Introduction If you've had questions about upgrades before, you've probably come across this chart: If you already understand about upgrades, that's a handy reference! But if you are relatively new or just not totally up on the subject, it might introduce more questions than it answers. What are all these paths? Which ones are good, and for what? What should you upgrade, and how do you do it, and where? For the answers to these questions and more, read on. I'll be breaking this guide into multiple posts, so please be patient as I will be adding them subject by subject. I'll also leave a post at the end to compile a FAQ out of questions people ask in the thread, unless nobody does in which case I'll just delete it.
Weapon Upgrades This is probably the main reason you're reading this. If you don't know, weapon upgrades are super important in Dark Souls, and you should begin upgrading your weapon or weapons of choice as soon as you can. But the system isn't entirely straightforward, and before I get into the individual upgrade options I'll clear up a few mechanical bugaboos. First off, you have to understand the difference between reinforcing a weapon and modifying a weapon. Reinforcing a weapon is simply incrementing the number after the plus sign--for example, upgrading a Halber +3 to a Halberd +4--and it can be done at any blacksmith for any type of weapon, or even just at a bonfire if you've purchased the weapon smithbox. Modifying a weapon is converting the weapon to a different type or tier, from normal to fire for example. An important (and confusing) note about this, though: not all types/tiers are indicated by name. For instance, if you upgrade a weapon to +5, it will disappear from the list of weapons you have available to upgrade. This is because +6 is the start of a new upgrade tier and requires modification to get to. Modifications can only be done by specific smiths, and many types of modifications require a special item called an ember, which I will get to later. Because of the confusion over this, I will refer to each upgrade tier separately and different ones with the same name will be identified with a number that I've added, even though this does not actually appear in-game. So on to the paths themselves. I'll be listing them in this format: Name Smith: <name of blacksmith that performs the modification that creates this type of weapon> Requires: <requirements to make this type of weapon> Upgrade Material: <material or materials needed to upgrade this type of weapon> Effect: <basically what it does> Accepts Buffs: <whether or not it can be buffed by Crystal Magic Weapon, Lightning Pine Resin, etc.> What it's good for: <when you would want to use this upgrade path> And we're off! Normal (I) Smith: - Requires: - Upgrade Material: Titanite Shard Effect: - Accepts Buffs: Yes What it's good for: Everything! Well, most weapons start out this way so you don't have much choice, is the truth. Later iterations are very powerful, but first-tier normal weapons are relatively weak. However, all other upgrade paths come through here, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with getting these upgrades early, regardless of what you eventually intend to do with your build and equipment. Normal (II) Smith: Andre Requires: Normal weapon +5, Large Ember Upgrade Material: Large Titanite Shard Effect: Increased base damage, sometimes increased scaling. Accepts Buffs: Yes What it's good for: In addition to being the stepping stone to the third and final tier of normal weapons, normal weapons +10 are needed to make lightning and boss weapons, making this tier a natural choice for low-stat builds that are on their way to one of those two (and don't want to go out of their way to get an early fire weapon). Normal (III) Smith: Andre Requires: Normal weapon +10, Very Large Ember Upgrade Material: Titanite Chunk (through +14), Titanite Slab (+15) Effect: Increased base damage, sometimes increased scaling. Accepts Buffs: Yes What it's good for: Dealing purely physical damage is great, being able to use buffs is great, and having weapons available with excellent scaling is great. For those reasons, this is the main choice for endgame builds with high strength or dex. Raw Smith: Andre Requires: Normal weapon +5, Large Ember Upgrade Material: Large Titanite Shard Effect: Increased base damage, massively decreased scaling Accepts Buffs: Yes What it's good for: Not much. In theory this is a way for characters with low scaling stats to get access to a decent physical damage weapon. In practice the damage boost is really small, so even with low stats normal weapons usually end up dealing more damage. Fire (I) Smith: Vamos Requires: Normal weapon +5 Upgrade Material: Green Titanite Shard Effect: Fire damage added, scaling removed. