Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires: Weapons And Artifacts + Characters and Titles

One of the biggest draws to Dynasty Warriors as a series is the huge range of weapons that the games have. Officers can mix and match to shake things up or wreak havoc with their favorites. The games keep things fresh even after so many years by updating movesets and switching some favorites around, too.

Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires

In Dynasty Warriors 9 Empires, however, weapons work in a very different way. You no longer pick up weapon after weapon, hoping for one with great attributes. Now, only attributes are left to chance, and weapons themselves are tied to rarity.

Weapon Types And Proficiency

Characters in DW9E have seven weapon proficiencies tied to the seven weapon categories in the game. These are Blades, Clubs, Long, Projectile, Twin Blades, Greatsword, and Special. You can tell a character’s proficiency with a weapon category by the number of stars on the weapon icon on their equipment page.

One star is the base proficiency, with a very large star being the maximum. Characters gain proficiency with a weapon by using it in battles and killing many enemies. At the beginning of the game, characters will start with three stars in the weapon category that matches their favorite weapon. If a character has two favorite weapons, such as Sun Jian, they will have three stars in both weapons’ categories.

However, the actual weapons that a character can equip are limited by the rarity of the Artifacts available to them.

Artifacts And Gems

Artifacts are equipped like weapons are, and they come in five rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary, and Epic. Artifacts are items that come with elemental affinities and slots to place Gems.

Common Artifacts have one slot for Gems, Uncommon Artifacts have two slots, and so on. Epic Artifacts are the best, with enough slots for five Gems.

Artifacts may be attuned to any of the six elements, or they may be non-elemental. The effects of the gems you equip to an Artifact will increase if they match elements. In addition, elemental Artifacts themselves become stronger if equipped with matching elemental Gems. The only exception is non-elemental Artifacts, which provide no elemental attacks but improve the effects of non-elemental Gems more than an equivalent elemental Artifact would.

From this, you can see that the best strategy for equipment is to use Artifacts with elements that benefit your weapon choice and your general approach and then equip those Artifacts with your best-matching Gems.

The selection of weapons and bows that you can equip depends upon the rarity of the Artifact you have. For example, when you have a Rare artifact equipped, you can equip the Common, Uncommon, and Rare varieties of your selected weapon. They only differ in how much Attack and Defense they grant, so using the rarest weapon that you can is the best strategy.

Acquiring Artifacts And Gems

You will get Artifacts and Gems by winning Invasion battles or as gifts from allies. The rarity of the Artifacts you acquire will heavily depend on the difficulty you are playing on, but there is always an element of random chance involved.

As a general rule of thumb, if you are looking for Legendary Artifacts, you’ll need to play on Hard Mode, and Epic Artifacts are likely to be extremely rare unless you play on Chaos Mode.

Reputation Overview

In most game menus, the six Reputations are represented only by small white icons. These are:

Brave, represented by a sword.
Commanding, represented by a flag.
Ingenious, represented by a fan.
Eloquent, represented by paper.
Benevolent, represented by sparkles around a head.
Evil, represented by lightning around a head.

You’ll improve these gradually as you make various choices in Conquest mode. This includes the diplomatic, militaristic, and commercial decisions you can make to develop your kingdom, the secret plans you choose before a battle and even interacting with officers during a Stroll.

As your scores increase, you will level up your Reputation. Each Reputation has a maximum level of 10, and improving them is the key to unlocking new titles.

How Reputation Affects Character Interactions

When on a Stroll, you can Interact with officers around the country. In addition, you can attempt to Recruit unaffiliated officers. How successful these interactions are is based on your Reputation levels. Each officer in the game has two Reputations that they like and two Reputations that they dislike. You can see which Reputations a character likes and dislikes when you choose them to talk to during a Stroll. The Reputations will have upward, blue arrows for likes and downward, red arrows for dislikes.

As a result, your Reputation levels affect two things: how much your relationship deepens with a character when choosing the Interact action and the chance of a character agreeing to be Recruited.

The formulas are listed below, where the Disliked and Liked Reputations are simply the sum of the levels of the relevant Reputations:

Relationship Bonus = (((Disliked Reputations) / 2) x -1) + (Liked Reputations) + 3

Recruitment Chance = (Disliked Reputations x -1) + (Liked Reputations x 2)

You will also get a bonus to recruitment chance based on your relationship level with the character, so you don’t have to rely on your Reputation levels alone. You can keep Interacting with them to become close.

Titles Overview

Titles are earned through leveling up your character’s Reputations, and they come in a few rarities:

Common Titles
Rare Titles
Legendary Titles
Epic Titles

There is only one Common Title, Common Officer. This Title provides no Reputation bonuses and no chance of acquiring Uncommon, Rare, or Legendary Secret Plans. It only serves as a starting Title for Conquest Mode.

On the other hand, rarer titles have different rates for Secret Plan Acquisition, affecting what personal Secret Plans you may be rewarded with at the end of a battle. The rates are as follows:

Rare 50% 50%
Legendary 40% 40% 20%
Epic 20% 30% 30% 20%

Your Title will also come with Reputation bonuses. These are either positive or negative modifiers attached to each of the six Reputations that affect how much Reputation you gain from certain actions.

To illustrate this, take the Great Training military action:

Without any modifiers, it will increase your Brave score by 15.
With the Mighty Officer Title equipped, it will increase your Brave score by 22 thanks to the Title’s 50 percent bonus to Brave gains.
With the Sage Title equipped, it will increase your Brave score by 11 thanks to the Title’s -25 percent penalty to Brave gains.
Knowing this, you can micromanage your Titles and actions once you gain enough of them to level up your Reputations efficiently.

The final things that come with new Titles are unique Political actions, new Secret Plans, and new Military Units. You must unlock the Title in your current Conquest Mode run to use the unique Political Ploys, but Secret Plans and Military Units are unlocked permanently in the game once you’ve unlocked them once.

When you unlock a new tier of Title, you will also have more action points to use when you go on a Stroll. Without any Rare Titles, you’ll have three actions per Stroll, all the way up to six actions per Stroll once you have any Epic Title unlocked.

Unlocking Titles

To find the requirement to unlock a Title and see all the benefits a Title has, head to the Title section of the Player Menu. Click on “Title Settings” to change your Title and “Title Info” to see every Title in the game and its unlock requirements.

Some Epic Titles are unique to certain characters, but they come with very powerful Secret Plans. These should give you simple goals to shoot for when thinking about how to play Conquest Mode. For quick reference, though, here are the generic Rare, Legendary, and Epic Titles, along with their unlock requirements. In these tables, the Reputations are abbreviated as follows:

Br = Brave
Co = Commanding
In = Ingenious
El = Eloquent
Be = Benevolent
Ev = Evil

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