Best Melee Weapons for your Heroes

The game (including all DLCs) has 31 golden quality melee weapons. Golden quality signifies that these weapons are of the best quality and have the highest stats. Typically, there is only one copy of them in the campaign map but some unaddressed bugs may cause more than one copies to appear at times.

Most of these golden weapons are already held by their respective heroes. When a hero dies and their weapons have not been stolen or looted by anyone else, they go into the available pool of weapons. These weapons can then appear to be held by random rebels that spawn in provinces when public order is too low. If you have followed my other guide with advanced gameplay tips that focuses on triggering rebellions and farming them, you may have already seen some of these unique golden items in the hands of the rebels.

There are also a few golden weapons that are not held by anyone. Besides farming rebels and praying for rng, there is another way of getting some of them: There are two settlements in the entire map that specialise in blacksmithing. One of them is in the south (close to where Yan Baihu starts) and the other is in the west (close to where Liu Biao starts). If you upgrade these settlements all the way to level 3, they have an increased chance of producing a rare or golden weapon for you at the start of your turn.

Keep in mind that this might take several turns as the chance is still small. Also, remember that the weapons crafted by the blacksmiths in these settlements are not going to be unique weapons that were held by heroes, e.g. you are not going to get Cao Cao's or Guan Yu's weapons. You are only going to get "generic" golden weapons.

A final note: As the name of the guide suggests, this guide focuses only on melee weapons. There are a few golden quality bows you can find, but these are not covered here. This is simply a quick peek guide based on my spreadsheets to quickly determine the damage value of these items. It does not say anything about the heroes who originally wield these weapons. There will be a different guide for that.

Without further ado, let's have a look at them!

The weapons that have "random" starting owner simply means that there is a random chance that these weapons may appear as the starting ancillaries of any faction when campaign starts. If they do not appear at all in the beginning, then the only way of acquiring them is either through farming rebels or through forging them in one of the two blacksmithing settlements.

The values that you will see in the following tables correspond to the DPS (damage per second) of these weapons. The value can be easily acquired by adding base and armour-piercing damage, multiplying them by the attack rate value and then dividing by 60 seconds to find the damage value per second.

IMPORTANT : All the following rankings ignore the coloured stat increases in expertise / instinct / resolve / authority / cunning that these weapons provide. Again, the purpose of these rankings is simply to compare head-to-head the damage of these weapons, it is not to attribute a value based on both damage and coloured stats they provide, so please keep that in mind when reading the ranking tables.

Also all the DPS values were calculated based on extreme size units. However, that doesn't really change anything as these values proportionally decrease for all weapons based on your unit size.

Here is the raw DPS values of these weapons for a target with zero armour:

The three weapons that appear with red names, have certain effects that have not been included in the calculations.

More specifically, The "White Tiger's Claws" increase melee damage by 10%. That type of modifier can only be accurately calculated when you wield the weapon and take into account the hero's stats too. It can be safely assumed that this weapon can score higher in the list.

The "Burning Mace" of Lady Zhurong has an additional effect of applying a burning dot on the enemy that does 115 additional damage over 15 seconds. This is not simple to account in calculations as every hit refreshes the DoT. The weapon also inflicts -50 melee evasion to enemies. It can be safely assumed that this weapon will score higher when both effects are taken into account.

"Fear & Discipline" increases attack rate by +5%. Again, as different heroes have different base values for attack rate, this effect can only be accurately calculated when wielded. As with the previous two cases, this weapon will score slightly higher in the list when having its effect included in the calculations.

As it can be seen in these rankings, Guan Yu's weapon does by far the most raw DPS to targets with no armour. Considering that most strategists have an armour value of 10 or less, it is safe to assume that the "Green Dragon Crescent Blade" is the best at killing them. In second spot we have Dong Zhuo's weapon which is also very strong. What's interesting about it is that it shines even more against armoured targets as the weapon itself decreases enemy armour by 25%. And in the third spot we have Zhang Fei's "Serpent Spear" which is also a high DPS value weapon. It is a little bit funny to think that Liu Bei's buddies start with some of the best weapons in the game, yet Liu Bei's "Shuang Gu Jian" appears to be the worst out of all the weapons in the list.

As soon as we move to DPS against a target with 45% armour we see an interesting change: The first four weapons on the table that have zero base damage but have high armour-piercing value end up at the top of the rankings. Interestingly, Guan Yu's Green Dragon weapon has dropped from first spot to eighth spot as its high base damage is effectively mitigated by armour modifier. It is important to note that for this and all subsequent rankings against armoured targets, Dong Zhuo's "Blade of Xiang Yu" and "The Blue Blade" special effects that reduce enemy armour have been adjusted and calculated properly. As mentioned previously for "Burning Mace", you can safely assume that it can score a little bit higher if accounting for its burning DoT, hence, it would top the list.

============================================================================

Let's look at DPS against targets with 55% armour:

It becomes noticeable that things do not change at all in the top 7 and we have the same weapons in the exact same order. In the game there are are several generals with armour values ranging between 40-55 armour. In fact, most generic vanguards and champions have armour pieces with approximately these values so these two lists give you a very good idea of what weapons best deal with them.

To summarise a bit what you will see in the following two tables regarding DPS against targets with 70 and 80 armour, the top 10 spots remain the exact same as it was against targets of 55 armour. There are only some minor changes further down in the rankings that don't really affect anything. Targets with 70 or 80 armour are mostly limited to certain unique heroes (e.g. Yuan Shao, Yuan Tan etc) and there aren't that many of them. What worked for the previous range will most likely work for this higher armour range too.

============================================================================

By averaging out the DPS scores we saw in all previous tables, here are the top 10 performing weapons in terms of pure damage:

The conclusions that we can reach based on these rankings are the following:

-Lady Zhurong's "Burning Mace" is the best weapon by far not only in terms of damage but also in terms of its two effects that are not accounted in these calculations.

-Another takeaway is that all the weapons with zero base damage but high armour-piercing value top the list. This is not a surprise as armour significantly diminishes the effectiveness of base damage.

-We observe a quadratic decrease between zero armour and 45 armour of 520 DPS and after that point the top values remain the same. There is certainly a very big damage discrepancy between the top and the bottom values so that makes it clear that not all golden weapons are good by default. Unfortunately for Liu Bei's weapon, it remains last in all rankings. Maybe he dampened it too much by carving shoes...!

-You have to remember that abilities aside, your weapon damage is what determines how powerful your hero really is for the most part, hence, wielding any of the weapons in the top 10 list will guarantee that your hero will win almost all duels under the right circumstances.

-That being said, weapon damage is not everything by itself. When exchanging a couple of blows on horses and you are looking for damage per swing, certainly the above rankings will give you a good idea of which weapon performs the best. But in a duel, there are numerous other factors that affect the outcome such as passive and active abilities, melee evasion and morale.

-Recall that heroes have varying base values and stats as unit entities, therefore, some of these weapons will perform better on certain characters than others. Moreover, not all heroes can wield every type of weapon so there is more discrepancy there.

There will be a more holistic review on hero damage with their golden weapons on a different guide I will publish and as a minor spoiler I can say that the rankings you see above do not necessarily reflect the top results when accounting for unique heroes.

If you are still playing the game, I hope you find these tables useful one way or another.

Cheers!