Let’s dissect Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty’s baffling gear system

polygon.com:

As you hack, slack, and stab your way across the regions of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, you’ll find find a ton of gear. There are countless weapons and numerous armor sets (with five pieces of gear each). To make things even more confusing, each individual piece of gear has both a rarity and an upgrade level on top of its base stats. It gets confusing fast.

Let’s talk about how Wo Long’s equipment, rarity levels, and upgrades work, and go over how to read the stats.

Every piece of gear in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty — every weapon and every piece (of every set) of armor — has a lot of stats associated with it. Let’s start with the base stats.

For weapons they are:

For armor they are:

At the very top of gear’s stats is rarity. Rarity is indicated by a number of stars, going from none (normal items like throwing knives) to 1★ and up through 5★. Many items come in multiple rarities. You might find a 1★ Bronze Sword followed immediately by a 3★ Bronze Sword. But every Bronze Sword will have the same base stats (Attack Power, Attack Bonus from Five Phases Virtue Points, and Spirit) regardless of rarity. That’s true of armor as well.

You can see this in the slider below:

Rarer items— items with more stars — will have additional Special Effects. These will be a number of minor buffs to various stats, like a 1.5% bonus to your damage output or a 5.8% increase to the amount of copper you find. You can view a (long) list of every Special Effect you have active from all of your weapons and armor by hitting X/square while in the Equipment menu.

The most important of these Special Effects in weapons are Martial Arts — the special attacks you launch with RB + X/square or Y/triangle. One-star weapons will only have one Martial Art, but