Dynasty Warriors Online Beginner’s Guide

Dynasty Warriors Online Beginner’s Guide by arumat2045

Hi everyone, my name is Arumat and I am a Shu player, as I was in the JP version 4 years ago as a counselor general (i had a cape and can use rank 4 weapons). I’m making this only to give people a good idea of where to even begin in this game, since no one really tells you. Note to everyone reading this bare with me as I normally don’t make guides of any sort.

Table of Contents
1. Basic Gameplay Tips
2. Weapons and Weapon tempering Tips
3. “Advanced” Gameplay Tips

1. Basic Gameplay Tips

A. Alright, first off I advise to use a controller for this game. A logitech ps2-like controller such as the one I use, or an xbox 360 controller work fine (I don’t own a ps3 so I wouldnt know if they work.) Reason being… its really hard to move/block on the keyboard and be ready to counter attack. You actually will be a weaker player without a controller (similar how mouse and keyboard is > controller for FPS, and arcade fight sticks are > controller for
fighter games.)

B. Money may seem hard at first to get, but after someone tells you (like me) how to get it, you’ll be able to contribute to the game economy instead of begging. There are generally 2 ways to make money that I know of (I don’t count salary). Questing is the first I’m going to mention as it’s the easiest way to make money guaranteed as well as leveling your domestic stats (I’ll get into these in a bit).
Quests are found from several locations such as every merchant in the market has one, your commanding officer has 2, the marshal has 2, but you mainly get your quests from the bar tender in the tavern (It’s in west plaza). Like most bar tenders, he stands behind the bar and will give you all the quests you can possibly get. The money and domestic points you get from quests depends on the Grade you get, but I’m not going to be helping on that as there are already guides and wiki’s out there who explain how to get S grades to max your gains.

The second way of making money is by using the Broker of “Auction House”. You can set up 1 weapon, 1 piece of armor, and 1 set of items at a time on the broker. This is an acution house, not new to many people so I’m not going to go further into this.

C. Domestic skills- There are 5 domestic skills that are leveled up by doing quests. These skills play an oboviously important role to whenever your not in combat, generally buying stuff (one is important to battle though, but more in terms of farming).
Commerce- Price of buying things from the merchants
Distribution- The luck stat, the higher this stat is, the better chance to get rare items such as gem or liutenant food. Also increases your chance for better weapons and gear.
Technology- This stat is still revolving around merchants, I believe this is the tailor merchant, although it could just reflect the cost of tempering/modifying weapons and armor.
Military- This stat increases the amount of weapon types and armors sold at the merchants.
Peace- This is your salary stat. Every week you get a salary based off your rank/peace.

List by important stats- Distribution
Peace
Other 3
Reason being is because you need rare items such as gems to make your weapons better (more on this in next section). And with better luck youll get good weapons and armor to sell on the broker to make good money. The other 3 stats are NPC based, which is generally aweful in every game, this one being no different. Infact the only thing you should use the NPC merchants for is Broker and blacksmith.

D. Basic tips for combat-
Lesson 1. Press guard when knocked down to fast recover back up, and make sure to recover away or behind your opponent.
Lesson 2. Watch your opponents musou (Super) bar, and keep an eye on yours. No matter how low life a person is, if they have musou ready, or will get it very soon, do not attack unless you also have your musou up. Be safe and jump charge.
Lesson 3. Jump charge is your friend, use them often when you want to safely poke at someone, or someone is running away and you need a knock down.
Lesson 4. Learn to gather enemy troops. dont just start flailing your weapon at 3-5 guys. Run around and grab as many as you can (generally 4-6 groups of soldiers). Then mow them down. That being said, goto high density areas on the minimap that show alot of red first, then yellow. STAY OUT OF BLUE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE .

E. Basic tips for domestic
SAVE YOUR GEMS, DO NOT VENDOR THEM!
Vendor bad gear and weapons with low temper, no one wants them.
Every day, check your musou board to see which officer is the one needed, go visit him, get the mark, high five him and go about your business. Free stuff is free, and we didn’t have this back when I played so take advantage of it.

2. Weapons and Weapon tempering Tips

When it come’s to your weapons, there are 5 stats and depending on the scenario you are

fighting in one might outweigh the other. An example is for 10 kill versus mode the primary

stats are attack and musou while the secondary is defense while life and damage are

worthless(I’ll get into why later.)