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: This is one of the two main elemental weapon types, ideal for characters with low scaling stats. In particular, the first tier is very useful as an early game buff, since you can access it as soon as you’re willing to brave The Catacombs to get to the smith. Fire (II) Smith: Vamos Requires: Fire weapon +5, Large Flame Ember Upgrade Material: Red Titanite Chunk (through +9), Red Titanite Slab (+10) Effect: Damage increased. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: On endgame weapons, fire tends to outperform lightning both in the DLC and against several original content bosses. It also has the advantage of using a red slab instead of a normal one, which is helpful if you have any normal weapons, shields, or armor that are also competing for your normal slabs. Chaos Smith: Vamos Requires: Fire weapon +5, Chaos Ember Upgrade Material: Red Titanite Chunk (through +9), Red Titanite Slab (+10) Effect: Damage reduced, damaged split skewed towards fire, humanity scaling added. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: The alternative to top-level fire is chaos, which has lower damage in return for scaling with your soft humanity up to 10. Cool in concept, but in my opinion not worth it, because with 10 humanity the damage still isn’t much better than fire, and with less than that it can be much, much worse. Still not a bad option if you’re confident in your ability to keep your humanity up, though. Lightning Smith: Giant Requires: Normal weapon +10 Upgrade Material: Titanite Chunk (through +4), Titanite Slab (+5) Effect: Lightning damage added, scaling removed. Accepts Buffs: Yes What it's good for: Damage output is comparable to top-tier fire, and it’s good for the same kinds of builds. In general it’s a little less good than fire, because the things that are weak to lightning tend to be a little easier anyway, but it hardly matters because they don’t share upgrade materials so you’re free to make one (or more) of each. Magic (I) Smith: Rickert Requires: Normal weapon +5 Upgrade Material: Green Titanite Shard Effect: Strength/dex scaling reduced, magic damage added with int scaling. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: This is the easiest-to-reach upgrade in the game from where you start, so it can be used to provide a boost to new characters early on. Beyond that, it’s a pretty good option for sorcery builds before they have access to their excellent boss and unique weapons. Magic (II) Smith: Rickert Requires: Magic weapon +5 Upgrade Material: Blue Titanite Chunk (through +9), Blue Titanite Slab (+10) Effect: Damage increased. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: Not much. Maybe nothing at all, in fact. The issue here is that you would only ever consider a magic weapon if you have very high intelligence, but if you do, enchanted will serve you better pretty much always. Enchanted Smith: Rickert Requires: Magic weapon +5 Upgrade Material: Blue Titanite Chunk (through +4), Blue Titanite Slab (+5) Effect: Damage increased, damage split skewed towards magic, int scaling increased (usually). Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: Enchanted isn’t used that much, but not because it isn’t good: for high-int, low-everything-else builds, it will usually out-damage any other upgrade path for normal weapons. The problem is that those builds have access to three excellent special weapons, and those are the ones that most people end up using. But if you just don’t like greatswords, thrusting swords, or spears, and you want a decent custom-made weapon for your int build instead, enchanted is your best bet. Divine (I) Smith: Andre Requires: Normal weapon +5, Divine Ember Upgrade Material: Green Titanite Shard Effect: Strength/dex scaling reduced, magic damage added with faith scaling. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: This works a lot like magic, but with an important difference that makes it considerably more useful: it has the divine property, which means that, among other things, it will stop the skeletons in The Catacombs and Nito’s boss chamber from regenerating, making those areas much less of a headache. For that reason most people end up making a divine weapon even if they aren’t playing a faith character. Divine (II) Smith: Andre Requires: Divine weapon +5, Large Divine Ember Upgrade Material: White Titanite Chunk (through +9), White Titanite Slab (+10) Effect: Damage increased. