Discover essential beginner tips for Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty. Learn about combat mechanics like Spirit Attacks, Deflect vs. Dodge, Morale Rank, Fortitude, and Battle Flags.
The first thing to understand about Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is that the game doesn’t hold your hand much, especially in terms of explaining some of the most basic combat mechanics. Unfortunately, these don’t work half as well using a keyboard and mouse setup as they do with a controller. If you bought the console version of the game you’ll be fine, but even if you bought the PC version, we’d strongly recommend using a controller to play the game. It’s generally poorly optimized for keyboard and mouse, but even with potential upcoming hot fixes, you’re likely to have a much easier experience with the controller. The only reason why you might want to suffer through using a KB+M setup is that you’ll have greater accuracy when using ranged weapons, but only if your aim is already decent. This is a relatively small part of the game however, and the melee combat arguably flows better with a controller.
One of the most important mechanics in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is known as your morale rank. This can be seen above your stamina bar whenever you’re engaged in combat, but it will disappear if you’re out of combat unless you set it to always appear in the HUD settings. You will also notice your morale rank in the top right of your screen whenever you enter the menu, alongside a similar icon to its right.
The icon on the right represents your Fortitude, which is the morale rank number that you can’t drop below for a specific mission. In general, each time you die your morale rank will be reduced to the minimum Fortitude number for the mission that you’re currently playing. If you die while fighting a boss, it’s a good idea to seek out and kill some regular enemies to regain your morale rank before you attempt the boss fight again.
At the beginning of the game you’ll have a brief chance to get used to the basic melee attack mechanics which revolve around normal attacks and Spirit attacks. The former are useful to quickly chain attack an enemy just before they execute one of their own attacks, and also to build up some Spirit, which you can see accumulating just beneath your health bar. Spirit is generally used to empower special attacks which can inflict more damage than normal attacks, or which have the capacity to interrupt an enemy.
Spirit attacks will be executed more slowly than normal attacks, but they have the potential to cut through the beginning of an attack animation for both regular enemies and bosses. This means that you can rely on them to stop incoming damage while also inflicting some of your own, instead of performing a deflection or dodge. You will also notice that Spirit attacks are useful for decreasing the amount of Spirit that your enemy has, which will weak them and eventually make them vulnerable to Fatal Strikes, which you execute with the same button for Spirit attacks ().
The main reason not to use a Spirit attack in a particular scenario is that once you begin to execute the attack, you’ll be locked into the animation. This means that although your attack can’t be interrupted by most enemies, you also can’t break out of the animation if you see that an enemy / boss is about to hit you with a powerful attack of their own. For this reason you’ll need to time your Spirit attacks carefully, and make sure you don’t use one when you see the enemy in the middle of an attack animation of their own.
In addition to normal attacks and Spirit attacks, you’ll also be introduced to the deflect vs dodge mechanics in Wo Long. It’s not immediately obvious how these work in action, but the best way to think of them is that dodge can be used to quickly get out of the melee reach of an enemy when required, while deflect is used when you stand your ground to time what is effectively a perfect parry. If you manage to deflect an attack, including critical strikes (marked by a red aura just before an attack), you will not only receive no damage from that attack, but you’ll also stagger the enemy and redirect the attack, inflicting a small amount of damage back to them.
In addition to this, you will also lower the Spirit level of an enemy if you perform a successful deflect against them, and you will also shrink their overall Spirit Gauge, making it easier for you to perform a Fatal Strike more quickly. On top of this you’ll increase your own Spirit after successfully deflecting. You probably get the picture by now: a deflect is most useful as a high-risk, high-reward move, while a dodge allows you to create some space between you and your opponent, but it won’t inflict any damage to the enemy or give you any special benefits. It’s a good idea to try dodging new enemies for a while whenever you encounter them, since this will give you some time to observe their basic and special attacks without being within reach of being hit by them.
You’ll be using the same button to dodge as you do to deflect, but you need to tap it twice quickly to dodge.
The function of Battle Flags and Marker Flags in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty are similar. You will encounter a number of these throughout a specific mission, and they provide you with an opportunity to raise your fortitude rank, which
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