Dynasty Warriors 5 (& XL) Discussion Thread

[mendedties]

Well now, that's something else I didn't know. Does the weight also affect the character's flinch resistance?

[Rydain]

It does in DW5:XL, where heavy weapons grant some degree of flinch resistance. As I understand it, this means that characters with a heavy weapon are not interrupted by normal attacks, similarly to Cao Ren and Xing Cai in DW5 vanilla.

For the record, I didn't know any of this myself until calbee219/DW5chaosmodeguide wrote his amazing FAQ which got me interested in the finer points of the game engine. I'm not sure it was ever explained in the game manual or any other readily available form. I own the DW5 data book, but I don't understand the text well enough to know if it contains these sorts of stats.

[SunXia]

I have always preferred Medium-Light weapons as I am more for speed than anything else!! Even if an attack is powerful, I find slow attacks to be boring and I find myself thinking how cumbersome!!

[Sun Fin]

I'm with Sun_Xia on this, I hate slow characters like Xu Zhu on DW5.

[mendedties]

Yeah, I prefer light weapons (usually), but I don't mind medium on most characters. Heavy I just can't stand with anyone. But when I played I was pretty young, and didn't do much for chaos mode, so my guess is those preferences could change now, though I don't think I could ever enjoy a heavy weapon.

Just did Ma Chao's chaos musou mode at less than full stats (and just now realized that Chao's = chaos ). As I mentioned earlier, him + 4th weapon + shadow harness makes chaos mode a joke. I think I quite literally took a total of 10 hits throughout the entire thing. I suspect Pang De will yield similar results.

Also, do bodyguards who know "Heal" ever actually heals themselves? I don't think I've ever seen it happen. I just did two chaos mode stages where I sat there and let my bodyguard do all the fighting. He slowly lost health until he eventually died, never once did he do anything that even looked like trying to heal himself. Maybe the difficulty is a factor?

[Nyara]

I personally prefer heavy weapons and high defense character for this game, it is because with a speed setup it resolves around "you're ultrapowerful, but 1 error = game over" and that is specially frustrating considering that single error can be a simple generic soldier attack that let them to chain you to death. On the others DWs I prefer medium or fast characters, but here I can't prevent taking a lot of punchs as it is hard to parry so many generic enemies, so I prefer just taking the blow if I fail and be ok with it in exchange of some speed.

Anyway, I play around the 60% of the time on an Improved Elephant with a Weapon with 20+ Horse, the item that gives you another 20+ Horse, both Hoofs and the Green Scroll, it is just so funny killing everyone with the Elephant I can't help it.

[Lady Wu]

Just did Ma Chao's chaos musou mode at less than full stats (and just now realized that Chao's = chaos ). As I mentioned earlier, him + 4th weapon + shadow harness makes chaos mode a joke. I think I quite literally took a total of 10 hits throughout the entire thing. I suspect Pang De will yield similar results.

Shadow harness is broken. Pang De is a joke in that setup too. And so is Zhou Tai.

Also, do bodyguards who know "Heal" ever actually heals themselves? I don't think I've ever seen it happen. I just did two chaos mode stages where I sat there and let my bodyguard do all the fighting. He slowly lost health until he eventually died, never once did he do anything that even looked like trying to heal himself. Maybe the difficulty is a factor?

They do on Chaos mode, just a lot less. They actually heal you a lot less on Chaos as well. I'm not sure if this is how it actually works, but it seems that the more they attack/defeat enemies the more likely they'll heal. But the defense penalty on Chaos is so ridiculous anyway that it's more likely that your bodyguard will die before remembering she can heal herself. (They're all female. Male bodyguards don't heal.)

And to, uh, weigh in on the weapon weight question: I think it depends on the difficulty. On Chaos it's impossible to make a dent with a light weapon unless you've got a good fire setup. On lower difficulty levels the extra speed from the lighter weapons may be more welcome.

[FoxWithWings]

Always go for medium when it comes to the weight. Heavy opens you up to too many attacks and light doesn't do enough damage.

[LordCBrasil]

In the end, it depends on our own style of game. A medium character could give some damage but not much, and could be kinda slow, so it depends on which type of character we like to play. I prefer characters like Lu Bu, Zhang Liao and Zhang Fei, but I don't think they are slow or heavy or something like this (ok, Zhang Fei is a liiittle heavy).

Anyway, I just can't help when I'm playing with Ling Tong and try to kill some Lu Bu on Chaos Mode. It's a lot more difficult.