While Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is surprisingly complex and difficult for a newcomer, it can also be satisfying when you finally get the hang of the game. So, In this article, I’ve compiled this game guide with a list of the top 10 tips and tricks to help you become a master at Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
1. Master the Spirit
The first thing you want to master is properly using your spirit gauge, which is the two-sided bar just below your character’s health bar. This will increase when doing normal attacks or deflecting enemy strikes and decrease when using spirit attacks. Martial arts spells or when being hit, so you might want to start most of the fights by doing a few normal hits, deflecting a few of the incoming attacks, and building that blue meter up.
Once at least one section of that is filled, this is when you want to spend it with the triangle spirit attack butting. Basically, the more that blue section fills, the more damage you do with a spirit attack. The point is that high enough levels will give other benefits, too, including making that attack uninterruptable by the enemy even passing through their defenses and, most importantly, reducing their spirit gauge. So, it eventually becomes a lot easier to stun them.
2. Use The Martial Arts
Martial arts in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty are different special attacks that can be performed using your spirit. All weapons have one or two randomly assigned types of martial arts attacks. Depending on the controller settings, you can cast using R1 plus Square or R1 plus Triangle.
They will all consume spirit when used, but they are amazing and sometimes quicker ways to deal significantly higher damage to enemies’ HP and their spirit. Also, martial arts are completely unblockable and make it easier to stun your enemies much faster.
The only downside is that they consume your spirits too. So, if you overdo it and fall too far into the orange section, you risk being just one small attack away from being fully stunned by an incoming attack. I fully encourage you always to test new weapon attacks as there are dozens of them for each weapon category, and even the same weapon can drop with different martial arts on it to completely change your play style.
3. Learn How To Deflect
Just like Sakuro and Neo, deflecting and guarding will be integral to the Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty gameplay, and you’ll want to master them if you want to stand any chance against many of the difficult boss encounters. And like most Souls games, however, the basic guard you do in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty with L1 will only get you as far as blocking the normal enemy attacks, but you can’t protect against the red critical blows.
So the game will force you to master deflection, which is done by pressing the Circle or Dodge button at the right moment, and it’s the only way to completely counter the red critical blows. Doing so just as the hit is about to land will completely prevent all that damage and leave enemy defense open momentarily so that you can follow up with your attacks.
Furthermore, it gives you a massive boost in your spirit gauge. So it’s a great way to immediately follow up with a triangle devastating spirit attack to redo the enemy spirit gauge and deal even more damage.
4. Don’t Miss The Fatal Strikes
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty has the fatal strikes mechanism built into it, and doing the above enough will eventually stun these enemies, points at which you’ll have a few seconds window to use a fatal strike, which you also do by using the triangle attack. Just as the target is still stunned, this combination of perfect deflects followed up counter damage and the fatal strike during stance will be the best way to shave off massive chunks of enemies’ HP. Even if you’re technically under-equipped for these fights, these will greatly help you.
There are many boss moments in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty that are nothing more than skill checks where your only chance of winning is by getting good at the game at the deflect and performing these fatal strikes. It becomes so satisfying as it will back-to-back stun these enemies that it is definitely worth it.
Another thing to note is that fatal strikes can also be used right away against unaware enemies. This includes performing them from behind just as the radical turns red, but you can also use them from above, which is a nice way to assassinate these targets and quickly remove them from the battlefield.
5. Summons Devine Beast
To make combat much easier, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty lets you summon mythical beasts at your aid, even from the first boss encounter you get in the first level. You can summon the divine beasts during the second phase of the boss fight, in which you might have even gotten stuck in dung since you are obviously under-equipped for it.
But if you just fill that gauge meter that shows up right above elemental attacks onto the side, you can press Triangle and Circle together to summon a divine beast and immediately finish the fight for you.
Of course, there’ll be a dozen different beasts you can unlock in different story moments by defeating story bosses, each providing different effects and powers for all the five elemental types in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
You can also summon them as a passive buff instead of using Square and X, which will then imbue your weapon with the elements they belong to. For example, early on, you can use Qinglong, which will leave a restoration ring on the ground that persists for a pretty long, giving you constant healing and letting you survive some of the tougher challenges.
6. Pay Attention To Morale Rank
Checking every corner of the map and exploring everything will be extremely beneficial in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Not only will it provide extra loot, but it also increases your morale rank with the major and the minor flags you find on each map. To expand upon the importance of the Morale rank, this is the circle over your HP indicating a number and your enemy’s HP bar.
It goes all the way to a max of 25, and the more you have compared to your enemies, the less damage they will deal to you. The opposite is also true, whereas being too low compared to them and falling into the red can result in getting owned pretty much like even the most basic of enemies.
So that’s why the first thing you might want to do on any new map is to always scout for these flags to increase your morale rank. This will also give you a permanent increase to that in a map via the fortitude mechanic, meaning that you do not lose them upon death. Even more so, it is the best way to prepare for the final boss unless you want to get instantly one-shotted by most of their attacks. Plus, the bigger flags can also be used as resting points to fill your healing pots, access character upgrades, skill trees, and more features.
