Other Gunfire Reborn Guides:

• Gunfire Reborn: Best Crown Prince Build
• Gunfire Reborn: Best Lei Luo Build
• Gunfire Reborn: Best Li Build
  
• Gunfire Reborn - Best Qing Yan Build
  
• Gunfire Reborn - Best Xing Zhe Build

Welcome to a guide on the rabbit hero in Gunfire Reborn, Tao! This guide will highlight a build focused on Swords Out. We'll discuss Tao's abilities and ascensions as well as the best weapons, occult scrolls, Gemini Inscriptions, and spiritual blessings for the build. Without further ado, let's get into the guide, starting with information about Tao as a hero!

How Do You Unlock Tao in Gunfire Reborn?

Tao is considered the fifth playable character in Gunfire Reborn. She can be unlocked by spending 400 Soul Essence. This may seem like a significant amount for newer players, and as such, she'll probably be one of the last heroes you get a chance to play, along with Qian Sui. This may be disappointing, but she's one of the more difficult characters to get the hang of, so it's worthwhile to work on other characters for a while first!

Active Abilities

Primary Ability

Swords Out is Tao's Primary Ability, summoning a barrage of flying swords that deal 200 damage each by default. These swords are summoned according to stacks of her Primary Skill (Blade Heart stacks), which are accumulated when you consume ammo. This makes fast-firing weapons particularly strong for Tao as they are able to consume ammo more quickly.

Secondary Ability

 Tao's Secondary Skill, Fatal Bloom, is an exploding flower petal that marks enemies and deals 400 damage. This 6-second mark can make enemies deal less damage, take more damage, or make your flying swords home in on them. However, these effects do not occur without particular ascensions. This skill also deals additional damage if you hit the marked enemy 12 times. This, like Swords Out, benefits from fast-firing weapons, making them far and away the best choices for this character overall.

Passive Abilities

Blade In Heart

Galloping Speed

Long-lasting Bloom

Superior Magazine

Resilient Shield

The Defensive Swords Out Build

Now, since we have a good idea of what Tao's kit looks like before you start a run, let's get into the weapons, scrolls, ascensions, and blessings for a powerful defensive build focused around Tao's Primary Skill, Swords Out! 

Weapons

Demonlore

While the Demonlore is far from the fastest-firing weapon in the Gunfire Reborn arsenal, it is fairly fast, and its overall damage output is practically unparalleled if you set up a no-reload synergy with Advanced Depot or Skateboarder. 

Laser Glove

As Tao's skills benefit greatly from using weapons with a high rate of fire, the injectors shine brightly. Of course, that's not to say they aren't good on other characters. Characters such as Li and Crown Prince love this weapon, too, for its good single-target damage, solid Burning potential, and great Gemini choices. It typically deals more damage than the Thunderclap Glove, which puts it ahead by just a hair.

Thunderclap Glove

The Thunderclap Glove is generally a worse version of the Laser Glove unless your build intends to spread Miasma, in which case the opposite is true. However, both weapons operate very similarly, and they are both great candidates for Elemental Effect Share, Magazine Share, and Spore Gemini combinations.

Rainbow

The Rainbow is another injector with a gargantuan fire rate and fair damage. However, this injector trades range for auto-targeting, with a beam that tracks enemies. You can also shoot a mark at an enemy and have your beam automatically hit that specific location repeatedly, setting up some nasty critical hit streaks. Generally, this weapon is a bit more dangerous to play with as you need to be a bit closer to your enemies to effectively target them, but it can take your focus off of aiming your weapon, which can be helpful for Tao.

Radioactive Gauntlet

The Radioactive Gauntlet is the Decay version of the Laser Glove and the Thunderclap Glove. However, it actually works a lot like the Rainbow as well. You can't place a mark on enemies with your weapon skill; instead, it just has the same enemy-tracking primary fire style. Its weapon skill, however, can help you to reload less often, which makes it quite strong for Tao.

Angelic Aura

The Angelic Aura is an incredibly high fire-rate weapon, although it plays pretty much by the books. There's no elemental effect, enemy tracking, damage stacking, or anything like that. However, it plays very nicely with Tao's ascensions, such as Warlike Blade, and generally does what Tao needs her weapon to do.

Fire Dragon

The Fire Dragon is the final injector, and it works similarly to the Rainbow and the Radioactive Gauntlet in that it lacks the range of the other gauntlets. However, instead of tracking enemies, the fire that this thing shoots is so large that it's very easy to land blows in close quarters. The drawback, of course, is that you normally won't deal Crit Hits, and you need to be up close. It can work for Tao, but the weapons listed above will all be generally better candidates.

