How to beat Zhang Liang, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s infuriating jerk of a first boss

Wo Long: fallen dynasty starts by taking you through a tutorial and introducing you to the different controls and attacks. And then, about 15 minutes into the game, you’re thrown into a shockingly intense boss fight – with little to no warning – against Zhiang Liang, General of Man.

It’s a real sink-or-swim moment, and it is So early in the game. It already needs you Real comfortable with the combat system. Us Wo Long: fallen dynasty Zhiang Liang, General of Man’s boss fight guide, will help you prepare for the fight and then guide you through both phases. (Yes, there is one second phase.)

Preparing for Zhiang Liang’s boss fight in Wo Long

The first boss fight comes early Wo longso there’s not much you can do to prepare, but let’s talk about anything you can do that might help.

Practice, practice, practice

When you Rest on any Battle flagyou get the option trip. This is how you replay levels or do side missions much later in the game. At this point, you’re going to get some extra training.

When you select Travel, use RB to go to Other. You should see a map for it Tutorial: basic training. Select that. Yes, you just went through the tutorial, but this is different. You go through a longer and more detailed training session here. Pay special attention to the Deflect section.

Do not skip this step. Go and do it. Do it twice. Then do it again. We promise it helps.

Level up

You should pick up plenty during the tutorial Real Qi to level up at least a few times (don’t forget to use real Qi flakes or fragments from your inventory). Our recommendation is to level up each one Water (reduced Spirit consumption when deflecting) and Firework (increased Spirit drain from Martial Arts and increased Spirit gain from attacks).

They also increase your health by a few points and increase your attack bonuses with the standard Ring Pommel Sabre. (That’s our recommendation, but put your points into the Five Points Virtues you want to build your character. Most importantly, spend the Qi to level up and improve at least some of your stats.)

Trim your equipment

You won’t have a huge inventory full of different weapons and armor at this point in the game, but you’ll have picked up a few things. Check your inventory for any weapon that does more damage than what you currently have or armor that gives you better defense than the Nameless Warrior Garb you start with.

Watch you Equipment Weightand keep it below 25%. This is how heavy your armor is and, as a result, how quickly your Spirit depletes while dodging and deflecting – you’re going to get a lot of dodging and deflecting.

Slot Wizardry Spells

We’re not going to go into detail here (the magic system is A Whole Thing, which you can read more about here). Plus, you only have enough Qi and Levels to unlock one spell in each of the five stages. However, we can talk about what works and what doesn’t.

Attacking spells won’t get you very far – your spells won’t deal much damage at this point, and the fight against Zhang Liang is fast-paced and brutal, so you won’t have much time to stand back and fire off a few piddly spells. Instead, look for buff spells.

If you have two points in the Earth Five Phases Virtue, you can cast Improved defense to reduce the damage you take. If you have two points in Water, grab Cloud Pose to reduce your Spirit consumption when deflecting (notice a theme yet?). If you have two points in Metal, take it Repression Crush to delay the recovery of Zhang Liang’s Spirit.

Understand the ghost meter

Think about Wo long‘s Spirit as a combination of mana and stamina. You lose Spirit when hit or dodged, and you use Spirit to cast spells or perform martial arts. You get Spirit when you make regular melee attacks or when you successfully parry an attack. Both your character and every enemy (including Zhang Liang) have Spirit Gauges.

When a Spirit Gauge is depleted to its lower limit, that person (or demon) will be stunned for a few seconds, exposing them to a powerful attack – a Fatal blow. Your goal is to prevent that from happening to you, and more importantly, make sure it doesn’t happen to your enemy.

Hitting an enemy with certain attacks — Martial Arts, Wizardry Spells, Spirit Attacks (using Y/triangle), or deflections — also reduces their Spirit gauge. That, in turn, makes it all the easier to clear their mind.

This is going to be a common occurrence, especially when it comes to the strategy of defeating Zhang Liang.

