I’ve never read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but my favorite part is probably where one guy on a horse just ran over like 10,000 other guys before popping his ultimate and saving the day. That is, until the other side’s hero jumped in with an SSR skin and thoroughly trounced our protagonist, who then had to switch between his friends to debuff the bad guy until they could beat him.
Wait, are you telling me that didn’t actually happen?
Dynasty Legends 2 is a hybrid MMO and action game from Taihe Interactive, that combines fast-paced action with hero collection and upgrade systems. There’s a ton of things to do in this game, and it’s very easy to get lost with all the options that are available to you.
For veterans of hero and hack-and-slash games, this game should look, feel, and play very similar to other titles. For newbies though, or for those who would like an explanation on the various upgrade paths for heroes, read on and check out our Dynasty Legends 2 beginner’s guide!
Making The Most Out of Your Heroes
Heroes are the meat of the game in Dynasty Legends 2, and to progress in the game, you’ll need to collect and cultivate your heroes.
Getting New Heroes
Let’s get this out of the way – yes, there is a character gacha, and it’s the most reliable way to get new characters outside of events and story characters (a category that pretty much just comprises Liu Bei).
Heroes and/or officers (I just use the term interchangeably) come in three rarities: common, epic, and legendary. As with all gacha games, higher rarity usually means a better character, but don’t neglect your more common heroes as they’ll form the bulk of your forces unless you’re insanely lucky.
If you’ve already acquired a character, you’ll pull shards of that same character in case you get a duplicate. Shards are used for evolving characters (essentially limit breaking) them, and can also be used to redeem characters you don’t have yet.
If you’re planning to use shards for this second purpose, tap the Exchange button on the lower left of the gacha screen. This will bring you to the Star Soul shop, where you can buy hero shards as well as other items. Each gacha roll will grant you one Star Soul, so you’ll eventually (but oh-so-slowly) be able to recruit most characters in Dynasty Legends 2. Do note that redeeming a hero via shards is far more expensive than the shard evolution cost, so be prepared.
Hero Classes
Yes, apparently, there are classes in Dynasty Legends 2. Each of these classes excel at a particular role, and will give you an overview of what you can expect from a hero. To check a hero’s class, tap the icon on the upper right on the hero screen, beside the hero’s name.
- Warriors use a single axe as their symbol. They’re good at both taking and dealing damage, though they don’t particularly excel at either role.
- Tanks are indicated by two crossed hammers (or are they axes?). These heroes are bulky frontliners, effortlessly fending off hordes of enemies.
- Marksmen (rendered as “Marksm” in the game) can be identified by their purple bow symbol. These rangers excel at delivering quick death from a distance, though they’re offset by their lack of physical bulk.
- Mages use a blue fan as their sigil. Their arts are varied, ranging from direct damage, AOE, to debuffs.
- Assassins use two crossed swords on a red icon as their emblem. Their swift, decisive strikes can turn the tide of battle with ease, though they’re not very sturdy.
- Support heroes are recognizable by the green cross. These heroes are varied in their abilities, but one thing they do have in common is that they bring the best out in their comrades.
Leveling Up
The simplest way to make a hero stronger is to increase their level. By feeding heroes exp pills, you can increase their level, and each level up increases a hero’s hit points, attack, and defense.
Evolution
It’s not enough to feed your heroes exp pills. At certain levels, their progress will be gated, and you’ll need to evolve them to make them stronger.
Evolving heroes is a relatively straightforward process – collect enough shards of a hero by rolling extra copies of them in the gacha, or progress through the main story to get story hero shards, such as Liu Bei.
Evolution doesn’t just increase a hero’s level cap, but it also gives them new passive skills, as well as neat little bonuses that you can find on the stars as you evolve a hero. Note that evolution levels require you to hit the center star in the constellation – if you haven’t yet, that hero isn’t considered +1 (or above). However, each completed node in the constellation does increase that hero’s level cap.
If you’ve forgotten what bonuses a hero has from evolution, you can tap hold on the constellation above the Evolve button to the right of the screen. Note that you don’t need to hit max level to evolve a hero; you can evolve them off the bat as long as you have the materials.
Mounts
Heroes can also be given mounts, which both improve their ability and provide a decent chunk of stats.
Mounts not only provide heroes a fast way to move both in and out of combat, but also pass on some of their stats to their riders. Mounts also have special bonds with certain characters, which provide them with potent passive bonuses.