Other Fast Firing Weapons

Other weapons with a solid rate of fire, such as the Crimson Firescale, Dragonchaser, and the Dual Fang, can be used to great effect on Tao. I'd recommend focusing on weapons with a stated rate of fire of at least 500 rounds per 100 seconds, but 1000 or more would be preferable. This is primarily to stack up the Blade Heart stacks as quickly as possible, especially if you aren't able to recharge those while Swords Out is on cooldown. (With the Sword Mastery blessing)

Ascension Tier List

If you just need a guide on which ascensions to choose while playing Tao to make a defensive build focused around Swords Out, look no further. This ascension tier list focuses on defensive ascensions that boost her max shield and reduce the damage she takes, as well as a lot of flexible ascensions that are both offensively and defensively beneficial. Otherwise, let's discuss some of these top choices and why they're strong for the build.

Warlike Blade

Warlike Blade is one of Tao's most flexible ascensions, providing a rate of fire boost after consuming a few ammo, as well as an accuracy boost and an ammo recovery effect. Its offensive benefits are obvious, but it also helps her to build up Blade Heart stacks, giving her defensive capabilities more juice as well. With a fast-firing weapon and Warlike Blade level 3, you can stack up to +100% RoF, +100% Accuracy, and a 75% chance to recover consumed ammo!

Sword Defense

Sword Defense reduces damage taken by 30%/50%/70% while casting Swords Out. At level 3, it also ensures that your HP will not drop below 1 during this skill. It doesn't take much deliberation to see why this is powerful but keep in mind that other ascensions like Sword Shadow and Luminous Heart can improve the overall uptime of this skill significantly, further bolstering Tao's defenses.

Sword Guard

Sword Guard gives Tao a temporary max shield and recovers the shield according to flying swords summoned. This buff is 2, 3, and 4 of each of these effects per sword at levels 1 through 3, respectively. The additional max shield lasts 6 to 8 seconds depending on level, which can easily result in permanent uptime for your bonus to max shield. Level 3 Sword Guard also gives a shield recharge speed effect, but it's not the most important effect of this ascension.

Luminous Heart

Luminous Heart gives Tao's Blade Heart +1 base stack and +1 max stack per level. This means more swords are summoned per cast of Swords Out, both at maximum charge and at minimum. Level 3 Luminous Heart also decreases the ammo consumption required to create a stack by 5. This is helpful offensively, as more swords mean more damage, especially with Ice Blade. However, it's also a huge boost to Sword Defense's uptime as well as Sword Guard's bonuses.

Cursed Mark

Cursed Mark probably doesn't sound like a great match for this build, but it's more of an answer to some of the most annoying elite monsters and bosses. In particular, the Elite Spearman and Elite Arsonist. It makes your Fatal Bloom reduce the enemy's movement speed as well as the damage dealt. It's usually not worth investing more than a single point into this ascension, but one point makes the aforementioned elite enemies much more manageable.

Sword Shadow

Much like Luminous Heart, Sword Shadow has a two-fold benefit. It increases the number of swords summoned by Swords Out by 1 per Blade Heart stack per level. This means at level 3; you will be adding 3 swords per Blade Heart stack to your casts. Along with Luminous Heart and Ice Blade, this can deal a lot more damage, but it can also give Sword Guard and Sword Defense a lot more power to keep you alive. Overall it's a great ascension worth investing multiple points in.

Ammo Extractor

Ammo Extractor is similar to Warlike Blade in that it provides a 50%/75%/100% ammo recovery to the magazine upon killing an enemy and increases subsequent weapon damage based on the recovered ammo. It's mostly an offensive benefit, but the ammo recovery can be helpful in keeping you from reloading, even without the proper scrolls, for a no-reload synergy.

Best Spiritual Blessings

If you happen to be playing in one of the Reincarnation difficulty levels, you'll get to choose spiritual blessings. Let's talk about the two best spiritual blessings to start with for this build, which will be Sword Mastery and Ice Blade.

Sword Mastery

Sword Mastery is a blessing that is exclusive to Tao and is specific to her Primary Skill, Swords Out. It gives her a 50% rate of fire bonus while casting the skill and allows her to accumulate Blade Heart stacks while the skill is on cooldown. This is considered a defensive ability due to the higher uptime of Swords Out, giving the damage reduction effect of Sword Defense more uptime, as well as improving the max shield provided over time by Sword Guard.

