Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills TIER LIST
This Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills Tier List will help you figure out which SAS skills to prioritize in your fights so you can take down enemies fast.
If you’re playing Scarlet Nexus, you’re going to want to use your SAS skills as often as possible so you can take down enemies quickly and efficiently. While all the SAS skills are situationally useful, some are better than others. This Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills Tier List will help you decide which skills you want readily accessible and which you can shuffle off to page two of your setup.
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As with all tier lists, there is a little subjectivity when it comes to the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills. The purpose of this guide is to give you a general sense of which skills are the most useful. I have beaten the game twice and feel like I have a pretty good sense of which skills felt useful to me and which barely got any attention, but opinions may differ.
Without further ado, here is the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills tier list.
S Tier – Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills
Pyrokinesis
Pyrokinesis, which you get from Hanabi, is by far the most useful of the SAS skills. It’s a powerful damage increase and once you level up your relationship with Hanabi and unlock the Brain Map skill that refills SAS whenever you execute a Brain Crush, it lasts practically forever.
If you’re playing as Yuito, when Pyrokinesis gets to level 6, it unlocks a powerful flamethrower attack as a combo finisher, which is probably the single most OP skill available in Scarlet Nexus.
While it directly competes with Electrokinesis, Pyrokinesis is a dramatically bigger damage increase on both Yuito and Kasane, so unfortunately, Electrokinesis tends to lose out unless it’s situationally required or it’s the only one of the two skills available.
For all those reasons, Pyrokinesis is top tier when it comes to the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills.
A Tier – Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills
Hypervelocity
Hypervelocity essentially stops time, which allows you to navigate to an enemies’ weak point and attack it, even if that enemy has erratic behaviors or teleports. This makes Hypervelocity an incredibly useful ability that will get a lot of mileage over the course of a playthrough.
The only problem with Hypervelocity is that it only lasts long enough for about 1-2 combos. This weakness is mitigated in the late game by skills that increase the length of SAS skills as well as its level 6 bonus which refills the Hypervelocity SAS meter whenever you use psychokinesis.
One of the things that makes Hypervelocity so formidable is that there are a number of annoying bosses who teleport around or who are unaffected by hitstun, and Hypervelocity gives you an opportunity to wail on them undisturbed for as long as the skill lasts.
Definitely one of the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills.
Teleportation
Teleportation, which comes from Luka, is among the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills for similar reasons as Hypervelocity. With Teleportation active, your attacks teleport you to the targeted enemy, which allows you to stick on them even if they move around a lot or knock you away, which is a fairly constant annoyance in Scarlet Nexus.
The main reason why Teleportation is not as good as Hypervelocity is because it doesn’t give quite as much of a defensive bonus, as you’re still vulnerable to attacks. Still, Teleportation greatly improves your dodge skill and makes it much easier to avoid enemy attacks.
Teleportation also lasts a lot longer than Hypervelocity and, like Pyrokinesis, you can have it up pretty much constantly as long as you keep Brain Crushing enemies to refill your SAS gauge.
Duplication
Aside from Pyrokinesis, Duplication represents the biggest damage increase you can activate for your character. Not only that, unlike Pyrokinesis, it also dramatically improves the damage of your psychokinesis skills, first doubling the damage and then eventually tripling it.
When you first start the game and you can only have one SAS skill active at a time, Duplication is not as good as Pyrokinesis. Where it begins to really shine, though, is once you’ve unlocked the Brain Map skills that allow you to activate multiple SAS skills at once.
At that point, activating Pyrokinesis and Duplication together (and later on, Hypervelocity and Teleportation) will maximize your damage potential and turn your character into an unstoppable killing machine. Definitely one of the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills.
B Tier – Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills
Electrokinesis
Electrokinesis is good for many of the same reasons that Pyrokinesis is good. It increases your damage and it causes status effects. If you’re playing as Kasane it has the additional bonus of dramatically improving her secondary attack and transforming it from a single-target jump-back attack to an AoE electric blade storm that lingers in the area.
