Beginners Combat Guide
Mastering combat in Where Winds Meet fundamentally relies on understanding the game’s core defensive mechanics: Blocking, Dodging, and Parrying.
This Where Winds Meet beginner combat guide will walk you through the essential mechanics, from adjusting the difficulty to choosing and progressing your weapon sets, ensuring you avoid the pitfall of mere button-mashing and can handle the challenging content the game provides.
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1. Initial Combat Settings and Difficulty
Before engaging in any major fights, it is prudent to review the game’s combat settings. The developers have provided several difficulty tiers and training aids to ease players into the system.
- Difficulty Tiers: The game offers Easy, Recommended, Hard, and Extreme, with the final, more difficult setting being Hardcore (permadeath). Playing on Extreme difficulty from level one grants special cosmetic tags and a unique health bar, showcasing one’s dedication to the challenge. Be aware that you can swap down from Extreme to Hard, but you cannot swap back up.
- Attack Tips/Parry Cues: The game includes an option to display on-screen cues for parrying, which is useful for learning the combat rhythms initially. However, to properly prepare for PvP and advanced content, it is recommended to turn this setting off eventually. This forces the player to predict attacks and learn boss patterns, which is a necessary step before getting into the real action.
2. The Foundations of Offense
The offensive system is built on a standard, yet flexible, foundation that varies slightly based on the equipped weapon.
- Basic Attacks: All weapons have a Light Attack (typically Left Click) and a Heavy Attack (can be keybound, e.g., R key).
- Some weapons, like the Greatsword or Glaive, use the Heavy Attack key to perform a Charged Attack.
- Other weapons, such as the Dual Blades, use the Heavy Attack to activate a Berserk Mode buff, granting temporary extra attack speed and life leech instead of a direct damaging attack.
- Abilities and Skills: Each weapon typically features two main abilities, often mapped to keys like Q and a secondary ability. Some skills may have multiple stages that are activated with successive inputs.
- Weapon Swapping: Instead of manually swapping weapons through the inventory, a quick press of the Tab key will perform an attack while simultaneously swapping your equipped weapon. This is an essential technique for chaining combos.
- Bow Usage: The Bow acts as a secondary, auxiliary weapon. It has no special skills and is purely for aiming and shooting, with longer charge times resulting in greater damage.
3. Defensive Mastery: Blocking, Dodging, and Parrying
Effective defense is the centerpiece of the combat system. Players have three primary methods for mitigating or avoiding damage.
- Block (Right Click): This action will block some incoming damage, but you will still take a reduced amount of damage to your health bar.
- Dodge: Dodging consumes stamina and provides i-frames (invincibility frames), allowing you to completely ignore damage for the duration of the animation. A Perfect Dodge will briefly slow down time, though this effect will not trigger in PvP or on higher difficulties like Extreme.
- Parry (Keybind E): The most critical defensive action. This must be timed precisely with the enemy’s attack.
Understanding Attack Types
To succeed in this Where Winds Meet beginner combat guide, you must recognize the cues for different attack types:
- Normal Attacks: Can be blocked or dodged. If a boss’s attack is a sequence of strikes, a single, correctly-timed parry can negate all attacks in that sequence.
- Red Attacks: These are usually powerful, targeted attacks that can be Parried. A successful parry of a Red Attack will result in a Perfect Parry and an immediate counterattack against the enemy.
- Golden Attacks: These are high-damage, unblockable attacks that cannot be parried. They must be Dodged.
The combat system is designed to reward deliberate actions. As mentioned in the video, button-mashing will not get you very far in this game.
4. Advanced Techniques and Resources
A few other mechanics will help you maximize your combat performance:
- Execute (F Key): When an enemy is vulnerable, an “Execute” prompt will appear. A crucial tip is to delay the Execute until the timer is nearly depleted (about 1 second left). This allows you to dish out maximum bonus damage with standard attacks before triggering the finishing move.
- Animation Cancelling: This technique exists in the game, allowing players to cancel a current attack animation by pressing the Parry button, opening up options for more intricate combos, particularly in PvP.
- Special Skills and Potions: On top of weapon abilities, you have a set of Special Skills that are situationally dependent. For example, one skill allows you to steal an enemy’s shield and throw it back for high damage. Potions (e.g., healing) are crafted and must be used strategically.
5. Weapon and Gear Progression
Where Winds Meet features an excellent in-game system for managing your gear progression.
- In-Game Weapon Sets Guide: By pressing H (in the Chinese version shown in the video), you can access a dedicated guide for weapon sets. This is a fantastic, no-nonsense resource that shows:
- Recommended weapon combinations (e.g., Spear and Sword).
- Performance graphs for Survivability, Agility, and Damage.
- Recommended set bonuses for both weapons and armor.
- Specific passives to aim for.
- Crucially, it features a one-button press (F) to automatically change your loadout to the recommended setup, including passives.
- Arsenal/Gear Locker: This feature, which typically unlocks around level 40, allows you to store your old, unused gear. By filling slots in the Arsenal based on the gear score of the items, you gain permanent bonus stats, such as minimum/maximum damage and extra HP.
- Acquiring New Combat Styles: New fighting styles for weapons are acquired in one of two main ways:
- Stealing: You can locate a teacher on the map (by pressing Spacebar on the weapon in the menu) and attempt to steal the style. This often involves a short quest chain to acquire a disguise or a key.
- Joining a Sect: Each Sect will grant you access to a specific weapon style upon joining.
If you focus on these fundamental mechanics—especially differentiating between Red and Golden attacks—and make use of the fantastic in-game guides for weapon progression, you will have a solid foundation for mastering the high-skill combat of Where Winds Meet.
This guide was brought to you by Ulfhednar! You can catch him here: https://www.youtube.com/@UlfhednarTV
Finally, be sure to check out our Where Winds Meet map to help navigate the Ten Kingdoms era of ancient China.