Last Updated on February 18, 2023
After working on your characters, weapons are the primary thing you want to focus on, and will take a lot more time. So let’s look at the various ways you can improve your weapons.
Go to Mama Menu > Enhance > Weapons. And you will see all your weapons. In the bottom right corner, you can toggle “Prioritize Current Deck” to see the weapons you’re currently using first in the list. And you can Sort/Filter as well. You can filter by elemental affinity, weapon type, and rarity.
There are five elements: Fire, Water, Wind, Light, and Dark.
There are six weapon types: 1 one handed sword, 2 handed sword, Gun, Staff, Spear, and Fists.
Tap on a weapon to see their enhancement page.
Weapon Enhancement
There are 4 tabs on the right: Enhance (to increase weapon level), Skill (to increase the active and passive skill abilities), Ascend (to increase level cap by 5), and Evolve (to increase rarity, and level cap by 10).
On the very left is the Weapon’s current Rarity (seen with *), their elemental affinity, weapon type, and weapon name. So here is a 4* Fire affinity 2H weapon named “Type-3 Blade”.
You can use Weapon Enhancement items to increase the weapon’s level. Similarly to character enhancement items, Weapon Enhancement items can be neutral and come in sizes “Small”, “Medium”, “Large”, and “XL”, with each increasing the amount of XP gained. Then there are also weapon enhancement items tied to a specific weapon that will give that weapon a bigger boost in XP gained. So using 2H weapon enhancement items on a 2H weapon will give extra XP.
Weapon Skills
All weapons come with two active skills and two passive skills. On a character loadout, the primary weapon’s active skills are what will be used in battle. The second passive skill of a weapon is unlocked by evolving the weapon’s rarity.
The most efficient way to gain items for enhancing Weapon Skills is through the rotating Daily Quests under Subquests.
To enhance a weapon skill to 15, you will need an Insignia of Quality, which you can gain from various exchange shops. They cannot be farmed.
Weapon Evolve
Apart from Dark Memory Weapons, which start at base 3* and can evolve to 5*, all weapons can be evolved once, as follows:
2* to 3*
3* to 4*
4* to 5*
Evolving a weapon’s rarity requires gold and jewels. The jewels required are based on the weapon’s elemental affinity:
Jewel – Element
Ruby – Fire
Aquamarine – Water
Emerald – Wind
Topaz – Light
Tanzanite – Dark
Evolving a weapon increases their level cap by 10, improves their stats, and unlocks a passive ability.
You can farm jewels through Subquests>Daily Quests or obtain them from an Exchange shop (generally Arena Coins and Event Medals).
Weapon Ascend
Weapons can be ascended 4 times. Each ascension raises their level cap by 5, their skill level cap by 1, and improves their stats.
There are two ways to ascend a weapon:
- Pearl (dependent on base rarity):
2* – Pearl
3* – Natural Pearl
4* – Black Pearl
or
2. A duplicate of the weapon (through gacha or event exchange).
Pearls cannot be farmed. They can only be obtained through an Exchange shop (again, usually Arena Coins and Event Medals).
Weapon Refine
As of February 17th 2023, weapons can now break the level cap of 90 to get to level 100 and have another passive added. The items you will use to refine weapons are called Adamant and you can gain them from Fate Board quests. You will have to go through your weapon list and see which weapons can be refined and which can’t, as they will not all be able to be refined at once.
Here’s an example of what that looks like:
Basic Weapon Tips
- Equip your characters with their preferred weapon (both primary and secondary) for bonus stats. The primary weapon being a character’s preferred weapon will give the character a chance to chain 1-5 hits during battle.
- It is generally OK to sell all 2* weapons. You can do so under Enhance>List/Sell>Weapons. The weapons you are unable to sell are either the main story weapons or weapons you are currently equipping.
- Don’t easily throw away 3* weapons, especially ones that you get from limited time events as you’ll likely not see them again. And remember that base 3* weapons can be evolved to 4* and are sometimes just as useful, especially when they’re much easier to ascend. Also, keep in mind that Dark Memory Weapons are initially received as 3*.
- Apart from jewels and enhancements, all items required to work on a Dark Memory Weapon are unique and only farmable in their corresponding quests. Remember, tapping on an item in any of the tabs will tell you where you can get it. You will know a weapon is a Dark Memory Weapon by seeing a cube symbol under the weapon type.
- To make sure you don’t lose a weapon, tap and hold on it, and then press on the key to lock it. If a weapon is locked, you will see a white key symbol on the right when looking at all your weapons under Enhance>Weapons.
How to Obtain Dark Memory Weapons
They were mentioned a few times in this guide. But what are they exactly?
Once you’ve cleared chapter 6 on normal, you have access to the story on hard mode. After you complete a chapter on hard mode, you will see new story dialogue, and then obtain a new 3* weapon – a Dark Memory Weapon – which then opens up the corresponding Dark Memory Quests of that chapter’s character. So it will be Rion for chapter 1, Gayle for chapter 2, Dimos for chapter 3, and so on.
There are 11 evolutionary stages to a Dark Memory Weapon, which means you will need to evolve the weapon until it reaches its 11th stage to complete it. This will be a long game of farming. Once you’ve reached the 11th stage, you will unlock new stages to complete. After those new stages are successfully cleared, you will receive the version of the character associated with that specific weapon. These characters are incredibly powerful and worth working towards long-term.
Remember that is is late-game content and much more difficult and time-consuming, so don’t feel the need to get it done right away or be too concerned that you’re currently unable to complete it. Dark Memory characters are not limited, so there’s no rush.
Hopefully this covers the basics of working on weapons in NieR Reincarnation, and is easy to understand. Enjoy the game.
