Your journey in Where Winds Meet starts small: one swordsman, limited resources, and a world that gets tougher every few levels. Because of that, upgrading your gear isn’t optional; it is the backbone of your build and your survivability.
Detailed below, in a clear and easy-to-read manner, is every upgrade system the game utilizes and how they all interlink to ensure you make the most out of your materials and don’t waste a single minute.
Permanent Upgrades: The Foundation of Your Power
Some upgrades stick with you regardless of what you’re wearing. Global boosts, which stem from upgrading the gear slots rather than items themselves, will apply to whatever you’re wearing.
These upgrades raise your minimum or maximum damage for weapons, and your HP and defense for armor. Early levels are cheap, but the cost ramps up fast—materials can be bought in shops or farmed in the open world, so you’ll end up doing a bit of both.
These upgrades provide steady, reliable power and are worth the investment when possible.
Gear Arsenal: What to Do with Old Equipment
Once you hit Level 40, you’ll unlock the Arsenal: a system that rewards you for not dismantling your older gear. You put your unused guns and armor inside the Arsenal in order to accumulate an NF score. When you hit specific score thresholds, you’ll unlock additional stat bonuses, including extra min/max damage and bonus HP.
Element swapping occurs here, too. Each of these weapons has recommended elements, and matching those will help you maintain set bonuses and trigger elemental combos. If you get the right mix, it’s pretty easy to make some extremely powerful builds.
Set Bonuses: Early Power, Late Flexibility
Wearing multiple pieces of the same set confers additional effects. The more you wear, the stronger the bonus. You’ll start off early on by basically using whatever pieces you find, but later in the game ,you may swap out sets for more specialized builds.
Changing your set only costs a minor fee—about 50 currency—so don’t stress about committing too early. Breakthrough scenarios – keeping up with world scaling. The world in this game scales with your level, and the difference between those level milestones shrinks the higher you go.
Sometimes you reach a sort of ceiling and have to do a breakthrough scenario before you can level further. These reward you with temporary stat boosts, daily energy, and a whole pile of rewards—often including armor and weapons. Once you clear one, it notifies you that the world has grown stronger, and upgrading your gear immediately afterward is almost mandatory. If you don’t, you’ll feel that difficulty spike right away.
Weapon Upgrades: Individual Power-Ups
Every piece of weaponry has its upgrade track. About every 5-10 levels, you will unlock some sort of breakthrough enhancement that adds extra stats, passives, or triggers. Materials are needed for such upgrades, but you can check drop locations directly from the upgrade menu, making farming very straightforward. These upgrades shape your playstyle, so try to keep your main weapon updated as you advance.
Passives: The Most Expensive (and Most Valuable) System
Clicking on a weapon shows you recommended passives for its ideal build; some of these are incredibly strong, such as the Horse passive, which applies an 8% physical penetration debuff that stacks ten times.
The catch?
They are expensive.
It takes 500 coins for a single passive page and a full ten pages to unlock a passive. They’re worth saving for, though. Passives also have their own breakthrough system. While each passive contains six talent points, they are earned very slowly and heavily by luck alone.
Most come from random chest drops, so get ready to grind. As you progress through the storyline, you’ll earn passive points for the Passive Tree, which grants both stats and skills to further hone your build. There’s also a second set of passives you can unlock from an NPC found just after the tutorial. These include stat boosts, new skills, and mobility options – such as Water Walking – earned by collecting glowing butterflies.