Attack- Physical power of your character, for normal charge and musou attacks.
Damage- Damage you do to buildings and such (urns, juggernaut, towers, walls etc)
Life- This is your HP
Defense- Very important stat, this reduces the damage you take by alot per upgrade
Musou- The true defense and true attack, this is your “super bar”.
Speed- This stat which cannot be modified is incredibly important in 2 modes, and that is 10
kill death match, and base capturing. Because of the time limits in quests, this is also key in them.
Jump- Your characters “ups”, used to get out of bad spots.

Stats in order depend on situation, but rule of thumb is Attack> musou> defense> damage> life

Reason being why life is awful, is because musou grants invulnerability, and the more musou upgrades your weapon has, the faster it charges, the longer it lasts, and the more damage you’ll do overall. Musou is of course less useful in the 2k or 3k kill objectives, but it’s still better than life.

Now that I went over the stats, you’ll want to have 3 weapons at all times as powerful as you can make them out to be. 2 of these need to be fast , one can be of any speed.

Base capture/quest= Your going to want a very fast weapon, like twin blades (lu xun) or whip with 5 ddamage upgrades 3 attack 2 musou 1 defense. Quest grades revolve around time generally, and base capturing is involved in both PVE and PVP. As most of you have noticed, not taking any bases in the first couple minutes in base capture in PVP means you generally already lost.
Player killing- Again, fast weapons are the supreme rulers in this, so lu xun or whip are still on top. Reason why alot of people are getting away with kills with different weapons, is no one has said anything really on how to even build your character in general towards player killing. So I’ll go ahead and tell you, if you can get 1 kill on an opponent, and all 4 of you are faster than your opponents, you can literally run around the entire map and win with 1 kill. Not saying that’s the fun way of doing it, but a good player always looks at the options he has to win.

Pang De and Dian wei you might think is good, because you can get x3-5 attack with upgrades , as well as weapon upgrades and one shot people. That’s all fine and dandy, but if your outrun by a bunch of speed demons, your dream of the glorious one shot kill is just a dream and forever will be a dream.

Stats you should want on this weapon- 5 attack(yes, that is alot of ambers), and as many musou as possible. After that, 1 or 2 defense upgrades. 0 damage and life required. With this set up , your musou will come up fast, it’ll do ridiculous damage, and with the defense upgrades you wont be one shotted.

The last and final one is the massacre weapon. This weapon is like pang de, zhao yun, etc etc. These are ones you can play favoritism to, as speed isn’t as required as the others are. I won’t even go into this as it’s pretty self explanatory, except you want Moon/eclipse as your 1/6, either way works.

3. Advanced Gameplay Tips

I’m going to say these are advanced, because I doubt many people really mastered this combat system. I have a lot experience and advice from JP players back when I played, so I’ll share some with you.

How to kite when your enemy out runs you- Jump charge attack is your friend, use it frequently in order to buy yourself time.
Learn how to combo well, without knocking them on the ground- This one is hard because with online lag it makes it difficult. I’ll use my lu xun as an example here. Using charge 3 and landing it will cause the enemy to go into a overpowered state (there are two states of dizzy, overpowered and star struck). While in the overpowered state, similar to the star struck, if you attack them they will fly up and go into a juggle state (this is bad online because lag makes it almost impossible to fully combo like you could in the console versions.) Here is the trick, after doing charge 3 and you send them into overpower, run behind them the second your attack ends, and as you see the weapon start to fall down, start the charge 3 again, repeat for easy kills (this can be done with every character, overpowered state is just a LOT easier as you can time it.)

How to kill a general- These guys seem very very hard… but they really aren’t. Find 2-4 people (this is annoying to do alone as you basically have one shot per person.) When the general arrives, your going to want to be in true musou range, max attack and max musou. If your not in true musou range, go find a generic officer like Zhu Ran or Yan Yan etc. and let them hit you a couple times. Now that your in the red, go find the general, hold block until he attacks, then let him have the musou. The fire elemental damage will devour their souls, and with 2+ people doing this, they drop rather fast. Make sure one of your team mates has a base capture weapon like i mentioned above so they can kill urns very quickly in the unlucky event you have a general who wants to turtle in their bases. Killing a general grants a weapon box I believe, which also usually is a higher quality than normal.

Alright that’s all I have for now, I hope this helped you out if you have any questions I’ll try my best to answer it and add it to the guide if I feel its a good point to mention.