As you progress your Journey, you find 9 different drinks for your Gourd, but which one is the best? The various Drinks have different numbers of Soak slots and some have potent effects in addition to the healing. So we've split this into two lists, the best Drinks for healing and the best Drinks with utility effects. Usually, when a Drink has higher utility, it recovers less Health.
Best Drinks for Healing
3 Drinks focus on Health recovery, Jade Dew (the upgraded version of Coconut Wine), A Thousand Days of Inebriation, and Dry Spirit (the upgraded version of Lambbrew).
Your best Drink option for general healing is to stick to Coconut Wine and collect Awaken Wine Worms to upgrade it into Jade Dew. This increases the healing to a whopping 55%, brings the Soak slots up to 3, and turns the humble brew into a formidable Drink.
In terms of raw healing, Dry Spirit gives more at 66%, but this has one less Soak slot and a majority of the healing occurs over time. A Thousand Days of Inebriation heals for 60% Health and has 3 Soak slots. But it temporarily impairs your movement after you take a sip, leaving you vulnerable.
It's worth noting that Soak slots are very valuable if you use the Tongue of a Connoisseur Perk, each slot is ~5% more healing on top of the utility provided by your Soak. This is why a fully upgraded Jade Dew is your best Drink for healing as it recovers nearly as much as the alternatives but comes with no downsides.
Best Utility Drinks
The remaining 6 Drinks provide different utility effects, most of these focus on providing additional resources when you take a sip of your Gourd.
The best drink for utility is easily the Jade Essence. This restores Mana with each sip! Normally, your Mana doesn't regenerate in combat making it an extremely limited resource. Combine this Drink with the Turtle Tear Soak to recover even more Mana in combat.
This isn't to say that the other utility Drinks are completely useless, but they're a lot more niche or alternatively other things like gear do the same thing but better. For example, the Pine Brew gives Focus but only if you heal while below half health.
Jade Essence is the best utility Drink, but there are a couple of other options that are worth mentioning. Loong Balm boosts your next attack and has 4 Soak slots, allowing you to stack multiple utility effects. The initial healing is low, but you can make some of that up by using the Tongue of a Connoisseur Perk. Because the bonus only applies to your next attack, you want to maximize this by stacking other buffs from your Soak and then unleashing a 3 or 4 Focus Charged Heavy Attack.
Sunset of the Nine Skies gives you Qi every time you heal and has 3 Soak slots. This is useful to fuel your Spirits and Vessels, especially before you get the Gilded Radiance set. Sometimes this Drink is the difference between getting 2 uses out of a Vessel during a fight or needing to save it for a key phase and only getting one use.
Check out our Gourds, Drinks and Soaks Guide to learn about all the Drinks available in Black Myth Wukong and where to get them.
Summary
Learn the best Drinks to use for healing and which offer powerful utility effects. Soak slots are a big factor here because each Soak you add increases the utility of your Drink. Jade Dew offers direct healing with no downsides and Jade Essence gives you more Mana to fuel your Spellcasting. There are, however, a few other drinks to consider as well.
Written by: Tenkiei
