After a fairly lengthy intro in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, you will have access to both Naoe and Yasuke and can swap between the two as you please for the rest of the game. Your XP is shared between the two characters, but each one has their own skills to master and gear to equip. Naoe is more suited to sneaking and assassinating enemies without being detected, while Yasuke takes a more direct approach and is built for open combat. This means each one should be using the appropriate gear to support that playstyle. Weapons, armor, and trinkets are dumped on you for doing almost everything, which makes sorting through it all and finding the best gear a bit annoying. For Yasuke, these are the pieces of armor and weapons you should focus on getting.
Best Yasuke gear
Just like Naoe, Yasuke can hold two weapons, wear armor and headgear, plus equip a trinket.
Weapons
Yasuke’s long katana is his old reliable primary weapon, with the best of the best being Venom Pillar. This weapon allows you to instantly charge a posture attack without holding the button by swapping between light and heavy attacks. You should be doing this naturally for better combos, buit this makes his basic attacks even more lethal. If you add the engraving that prevents your attacks from being interrupted, you become unstoppable.
We like to give Yasuke a ranged weapon as a secondary, so we went with the Dragon’s Wrath bow. Thanks to the perk of instantly charging your arrow shots, you don’t have to slow down to whip this out in a fight.
Armor
If you are as aggressive with Yasuke as we like to be, the Defense Master Clothing is a must to keep yourself alive. This armor has the perk of restoring 10% of your HP when you land a hit after a parry. Yasuke already has a lot of HP restoring skills, so stacking this one on top is just one step closer to being unkillable. Just make sure you master the art of parrying.
Headgear
Sadly, even with all your skills and armor, sometimes you will get overwhelmed and taken down. The Samurai Daimyo Helmet of Legend is your get-out-of-jail-free card in that scenario since it gives you the Samurai Stand ability on death. This essentially gives you one free revival per battle.
Trinket
Yasuke’s trinkets aren’t especially powerful, so we just went with our most powerful one that buffed our stats for the Long Katana or increased our adrenaline gain so we could use our skills more frequently.