Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends - Bodyguards FAQ v 1.1 Written by Ultrace (ultrace@ultrace.com) Last Updated 1/23/03 Contents I. Introduction II. Disclaimer III. Version History IV. Bodyguards in Dynasty Warriors 3 and Xtreme Legends V. Frequently Asked Questions VI. On Bodyguard Use VII. Advancing Bodyguards VIII. Bodyguard Weapons and Items IX. Normal Bodyguards vs. Warrior Bodyguards X. Contributors I. INTRODUCTION This FAQ is intended to help players of Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends [DW3:XL] with developing, maintaining and using their bodyguards in the game. While the Xtreme Legends expansion, in my own opinion, is a great work, it is not without its problems. In particular, due to the increased difficulty of this expansion and the weakness of newbie bodyguards, rapid bodyguard death--or rather, retreat--is a common problem within the game, but one which can be overcome with just a little work. II. DISCLAIMER This is my first attempt at a FAQ; although I have taken many efforts to double-verify and confirm all the information contained here, there may be inconsistencies or incorrect info. I will not be held responsible for any ill result which comes of using this FAQ. I reserve the right to not update this FAQ further for any reason or to ignore corrective information sent to me. (I welcome corrections by e-mail, but be aware that my time is limited and any such information may not be incorporated for some time.) This document contains some spoilers about the rewards for completing some characters' musou modes, and how to obtain items and rewards. These spoilers are not labeled. Caveat lector. This document is copyrighted by me. It may be posted to any website, newsgroup, or other medium so long as the content is unaltered. The color, font, and other semantic formatting may be changed as desired. III. VERSION HISTORY 1.0 - This is the first version. Comparison of bodyguards between DW3 and DW3:XL, information on using bodyguards, levelling them, and their items is included. 1.1 - Some minor revisions to text. Added maximums for bodyguard items, taken from Muni Shinobu's DW3:XL FAQ. Also added section IX on Warrior Bodyguards. IV. BODYGUARDS IN DYNASTY WARRIORS 3 AND XTREME LEGENDS When Koei created DW3:XL, the existing bodyguard system from DW3 was completely overhauled, and for the better. In DW3, each character had a troop of 2, 4, 6 or 8 bodyguards, depending on the character and his or her rank of gained points in the game. Each character's bodyguards had differing stats, so that Zhao Yun might start out with defense-heavy bodyguards while say, Xaihou Dun might be offense-heavy, and Gan Ning's bodyguards might be balanced. All bodyguards were the same gender (male) and of the standard male type. Their colors varied depending on the alignment of the character they belonged to. They were all known as "Bodyguard." The bodyguards could be assigned to either "attack" or "defense" as their strategies They could not equip weapons or items. Bodyguards in DW3:XL differ in the following ways: 1. Bodyguards no longer belong to an individual character. Instead, you may create up to four troops of bodyguards which each can be used by any character in any stage. Thus, a brand new character having trouble can be equipped with a troop of maxxed-out bodyguards for full support. When you first boot up the game, four generic troops are created for you, each with brand-new stats. 2. Each troop starts out with the same stats. The troop gains experience points as a percentage of the points that your character gains in any given stage. In addition, as the bodyguards advance in points and gain levels ("advancement points") you can determine which of their stats increases--rank, attack, defense or life and musou. All troops start out with 2 bodyguards, and increase by 2 bodyguards for every 25000 experience points the troop gains, to a maximum of 8 bodyguards at 75000 points. 3. Each troop can have its own gender and race. At the outset, only standard male and female guards are available, but by completing some characters' musou modes, an additional type of male and female bodyguard can be unlocked. Once selected, a troop's race and gender cannot be changed unless the troop is wiped out and recreated from scratch. You may encounter female guards for the enemy now as well. 4. Each troop can have its own color of uniform. A troop's uniform can be changed at the beginning of any stage. At the outset, only red, blue, green, purple and "normal" colors are available. Completing some characters' musou modes unlocks additional colors for bodyguard uniforms--yellow, peach and black. 