Image: Airship Syndicate via HGG / Joel Stadler
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Reviewed by Benjamin Barr
The MMO Wayfinder has been out in early access for a while now, but there are still new players flocking to the game – especially with the free-to-play version releasing soon. In some ways, Wayfinder is like your standard MMO, but it’s quite different in many other aspects. With that in mind, we’ve put together a beginner guide for Wayfinder to provide you with some useful starting tips and info!
Use the Tutorial to Test Each Character
At the start of the game, you’ll get to play through a short tutorial that will familiarize you with the basic mechanics of the game, as well as introduce you to each of the individual wayfinders and their unique abilities/starting weapons.
Once you complete the tutorial with a wayfinder, you’ll be given the choice to proceed with the game as that specific wayfinder, or replay the tutorial again. This is a great opportunity to try out all the wayfinders, and you shouldn’t waste it.
While you can eventually unlock every wayfinder to play as, it isn’t the easiest thing to do. As such, your choice of a starting wayfinder is an important one, so you’ll want to be as informed as possible. Try out each wayfinder and find the one that best suits your playstyle.
If you’re the type of player who wants to play solo for the most part, we’ve also ranked the best solo characters to play as.
Find a Favorite Weapon Type
Let’s piggyback off of the last tip by talking about weapon choice. When you play the tutorial, the wayfinder you play as will get a specific starting weapon. For example, if you play through the tutorial as Niss, you will get the twin blades Slicer and Dicer as your starting weapon.
The weapon you use will have a big impact on how you play, determining your attack combos. However, unlike most other MMOs, weapons are not class restricted in Wayfinder. Any wayfinder can wield any weapon in the game.
So if you really want to wield a scythe, you don’t have to play as Kyros to do it. You could just as easily be a scythe-wielding Senja if you prefer.
Tips for Questing
Now that you’ve picked a starting wayfinder to play as, it’s time to start questing and leveling up. This is standard-fare for an MMO, but there is one thing to bring up here. Most of the quests you will complete in the game are either main story quests or priority quests.
Main story quests are fairly self-explanatory. As for priority quests, these are quests that unlock useful benefits in the game – such as player housing or new wayfinders to play as.
Which Quests to Prioritize
Early on in the game, you’ll be told that priority quests are very important and should be completed right away (hence the name). This is a straight up lie. You can complete the priority quests if you feel like it and whenever you want to. They can provide some nice in-game features but aren’t necessary (and definitely not a priority).
As you play through the main story quests, you’ll unlock all the truly necessary features such as waypoints for teleportation and the affinity system. So don’t feel like you need to rush and do every priority quest you find. Ignore them or complete them as you wish. Either is fine.
As far as the main story quests go, completing them is the best way to level up and to (unsurprisingly) progress the main story. However, if you simply jam main story quests non-stop, you’ll quickly find yourself under-leveled for them. Luckily, this is alright.
Grouping vs. Soloing
Wayfinder allows for up to three players to do any given expedition (dungeon) or hunt (boss fight) at a time. With even just one more player, certain challenging encounters become relatively easy (or at least doable).
For example, the first several times you fight The First, you’ll probably get hard carried by your other teammates (I know I was), and that’s fine. But if you don’t have friends to play with and don’t like queuing with randos, you might have to do some grinding to solo certain expeditions or hunts.
Your power rating will be useful for judging what challenges you can handle solo. When entering an expedition or hunt, you’ll see your power rating compared to the recommended power rating for the expedition or hunt in question. Unlike in some games, the power rating system in Wayfinder is a fairly accurate measure of how difficult or easy a time you’ll have, so pay attention to it.
Tips on Expeditions
One of the big selling points of Wayfinder is that it uses procedurally generated dungeons. For example, if you queue up the Codex Halls, it will be the same expedition for the purposes of quests and the like, but the actual dungeon layout will change each time.
The puzzles and events in the dungeon will change as well, although the boss encounters will stay the same. So don’t be worried if you go into the Codex Halls for the second time and they look completely different. That’s supposed to happen.
Also, very early on in the game you will meet an NPC named Omen. She is one of your main sources of information and quests. She’s nearby the first gloom gate you will encounter in the game.
Gloom gates are the portals you use to queue up expeditions and hunts. Throughout the game, you will travel to different places in the overworld to unlock different gloom gates. However, the first gloom gate is special.
By using that specific gloom gate, you can enter any expedition or hunt you’ve unlocked so far. For example, if you want to grind the Bone Orchard, you don’t have to be in Deepwood Holt; you can do it from the comfort and convenience of Skylight.
Maximizing Bonus Chests
At the end of expeditions, you’ll have three chests you can unlock with rewards. These can give you anything from gold to spectra to imbuements.
During the expedition, you’ll have a purple bar at the top of your screen. As you explore and the complete the map, that bar will steadily fill up. The bar is what determines how many chests you unlock at the end of the expedition.
Dying during the expedition will decrease your progress on that bar, so do your best to avoid death to maximize your bonus rewards at the end of the expedition.
Using Imbuements
You’ll start using imbuements very quickly in the game. There are five types – Flora, Chaos, Solar, Shadow, and Greed. When starting an expedition or hunt, you can add up one imbuement (eventually up to two) to make the expedition or hunt more challenging, but also more rewarding.
Certain quests will require you do to hunts with specific imbuements. However, outside of those quests, you should avoid using imbuements on hunts because they’re so short that you simply won’t get enough rewards to justify using them.
Instead, save your imbuements for expeditions, where you can spend your time maximizing the rewards and squeezing every last drop out of your imbuements.
Plan Ahead for Affinities
One of the early quests in Wayfinder is called “Instinct, Discipline, Focus,” and it unlocks your three affinities (no bonus points for guessing what they’re called). These affinities will grant you varying bonuses to different stats.
However, the bonuses are dependent on the type of weapons and accessories you have equipped. For example, if you max out your Focus, it might grant you a bonus to weapon damage when one weapon is equipped, but a bonus to maximum health when another is equipped.
There are many different weapons in Wayfinder beyond the basic starting ones, but you’ll have to craft them yourself. However, crafting is a rather involved process that’s quite resource intensive, so it’s a good idea to figure out what weapon you want to use as your main weapon early on and what affinities to focus on. Especially if you plan on maximizing your build.
What to Consider
The main thing to consider when it comes to choosing a weapon is what bonus stats it gives. For example, let’s say that you want to play a build that focuses primarily on Crit Rating/Power. Naturally, you would want to choose and craft a weapon that gives bonuses to both stats. But remember – those bonuses only apply if you’ve increased the right affinities.
Currently, you can spend a maximum of 29 points on affinities, with each one maxing out at 15. (It’s supposed to be 30 points, but that’ll be fixed in a later update.) As you’re limited in points, you can’t max out all of your affinities, and the game currently doesn’t let you respect your affinities.
Unsurprisingly, this becomes rather problematic if you invest in the wrong affinities and end up using a weapon that can’t take advantage of them. The only current way to avoid that is to plan out your build by studying your weapons, accessories, and affinities to make sure they synergize and give you your desired stat bonuses.
Take the time to do some research. There’s no worse feeling than knowing you’ve crippled your build in an MMO with no way to fix it.
Join the High Ground!
And that concludes our short beginner guide and tips for Wayfinder. We hope this has helped you get a solid start in the game.
If there’s anything else that you think we should cover, let us know in the comments below! And don’t forget to subscribe to the High Ground for more guides and articles on Wayfinder and all your favorite games!
Have fun exploring the gloom wayfinder!
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