Ice Blade

A more offense-oriented option is Ice Blade, another exclusive blessing for Tao. This blessing gives flying swords from Swords Out True damage equal to 10% of the enemy's current HP. This is capped at 5000 per player on Elites and Bosses, but the effect still applies. This makes Swords Out deal a significant amount of damage at any difficulty or point within the run and allows you to go all-in on defense. If you do take this blessing while playing with Interdependent Fortunes enabled, be sure not to select Paranormality for an Interdependent Fortune. This will give all enemies 1 flesh HP, and your swords will hit like noodles. Taking Paranormality otherwise is still a good idea, just not from Interdependent Fortunes.

Occult Scrolls

Ammo Belt

Ammo Belt is an occult scroll that doubles your ammo capacity for all ammo types. This makes it much less likely that you run into ammo issues in a run, which is particularly noticeable when playing Tao, as she loves to consume as much ammo as possible.

Magic Magazine

Magic Magazine saves your reserve ammo when reloading 33% of the time. It also boosts that magazine's weapon damage by 30%. It's not the biggest difference, but it's a welcome damage boost and ammo savings baked into one scroll.

Genesis

Arguably stronger than the first two scrolls listed here, Genesis has a 20% chance to add ammo directly into the magazine when shooting. This does not affect your long-term ammo issues, but it can be used to great effect on weapons like the Demonlore and functions like a 20% magazine size boost. It also works well with other scrolls like Ammo Belt and Bullet Bank, as having more ammo in your reserve helps keep this from sucking up all of your reserve ammo.

Bullet Bank

With Bullet Bank, all ammo you pick up will be automatically converted to the equipped weapon's ammo type. As you're likely to be using a normal ammo weapon with this Tao build, the amount of ammo per box will be the usual amount. However, you would no longer need to worry about which type of ammo you see; just grab it!

Against the Flow

Against the Flow is a contentious scroll for some people. On the one hand, it drains 1 random ammo type each second from your reserves. However, upon dealing damage to an enemy, this effect is replaced with a 15% magazine recovery per second for your equipped weapon. This effect also lasts for 4 seconds after the last instance of damage. With small magazines and low-fire-rate weapons, this isn't very strong. However, weapons with 50, 60, or 80-round magazines benefit greatly. A 60-round magazine will recover 9 ammo per second during this effect, which is more than meaningful.

Skateboarder

Another scroll that can create a no-reload synergy is Skateboarder. Dashing fills your magazine instantly. Notably, this does not count as reloading for the purposes of Demonlore's damage calculations, so it's incredibly strong in combination with that weapon. Just don't forget to dash often enough to keep your stacks up!

Advanced Depot

Advanced Depot requires you to take a 15% decrease in weapon damage in exchange for making your reserve ammo into your magazine. That's right; you'll drain ammo from the reserve first. In combination with Ammo Belt, Bullet Bank, or other ammo scrolls, you may just be able to hold down the trigger without regard for ammo consumption. What's better is that it's the easiest way to ensure a Demonlore can reach and maintain its maximum damage bonus of 990%. Rock on!

Deft Hands

You may be surprised to hear that of all the no-reload scrolls, this is the one I recommend the least for the Swords Out Tao build. The main reason for this is that its effect, not consuming ammo for 2 seconds after killing an enemy or destroying an item, stops Tao from consuming ammo. This also stops her from accumulating Blade Heart stacks and throws a wrench in her primary survivability strategy. Advanced Depot and Against the Flow would be optimal, but this may still be fairly strong with weapons like the Demonlore or Aura of Venom.

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is strong for bursting down the first 30% of enemies' HP. It gives you a 45% boost to skill damage when hitting an enemy with over 70% HP. It's not likely to elicit huge damage numbers, but it will make your damage more consistent over a large number of enemies. In short, the sooner you get it, the better.

Enduring Caster

Enduring Caster gives you a 1% skill damage bonus for every 5 total max HP you have. Note: Total max HP refers to the total of flesh and shield/armour. This means it's still a great option with Paranormality since you're not restricted to focusing just on red HP.

Energy Sandals

Unlike Enduring Caster and Sucker Punch, Energy Sandals sets you up for one big skill cast. This is fantastic for elites and bosses but less effective when fighting many enemies over the course of the run. Basically, dashing will stack 24 energy, and the next use of either of your skills will deal +1% damage for each energy. It will consume all of your energy, which could amount to as much as 600 at once, for a 600% boost.