5. Each bodyguard in the troop has its own name. When you create the troop, you assign names to all eight bodyguards, even though the troop only starts with 2 bodyguards. Once selected, a bodyguard's name cannot be changed unless its troop is disbanded and recreated. 6. Troops can be assigned four different strategies to use in combat: Attack (go all-out with standard and charge attacks), Defense (use only standard attacks, do not use charge attacks that might leave the guard open to counterattack), Support (use only charge attacks, and focus on any archers first if they are present), and Shield (increases defense rating of the guards, who try to surround the character and do nothing but block during the stage.) 7. Guards can equip differing weapons and items. Each of the five guard weapons has three levels of weapons which can be acquired during stages. There are also ten equippable bodyguard items, although only one can be used by a troop at any given time. All weapons and nine of the bodyguard items are found during normal stages, and picked up like your own weapons and items. They are in fact indistinguishable from normal weapons and items until you see what they are at the end of the stage. V. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Q: My bodyguards keep dying before I can even complete a stage. What am I doing wrong? A: New bodyguards start out very weak and can be wiped out by the enemy very easily. Since enemies in the game are slightly modified to the power of the character you're using, try taking a weaker character into a low-level stage on easy or novice difficulty. After one or two passes (about 4000-6000 guard experience points) and a few advancement points in defense, your bodyguards should have enough advancement to survive on the lower-level normal stages if you play carefully, and eat surplus food when you can. If you find an item for your bodyguards which raises their defense, be sure to have them equip it. (See Section VII for more advice on advancing bodyguards.) Q: My character is at 99999 experience. Can my bodyguards still gain points with him/her? A: Yes, the points the bodyguards receive at the end ofthe stage are based on how many you amass with your character, not how many the character actually receives. Use caution, though. A character with 99999 experience is probably pretty pumped up, which means the game will adjust the enemies to be tougher, and they'll be able to kill your bodyguards easier. Q: Normal enemies are dropping items. Is this a bug? A: No. New to DW3:XL is the ability for normal enemies to drop weapons and items. This is more likely to happen on higher-ranked enemies , particularly Guards and Guard Captains, but I have also seen items dropped by Majors on occasion. What affects the likelihood of these dropping is unknown. The weapons and items may be for you or for your bodyguards. Q: How do I unlock more bodyguard options? A: Defeat the musou mode of the Xtreme Legends characters. Beating musou with Meng Huo unlocks male Nanman bodyguards, Zhu Rhong unlocks female Nanman, Zhang Jiao unlocks yellow uniforms, Diao Chan unlocks peach uniforms, and Dong Zhuo unlocks black uniforms. Lu Bu and Yuan Shao do not unlock any bodyguard options that I can tell after beating their musou modes. Q: What's the tenth bodyguard item? How do I get it? A: The final bodyguard item and only one which cannot be dropped by an enemy is the BG Healing Scroll (known in the Japanese version as the Bodyguard Complete Book), which allows your bodyguards to automatically recover their life one time, much like officers in battle do. To get this item you will need to complete the Iron Man challenge with a score of 350 or higher. VI. ON BODYGUARD USE This section is more based upon my own personal opinion and experience, so if you're looking for a section with numbers and facts to support it, by all means skip ahead. In DW3, bodyguards were limited in their use. They couldn't be told to take out those pesky archers first, they didn't seem to want to shoot anyone above them, and were extraordinarily reluctant (to say the least) to use their musou attacks. Things are changed somewhat in DW3:XL, but it's important to remember that bodyguards are not primarily for killing your opponents, but for saving your life. Therefore, the best use for your bodyguards is generally to have them run interference. Bodyguards armed with bows or crossbows can snipe enemy officers from a distance and give you the opening you may need. With melee weapons, they can distract the officers and allow you to come around from behind and attack. Although even a maxxed bodyguard won't survive that long in Very Hard mode, while they live they're