Weapon Farming in Dynasty Warriors 8 Made Easy

I'm constantly amazed, as I'm sure you all are, at just how much I can talk about a single Dynasty Warriors game as I'm playing it and indeed for a time thereafter.  It seems like every day brings a brand new topic about the game that I can take and pull apart until I can present it in possibly the most long-winded way possible, and it's something that I've found I can't really do for many other things.  So, whatever, I can do it and I like to do it, so that's what I'm going to do.  I'm aware that most of you are probably not as interested in Dynasty Warriors or really any flavor of game KOEI releases as I am, but I hope the deluge of content over the games is not off-putting.  Because, I mean, I'm gonna keep doing it.

Going with the theme of the last Dynasty Warriors 8 post, we're going to talk about trophies.  Or rather -a- trophy.  We're going to cover the Herculean amount of effort that goes into a single trophy called Weapon Collector that, as you might have guessed, tasks you with collecting all the weapons in the game.  You see, the whole weapon system in Dynasty Warriors 8 got a bit of an overhaul that more or less makes it a very different beast from the games before it except, in a sense, Dynasty Warriors 6.  That's not as bad a thing as that comparison might lead you to believe, however, so don't get ahead of me.  The weapons all have an element attached to them that is either Heaven, Earth or Man, which recalls to DW6's Standard, Skill and Strength types of weapons, though they don't have the same sort of effects and really I guess the only similarity is that they all shared red, green and blue and I swear I was going somewhere with that, but forgot.

Anyway, that's -one- of the categories of the weapons, though.  There's actually two beyond the Elemental Shift, and its all about rarity.  Common Weapons have Orbs, but rare weapons and the Fifth Weapon for each character have Stars instead.  These merely denote uniqueness and nothing else, because as you'll learn, each character has Four Orb weapons and Three Star weapons.  (Well, Sword has like four Star weapons, but you get one from Ambition Mode and it's not important)  You need to collect one of each of these seven weapons for every single character in the game for the trophy which is just a Silver trophy even though it will be the actual second-most grindy thing you do in the game.  Yes, Ambition Mode in all its splendor and magnificence has been bumped to third, with Bond-grinding still likely holding first place.  Though, in all honesty, Weapon Farming might just usurp it, it's that bad.

How can it be so bad, you might be innocently asking?  Well, it's pretty simple.  Of the three Star weapons per character, only -one- of them is a guaranteed drop.  That is the Fifth Weapon which have unlock conditions (readily visible in the Gallery once you've beaten every single Story Mode Stage) that you have to follow on Hard Mode.  You have to do that with every single one of the 77 characters included in the game.  That's the easy part, because the thing you want to do is get Xiahou Yuan's Fifth Weapon first.  It's called the Bow of Destruction, and if there were ever a more appropriate moniker, I don't know of it.  You see, what makes the Bow of Destruction so special is that it has an element on it called Cyclone, which is at level 10.  Cyclone breaks through an enemy's guard with charge attacks.  The weapon also has multiple charge attacks that have multiple hits within it that do Wind damage which seems to take a percentage of health rather than do -damage-.  What this means is that a single charge attack from the Bow of Destruction (one that has the multi-wind shots at least, which are C2, 5 and 6) will straight-up murder any officer, even on Chaos difficulty provided the full attack hits them.  Even if it doesn't, it's not hard to do a follow-up and basically it just means that you will not have to worry about the damage -you- do.

What about the other two Star weapons for each character?  Well, first what you want to do is get your Fortune Hunter skill leveled up, which increases your Luck.  Level 10 at minimum, though you'll likely want up to about 15 unless you're crazy and want to grind it up to 20.  Why would that be crazy?  Well, because the way you level the skill up is by defeating officers on a map after you've attained 1,500 KOs.  On the same map.  There are precious few maps that will allow you to rack up that many kills while also leaving enough chattel for you to reap in an attempt to level up the skill (Because, of course, not every single one and in fact most will not do it since it's based on some weird RNG), but if you are feeling particularly interested, then the Yellow Turban Conflict stage is what you want.

