Tag: guides

“Heads Will Roll” is the final quest in the hunt for The Wounded, one of the targets in Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ main story questline. It ends with the assassination of Wada Koretake, and asks you to make a choice that could potentially anger Yaya, someone you can recruit as an ally.

In this Assassin’s Creed Shadows guide, we’ll walk you through how to complete the main “Heads Will Roll” quest and whether or not you should side with Yaya or Mitsumune when it comes to sparing or killing Nobunaga’s soldiers.

‘Heads Will Roll’ walkthrough in Assassin’s Creed Shadows

To start the quest, follow the marker on your map until you reach an Animus portal. Interact with it.

After a lengthy cutscene, you’ll be dropped into a castle to assassinate Koretake. Your allies will fight a battle against Koretake’s soldiers on the ground, and you’ll start on the rooftops with one goal: kill the snipers at the gates. You’ll get markers on your screen for the locations of all six of these snipers, so work your way across the castle rooftops and take them out.

While you can assassinate many of these snipers to instantly kill them, you don’t need to remain incognito to progress. Because they’re snipers, they’re pretty simple to fight, as they don’t really have any good close-range combat options. They’ll also be distracted by your allies, allowing you to sneak up on them.

Once you kill them all, head to the main courtyard, which has all the yellow flags and curtains. Stay on the rooftops to the left and watch for more archers and snipers.

How to assassinate Wada Koretake in ‘Heads Will Roll’

Climb along the rooftops to the back part of the courtyard, behind a small building that Wada Koretake walks up to and pauses at on his loop. Assassinate the snipers and scouts in the area to reduce the likelihood that you’ll get caught. Beware that a beefy castle guard tends to roam here even if you stay stealthy.

Once the enemies are taken care of, climb up the small building and perch on the point overlooking the courtyard. When Wada Koretake gets close enough, assassinate him from your perch. This will bring you into a cutscene that will end the mission and lead to a choice.

Should you side with Yaya or Mitsumune?

With Koretake dead, your allies have gathered all of his soldiers in the courtyard area. Mitsumune is looking to execute all of the soldiers, while Yaya and Kyonyo want to prove that they are different than Nobunaga and his goons.

Partway through the cutscene, you’ll get two dialogue options:

The game warns you that “this [choice] will impact Yaya,” but doesn’t give you any additional information. After playing the mission twice, we can tell you that Yaya wants the soldiers spared, and she’ll be pissed if you decide to support their execution. However, you won’t see how the decision impacts Yaya until later in the game — and it’s unclear how much of an impact it really makes, outside of her attitude in dialogue — though if you want to recruit her as an ally, go with “killing them isn’t justice.”

Regardless of your choice, Mitsumune and his goons will execute a soldier, and the cutscene will play out almost identically. The only difference is whether Yaya and Kyonyo blame you and Mitsumune, or just Mitsumune. Mitsumune is cold to you either way. Sparing the soldiers will make the fewest people mad at you — specifically Yaya, who is the only character the game explicitly calls out as being impacted by this choice long-term.

For more Assassin’s Creed Shadows guides, see our running lists of Lost Pages, Kuji-kiri, and armor locations. Or see our full Assassin’s Creed Shadows walkthrough, and our guides on how to get all companions and romance options.

The max level cap in Assassin’s Creed Shadows is so high you might not even need to worry about it.

In general, your level determines the equipment you can use, the in addition to the rating of your base stats, like health. The weapons and armor you find — plus the enemies you run into — will scale in level alongside Naoe and Yasuke. Thankfully, at least the two share experience points and level progress, so you only need to keep track of one experience meter!

Here’s what the max level cap is in Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and a rundown on what we learned during our playtime regarding leveling up.

What is the max level in Assassin’s Creed Shadows?

The max level cap in Assassin’s Creed Shadows appears to be 60, based on how Forge upgrades work at your Hideout.

You can upgrade rooms at your Hideout. As described in the game, when your Forge is upgraded to its highest rank, it allows you to upgrade weapons and armor to level 60, indicating that’s the highest level in the game. This number tracks contextually with how much of the game we’ve played so far, as of this writing, and is aligned with other players who’ve reported a similar max level.

Getting to level 60 is no small feat, though. After 62 hours, we’ve finished the main story, completed a bunch of optional activities (like Lost Pages and Kuji-kiri), and still only reached level 50. As a result, it stands to reason it’d take you a considerable amount of time to reach level 50. At this point, the regions have scaled to level 46, and equipment at level 51 and level 52 has started to appear.

By level 50, it takes around 18,000 experience points to level up. Naoe’s flat stats are 945 Health and 492 Attack Damage, while Yasuke’s are 2,211 Health and 985 Attack Damage. Moreover, equipped with a gear set and weapons around this level, Naoe reaches 3,947 Health and 1,969 Attack Damage, while Yasuke gets 9,104 Health and 3,784 Attack Damage.

So far, we’ve earned 294 mastery points, but this is also the result of a focus on clearing castles. Each castle features a number of Samurai Daisho; you’ll get one mastery points for every Samurai Daisho you assassinate. Because of that, the numbers may vary depending on how much time you spend clearing castles.

Completing castles is great for leveling up, though, since they generally give you a lot of experience (and, as a bonus, reward you with rare gear). But the biggest source of experience in the game is hunting all of the targets in one single board of your Objectives menu. Doing so involves completing a final quest. In the end, you may earn around 10,000 experience points.

But if you want some quick missions to complete and earn a little bit of experience, you should consider taking advantage of Contracts and Anomalies — not just for experience, but for bonus materials and mon as well.

Just starting Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Beyond our full Assassin’s Creed Shadows walkthrough, here are explainers on how long to beat the game and when you unlock Yasuke, plus if you should play canon, immersive, or guided exploration modes.