a godsend for taking down enemy officers. In stages where you have problems with archers or are short of arrows (such as the Raid on the Bandit Fortress), set your bodyguards to use a bow or crossbow and the Support command. They'll take out archers in towers and allow you to conserve arrows. In stages where you're having problems keeping a particular ally alive, set the bodyguards to melee weapons with the Attack command, and wade into the fray. The support will generally allow your ally to retreat to a safe distance or recover life, and instead of just you trying to fend off a small army, you'll have up to eight helpers. For casual gameplay, I generally set my bodyguards to bow with the Defense command. They'll give supporting fire, but not enough to get in my way or steal too many kills. As you gain more bodyguards, particularly if they're set to using bows and crossbows behind you, always keep an eye out for weapons and items dropped by the enemy. If you press ahead without checking, you could pass a number of valuable pickups. VII. ADVANCING BODYGUARDS As mentioned, bodyguards gain experience points at the end of a stage based upon how many experience points your character gained during the battle (bodyguards gain about half the experience points your character does.) This is also modified by how many bodyguards survived the battle versus how many entered it. If you enter a battle with two bodyguards and one is forced to retreat, then your bodyguard troop will receive approximately half the experience it would have normally. This makes it much easier to level your bodyguards once you get four or six of them, since losing one will have less of an impact. To gain more points during a battle for your bodyguards to feed on, do the following: 1. Defeat more soldiers. Reaching 1000 kills can not only save your side due to the morale increase, it results in big points. 2. Defeat more officers, including sub-officers. Each officer is worth a specific value; the more famous or tougher, the better. 3. Secure enemy gates. Each gate is worth 100 points. 4. Complete the stage more quickly. A very quick completion can yield over 2000 points. Some people report getting about 3000 for super-fast finishes. 5. Perform more and better combos. A "Good" combo is worth 10 points, but a "Perfect" combo is worth over 120. 6. Take more bodyguards with you. Each bodyguard who survives the battle is worth 200 points at the end. 7. Keep your bodyguards around. Each bodyguard who retreats is a -300 point penalty. Unlike what the manual says, bodyguards do not gain advancement points every 1000 experience points, at least not after the first two. Much like your character's rank, bodyguard ranks become more difficult to achieve. You will gain advancement points at 1000 xp, 2000 xp, 4000 xp, 6000 xp, 8000 xp, 10000 xp, etc., in increasing increments. However, by the time your bodyguards reach 10000 experience points, they will have gained six advancement points, enough to make them sufficiently tough to safely take into normal mode if you spend the points wisely, so maxxing out bodyguards is not necessary to make them useful. Advancement points can be spent on the following stats: Rank - Affects the bodyguard's appearance (for males), their maximum life and musou, and how often they attack and block. Since rank increases maximum life and musou, you should never spend advancement points on advancing actual life and musou until the bodyguard's rank is at maximum. Only three points can be spent on rank, taking your Private to Sergeant, then Major, then Guard. Life and Musou - Increases the maximum life and musou of the bodyguard. As said previously, you should not spend points on this until the bodyguard's rank is completed. Even then, it's generally better to raise defense instead of the guard's life. A guard with low defense but high life is still hot butter for the enemy knife to cut through, just more of it. Attack - How much damage the bodyguard does in combat. This is nice, but remembering that your bodyguards are more for support and less for clearing out armies, I generally place this as less important than defense. Defense - Arguably the most important stat (along with rank.) This affects how much damage your bodyguard takes in combat, along with their speed and ability to evade enemies. When maxxed out (at around 12-15 advancements), the bodyguard can even survive for some time in the low-level stages on very hard mode. Since bodyguards start out very weak and easy to kill, I recommend that your first ten advancement points be spent like this: Defense -> Defense -> Defense -> Rank -> Defense -> Rank -> Defense -> Rank -> Defense -> Defense By