While it’s a great skill and a very noticeable upgrade over normal attacks, it’s just not as good as Pyrokinesis. The damage bonus is just not on the same level. So, even though it stuns enemies in addition to providing additional damage, since you can’t use Pyrokinesis and Electrokinesis together, you’re most likely going to opt for Pyrokinesis for the additional damage potential.
All that said, though, Electrokinesis remains one of the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills, especially during the mid-game as Kasane where Pyrokinesis is unavailable.
C Tier – Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills
Sclerokinesis
Sclerokinesis is good for one reason and one reason only: it nullifies hit stun. So as long as Sclerokinesis is active, you can attack an enemy without any concern for counter attacks.
The main problem with Sclerokinesis is that, like Hypervelocity, it doesn’t last very long. Not only that, you lose SAS gauge every time you get hit.
Still, especially on Yuito who has to put himself right in the face of every enemy, Sclerokinesis is often a go-to SAS skill to activate as you’re running in for your big combo. Once you get the Brain Map skills that allow you to activate multiple SAS skills at once, you’ll often throw Sclerokinesis on alongside Pyrokinesis, Teleportation, Duplication, etc, in order to get the most out of those other skills.
Clairvoyance
Clairvoyance is a situationally useful skill, and outside of those situations, it doesn’t really do much. Fortunately for the skill, those situations happen incredibly often, meaning you’re always going to want Clairvoyance available to execute when necessary.
Essentially, Clairvoyance reveals invisible enemies and shows you the real enemy whenever an enemy uses a duplication skill to clone itself. These invisibility and cloning skills are pretty common for enemies in most dungeons, so Clairvoyance sees a fair amount of use.
While it’s not one of the Scarlet Nexus best SAS skills, it is a skill that offers a decent amount of utility and solves problems no other skill solves.
Invisibility
Invisibility is alright when you first get it because it allows you to start fights by significantly reducing an enemies’ brain crush gauge. It also has situational utility later on where it allows you to approach long range enemies that activate invulnerable defenses at close range.
Unfortunately for Invisibility, its utility kind of wears off as the game goes on. Teleportation and Hypervelocity both share the same utility. Any enemy that is vulnerable to Invisibility can often be more easily destroyed with Teleportation and Hypervelocity, and often more efficiently. Invisibility will only let you backstab a single enemy; meanwhile, you can usually take down 2-3 enemies with a single activation of Teleportation/Hypervelocity.
The damage potential of Invisibility also starts to lose its appeal as the game goes on. While it does a significant amount of damage, it also takes quite a while to charge and slows down the pace of battle quite a bit. Usually, late game, it’s much more effective (and fun) to just repeatedly hit enemies with Pyrokinesis and Duplication active.
D Tier – Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills
Psychokinesis
You have 8 slots for SAS abilities in Scarlet Nexus and 9 SAS abilities total, which means you have to leave one off your bar. The one to leave off is probably either Invisibility or Psychokinesis.
Psychokinesis, don’t get me wrong, is a powerful skill. It essentially extends your natural psychokinesis ability to affect every object in the surrounding area, which can deliver an extremely high amount of damage. The problem with it is that it takes forever to cast, it can only be used once per activation, and if you get hit while you’re charging it, you have to start all over. Additionally, there are multiple bosses that straight up dodge psychokinesis attacks, including the final boss.
Hitstun and interruption are constant issues throughout Scarlet Nexus. Little annoying enemies are constantly hitting you with weak attacks that interrupt your combos and cause hitstun, and Psychokinesis doesn’t benefit from existing in a game where that amount of hitstun is so prevalent.
If you do manage to get off a Psychokinesis attack (it’s not that hard, but it tends to be annoying), the damage, while impressive, is usually still not as good as if you had just spent the same amount of time smacking an enemy in the face with Pyrokinesis empowered normal attacks.
That about covers it when it comes to the Scarlet Nexus Best SAS Skills Tier List. Be sure to check out the main page for more RPG game guides. Check out the Scarlet Nexus section for more guides for this game. Click here for my full review of Scarlet Nexus on my YouTube channel.