This is Zhang Jiao's Story stage and it offers a -lot- of officers plus a handy little infinite spawn of mooks that you can inflate your score with in the course of a few minutes.  All you need to do is rescue Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang and wait for Huangfu Song to change the direction of their approach.  This will divert forces to the lower left portion (south of Zhang Bao) and the square at the southernmost point before you go East into a base will just, as stated, spawn infinite amounts of soldiers after you defeat both Base captains in the neighboring areas.  Get up to 1,500 KOs (or more if you feel like it, I don't know if it affects your chances) and then go around slaughtering officers until you take down He Jin.  You should hopefully get at least 2 levels if not more, and...then you just do it again until you're happy.  Better chances if you perform the stage on Chaos Difficulty, and of course you don't have to use Zhang Jiao when selecting from Free Mode.  In fact, I would recommend it.  I personally used a Level 99 Lu Bu who has max stats and his Fifth Weapon - since it's an early map it's not difficult at all, even on Chaos, so you won't have to spam Cyclone abuse.

So now that you have Fortune Hunter up at a decent level, you'll want to equip that and go to Shu's section in Free Mode and pick the very last stage - Capture of Wei - Wei Forces.  You see, it's not simple enough that you just kill a bunch of officers for a chance at Star weapons.  No, you have to kill unique characters, since generics possess only the -barest- chance of actually dropping them, where Uniques, especially with a proper Fortune Hunter score, have a chance that approaches reasonable and contrary to what I thought prior, they have a chance of dropping weapons that -aren't- theirs.  Capture of Wei on the Wei side offers you a small-ish map (or at least a map where only 30% of it is used) that has no less than 11 Unique Officers (Jiang Wei, Huang Zhong, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhang Bao, Liu Shan, Guan Xing, Zhao Yun, Ma Chao, Zhuge Liang and Guan Ping) in a short timeframe.  Plus it has one more benefit which I will explain to you momentarily.

I've found in my runs tonight that with Level 15 Fortune Hunter, you can expect to walk away from the map with -at least- one Star weapon, which is good.  Not great since there's, you know, 154 Star Weapons in the game not counting Fifth Weapons (Jesus Christ), but it could be worse, and it's honestly a relatively short map.  There -is- a bit of an issue with the scripting, however, in that sometimes Guan Ping and Ma Chao simply refuse to advance on you or on the Wei Main Camp, and Guan Ping is ridiculously out of the way if he doesn't meaning you lose out on a potential chance unless you charge his ass, and even if he does charge, he always charges with Liu Bei (as does Zhuge Liang) who you do not want to kill immediately because it will end the stage and if you kill Liu Bei and, say, Zhuge Liang at the same time, Liang will not drop a weapon.  Which is incredibly frustrating.

The key thing about any and all forms of grinding and farming is the amount of time invested because obviously you want to cut the amount of time spent down as much as possible.  Because grinding/farming is fucking obnoxiously boring and games that rely on it for anything in excess are made by developers who are dumb and also stupid.  And are also jerks.  The good thing with Dynasty Warriors 8 and the way weapons unlock is that there's a little bit of a trick that cuts -way- down on the amount of down-time you have in between runs of the map.  As in, cuts it down to damn-near zero.  You want to know what that funny little trick is?

Let Liu Bei kill you. 

(After killing all his officers.  It's not even difficult to let it happen, since Capture of Wei - Wei Side is an end-story mission which means it's max difficulty and then you have Chaos on top of that...yeah, characters do a lot of damage.  )

You see, when you lose a stage, a message comes up asking if you'd like to restart from the beginning, which it will do so without any load time (unless there's a cinematic at the start, I imagine) allowing you to get right into it.  And at least with Star weapons (honestly haven't tested with Orb weapons, honestly don't even care) they seem to work on an unlock system in a sense.  Because they're unique, once you have them, you -have- them unless you sell them or something else.  So say you get Guan Xing to drop the Sky Splitter which is one of Guan Ping's Star weapons and then you do as I say and allow Liu Bei to kill you.  When you restart the stage, you can check your weapons and look at that, you still have the Sky Splitter.  This way, you cut out the load into the main menu, the load into the stage selection, into the character selection and loading up the stage proper.  That is a tangible amount of minutes and given that you're damn near guaranteed one or two weapons per run (if not more, one particularly generous run netted me four) using that stage and Fortune Hunter 15, it will potentially shave -hours- off of your general farming, especially if you would use a different method.  I would advise, however, that you end a Farm sessions with a victory - I doubt if it really matters if you quit to menu after a defeat rather than replaying and winning, but it's...best not to take chances, yeah?