this point, you will be approaching, if not at, four bodyguards instead of two, and the bodyguards will be strong enough to survive most stages on normal mode. You can then safely start pumping up their attack or life/musou if you desire, or continue down the path of defense (which is what I do until it reaches the maximum.) VIII. BODYGUARD ITEMS Bodyguards can now equip powered up weapons and one non-weapon item per troop. While most of the items aren't very useful, they're all better than nothing, which is what your bodyguards could equip in DW3. Apart from the BG Healing Scroll, all the equippable bodyguard items are just bodyguard versions of regular items you can equip. The items are: BG Peacock Urn - Increases maximum hit points. This is handy if you can get a good amount on it, particularly if you don't have a good defense item. The maximum limit for this item is +32. BG Dragon Amulet - Increases maximum musou gauge. While bodyguards do pull off musou attacks in DW3:XL, the length of the musou bar is pretty much negligible. Bodyguards "holding down the button" to get the full extent of their musou bar just isn't that important. The maximum limit for this item is +32. BG Tiger Amulet - Increases attack. Pretty self-explanatory. If you want your bodyguards to have more punch and you can't advance them anymore, this is the way to do it. The max for this item is +20. BG Tortoise Amulet - Increases defense. Once you've put all the points you can into defense, this will be the next step in slowing the tide of damage.\ The max for this item is +20. BG Huang's Bow - Increases bow attack. If you have your bodyguards set to bow, this is better than the Tiger Amulet for increasing damage. I'm not sure if it has any effect on crossbow bodyguards. If your bodyguards are using melee weapons, then this is completely useless. The max for this item is +12. BG Shell Armor - Increases bow defense. You'd need a relatively high modifier on this item to have enough of an impact to make it better than the Tortoise Amulet (since that affects all damage taken and not just from arrows), but for bodyguards set to Support, this can help prevent them being cut to ribbons while they seek out those archers for you. The max for this item is +12. BG Speed Scroll - Increases speed. I find this to be unnecessary, especially for bodyguards with moderate defense, who can keep up with most characters who are themselves equipped with a speed scroll. The max for this item is +12. BG Wind Scroll - Increases attack range. For melee weapons, and with a high enough modifier, this might be worthwhile to check out, but I would probably stick with the BG Tiger Amulet or BG Elixir for fighting machines. The max for this item is +12. BG Elixir - Increases musou charge. Bodyguards do use musou attacks now, and they can use them quite frequently, especially when in a pinch and their rank is high. Equipping this will allow them to charge that meter faster. (Ironically, in playing DW3 and DW3:XL for well over 200 hours, I've never received an elixir for myself, and I've gotten three for bodyguards since I started playing DW3:XL.) The max for this item is +12. BG Healing Scroll - Allows each bodyguard to recover their life, but only once per battle. This works much like officers on the battlefield who regenerate themselves; the bodyguard pauses for a moment to summon up energy, and recovers life. This appears to trigger when the bodyguard is around 20-25% of their hit points. Once acquired, this item will probably help more in keeping the bodyguards alive than a good Peacock Urn or Tortoise Amulet. Each of these items can have their limits broken like the normal items you find on the Very Hard mode stages. As for getting high values, I haven't had a lot of success in this, with a +12 Tiger Amulet and +8 Elixir being my biggest finds. There is a strong likelihood that playing harder stages, harder modes, and getting higher combo points will result in higher-quality items, but most of the stages I beat in researching this were on normal or easy mode, for the sake of speed. (I beat the Wu Navy Skirmish on very hard mode, but the items were all for my character and not that great. Yeah, just the Wu Navy Skirmish. Very hard is too tough for me...) It's been mentioned on the GameFAQs boards that achieving high combo amounts prior to picking up weapons or items will have an effect, while picking up items and then proceeding to an area to rack up combo points (such as the south gate in Yi Ling) will have less or no effect. I have not been able to extensively or successfully test this yet. Bodyguard weapons come in three flavors for each weapon, some of which are taken from the