Otherwise, if you only rely on morale rank, that comes from attacks that increase it momentarily when defeating enemies, landing marital arts, spirit attacks, or even fatal strikes. It’s just that those will always go away if you die. Furthermore, if enemies do land critical hits against you, which are indicated by the red glows, this will also reduce your morale rank by one point. This is another reason mastering deflection or dodging is so important in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
7. Always Upgrade your Character
In between major chapters in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, you should always constantly upgrade your character. If you upgrade enough, this will give you plenty of stats, so you can take on any boss fight with no problem, with maybe one or two exceptions. So around the start of chapter 3, you’ll unlock the blacksmith in the hidden village where you can teleport at any time, a place where you can upgrade your gear.
For weapons, you will need the metal starting with rank 1, but it goes all the way to rank 9, providing increasingly higher damage that almost doubles the damage of a certain weapon by rank 5. The same goes for armor, but it requires leather instead. You’ll also want to boost your armor for the defense rating that you get from it. This will significantly reduce the damage you take from enemy hits if you aren’t paying much attention to the Morale rank.
Early on, I won’t worry too much about these passive bonuses that you randomly get on gear since you can change all of these via the embedding mechanic and the blacksmith. But you should know that the higher an item’s star rating, the more extra stats it can hold. This is why 4-star and even 5-star gears become a lot more important later on when the difficulty gets higher.
8. Farms Early in the Game
Farming is easy on Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. You will want to spend a lot of time farming and prepping between the different story chapters whenever you have time, especially at the points where you can’t defeat a certain boss.
You can simply go back and complete the previously unlocked sub-battle fields that open up as you complete that chapter’s main story. You can still repeat the major ones, too, and loot even resets inside of them. But the subs’ enemies are faster and sometimes give better-specialized loot you can see from the menu screen.
For example, early on, you can do the escape from the capital and the valorous trio to the rank for leather and metal, plus a decent chance of getting rank 3 or 4-star rating gears. Another thing you can do to get more materials is salvage gear you no longer use, especially low-star quality gears with upgrades. For example, the game drops a one-star quality but with a plus 8 upgrade on it.
You can simply salvage this, giving you the rank 8 crafting material out of it to funnel it right into your main set. It also gives you the gems needed as general materials to alter gear. If you do this with all of the upgraded low-star quality items, you just get that respective level crafting material to use again on your main battle set.
9. Pay Attention To Your Stats
Another important aspect of your character progression is constantly boosting your stats by spending the Genuine Qi you get from defeating enemies or consuming Essences. Initially in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, you should invest your first few points into the Wood, Fire, and Earth virtues.
For most early-on melee setups, these virtues give you by far the biggest boost per point to your character’s HP. They are also great for the spirit defense that you get from them. This will basically affect how much spirit gauge you lose when enemies hit you.
Fire virtue is mostly there to increase your spirit gain range, which is useful, as I’ve said, for the spiriting strikes that we always want to perform on enemies, but it’s also good for reducing the cost of your martial arts attack. Earth virtue is kind of like endurance from Elden Ring, letting you equip heavier armor sets that can benefit better defenses. This also further prevents fat rolling, reducing your dodges’ effectiveness.
Water virtue makes it harder for enemies to detect you and increases your assassination damage attacks. However, you should only use this if you have a very good scaling for this particular stat. Metal virtue is mostly for the spellcasters or even hybrid characters, reducing the cost of the spells, which requires a significant investment to be noticeable. This build is more effective in the middle to late-game builds.
10. Use Skill Trees According to Your Need
The more points you invest into the virtues, the more you’re going to unlock their respective skill sets in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Since each one of them has its own separate skill sets with up to dozens or so active abilities, the more you invest points into them, the more access you will gain to these spells.
And you can’t use them unless you invested the required number of points into them in the first place. Also, all spells have a second requirement, depending on your morale rank. For example, the starting ones will not require any morale to be castable, while others will require a much higher one. This again brings even more importance to fully upgrading them depending on the battles you’re prepping for.
11. Take Advantage of The Revenge Mechanic
You should know that you’re going to die a lot in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and let’s say you mess up, and you die. Yet there are a few dire penalties and one upside. You should know death will slash off half of your Genuine Qi that you had at a time, which can cost you one or two levels if you foolishly decide not to spend them.
Death also removes all of the unsafe morale ranks you got by defeating enemies or doing some of the other stuff except those you didn’t get via the fortitude mechanic of the flags. Luckily, however, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty offers a Revenge mechanic, which lets you get all back if you can defeat the enemy that killed you in the first place.
This will be marked on the map with a special orange indicator and an orange Haze that will surround the enemy’s morale ranks who killed you. You’ll have to defeat them this time around. However, to get all the lost Qi and morale rank back, if you die a second time to them, all of those are gone for good. And you’ll need to reform them once more.
The only exception in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty to this rule is fighting bosses, so if you do get defeated by one, you automatically get all the Qi and morale points back when attempting to fight the same boss again. So it’s always best to get the lost Qi and morale back as soon as you die, but take careful measures because the enemy who killed you will have higher morale this time.
I hope these points will help you better understand the mechanism of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and mostly help you enjoy the gameplay, as it’s truly fantastic. Stay tuned for more tips on Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and have fun playing it.
Also, check out my Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty Review.