I'm personally up to 90% of the entire Weapons Catalog filled, so it shouldn't be too terribly long before I can get to bond-grinding and then...simply being done with Dynasty Warriors 8 until Xtreme Legends comes out in some fashion.  Since I will most likely be getting it provided it's physical -or at the very least it's localized for the Vita-.  I'm being optimistic that Xtreme Legends is going to get localized (it's barely been out in Japan yet, so I'm not too worried about lack of announcement) but I wouldn't be surprised if KOEI pulls the same bullshit as they did with 7 and cut the English VAs for a little cost and cut out the Disk production for the same reason.  (Because, once again, no dubs = no disk is bullshit)  If it's localized for the Vita, unless it's just a dreadfully shitty port, I'll at least be alright with downloading that since it will be far smaller than the ~11 gigs that standard KOEI fare seems to be on PS3.  I'd say I don't know -why- I'm bothering, but it's obvious - Zhu Ran is in Xtreme Legends.  I can't wait for an official announcement so I can do another "Let's Talk About the New Characters" and probably just devote an entire post to Zhu Ran.  Just you wait.

Update!:  I figure it's appropriate to do a tl;dr of my method here for the folks who...somehow stumble across this and want to be Weapon Collecting Masochists.

• Get the Bow of Destruction - It's Xiahou Yuan's Fifth Weapon.  The game tells you how to get it.
• Buff Up a Fighter of Your Choice (Potentially Optional) - Abuse the Academy in your Ambition Mode town and use some (most/all) of that gold you've stockpiled playing every single Story Mode mission.  Get someone to Level 99, buff their stats to 1,000, go all out.  I went with Lu Bu, obv. but you go with whoever works for you.
• Upgrade Fortune Hunter - Go to Yellow Turban Conflict (Zhang Jiao's story stage) on Chaos Difficulty in Free Mode, rescue Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang and go to the southwest corner (south of Zhang Bao) where Peons spawn infinitely.  Massacre 1,500+ and then go to town on all the officers in the stage.  Repeat as needed; Bare Minimum Level 10, Recommended 15+.
• Farm Farm Farm - Go to Shu's Missions in Free Mode and pick Capture of Wei - Wei Forces (or find it in the Xuchang maps, maybe).  Equipped with Fortune Hunter and the Bow of Destruction, you should be able to wrangle 1-4 Star Weapons from the 11 officers present per run.  Let Liu Bei kill you to immediately restart the stage.  You'll retain your Star weapons and save a lot of loading time.  Repeat until the trophy dings!

As another side update, I got my Weapon Collector trophy so yay me!  Also Bond-Grinding is definitely number one most grindy, awful thing in DW8.  No question.

okay, I do still wonder sometimes why I do this to myself

On Star Ocean 1&2 And Why They're So Fun to Break

So, I've been playing Star Ocean:  First Departure on PSP as I claimed I would do for my next PSP game and I've had a lot of fun with it.  As we all know, the sequel to the game, Star Ocean:  Second Departure (Or Second Story, depending on which version you prefer) was one of my gaming 'white whales' for quite some time until I learned to relax and enjoy the game rather than the grind.  So when I started First Departure, breaking the game was, well, not really close to my mind.  This was something new, different than SO2, so I didn't need to really try all the different tricks to break it into little pieces and control it.

But, well, these things happen sometimes and you don't intend for them to happen, but you're just playing and suddenly you've constructed Gods of Destruction who have access to a near limitless source of money and have the answer to infinite power (read:  fairly reliable level-ups from one encounter) at your fingertips.  And you didn't really mean to do it, but, well, you did it and it'd be a shame to let that go to waste, you know?  For those of you who don't want to learn how to absolutely wreck Star Ocean 1 (and, for the most part, 2), perhaps skip the next couple of paragraphs.

