Demon’s Souls hides its weapon upgrade system behind a few different barriers that will keep a wide variety of players from ever truly experiencing it. This is honestly a shame, as upgrading weapons allows players to customize their character even further than what the game already allows for, and can create some truly powerful builds as well. This holds especially true for magic based characters, as they often lack the Strength and Dexterity required to make great use of some of the stronger weapons in the game, but weapon upgrades can turn even weaker weapons into powerhouses.
Weapons in Demon’s Souls determine damage in a couple ways. First, all weapons have a set base damage that they deal regardless of the player’s stats, and an additional damage parameter that scales alongside specific attributes. The four stats that can affect weapon damage typically are Strength, Dexterity, Magic, and Faith, but there are some odd cases that break this rule. If a player has a weapon that has an A rating in Strength scaling, they are going to want to pump up their Strength as high as possible. Upgrading weapons modifies what stats they scale with, allowing them to be further customized.
Before getting into the specifics of which upgrade paths benefit magic using characters the most, it’s important to understand how to upgrade weapons in the first place. Blacksmith Boldwin is one of the first NPCs players will meet when they get to the Nexus, but he is only able to do low powered upgrades, mostly down the standard path of each weapon. In order to upgrade weapons down special paths, players will need to seek out Blacksmith Ed, who can be found at the bottom of the shortcut elevator in Stonefang Tunnel (world 2-1).
They can get to him without defeating the Armor Spider, but they do need to activate the shortcut. This isn’t quite enough, though, as players also have to bring him a sufficiently powerful weapon. Each weapon varies slightly as to how far upgraded it must be to start down a particular path, so players should look for that information elsewhere based on the specific weapon they are wanting to use. Finally, each of these upgrade paths requires a special type of ore that players must hunt down by defeating specific enemies in certain regions of the game. With that out of the way, players will likely want to focus either on Blessed, Crescent, or Moon upgrades.
The Blessed weapon upgrade lowers the Strength and Dex scaling of a weapon but adds very potent Faith scaling in its place. This is ideal for players that are using a lot of Miracles in their builds and have high Faith stats. It’s important to keep in mind that the damage dealt by blessed weapons will be split, with it dealing a small amount of physical damage and a decent amount of magic damage as well. Since many enemies in Demon’s Souls are weak to magic damage, this can be very helpful at times.
To create a Blessed weapon, players have to bring a Faintstone to Blacksmith Ed. Faintstones can be found in the Swamp of Sorrow area as a drop from the Depraved One enemies, and come in three varieties. Shards are the easiest to find but will only carry a weapon so far. Chunks are a bit rarer, and the rarest of Faintstones is the Pure Faintstone. This is required to bring a weapon to the final upgrade of the Blessed path, at which point it will do heavy magic damage based on the player’s Faith stat. This upgrade typically applies to Straight Swords, Axes, Hammers, and Large Swords.
While Blessed weapons are only really useful for Faith builds, Crescent weapons can help either Faith or Magic users. The Crescent upgrade completely removes scaling from Strength and Dexterity and replaces it with great Magic scaling. On its own, this enchantment wouldn’t be that useful, but it has the added effect of giving mana regeneration when the weapon is equipped just like the Royal’s starting Fragrant Ring. For this reason, even though a Faith user may get more damage out of a Blessed weapon, having a Crescent weapon on hand helps with keeping MP up.
To create a Crescent weapon, players have to bring a Moonshadestone to Blacksmith Ed. Moonshadestones can be found in the Ritual Path area if players defeat the Reaper enemies, and come in the same three varieties as mentioned above. Just by killing enough Reapers, players will probably find a good deal of Moonshadestone Shards, but to get Moonshadestone Chunks they will have to farm a bit. Finally, the rarest version, the Pure Moonshadestone can only be obtained from two crystal lizards that spawn in that Archstone. This enchantment can be applied to most Curved Swords, Daggers, and Thrusting Swords.
For those magic users that aren’t worried about MP regeneration, the strongest weapon upgrade to use is the Moon upgrade. Like the Crescent upgrade path, Moon weapons gain scaling with the Magic stat (though not as much), but they reduce scaling from Strength and Dexterity rather than completely removing them. They also imbue weapons with much higher base magic damage, making them more useful at lower Magic stats. Typically speaking, a Moon weapon will out damage a Crescent weapon as long as the player’s Magic stat is below 60. At that point, the scaling from Crescent kicks in and it becomes the better option.
To create a Moon weapon, players have to bring a Moonlightstone to Blacksmith Ed. Moonlightstones can be found in the Tower of Latria area and are dropped by the prisoners there. There are also several Crystal Lizards that will drop this upgrade material in all three of its forms. Like the other upgrade paths, the Moon upgrade can only be applied to certain weapons. For the most part, this applies to straight swords, curved swords, axes, and hammers, but there are several exceptions to this rule.
Demon’s Souls is available now on PS5.
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