utility.
Charge is absolutely necessary for a truly devastating Yoshitsune, but you can easily have it on a dedicated support Persona that you switch to. Still, that’s a little inconvenient and it means you’re lowering your defenses every time you need to cast charge, so having it on Yoshitsune does provide some convenience.
Victory Cry, which I covered above when talking about Apt Pupil.
As you can see, your options aren’t… great. Ali Dance is a little nice purely because it helps out your whole team, so you might consider putting that on there even in the build where you’re immune to all damage.
Here’s what I’d recommend:
Hassou Tobi
Charge
Arms Master
Drain Ice
Drain Wind
Drain Psy
Drain Nuke
Repel Curse
This is the classic OP Yoshitsune build. This thing stomps the game. Nothing can touch you and Hassou Tobi eats through every boss and random encounter like butter. It’s hard to imagine better skills for Yoshitsune in Persona 5.
The alternative build would be this:
Hassou Tobi
Arms Master
Ali Dance
Angelic Grace
Auto-Mataru
Auto-Maraku
Auto-Masuku
Victory Cry
It’s still an incredibly good boss-killer, but you can also use it to plow through every encounter. The first build is better, though, if I’m being honest. Here’s the problem with using Yoshitsune as your random encounter Persona: lots of monsters reflect physical skills. This won’t kill you, since Yoshitsune also nullifies physical damage. But you’ll have to switch to another Persona. Which means you need another Persona for random encounters anyway, and that Persona usually runs Megalodaon, which can’t be resisted by any enemies.
So, in conclusion, go with the full immunity build.
That about does it for the best skills for Yoshitsune in Persona 5. Be sure to check the Games Section for more content like this, and click here for more game guides related to Persona 5.