The skill lists in Star Ocean 1 and 2 are largely intechangeable in both name and effect, so knowing that there's a skill in SO2 that, when purchased (up to a max of 10 times, as with all the skills) reduces the overall skill point cost of all other skills, I couldn't help but, y'know, save my SP up for that.  With that bought, and by that point I had access to all the purchasable skills, I used the rest of my SP bounty on skills that just so happened to unlock Train, which, when activated lowers your characters overall abilities slightly in exchange for more XP gained for each battle.  I guess, before I go on too much, I should sort of explain the skill system as it is in Star Ocean 1 and 2.

You see, it's sort of a three-tier system:  You buy skills with skill points after you've learned said skills from different skill guilds scattered across the land.  They sell you different skill-sets (there's four sets and three levels of each; each set offers a few different skills within) for Fol (money) and then, as I said, you purchase skills with SP which you gain, unsurprisingly, from leveling up.  After purchasing some compatible skills, you start unlocking specialties.  Specialties are sort of super-skills that let you make different items, whereas the regular skills basically only offer passive bonuses.  (Knife, for example, raises your strength with every skill level.)  Train is an example of a specialty since it, well, does something, same as Alchemy, Customization, and Music.  (All of which you should be interested in.)

Then it goes a level further with Super Specialties which are gained after a certain majority of the group learns the proper specialties.  Super Specialties, because of that, use the whole party, rather than just the individual and are harder (slightly) to get to Level 10 because of it, but these are your major bread and butter.  Orchestra (the next level of Music) will really help you in Item Creation, Group Appraising will let you raise prices at stores (when you want to sell something, thus making more money) or lower prices (when you want to buy things at a lower cost) at will, and Blacksmith will let you make some really outstanding armor.  These are just examples, of course, as there's quite a few.

Anyways, after getting the Train specialty on everyone, I just so happened to invest the right way to get my Super Specialty, Enlightenment, up to Level 10.  Enlightenment, as with Train, lowers your abilities while active (did I mention you can deactivate Train?  Well, you can.  Same with this.  Think of them like DBZ-Style Limiters) in exchange with netting you a good deal more SP per leveling up.  A string of coincidences, you see.  It was all very surprising to me, honest.  That served me well for....well, the most of the game, really.  I'm in the final stretch currently and will likely be able to finish it as early as tomorrow or as late as Sunday, depending on when I'm bothered to actually play it again.  And when I stop grinding.  Oh, right, the grinding.  Again, purists may want to skip, skip skip.

So, remember how I mentioned Alchemy as a Specialty?  Yeah, well, it's probably one of the more OP Specialties there is, topped only by Music and a couple others.  With a simple chunk of iron (which you can buy for 150 Fol) and a little luck, you can turn that iron into gold, mithril, and other various gemstones and ores all the way up to the mythological Philosopher's Stone.  Provided you have level 10 Alchemy, an item that will up the success of Alchemy, and the required talents (which I'm not even going to go into) you can create a few Philosopher's Stones out of every batch of 20 iron you buy.  Moreso if you use Music and even more if you use Orchestra.  Why go to the trouble, you might ask?  Because a single Philosopher's Stone will sell for 300,000 Fol at base.  Upping the cost with Group Appraisal takes that to the higher end of ~490K per stone.  I'm sure you can guess where this is going.

With this untold wealth, it's easy enough to go off and buy some nice accessories and some nice instruments (provided you haven't bought them all already) and use your resident music-lover to compose some musical pieces for them all, particularly the Silver Trumpet, which will cost you a pretty Fol.  After writing The Devil's Aria, you can perform it at any time on the world map, which will summon a boss encounter similar to that person's Music Specialty level.  8 is the sweet spot here, because with that, you'll summon a rather large phoenix that can go down like a bitch and net you 91k experience in the doing.  Over and over again.  I remind you that because of Train and Enlightenment, I'm not even using my characters at their fullest.