While you get one horse for free at the start of the game, you’ll need to work for the rest of them by doing dungeons and events. Either that, or shell out cash.
Officer Advancement
By giving your officers the right trinkets, you can increase their officer rank, leading to an overall power increase.
These trinkets can be acquired by fighting in stages. If you’d rather not manually grind for these items, you can blitz through completed stages, which will auto-complete them and give you the appropriate rewards.
Weapon Activation
Getting a hero is just the first part of the process. To truly bring out a hero’s might, you’ll need to activate their weapon, which will both improve their stats and unlock new skills for that hero’s use.
To activate a hero’s weapon, tap on the activate button while you’re in the Training Menu- it’s pretty much below the hero. Don’t forget to do this for every new hero you get; few things are as unpleasant as slotting a brand-spanking new hero only to find that they can’t use their skills due to unactivated weapons!
The Mansion
Apparently there is a mansion where all your heroes chill when not in combat, and the tutorial doesn’t mention it at all. If you want to gatecrash the mansion, tap the button in the lower right menu, then tap mansion.
The mansion houses your hero archive, where you can unlock extra passive bonuses for heroes for reaching certain milestones with them, such as when you first get a hero or when you evolve them. The bonuses aren’t much, but every little bit helps.
Lieutenants and Officers
Note that you actually only have three characters to switch to, but there are six empty slots in the officers screen. What this means is that there’s actually three pairs of heroes and lieutenants.
Lieutenants do not actually fight, but pass their stats to their linked officer. Most characters are more than capable of fighting on the frontlines as a hero or providing backline support as a lieutenant. This also means that you can use high-level characters to babysit your new heroes by passing their stats. Do note, however, that there are still dedicated support units that can’t be deployed on the battlefield – more on them later.
When your heroes are accompanied by a lieutenant, that hero will also gain access to one of their lieutenant’s skills, which can be performed by tapping on the Lieutenant icon in the skill bar. This will summon the lieutenant to perform their skill. Do note that calling in this assistance has a very long cooldown, and that you’ll need to upgrade your characters a bit – weapon activation in particular – to unlock their skills, lieutenant skills included.
It’s especially worth noting that the exp pills and other upgrade materials are actually invested into the character slot, not the character. This means that if you decide you’d rather level someone else, you can just put the new character in the slot occupied by the old character, and they’ll receive the same bonuses you’ve invested into the first character – minus evolution, of course. To do this, tap the Switch button on the lower right of the character formation screen, which has a very ambiguously-worded effect that made me think I would lose the first character.
Character Bonds
As your officers and their lieutenants fight side by side, they’ll eventually develop bonds which allow them to fight together better, with synchronized movements and advanced tactics. This translates to increased stats when those two heroes are paired together.
Bonds cannot be formed independently: each hero only has specific characters with whom they can bond, which will increase both their stats if they’re deployed in the same unit. By evolving both characters, you can increase the bond level, and thus gain even more passive bonuses from them working together
Mastering Combat
Combat is the heart and soul of Dynasty Legends 2, and while it’s relatively straightforward, there are a few nuances that you’ll need to be aware of.
Combat Controls
Combat in Dynasty Legends 2 is relatively straightforward, and if you’ve played the game series that it’s based on, Dynasty Warriors, you’ll be able to slip in without a problem.
To the lower right of the screen are your combat controls, with the large sword serving as the normal attack button (which will target the nearest enemy), and the buttons above it for your various skills, as well as your lieutenant skill. Finally, there’s also the Flash button, which will cause your character to dash a short distance, gaining some invulnerability frames in the process. Judicious use of your dash is very important as you’ll not only be able to cover ground faster, but also avoid dangerous attacks from bosses.
Switching Characters
It is entirely possible to play Dynasty Legends 2 without ever switching characters, but where’s the fun in that?
If you’ve ever played hero games like Genshin Impact, you’ll already be familiar with the concept of rapidly switching characters on the battlefield. Your party of heroes can work together to take down foes that they would have no chance of defeating alone. By actively switching heroes in the middle of combos and in the thick of battle, you can both improve your heroes’ performance and survivability.
Note that skill cooldowns are calculated individually. Put another way, heroes do not share cooldowns. This means that you can quickly rotate between your heroes while firing their skills off, which will maximize damage or even set up huge sweeps.
To make the most out of this system, you’ll want as many hero slots available as possible, which is why I urge you to rush to and complete stage 2-6 as quickly as you can. This way you’ll have 3 pairs of heroes to switch between in combat.
