Crimson Desert features a wealth of weapon options between one-handed and two-handed weapons for all three playable characters: Kliff, Damiane, and Oongka. With different abilities and stats, it can be daunting to find a weapon powerful enough to safely invest rare materials to upgrade it.

When choosing the best weapon in Crimson Desert, however, you shouldn’t stop at how rare it is and how high its attack power is. The only things that truly matter are Critical Rate and Abyss Gear sockets.

Quick Summary: What Makes Weapons The Best

If you want the most powerful build in the game, follow these three rules:

1. Ignore Base Attack: Damage numbers are roughly the same across weapons of the same type
2. Go for High Critical Rate: This is the only stat that matters.
3. Prioritize 5 Sockets: Two-handed and Ranged weapons have 5 Abyss Gear slots, making them mathematically superior to one-handed weapons, which are capped at 3 slots.
4. Extract Rare Abyss Gears Use Witches to extract effects from special rare weapons and slot them into the weapon of your choice.

Critical Rate: The Only Weapon Stat That Truly Matters

Right from the beginning of the adventure in Hernand, you will come across so many weapons that you will soon be forced to expand and max your Inventory Slots to hold them all. However, if you take a good look at even the starting weapons in the game, you will inevitably notice something important:

• The Attack Power of most weapons is roughly the same, even at similar upgrade levels.
• The only element that sets them apart is Critical Rate. Most have a very low value, which makes damaging critical hits with them a rarity.

As such, the first and last stat you should be looking at when finding a new weapon is Critical Rate. A high baseline will make a weapon even more powerful once you start customizing it with Abyss Gear.

NOTE: Some may argue that Attack Speed is another important stat to consider when upgrading weapons. However, even at high values, the difference in real speed is negligible, making high Attack Speed only something that is nice to have but not mandatory at all.

Abyss Gear Slots: How to Make Most Weapons A Viable Endgame Choice

The true S-Tier weapons in Crimson Desert are those that can hold 5 Abyss Gear slots. These slots allow you to stack many beneficial effects that far exceed any base stat.

• One-handed weapons are capped at 3 sockets.
• Two-handed weapons and Ranged weapons can have up to 5 sockets. This makes Greatswords and Spears much better than any one-handed weapon for raw stat stacking.
• Visit a Witch such as Sylvia or Elowen to open locked sockets in exchange for Silver, as few weapons will come with every Abyss Gear slot open.

The number of total Abyss Gear slots, alongside the base Critical Rate, is what that determines if a weapon is worth upgrading for mid and late game challenges to maximize damage output.

Rare Weapons: Take Their Abyss Gears To Create The Best Weapons

Looking at the above, you may wonder if searching all over Pywel for rare weapons is a complete waste of time. It is most definitely not.

• Some rare weapons may not have great Critical Rate or could be a one-handed weapon with limited Abyss Gear slots.
• However, they often have unique Abyss Gears which grant special effects to certain attacks (like Ator’s Orb) far beyond the straightforward stats increases some easily farmable Abyss Gears grant.
• These special Abyss Gears are not locked to their starting weapons! Any Witch can remove them so that you can socket them into your weapon of choice, even if your choice is based purely on looks.

This concludes our guide. For more help, visit our Crimson Desert Complete Walkthrough and Guides Hub.

Guide based on a 70+ hours playthrough in the PC version of the game. Screenshots captured from the same version.

About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack.

After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi “Suda51” Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA’s president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3.

When he’s not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.

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