The process is rather similar in Star Ocean 2, though I'm not quite sure what specifics are different.  I assure you, some of them are, but that's really the bulk of it right there.  And, while many RPGs offer you the ability to become OP as hell, much as I described, somehow in SO it's different.  I'm not quite sure if it's because you're OP as hell with sealed off ability or if it's just the way you can just become as death pretty much with only a few hours work, but it's really, really satisfying.  And part of the reason why I never could beat SO2, because it was that feeling that I was going for but never really got until this last playthrough.  This time, with SO1, though....I was ready for the game.

The game was not ready for me.

Looking forward to Dissidia 2: Live Free or Dissidia Hard?

The original Dissidia might be a good place to start.  Since, as we know, Dissidia 2:  Dissidia Harder, will feature a save import function to retain all your character levels, and a special accessory just for importing.  Now, granted, Dissidia 2:  Electric Boogaloo (I'll stop that now) might be more fun, we don't know, but it'll be an extra $10, a $10 you can save by playing the first and waiting for the second to shed that!

Should you decide to do that, you'll likely end up looking for an easy way to level up your characters.  Trust me, we all went there eventually; and it is fairly easy.  And not really that exploitative either, for those of you who might worry about that.

So, what will you need?

1. Ex-Death unlocked.  (Which might be automatic, I forget.  It's been a really long time.)
2. The ability to set your Foe's level in a free battle to 100.  (For max results.)
3. A Manual Magic Pot summon.  (You'll be able to tell it's Manual because it won't say Auto)
4. (Optional)  +Exp items (Chocobo feathers, etc.)
5. (Optional)  Bonus Day

Now.  Instead of explaining everything at first, I'll give a little visual demonstration of what the Level-up trick entails.




So, watching that at first, you might just be wondering what the balls is going on.  So I'll go ahead and explain it a little before getting into the finer details.  As you might have noticed, at the start of this battle, Squall is level 1.  This was on my Bonus day, and Squall had a Chocobo Feather on, with a Summon Used/Unused combo for a seamless 1.5x effect on his Experience.  So, bonuses on top of bonuses is the key.

The overarching goal is to get Ex-Death to hit you with a Brave attack, not an HP attack.  It will break you, and put his Brave all the way to 9999.  All you have to do after that is avoid being hit even more than you were already.  Then, the final goal is to use Magic Pot to get your Brave to 9999, attack him with an HP attack, and that's a One-Hit KO for anybody, even someone who has 99 levels on you.

So, here's what happened in the video.  Starting at 0:10, I went poking at Ex-Death; not only because I was testing how apt he was to dodge my attacks, but because I was trying to force him to use his teleport.  When he does that, he usually teleports more or less into you, which counts as a Brave attack.  (Brave, btw, determines how much damage your HP attacks deal.  As in, directly affects; the amount of Brave you have is the damage you deal.)  When he'd do that, I'd hit Break status and bam, easy as that.  This eventually does happen around 0:33.  Afterward, you see I play a little keep away while also running in to grab the EX-Mode item.  While not -necessary- to keep your foe away from these, allowing them to go into EX-Mode generally ends poorly for you.

Also vital to note is that I stayed away until my Brave refilled past Break.  Always remember this.  If you try to use Magic Pot while you're in Break status, it will miss, and you've lost it for that battle.  Once you get to that point, Ex-Death has 9999 brave, and you're back from the brink, it's just a matter of picking your spot.  Watch him while he moves and wait for a jump if possible; the worst that can happen is he teleports and Breaks you again.  Then dash in, and for the optimal chances of not having your Magic Pot wasted, use it as you're executing your HP attack.  Sometimes your foe will have summons that cut your Brave or the like and in those cases, you're in for a much longer fight.  But they don't always activate instantaneously, so minimizing the window he can use it is key.

As you see, it goes off without a hitch.  With one single attack, I gained nearly a million, (Million.  With an M.) Exp, and that, coupled with the other few pick-and-prod attacks, one battle gained 65 levels for me.  In just over a minute. 

So there you are!  Hopefully the video coupled with the explanation will help you if you decide to get Dissidia or already have it and are possibly playing it in anticipation of the prequel.  (Yes it's a prequel.  Why your levels carry over in that case is beyond me.)