Ignore your companion

During this battle, your companion, the blindfolded boy, will shout encouragement and advice while very sporadically dealing the smallest amount of damage possible. Don’t think about him. He will only distract you.

More importantly, if you take too much damage, he’ll say “You’re hurt…Stay behind me” or “I’ll protect you from further harm.” These are both lies. More precisely, they are just dialogues. He’s not going to protect you or do anything else. He just says things to make you feel better.

How to beat Zhang Liang’s boss fight – stage 1

When you first enter Zhang Liang’s arena, he’ll give a big villain monologue – don’t worry, you’ll automatically skip it if you get killed and need to come back. When he’s done, he raises his mighty mace and knocks it down in front of him. This move is mostly for show, but sprinting straight at him will take a hit.

Instead, take a moment, cast a buff spell and let it come to you.

Your main goal in the first phase of this fight is to deflect with the B/circle button. You’ll also need to do some damage, but focus on deflecting first. You have to press the button right before one of Zhang Liang’s attacks connects, like a parry in most other games. However, you don’t really get penalized for (trying to) deflect multiple times in a row. Practice to get the timing right, but you can mash a few knots if you have to. Worst case scenario, you just dodge.

We’re not going to abort his attacks here. Just know he’s going to attack. A lot of. Nonstop. What you need to focus on is deflecting with B/circle to shorten his Spirit gauge. Each time you successfully deflect, it will decrease its gauge.

As you get more comfortable with deflecting, start mixing some normal with X/square and Spirit Attacks with Y/triangle. These will continue to drain his (already shrunk) Spirit Gauge. You can see this in the GIF below – keep an eye on his Spirit Gauge under his health bar. The white chunks at the end are from deflections that decrease his total meter, and the red bar is his ghost that drains when we hit him. When the shrinking part meets the draining part, that means he is numb.

The first phase of this fight isn’t so much about dealing damage, but more about shrinking and draining his Spirit Gauge so you can hit him with a Fatal Blow. Do that two or three times and you’ve got it.

Now it gets interesting.

How to beat Zhang Liang’s boss fight – stage 2

The good news is that you only need to drain his health bar half way through to finish this fight. Actually, that’s also the bad news.

The biggest change for stage 2 of Zhang Liang’s boss fight is that he now has a giant elixir-powered demon arm. This increases his range dramatically, but you can still parry almost any attack. He is also a bit more aggressive.

The adjustment you need to make is now to parry multiple attacks in a row. In the video below you can see that we are not succeeding.

You can also see Zhang Liang end up as his most common Critical hit in this phase. He winds up his demon arm and then pushes it forward like a battering ram. By deflecting it, his demon arm is (temporarily) cut off And dramatically reduce his Spirit gauge. It shouldn’t take too much to get him sedated for a fatal stab at that point.

However, he will grow it back not long after.

He also has a few new attacks to watch out for.

The first, and most annoying, is one Soil-based magic attack. He swings his bat around and plants it vertically in the ground in front of him. A moment later, a row of bricks will explode along the ground towards you. It’s possible to deflect it (mostly), but we had much better luck just guarding with LB.

He also adds an offensive attack that may or may not be a critical hit (when he glows red). He swings his club like a lance to his side and charges at you. Both guard and parry work to deal with the non-critical version, but you’ll need to deflect when it’s glowing.

He also has a rushing flurry of Critical Blows attacks. It’s a lot to deal with, but he rarely does. Guarding is the best option when he’s close, but if you can, try deflecting the third, biggest swing at the end to deal a lot of damage to his Spirit Gauge.

Image: Team Ninja/Koei ​​Tecmo via Polygon

When you eventually reduce him to about half his health (or slightly less), the blindfolded boy will shout to “unleash the power in the jade!” He tells you Summon the divine beast. You’ll also see the icon on the right side of the screen fill up and you’ll get a handy tooltip on the left.

All you have to do is hit Y+B/triangle+circle and enjoy your win.