Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed Tips, Cheats and Strategies

Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed is a free-to-play rendition of the popular musou series from Koei Tecmo, which has been adapted by BadBird Studio and published by Nexon. If you’re familiar with Dynasty Warriors and free-to-play games you’ll likely know what to expect here (lots of upgrade systems that require time/money/real money, slow character leveling, etc) but in practice it ends up being a pretty darn solid hybridization. Gamezebo’s tips, cheats and strategies guide for Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed will familiarize you with the basics, show you how to best put those upgrade systems to good use, and otherwise keep your teams in fighting shape.

Getting Started

Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed Tips, Cheats and Strategies

Stick to the Campaign. Many of the other modes and options won’t open up to you until you reach the right player level. By working your way through the Campaign you’ll be able to slowly earn stuff like additional characters and equipment, while also familiarizing yourself with the combat mechanics.
Collect chests as you progress the Campaign. Finishing a Campaign level will earn you up to three stars each based on your performance. Once you’ve earned enough stars, you’ll unlock a chest (displayed along the bottom of the Campaign mode screen). Remember to tap on these to collect them, otherwise they’re just going to sit there not being useful.
Make sure to outfit your officers. Every officer can equip a weapon, a piece of armor, and artifact, and a legendary item (once you can find any), plus additional accessories like bracelets, necklaces, rings, and costumes once they attain a high enough level (and you find those items, too). Each piece of equipment will increase the officer’s stats in some way, depending on the item.

Upgrade officer equipment. Most equipment can be leveled-up and even fused with other pieces to increase its power. This is going to get real important as you progress in both the Campaign mode and move on to other multiplayer-centric options.
Try to have one of each officer type on your team. Each officer belongs to an element type (earth, fire, and water), and those elements are each weak to one and strong to the other. By rounding out a team with all three elements you’ll be more adaptable when facing off against more than one elemental type of enemy.

Managing Officers

Training is essential. You can spend some coins and sacrifice unwanted officers in order to give your favorites more experience. You can also give them special XP-boosting items (when you find them) that don’t require coins to use.
Try to match elements or duplicate officers when training. Using a like-colored (i.e. matching element) officer will grant a little more experience. Better still, using a duplicate of the officer you’re training will increase the level of the trained officer’s special skills – thus making them much more formidable in battle.
Stars matter. The number of stars an officer will give you a basic idea of their overall toughness, but it also shows you what their level cap is: 1 = 10, 2 = 20, etc. More stars means more potential levels, and more levels means stats that are a LOT higher.

Fusion can be handy but is a bit of a crapshoot. By getting two officers with the same number of stars to their maximum levels you can fuse them to create an officer that’s one star higher. This is a decent way to acquire more powerful officers early on, but you won’t know who you’ll get until you fuse. This means you could end up with a 5-star fire officer when you really wanted one who was water.
Promotion is less random but costs more. If you want to keep the officer you have but upgrade them with another star you can Promote them. Unlike fusion, the promoted officer will stay the same (same character, same element), but it requires way more resources. The cost of promotion is a number of max-level officers equal to the current star rank of the officer you want to promote, and they also have to be of the same star rank. In other words, promoting a 5-star officer will require a total of six 5-star officers at the maximum level (the officer you’re promoting, plus five more to sacrifice).

Gearing Up

Refine equipment to make it stronger. Refining works just like officer training in that you can sacrifice unwanted gear and some coin in order to level-up something else. The catch here is only weapons can be used to refine weapons, only armor can be used on armor, and so on.
Star ranks denote general power. More stars is better, naturally, but unlike officers equipment has a hard level cap of 20.
Combine gear to generate new ones of a higher star rank. Just like officers, you can get two pieces of gear of the same star rank (and both at max-level) in order to create a new one a the next star rank. Unlike officers, however, the random nature isn’t quite as detrimental as elements aren’t a factor.
Upgrading lets you keep the gear you have but good luck getting what you need. Seriously, upgrading takes a lot of work and patience to get the materials (in this case, gems) you need. It’s much easier and faster to fuse instead.

Gems are good. Once equipment reaches a high enough star rank – typically around 4 or 5 stars – you can slot gems into them to further boost their effectiveness. Gem slots are color-coded, however, so you can’t go slotting anything you want into that new sword or chest plate.
Gems can be combined to make better gems. Five of a given kind of gem (matching color and matching equipment icon) can be fused together to make a larger gem that grants an even bigger boost.
Legendary gear can’t be combined like regular gear. It doesn’t level-up and gems can’t be socketed in. Instead, you can combine a piece of legendary gear with other legendary gear of the same star rank (the number required equals the number of stars, naturally).
Legendary gear can be improved by using special items, but those items are even tougher to come across than the legendaries themselves.

Throwing Down

Stick to the elements. When you see an enemy officer with a designated element, switch to one of your own officers with an element the enemy is weak against. This will result in much more damage – especially if you were originally using an officer with a weaker element.
Get used to your officer’s special attacks. Not all specials have the same area of effect or range. In addition, some specials will grant temporary stat boosts (like increased damage or defense) for a few seconds after they’re used. By familiarizing yourself with a core team of officers you’ll be better prepared to deal with different combat situations.
Defeating enemy officers will automatically get rid of all their subordinates during a campaign mission.

Use the Auto attack option often. You can toggle this via the button in the top-right corner of the screen. The basic auto attack has your selected officer rush in and perform melee attacks on their own – automatically targeting enemies and such. This way you only really have to worry about activating specials. Plus officers will also automatically go after breakable objects in the environment that can contain equipment drops and power-ups, making it much easier to find them in the first place.
Don’t use Auto around traps and environmental hazards. Some levels have things like deathtraps and firestorms that can damage your officer and toss them backwards. As good a job as the Auto mode can do finding its way around a level, it’s terrible at avoiding environmental hazards like this. You’re better off switching back to manual whenever you see glowing red spots on the ground.

General Tips

Earn lots of coins from Daily Trials. Specifically, the Wooden Ox trial is great for earning coins. With the right officer (preferably someone with a wide mid-ranged attack, like Wang Yuanji) you can earn roughly 100K coins every day just by holding the attack button down for a couple of minutes.
Use the War Supply to farm for essentials. You can access the War Supply from the Battlefield menu option. Here you can choose to “farm” from several different locations, each of which can offer up things like gold, coins, armor, or weapons. You will need to assign a team of three to guard that location from other players, though.

Use Exploration to level-up officers when there aren’t enough for training. Once you unlock Exploration (found in the Challenges menu) you can send an officer off to explore for a certain amount of real time. Once time’s up they’ll return, hopefully with some useful items, but even if they come back empty handed they’ll still gain experience.

Check the Night Market from time to time. You can find the Night Market in the Market tab on the bottom of the main menu screen. Here you can spend premiium currency, regular currency, and various other nicknacks you acquire on things like random items chests and 3-star officer enlistment scrolls. You might not want to spend your money on some of this stuff, but specific currencies like multiplayer medals and scroll fragments and whatnot can’t really be used anywhere else.