As you progress through the missions of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, leveling up your gear as much as possible is important if you want to get the best damage and defense possible. While upgrades are not necessary In order to succeed, you will find it much easier to endure tough encounters and boss fights with them.
That being said, it’s not immediately clear where to upgrade or how the upgrade system works. In this guide, we’ll go over everything you need to know, including where to find Wo Long’s Blacksmith NPC, how to upgrade your gear, what resources you’ll need to do it, and how the game’s embedding system works.
Where Long: Blacksmith location and where to find him
The Blacksmith of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is Zhu Xia, a woman easily identifiable by the huge stone hammer she is holding. In Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the campaign, you will encounter her at the beginning of each level. Once you introduce yourself, she will be happy to offer you her upgrade service. Note that she also offers a wide variety of basic weapons and armor that you can buy for a currency called Coppers, and you also have the option to sell her your spare gear as well.
Once you get to Chapter 3 and unlock the Hidden Village hub area, Zhu Xia will move to a forge located there to the right of the battle flag. This is where she’ll stay for the rest of the game, but she’ll also reappear in her old locations in Chapters 1 and 2 as you replay those parts of the story.
Wo Long: How to Upgrade Weapons and Armor
After meeting Zhu Xia, Talk to her and choose the upgrade option to start upgrading equipment. from here, Select the gear you want to upgrade and click the upgrade button to upgrade it. Upgraded weapons deal more damage (including spirit damage) and reduce the amount of spirit you lose when blocking or deflecting with them, while upgraded armor pieces offer increased damage and spirit damage reduction thanks to increased defense rating. do upgrades not Level up the rarity of items, so keep that in mind.
Notably, upgrading weapons also improves their attack bonuses, which are stats that determine how the weapon scales with the five-phase virtues gained from character leveling. Most weapons don’t start out at a higher scaling than C-, but upgrades can give you attack bonuses up to A- or A+.
In order to upgrade, you must spend both copper and upgrade materials such as leather (for armor) or steel (for weapons).. Copper is easy to get – you’ll earn it naturally over time, and you can get more by selling gear to Zhu Xia – but leather and steel are rarer. We’ll go over how to get these resources below.
How to get leather and steel upgrade materials
Since you can’t upgrade without Leather and Steel, getting your hands on these resources is important. Thankfully, there are a few different ways to obtain and even farm them.
The main way to get leather and steel in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is to simply find them as you progress through and explore each level. There are tons of upgrade materials to be found in each mission’s environment, and particularly thorough explorers might even find leather or steel of a higher rank than what’s typical for the level you’re in. This will give you a head start on the more advanced upgrades you will encounter in the future.
Second, you can also get leather and steel for completing main and side missions. Note that that is repeatable, so if you need a specific type of Leather or Steel it’s a good idea to replay a level which will give it to you if you beat it. You can check what rewards you get for completing a mission before starting it. So keep an eye on these previews for upgrade materials you’re looking for.
Last but not least, you can salvage upgraded gear from Zhu Xia to get some upgrade materials. This includes items you’ve upgraded in the past, as well as upgraded gear you find throughout the game.
Wo Long: Embeds explained and how to use them
In addition to the standard upgrade system, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty offers another way to improve your equipment: embeds. Similar to Bloodborne’s Blood Gems, these minor stat boosts allow you to tweak the stats and effects of weapons and armor pieces. For example, you could give a weapon an embed that increases the spirit damage you deal by 2.5%. While perks like these may seem small, they have a significant impact when you add multiple embeds to each of your character’s weapons, armor pieces, and accessories.
In order to get more embeds, you must first extract them from the gear you collected in your playthrough. Extraction can be performed by speaking to Zhu Xia, selecting Embed, selecting the piece of gear you want to extract embeds from, and then holding down the Extract button while hovering over the embed you want. This will add the embed to your collection and make it available to other gear while also removing the embed from the item.
Adding embeds to elements is done in the same menu, although the process is slightly different. To add an embed to something, select it in the Embed tab, select one of the object’s empty embed slots, and select an embed to add. Add embeds to gear will cost you some Gem Fragments, a material you can easily obtain by salvaging unused weapons and armor.
Where Long: Fallen Dynasty Gear rarity explained
Wondering what the point of rare gear in Wo Long is? The game never explains it to you directly, but the main difference between rarer and more common gear is that Rarer items have more slots for embeds. This means that you can tweak and upgrade these weapon versions more than simpler ones, making them more effective in combat. When you find a four-star weapon, armor piece, or accessory that works well with your build, keep it, upgrade it, and add embeds.
Another benefit of using the rarer three or four star versions of weapons is that they come equipped with two martial arts attacks instead of one. This gives you more flexibility in combat, which is always good to have.
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty is now available for Xbox, Windows PC and PlayStation systems. In particular, the game can be played via a Xbox Game Pass subscription and is one of the best xbox games from 2023 so far for fans of intense, high-octane hand-to-hand combat.