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: This one is a lot dicier than the above. For much the same reasons that magic performs worse than enchanted, divine tends to perform worse than occult for faith builds. On top of that, occult gets a damage bonus against “holy” enemies--which include several endgame bosses and some tough enemies--while divine gets a damage bonus against a bunch of easy enemies and Nito. It does still have the ability to deal with the skeletons in The Catacombs, but +5 is really enough for that anyway. Occult Smith: Andre Requires: Divine weapon +5, Dark Ember Upgrade Material: White Titanite Chunk (through +4), White Titanite Slab (+5) Effect: Damage increased, damage split skewed towards magic, faith scaling increased (usually). Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: Faith builds with low strength and dex, with the caveat that such builds are usually not very good anyway. Unlike sorcery, it’s hard to make miracles the focus of a successful build, so most faith builds use them to supplement strength or dex. But if you do want to stick to high faith and nothing else, occult is your best bet. Crystal Smith: Giant Requires: Normal weapon +5, Crystal Ember Upgrade Material: Titanite Chunk (through +4), Titanite Slab (+5) Effect: Damage increased, durability greatly decreased, can’t repair. Accepts Buffs: No What it's good for: Not so much everyday use, but for tricky challenges or setting damage records it’s worth considering. You can get around the repair restriction to some extent by not upgrading it all at once, since it will be repaired to full durability whenever you do an upgrade. Demon Smith: Giant Requires: Normal weapon +10, boss soul Upgrade Material: Demon Titanite Effect: Makes a whole new weapon! Accepts Buffs: No. What it's good for: This is the one called “Boss” in the chart above, but that’s not quite accurate because there are weapons that you can find that pick up on this track. Anyway, most of these seem underwhelming at first, but it’s really just that they require specific builds to get the most out of them. The best one is probably the Moonlight Butterfly Horn, which is excellent for sorcery builds, but most of the others are at least worth trying sometime. Dragon Smith: - Requires: - Upgrade Material: Dragon Scale Effect: - Accepts Buffs: Not usually What it’s good for: These are mostly weapons you get by cutting the tails off dragons. They only upgrade one way. A lot of them have very high base damage and no scaling, kind of like a better version of raw weapons, which is good on the ones with low requirements and awkward on the ones with high requirements. They can only be upgraded along one path, which maxes out at +5. Be careful when upgrading them, as some of them (i.e. the Drake Sword) get extremely small gains from being upgraded and are not worth upgrading as a result. Unique Smith: - Requires: - Upgrade Material: Twinkling Titanite Effect: - Accepts Buffs: Not usually What it’s good for: These are separate from normal weapons, and like dragon weapons they can only be upgraded along one path. Some of these weapons are pretty lackluster, but some (the black knight weapons in particular) are very powerful. They also have the advantage of only ever requiring souls to upgrade (because Twinkling Titanite is for sale and that’s all they ever use), which means it’s much easier to upgrade several alongside weapons on other paths if you are so inclined.
Other Upgrades I'm not going to go into as much detail here, but here's what you need to know about upgrading things other than weapons. Ranged Weapons Ranged weapons (bows and crossbows) upgrade along the same lines as melee weapons, except that they don't have access to the occult, enchanted, and raw paths. In general they work the same way, but there are a few wrinkles specific to them. For one, crossbows (which have no scaling at all) end up benefiting from the divine and magic paths about as much as the fire and lightning paths, which bears keeping in mind as you are far less likely to find a use for blue and white titanite on melee weapons than you are red and normal. The bigger twist though, has to do with ammunition that deals multiple types of damage, such as lightning bolts and fire arrows. There has been a lot of confusion over time about how these work and how they interact with various upgrade types, but the most sensible explanation I've seen is that your