
All officers are given a particular strategy to indicate their effectiveness against other units when controlled by the AI. The move deals minor damage and cannot KO. It emits an aura akin to a shockwave that staggers nearby opponents with an unblockable stagger, functioning as a guard break and can also dismount rider units. Characters can announce themselves by pressing R3. defense stats calculations for guarding now dictates if a higher-damage-enforced attack will simply become completely unblockable instead, but now with more items and/or elements adding to the damage calculations. Units with higher attack stats are unable to guard-break lower defense units that are blocking via normal hit strings or C1 attacks, even with generic soldiers and/or generals making use of tweaked C1 animations from the prior installment. crowds, but easily exploitable in 1 v 1's. As of this game, guarding in general now causes units to continuously face their current direction under blockstun as opposed to orienting towards their most recent attacker automatically this makes guarding more effective vs. There is limited invincibility during the start of the animation which can allow characters to evade attacks (even ones that cannot trigger a counter), and the counter attack has its hitbox last throughout the whole attack's animation. Performing this action can allow a character to perform a parry animation, which will make them dodge an enemy's attack and immediately trigger a counter attack based on one of their normal moves or charge attacks.
Power guards (press while blocking) are replaced by parries (press while blocking).Several other shared attack graphics also have updated tweaks which make them more practical to use, along with tweaked hit effects.However, most other non-physical attacks (mainly from charge attacks as well as all jumping charge attacks) no longer fill up the musou gauge on hit, on top of the Musou Charge stats being nerfed overall.C1s ( ) are now unique to each character and C3s (, , ) are now multi-hitting attack strings known as charge rushes that can be followed by several taps from the button some of them can either stun or stagger enemies on hit.
Jumping charge attacks are available, where the user performs a stationary/vertical falling dive attack that often emits an area-of-effect attack (such as a quake or a gust of wind) that launches a small bit on hit (the camera angle is also altered and turns towards the back of the character when performed).