Blitzing and Auto Combat
We’ve all been there: beating 200 guys to a pulp with just a wooden stick is fun, but it does get repetitive, especially if you’re grinding. Luckily for us, there are two ways to automate combat: blitzing, and auto combat.
Auto combat is pretty simple: your character will simply run forward, completing objectives and fighting enemies while using any skill that’s off cooldown. Do note that while auto combat is reliable, there are stage mechanics that require you to actually play the game, such as aiming and firing a catapult. To activate auto combat, tap on the screen on the lower left middle of the screen while you’re in a stage.
Note that by default, your characters will not use their ultimates while in auto combat. Luckily
Blitzing, on the other hand, allows you to spend stamina to instantly clear a stage that you’ve already done to gain advancement materials and exp pills. To blitz a stage, you can either tap Quick Blitz if you’re farming for officer advancement materials. Alternately, go to the stage selection screen by tapping Events (the button is below the minimap), then tapping Main Story on the Daily tab.
Complete Challenges and Grow Stronger
There are a ton of dungeons and daily challenges that you can complete to gain even more strength. All of them are important in one way or another, so I’ll provide a quick breakdown of the earlier ones that you can do.
Stage Scores
Before we start, you have been 3-starring the regular stages.
You have, right?
Right?
Each normal mode stage has three stars, which can be achieved by completing the level, not losing a single hero, and taking 10 minutes or less to clear the stage – all relatively easy and straightforward tasks. By ticking off all these marks in a stage, you’ll gain extra bonuses that you can redeem by tapping the pouches at the bottom of the chapter.
These pouches contain sycees (premium currency), hero shards, exp pills, and recruit tokens. Changes to get free heroes are few and far between, so I strongly suggest you go back and ace any stages you haven’t 3-starred!
The Officer Biography
The officer biography is part demo, part story. During biography quests, you’ll be able to try out heroes as they play through the events in their lives that led them to where they are now. Officer biographies provide a big one-time payout of hero shards, which can be spent to either buy or improve that hero, if you already have them. And yes, these are repeatable though subsequent clears won’t give out quite as many shards as the first clear.
Each biography chapter has a different unlock condition: some are opened once you’ve finished a certain stage, others require you to complete the stories of other characters, and so on. You can only run officer biography stages 6 times in a day.
Trial of Supplies
The Trial of Supplies, as its name suggests, gives out common supplies like candy. And “like candy” is apropos, I assure you – these challenges are more akin to minigames than actual combat.
Silly or not, these trials are very important as they provide a large amount of gold, enhancement stones, and exp pills. Maximize these: you will need a lot of resources, and you can only clear two trials per day.
The Team Dungeon
The Team Dungeon is a multiplayer dungeon where you team up with two other players to complete objectives and defeat a boss.
You can only do this dungeon once a day, and it’s well worth doing: the Team Dungeon is the main source of mount shards which you can use to both get new mounts and improve existing ones.
Treasure Hunting
Treasure Hunting sounds fantastic, but it’s far less fabulous than you might think. On the plus side, it is absolutely worth doing.
To go treasure hunting, all you really need to do is to use a map. After which you can leave your character on autopilot as they will happily run around and dig up treasure on their own. However, you can occasionally be forced into an encounter when trying to retrieve the goods.
Treasure hunting is a great way to supplement your income as you’ll commonly gain resources such as gold and exp pills. More uncommonly, you’ll gain random hero shards that – as the name says – gives you a shard of a random hero. Win-win!
The Activity Bar
Put all of these activities together, and you get the activity bar.
You may have noticed that in the menu, each of the above activities has an “activity” stat. This refers to how much activity points they’re worth when fully completed. These activity points are poured into the activity bar at the bottom of the menu, where you can redeem extra rewards based on how full it is.
As every single one of these activities is important, I’m fairly sure that you’ll be able to withdraw the full activity chest every day. If you need more motivation though, the final chest on the activity bar gives 3 exp pills, 3 recruit attempts, and 150 sycees. And because the activity bar is a daily activity, this is infinitely repeatable.
The MMO Experience of the Three Kingdoms
With so many paths to glory available for players to explore, there’s never a dull moment in Dynasty Legends 2.
That ends my Dynasty Legends 2 beginner’s guide, and I hope that I was able to help you make heads and tails of the numerous systems in play. If you have any tips of your own to share, make yourself heard in the comments below!