weapon will deal whatever types of damage it's supposed to deal regardless of the ammunition you use, and vice versa. What this means, though, is that if you have a weapon and ammo that don't agree--for example, a Fire Sniper Crossbow and lightning bolts--you'll be dealing three types of damage and you'll find yourself getting punished by your enemies multiple defenses even more than you already are when you deal two types. So if you're going to use elemental ammunition, use a weapon of the same element for best results. Shields As with weapons, some shields are classified as "unique" and upgradeable with twinkling titanite, and some are made with boss souls and upgradeable with demon titanite. Apart from these, shields can be upgraded along the normal, fire, lightning, magic, and divine paths. These will change the type and amount of damage they deal when used as a weapon, but that's not important because using a shield as a weapon is generally a pretty terrible idea. What does matter with shield upgrades are two things: stability and damage reduction. Sometimes upgrading a shield on the normal path will raise the stability, and sometimes it won't. Sometimes upgrading it along an elemental, magic, or divine path will increase the defense against that type of damage, and sometimes it won't. With shields, it is very important that you pay close attention to exactly what stats are changing and how as you upgrade them, as some upgrades are simply not worth doing. That said, upgrading your shield is nearly as important as upgrading your weapon. Stability is far and away the most important stat on a shield, and upgrades are the only way to get access to a really good level of stability at whatever your allotted shield weight is. Armor Like shield and weapons, some armor exists that is upgradeable via twinkling or demon titanite. Normal armor, however, functions quite differently. You can only upgrade it along the normal path, and it only goes to +10 instead of +15, and it doesn't require any embers. The only thing that changes when you upgrade armor is the damage resistance, not the poise or weight or color or anything else. So should you bother upgrading it? Yes! But it is your lowest priority. I find that the most worthwhile armor upgrades are the ones early on; they tend to advance fairly linearly, so the first couple upgrades can increase your defense by a much bigger percentage. They can also be done quickly and cheaply with materials purchased from Andre, and as such represent a solid and often-overlooked boost in survivability for new players. Beyond that, you'll want to invest a lot of upgrades in whatever armor you settle on for the endgame of course, because why not? On final note: unlike weapons and shields, some armor just can't be upgraded. This stuff is usually better than similar equipment that hasn't been upgraded, but worse than that equipment at max level. That said, choosing armor is often a very finicky process that's about finding a balance between aesthetics, weight, poise, and defense, and sometimes a piece from the Stone or Gold-Hemmed Black set might be just what you need to bring an outfit together, so don't feel like the lack of a plus sign and a number after the name of a piece of armor makes it not worth using. Spell Tools Catalysts and talismans cannot be upgraded. The Pyromancy Flame can, however. It only costs souls, no materials, and it can be upgraded to +15 by either Laurentius, Eingyi, or Quelaana. After that, Quelaana can modify it to an Ascended Pyromancy Flame, which she can then upgrade as high as +5. This is recommended for any character that makes use of pyromancy, or really any character at all once you get to the point that the upgrade cost is cheap relative to anything else left to buy. Additionally, any catalyst can be ascended using the Soul of Manus to make the Manus Catalyst. This is done by the Giant Blacksmith, and doesn't require any embers or upgrade materials or anything like that. Estus Flask Ok, it's really different from the rest of this stuff, but technically it's an upgrade so I'll include it. Scattered around the world are four Firekeeper Souls, which also drop from firekeepers when you kill them (which I don't recommend doing). If you have one in your inventory, you can go to any firekeeper and choose the "Reinforce Estus Flask" option, which will make it heal more hit points per swig. It goes up to +7 and you should definitely do this, since it's awesome and costs nothing besides an item that there's no other use for besides gaining some humanity.
