Summary
Nunholy is an indie roguelike that combines the three virtues of hot nuns,heavy metaland hardcore violence. The game focuses on a trio of nuns determined to take down a vampire queen, with an undead army in their way. This game wears its Hades and Vampire Survivors influence on its sleeve.
Besides the weapons and skills, each nun can gain passive abilities and one ultimate attack over the course of a run. You have to pick the best ones to make it through the game, as dying sends you back to the start with all your abilities erased. Here are the ones you should invest in most.
Leveling up abilities requires you to either absorb Bloodstones or receive a Moonlight Blessing.
8Blood Moon
Near the start of each run, you’ll be given access to a Moonlight Blessing: this assigns you your ultimate ability for the run. Ultimate abilities are charged up with your regular attacks and act as a devastating skill that can clear hordes of enemies.
If you’renew to roguelikesand playing with Preiya, you should make a dash for the Blood Moon ability. Similarly to the Spinning Slash, this ultimate ability creates a boomerang that inflicts AoE damage to all enemies in front of you. It has a long range, and rebounds to hurt enemies even more.
7Blood Power Boost
There are four types of damage in Nunholy: physical, fire, blood and holy. Blood damage is the second most useful one after fire, as it makes enemies bleed and lose additional HP with each subsequent attack.
The Blood Power Boost ability makes bleeding damage increase by 25 percent to start with, and you can boost this rate even more as you level it up. If you’re willing to focus on bleeding attacks, Blood Power Boost should be in your arsenal as soon as possible. If it bleeds, you can kill it.
Bleeding damage does not stack like burn damage, but a singular instance of bleeding can last longer.
6Bat Swarm
Despite its twin-stick shooter appearance, Nunholy doesn’t really let you control the direction of attacks independently of movement. As you’ll spend a lot of time dodging and stacking invincibility frames against crowds of enemies, any attack that isn’t influenced by your nun’s direction is a boon.
Enter Bat Swarm, an ultimate ability that creates a horde of bats that attack enemies. Bat Swarm is an active ability and a very useful one: use it to deal with enemy crowds from a safe distance. In case your wondering, the nuns you control arehalf-vampires themselves, so using bats isn’t too out there.
5Bloody Strike
If you’re intending to rely on bleeding damage, you’ll find that you’re able to’t do that with your weapons alone. Your weapons can be physical, fire-based or holy, but no weapon makes enemies bleed directly. Instead, you need a passive ability like Bloody Strike.
When you attack with your main weapon, Bloody Strike creates an additional slash that can cause enemies to bleed. Now, stack that on top of another passive ability like Blood Power Boost, and you’re doing numbers. You can level this ability up to make the initial bleeding damage even higher.
4Bloodstorm
The most versatile ultimate ability, Bloodstorm is priceless due to its AoE attack and invincibility frames. In Nunholy, the real threat isn’t the boss enemies who clearly telegraph their attacks and are easy to dodge. It’s the low-level mooks that can overwhelm you through sheer numbers when the action gets too hectic for you to see your character properly.
That’s where the Bloodstorm ability comes in clutch. When this activates, you can steamroll your way through crowds with ease. You can increase its duration - and thus your invincibility frames - by leveling up this ability.
The only other instance of invincibility frames in the game is for a short time while dashing.
3Survival Instinct
Later bosses in Nunholy deal high damage, which can make even one missed dodge very costly. If you level up the survival instinct ability appropriately, however, you have nothing to fear. Survival Instinct permanently caps the damage a single attack can inflict on you.
While it starts at 32 HP, each subsequent leveling of this passive ability reduces the amount of damage an attack can do to you. If you invest in this ability throughout your run, no boss will be able to hurt you.
2Corpse Explosion
Nunholy isn’t so much about direct damage:it’s about dodgingand letting bonus damage take care of things for you. Corpse Explosion is one of the most useful abilities for this: every enemy you kill creates a small AoE effect that can damage other enemies.
With most of your combat focusing on crowd control, Corpse Explosion quickly becomes a boon because of the ripple effect killing just one enemy can create. Combine that with fire and bleeding damage to begin a feedback loop of death for the undead.
1Sharpshooter Miniette’s Legacy
Every time you take down a boss in Nunholy, you’ll be awarded a Legacy of the Martyrs ability, ostensibly a special bonus passed down from previous vampire hunters. As Preiya, you should make a beeline for Sharpshooter Miniette’s Legacy.
Preiya’s sub-weapon is powerful and does bonus damage, but has only two bullets. Reloading it is a long and arduous process of waiting and dodging, or relying on your melee attacks to speed up the charge. Sharpshooter Miniette’s Legacy gives your sub-weapon the chance to reload instantly when it fires.
In our experience, the RNG for an instant reload is reset every time the weapon is fired, but is capped at four continuous shots.