weapons for playable characters (such as the Dragon Spear.) They come with assorted stats, but with the exception of a single +20 life and a +5 attack, I have failed to get more than +1 on any stat for a bodyguard weapon in any stage I've played, regardless of difficulty or combo points. I've also not managed to get more than 2 stats on a weapon. I'm still researching to find out if there's something I'm missing here. IX. NORMAL BODYGUARDS VS. WARRIOR BODYGUARDS New to XL is the ability to take a playable character into battle as your bodyguard in Free Mode stages. Because of the PS2's memory limitations, only 14 different officer models can generally be loaded into the game, allowing for 11 unique characters and 3 generic officer types. Therefore, if you pick a stage with a lot of unique characters, and choose to play as a character not already in that stage, you've used up the one spare character model the programmers allowed for, and your choice of bodyguards will be limited to characters already within the stage. You cannot pick as your warrior bodyguard any character on your side who has special lines or functions, or who is part of the victory or defeat condition on your side. You can pick any character from the enemy side as your bodyguard without trouble. They will simply be a doppelganger of the enemy, as if you had picked that character yourself to play as. If you pick for your warrior bodyguard a character who is already in the stage on your side, that character's position in the stage will be replaced with a generic officer. Depending on the difficulty of the stage, this can cause a disaster. If on the other hand, Very Hard mode just isn't hard enough, try taking a warrior bodyguard who is one of your better officers in the stage to accelerate your army's destruction, like Zhao Yun in the Shu side of Wu Zhang Plains. You cannot pick a warrior bodyguard in musou mode, probably because of the vast number of characters that would be present in all the different stages you play. While taking Daio Qiao into battle with Zhou Yu as your bodyguard, or Cao Cao with Dian Wei, etc. is a nice novelty, the question becomes, normal or\ warrior? Warrior bodyguards get to retain all of their base stats when you take them into a stage. A maxxed-out Lu Bu is still a maxxed-out Lu Bu. I've taken maxxed warrior bodyguards and maxxed normal bodyguards to the same stage on the same difficulty and let them go at it with enemies to test this. Also, load a stage with your maxxed out character, remove the items and weapons that increase their stats, and compare them with a maxxed bodyguard, and you'll see that they are very similar in the stats that are at their maximums. However, warriors cannot equip items or weapons, and you cannot give them commands--they do their own thing, and will not shoot arrows. They do not tend to follow you as closely as normal bodyguards. And, there is only one of them, and when he or she bites the dust, that's it. Normal bodyguards, even at maximum experience, have stats which are weaker than that of a maxxed-out character; you can max out only two, at best, of a bodyguard's three (four if you count life and musou as separate) stats before running out of experience, while a character can have their life, musou, attack and defense all ramped up to the top. Normal bodyguards, however, can equip items which give them more flexibility than warrior bodyguards, with increased musou charging, self-healing, and stat increases from items and/or weapons. You can give them commands and change those commands during the course of the stage as needed. You can also have up to eight of them, and regardless of how powerful your maxxed out Lu Bu, Zhang Liao or Guan Yu might be, eight maxxed out bodyguards are just plain better, if admittedly not as cool. For casual play, if your life isn't on the line, then either choice will work, and it's certainly more fun to me to bring in the pumped-up character than go with the normal bodyguards. But in a clinch situation, a troop of advanced normal bodyguards (50000+ experience) is almost definitely the way to go for the proper support of you and your allies. X. CONTRIBUTORS Some of the information in this FAQ was gleaned from the message boards at www.gamefaqs.com. In particular, how to acquire the "Bodyguard Complete Book" (although I had to find its real name myself and how it worked), and info on normal enemies dropping items not being a bug. Shadow780's theory on increasing items by achieving combos before picking up the items also came from the boards. Info on the maximum limit for bodyguard items comes from Muni Shinobu's DW3:XL FAQ, v3.10, which can be found at www.gamefaqs.com.