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Reviewed by Benjamin Barr
In Wayfinder, weapons have a far bigger impact on your character than in most other MMOs. Every character/class can use any type of weapon, and each weapon greatly changes your playstyle, coming with its own unique stats/moves, attack animations, ranges, and weapon mastery upgrades. As such, getting a new weapon in Wayfinder is a far more involved process, especially when you’re crafting it.
With that in mind, we’ll be going over how weapons work in Wayfinder, their benefits, and everything you need to go about crafting your own!
How Weapons Work in Wayfinder
First things first. What exactly do weapons do in Wayfinder? This may seem like a silly question, but it’s a bit more involved than you might think.
Like in other games, your weapon will have a number associated with it that determines its base damage, but that’s just the start. Your weapon will also have other stats that get bonuses depending on your affinities.
You have three affinities – Instinct, Discipline, and Focus. Each weapon will have stats associated with a different affinity. For example, your weapon might boost your crit rating and max health. However, the crit rating will scale with your Instinct ranks, while the max health will scale with your Focus ranks.
In addition to base stats, each weapon type will have a weapon mastery track that grants you bonuses depending on your Wayfinder’s archetype. As you use the weapon, you will increase the mastery and unlock various bonus options. You can unlock three for each weapon mastery per Wayfinder you have unlocked.
Finally, your individual weapon will have a special ability, adding onto your character’s kit, to round out the moves you can use in combat. Naturally, taking all of the above into considerations means that the weapon you choose will be quite important.
Crafting Weapons in Wayfinder
After you go through the tutorial, you will chose which Wayfinder you want as your starting playable character. Each Wayfinder will start with a specific weapon. Unsurprisingly, these starting weapons will not be as good as the weapons you can craft later on.
Shortly after exiting the tutorial, you’ll be given a quest to meet all the merchants in Skylight, the main hub of the game. One of these merchants is Arsenal. This is who you will talk to to craft or buy weapons.
Any base weapon in the game can be bought from Arsenal for in-game money, with no other resources required. This lets you try out all the different weapon types in Wayfinder before you commit to crafting a specific weapon.
Parts Needed for Weapon Crafting
As you would expect, in order to craft a specific weapon, you’ll need in-game resources acquired while playing the game. Crafting any weapon will require four parts – the form, spirit, shell, and essence.
The essence of your weapon is a special drop you can acquire from farming specific bosses. You can craft the form, spirit, and shell by using resources acquired through dungeons, bosses, and the overworld. These parts will also require in-game currency in addition to the weapon itself.
Naturally, this means crafting weapons will be costly and time intensive. That might make weapon crafting in Wayfinder seem a bit daunting, but each piece of your chosen weapon has a list of all the required materials. You can also open up the material details window to find out exactly where to get them. Speaking of which…
Imbuements & Crafting Materials
Very early on during the main quest in Wayfinder, you will be shown how to use imbuements to modify expeditions (dungeons) and hunts (boss fights). Adding imbuements will provide additional challenges but will also increase the type of rewards you earn – one of which is specific crafting materials that you need for your weapon.
There are currently 5 different imbuements in Wayfinder – Flora, Shadow, Chaos, Solar, and Greed. You can choose which imbuement to equip when selecting an expedition or hunt to embark on. Initially, you can only choose one imbuement but eventually can have up two active at a time.
The greed imbuement gives you bonus gold but makes enemies tougher proportional to the extra gold you take. The other imbuements will add bonus effects to the expedition/hunt, while also determining the types of enemy drops and rewards from chests available to you.
Depending on which resources you need to craft your desired weapon, you’ll have to run specific imbuements to ensure you have a chance at them.
The imbuements themselves can be acquired as loot from expeditions and hunts. However, you can also go to an Echo Matrix and craft the specific imbuements you want using Gloom Shards (another resource gained from expeditions and hunts).
Random Events & Specific Materials
In addition to needing specific bosses and imbuements to gain the crafting components for your weapon, some of the resources you need can only be obtained from specific events.
One of the aspects of Wayfinder that makes it fairly unique is its procedurally generated dungeons. When you go on an expedition, the game will create a dungeon for you that combines various layouts and treasure spots, enemy spawns, etc.
Random events can also appear in the dungeon, and these events can drop unique resources you need for weapon crafting. For example, the Treasure Phoenix event drops feathers that are needed for a lot of different weapons.
The events will spawn randomly in any dungeon, so you don’t need to farm specific expeditions. However, you will need to keep going until you get lucky with the right one spawning.
Crafting Weapons Costs Gold
In addition to standard crafting resources, you will also need a lot of gold to craft your weapon in Wayfinder.
Each individual piece (the form, spirit, and shell) will cost you at least several thousand gold, not counting the other resources. Once you have all the parts, crafting the weapon itself will also run you an additional several thousand gold. This all adds up painfully quick.
How to Farm Gold in Wayfinder
That being said, gold farming is fairly easy to do in Wayfinder. All you need to do is run an expedition using a greed imbuement. With the greed imbuement, gold piles will spawn randomly throughout the dungeon. Picking them up will give you gold but also increase your greed counter, which will in turn increase the damage you receive from enemies.
If you die in the dungeon, it will reset the greed counter, but you will keep all the gold you have gained so far. Additionally, while the gold piles will be different sizes, the amount of gold you gain from each pile is random, having no correlation to the size of the animation.
Another thing to keep in mind is that if one party member grabs a gold pile, only that member gets the gold. It’s first come, first served, which is very appropriate flavor-wise, as it means all three party members are rushing to be the first to get the gold.
It also means that if you’re gold farming, you’ll probably want to do the expedition solo, so no one can steal your precious gold. Alternatively, if you have friends who are willing to help you without taking gold piles for themselves, that can work too. The point is, don’t trust randos, they will take your gold (your precious).
Best Spot to Farm Gold in Wayfinder
Fairly late in the main story questline (as of the early access version), you will unlock a new area called Deepwood Holt. This will come with new hunts and new expeditions. One of the new expeditions you will unlock is called the Bone Orchard.
This is basically a big spooky forest full of spiders, ice elementals, reavers, and (shudders) witches. Watch out, witches be crazy. It is also the largest dungeon by far (regardless of how it is generated), with plenty of open space. This makes it the best place in the game for gold farming.
Given its sheer size, if you enter it with a greed imbuement, it will spawn a lot more gold piles than any other dungeon. Naturally, it’s also a dangerous place to be, what with the aforementioned threats.
That being said, you can simply run around collecting gold piles and avoid enemies, before abandoning the expedition with all your loot. This is by far the most efficient method to farm gold in Wayfinder and will get you the funds needed to bankroll that shiny new weapon in no time.
Join the High Ground!
And that’s everything you need to know about weapon crafting in Wayfinder. It may seem like a daunting task, but if you use the materials details guide in your desired weapon’s description and take it step by step, it’s actually quite doable (if not labor intensive).
Let us know how your weapon crafting journey is coming along and whether or not you have any more questions in the comments below! And don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more gaming content!
Happy crafting, Wayfinder!
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