What You Need In which I tell you how to obtain and meet the things and people you need in order to upgrade things. Smiths There are four of these. I'll be giving fairly detailed locations for each, so if you consider that a spoiler please skip this section. Upgrade Materials Most of these are available in all kinds of places. I'm not going to give you a complete rundown. I'm only going to tell you the best place to get them. Titanite Shard - Drops from a lot of different enemies, purchase from Andre. Large Titanite Shard - In the mid-game your best bet is to just buy these from the Giant Blacksmith, later on you can farm millions of them in Oolacile Township. Green Titanite Shard - You can buy these from several merchants but I don't recommend it. Farm the leeches in Blighttown instead, which drop five of them at a time with a pretty good drop rate. Titanite Chunk - Darkwraiths in New Londo Ruins. Red Titanite Chunk - Chaos eaters in Lost Izalith. These are kind of a pain to farm, but you can also get a few from black knights including the hard-to-miss ones in the Undead Asylum, so you probably have a head start. White Titanite Chunk - Bone pillars in Tomb of the Giants. This one is surprisingly not that painful to do, but make sure you get the Lordvessel first or you're in for a pretty irritating trek back out of that place. Blue Titanite Chunk - Crystal golems in The Duke's Archives, the outdoor section before the Crystal Cave. They drop plenty. Titanite Slab - There are three: one is your reward for beating the Stray Demon, one you get if you finish Siegmeyer's quest line, and one is in a chest in Kalameet's boss chamber. Recommend grabbing all three if you can. White Titanite Slab - One in the Tomb of the Giants in the room with the mini-Pinwheels and one in the Chasm of the Abyss. Red Titanite Slab - In the underground part of Lost Izalith, under the collapsing floor. You can get a second one by trading an Ascended Pyromancy Flame to Snuggly if you want, but that always seemed pretty pricey to me. Blue Titanite Slab - One in Royal Wood and one in the Crystal Cave, at the other side of a more complicated invisible walkway if you go left at the end of the bridge with the golden golem on it instead of right, which leads to the boss. Twinkling Titanite - Drops from crystal lizards, buy the rest of what you need from the Giant Blacksmith. If you want to farm it instead of buying it, the stone guardians in Royal Wood are probably your best bet. Demon Titanite - Found in assorted chests and drops from titanite demons. I think you get just enough that way to max out one boss weapon per playthrough. Beyond that you can farm them two-by-two from the ultra-tough titanite demon in Lost Izalith. Dragon Scale - The biggest repository is in Ash Lake, where there are a total of five available for the taking. There are a few more scattered throughout the world, and they drop from most dragon bosses and mini-bosses. You can also farm them from the drakes in the Valley of Drakes, using the Darkroot Basin bonfire as a staging area. Embers An ember is an item that you find in the game world, give to the appropriate blacksmith, and thereby open up a new upgrade path. There is one of each ember in the world, and once you turn it over to the blacksmith you can make any number of weapons with it. Beyond that I don't really have anything to add on this subject, so rather than reinvent the wheel and give you detailed instructions on how to get to them, I shall direct you to this page.
Hurry and finish this guide I need it when I plop my ass down on the couch tonight and play! What happens when I make a Fire shield, or Occult shield? What the hell does a Raw weapon do? Where can I farm green titanite to make a Holy Whip and be Simon Belmont in the catacombs?
Maybe not, but now I want to try making a Holy Whip and do it and use some leather armor and make my guy look like Simon Belmont. Dark Souls!!!!
Invade me. Like, right now. I want you to appear in my plate of General Tso's and parry my fork. That is the best idea.
Raw weapons should be a physical elemental weapon (if that makes sense), in that it would give high physical damage, but no stat scaling at all. Unfortunately From didn't make it like that. I'm trying to think of a use, but I'm not finding one where it comes out on bottom. Using the calculators in the OP of The Thread I did some basic research. The following are the results for the plain halberd with the necessary stats to 1 hand it (i.e. 16 STR, 12 DEX): Raw (+5): 287. Crystal (+5): 353 Normal (+15): 327 Now all of these compare weapons at their max and clearly raw does worse than all of the other physical weapons. I would be curious how it does at the bottom range i.e. +0 raw, +0 crystal, +6 normal. My guess is that it would still lag behind. ETA: assuming the numbers in the calculators are still right.
One thing to explain to people looking at this whole upgrading thing is how the different damage types work. It's hard to decide how to upgrade your weapons when you don't really know what the different upgrades do in the first place. It took me ages (and a lot of patient explaining from you guys) to understand that normal weapons get a damage bonus from stats, and that elemental weapons don't but their damage rolls against 2 different modifiers (for example armor rating and lightning resistance).