Skill Booster

Just like Energy Sandals, Skill Booster stacks energy and deals extra damage per stack when consuming it. However, while it also gives a +1% boost per energy, its stacks are stored separately, max out at 500, and are accumulated 4 at a time when dealing a Crit Hit. This is easiest to accumulate on fast-firing weapons like the Laser Glove, which is fantastic news for Tao. The maximum boost is 500%, which is thought to apply additively to the boost from Energy Sandals, as well as most other skill damage boosts. However, that just means that instead of being absolutely ridiculous in effect, it's pretty good. 

Magic Watch

Magic Watch offers a modest boost to both your offensive and defensive capabilities. It gives you a 33% chance to reset your Primary Skill or Dash cooldown upon using them. When not holding the Sword Mastery blessing, this makes a big difference since you'll be able to start stacking up Blade Heart immediately after casting Swords Out 33% of the time. 

Deadly Curse

Deadly Curse gives you a 75% weapon and skill damage boost in exchange for losing 75% of your max HP. This is extremely dangerous; however, it is well worth grabbing if you have Paranormality, as that scroll removes the drawback of Deadly Curse.

Rational Consumption

Rational Consumption is a strong scroll that begins as a simple 80% skill damage buff. However, purchasing from the Peddler decreases this bonus by 5%. This bonus will never become negative, so it's never a strict detriment. However, you'll want to visit any Peddlers nearby before picking it up. Note: You cannot drop this scroll, as doing so would make it easy to drop before trading the Peddler and picking it back up.

Spirit Bible

Spirit Bible is a better version of Rational Consumption, offering +120% skill damage with no drawbacks.

Surprise Bonus

Surprise Bonus allows you to deal a massive +100% total skill damage. Unfortunately, this effect triggers randomly 15% of the time. However, it's multiplicative with other damage bonuses and allows characters like Li, Xing Zhe, and Tao to deal massive amounts of damage with their Primary Skill.

Paranormality

Like with other heroes with shield-boosting ascensions, Paranormality is a very strong defensive scroll for Tao. It'll double the shield gained with Sword Guard, which can easily stack her over 500 shields at one time!

Reinforced Eggshell

Reinforced Eggshell gives you a 30% reduction in damage taken on shield/armor but increases damage taken to your flesh HP by the same percentage. This works very well with Tao's defensive capabilities, but it also combines extremely well with Paranormality.

The Best Gemini Inscriptions for the Build

Magazine Share Gemini

Perhaps the most obvious choice of Gemini Inscriptions for the build would be the one that shares the magazines of two weapons as well as giving a respectable buff to the rate of fire. This would work very well with Tao in most circumstances, but it may be a bit underwhelming. You'll be accumulating Blade Heart stacks a bit quicker, dealing a bit more damage, and reloading a bit less. However, there's another option that may be a lot juicier.

Spore Gemini

The Spore Gemini Inscription is one I've avoided mentioning in the other hero guides for the most part. For the other characters that love fast-firing weapons, like Crown Prince and Li, it disrupts their main goal of having a fast-firing weapon, which is generally to apply elemental effects. However, it plays really well with this build's goals. When using a fast-firing weapon and a high damage-per-shot shotgun, spores can deal an unhinged amount of damage. You want to shoot with one of the weapons recommended in this guide, such as the Angelic Aura or an Injector. Then, as your secondary weapon, choose an Argus, Hell, Pupil, Wild Hunt, or Wheel Saw.

Make sure you get Spore Gemini on both weapons and only upgrade the shotgun. If you read that correctly, you'll shoot with the injector and upgrade the shotgun. Each shot of the injector will plant spores based on the shotgun's projectile count, detonating each time you stack 30. The detonation will be based on the shotgun's weapon damage. That means that an injector shooting 10 times per second can deal damage equal to shooting the shotgun 3 to 5 times per second. Hopefully, that helps you to understand why this is so strong.

Conclusion

Overall, this Tao build is designed to make you the most defensive you can possibly be while offering offensive scaling options through either your weapons or Swords Out. If you're playing in Reincarnation difficulties, I'd recommend the Ice Blade spiritual blessing, as it's the easiest way to get a solid amount of damage for the build and frees up your ascensions to focus heavily on defense. Feel free to keep this page open to the ascension tier list or to check out our other Gunfire Reborn character guides!