Dynasty Warriors 5 Xtreme Legends
Chaos Mode
Siege of He Fei Castle (Wu Forces)
Gan Ning (moveset)

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Gan Ning's Maximization

Recommended Weapon:
Medium Weight
Attack / Musou / Fill / Charge / Speed
Charge and Speed are the least important. Fill actually isn't even that important, but definitely helpful.
Putting Life and Defense in the place of Charge and Speed may be a good idea. I'm just more geared towards flexibility and damage maximization. Attack, musou, and fill shouldn't be changed though.

Recommended Items:
Ice Orb
Tiger Amulet / Green Scroll / True Way of Musou / Wind Scroll / Dragon Arms
Offensive maximization of course, as always. The way maximization should work in this game is to maximization damage in order to get as much musou fill as possible. This naturally gives the best defense. The idea is to not get hit, instead of being able to sustain more hits. Sustainability is the governing thing for Chaos Mode, because recovery items are scarce.

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Hehe, Gan Ning's moveset maximization just had to be one of the first redos right?
The interesting thing about performance maximization in Chaos with Gan Ning is being creative and skillful with his musou. But being skillful with musou filling can be just as important, but perhaps not as important as more complex characters like Guan Yu (yes Guan Yu is complex)

It's kinda nice how I've developed no rust from not playing DW5 for a while.
In fact, I'd maybe consider this some of my best work.
OK, aside from maxing out damage output, the Musou bonus on the weapon is pretty much a MUST.
I mean the offense shown in this video is precisely why Gan Ning deserves to be a very high tier character. He's not as great as Sun Jian is because there's an element of musou consistency here, and this doesn't involve lack of experience and control with musou, as I always consider that not a valid variable. The thing that causes occasional inconsistencies is stage obstacles, and this is why I chose this stage to present Gan Ning's maximization. Trees, statues, buildings, you name it....once there are obstacles in the way, you've really gotta do some planning, or just C6 and hope ice kicks in.

Against playable officers though, killing in one musou without ice is possible to extremely hard. So this is another area where Gan Ning can't quite match Sun Jian's maximization.

Now the reason why Musou is a must, is because a short musou won't quite allow enough time to comfortably get two run throughs on a generic officer. The way to maximize Gan Ning's offense is to hit officers when turning with his musou. This allows enough time to get two hits, whereas if you just run right through like in a straight line, you'll only get one hit. If you freeze an officer near a wall, and execute his musou, you'll see that the frequency of hits with his musou is very high, and the idea is that it's high enough to make two hits consistently possible on an officer that is not frozen. The key to killing generic officers is to get two successful run throughs. After the first run through, you have to kill some time to allow the officer enough time to get up, and this is exactly the reason why you need a Musou on his ideal weapon. Do some sort of oval shape or whatever to kill the necessary time, and then take the fight right back to the officer when he gets up. May take some time to master, but once you get it down, sometimes even the mini-map is enough to take down officers. And, I've shown in this video well enough that control consistency should not be an issue for Tier List evaluation.

That should do it, for the important notes. For musou filling, you should try to waste his third normal attack. Having Speed on his weapon will help.

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AUDIO:
Dynasty Warriors 4 - Dark Angel
Dynasty Warriors 5 - Dual NRG
Dynasty Warriors 6 - Tropical Wars (less info)