The trick with raw +5 is that it's really equivalent to a +10 weapon rather than a +15, and only requires large shards to max out. My guess is that the weapon was designed around the original levels of scarcity in the game at release, namely with twinkling titanite being a limited resource and slabs/chunks being a pain in the nuts. The problem in my view was that once they re-balanced the game (first in terms of resources and then in terms of normal vs elemental damage), the sort of boost it would take to keep raw competitive would make everything else obsolete since straight physical damage is so cost-effective even with the substantial investment in strength or dex that it currently requires.
extarbags You have Fire(i) in there twice. Looking good otherwise. Would've saved me a ton of time on my first ever character as he flailed around trying to figure out WTF all this stuff actually does.
What does ascending shields do, in particular shields that don't have a bash? For example, if you ascend a heater shield to be a fire heater shield, does it up fire resistance or something? What about a magic heater shield?
I'll cover it later, but the short answer is that yes it raises that particular defense, and also it sometimes raises stability and sometimes doesn't.
I can't think of many likely scenarios where going elemental is preferable to just finding a better suited shield for the task, mainly because of that stability trade-off that's usually there. Even with my SL1 when I was looking for a low strength lightning shield, I ended up using the gargoyle shield with normal upgrades as it was a much better cost benefit (I just needed it for a single boss fight where I was having trouble dodging a single attack well).
Modifying shields is probably better terminology. But no, it's been there all along, analogous to what you do with Andre to get your normal shield to +6 and +11. It's just no one checks it with the other blacksmiths, I guess.
Huh, maybe it was just that nobody mentioned putting elements on your shield because just raising it to +15 was pretty much always the better option.
I'll include this in the appropriate section, but I just found out a neat thing: Magic Sniper Crossbow has about the same damage as Fire Sniper Crossbow. This changes everything.* *Or at least, it provides an actual use for blue titanite.
Alternate use: green shards if you feed it to Frampt. Which you can do even if you want to do the Darkwraiths, so long as you don't try to do it once you have the lordvessel.
I haven't used whips, but what I have noticed in the catacombs is that faster divine weapons suck ass. Divine BSS? Garbage. +5 or +10, it takes so many hits to kill a skeleton it is largely useless.
The best divine weapon I had for a non-faith character is my divine great axe. Too bad most people don't have the stat to wield that. Lots of physical damage, enough divinity to put them down, a wide arc to strike a few skeletons and knockdown if you don't. Of course gargoyle halberd is probably the best all around non-faith divine weapon.
Just bumping to let everyone know that the first three posts have been updated and the guide is now done, except for the FAQ part and any corrections. If I've missed anything or gotten anything wrong, let me know, and if you have any questions please fire away.
There are some scattered in the Duke's Archives, the giant clams in the crystal caves/ash lake drop it, and the Royal Wood giants. ETA: Royal Wood giants in the DLC are probably the best way to farm.
Added the thing about the stone guardians. I know they're stashed all over the place but I don't intend this as an exhaustive index of every place things can be found.
Yea, that's fair. I was only thinking that the Duke's had a fair number of them relative to other areas.
I would say I much prefer mass murdering clams because of how easy it is to warp there and farm away safely, especially if you have a weapon that does high poise damage like the humble reinforced club. I find the royal wood much less efficient even given the higher drop rate, apart from specific builds, if only because of the amount of terrain you need to cover and the trash enemies surrounding them.
God I spent like 3 hours farming slimes in the Depths last night, in that corridor by the bonfire, and I only for 3 Green Titanites. I did earn like 60k souls though which I used to reinforce my pyromancy flame to +12. Those slimes are so fucked next time I log on.
That's alright, I was getting so bored with the slimes I tried out a Captain America build, and put my Spider Shield +7 in my right hand and punched with my left. I gave those slimes the beating of their lives!
Perhaps a silly question, but can you change upgrade paths for a weapon somehow? For example, say I upgrade my Long Bow to +5 fire and then later decide I'd rather just have it as a normal Long Bow anyway, can I downgrade it back to a normal +5 and then up to normal +15 instead?
Yes, but you *will* lose your upgrade materials. So don't ever waste a slab on something you aren't sure of. edit: or a boss soul.
