Arknights: Endfield Weapon Essence Guide

Weapon essences are stat boosting items that can be attached to weapons to improve their overall stats with the weapon stats being leveled from 1 to 9 for each of the weapon's available stats.

Each weapon can only equip one Essence at a time, and essences come in 5 different rarities denoted by color. Each essence will have 2-3 perks with boosted levels being determined by the engrave level of the essence. You will want to roll an essence with boosts matching all of the perks on the weapon you’re equipping it to.

There are two sources for Essences: Farming Alluviums, or as as a Random drop from enemies. The quality and rarity of the latter is rather limited though, and Alluviums will be your primary and only way to obtain the highest rarity of Essences.

The essence system also has a stat-boosting feature called Etching. This allows you to increase the level of an essence's stat. Etching is only available for gold-rarity Essences, as both the Essence you want to enhance, and the Essences needed to "feed" into your chosen Essence have to be of gold rarity.

When etching, you can pick and choose which stat you want to increase. This is not a guaranteed process, but rather a chance to succeed. The higher the level of the stat, the lower the probability of success, so you will be needing a lod of "fodder" Essences.

Failing to successfully enhance a stat will consume and destroy the fodder-Essence, and instead grant you Coolant Gel. You can use Coolant Gel to upgrade a stat with 100% success rate, but the cost increases the higher the level of the stat is. The cost is as as low as 30 Gel for Level 2, and increases to as high as 450 gel for level 6. The cost for the passive skill of the weapon is more expensive to upgrade with Gel, than the first and second stat.

Let’s take a look at the Forgeborn Scathe sword. The stat boosts on the sword are Intellect, Attack Boost, and Twilight. Naturally, this means we will want to farm Alluviums until we get an Essence that matches these three stats.

The third stat slot of the weapon is the most important factor for which which of the Alluviums you’ll want to farm. Not all Alluviums can drop every combination of stats!

In the case of Forgeborn Scathe, Wuling City is the only Alluvium that can drop Essences with a combination of the Twilight stat, that can also drop Attack % Essences. Of course you can get a variety of other Essences from this spot as well, and any Essence from this Alluvium can drop any combination of stats that are present for this Alluvium.

In terms of potential attributes an Essence can have, they come in the following brackets:

• Primary: Agility, Strength, Will, Intellect, and Main Attribute.
• Secondary:Attack %, Heat DMG, Electric DMG, Cryo DMG, Nature DMG, Arts Intensity, Ultimate Gain Efficiency, Arts DMG, HP Boost, Treatment Efficiency, Physical DMG, and Critical Rate.
• Skill: Suppression, Detonate, Infliction, Pursuit, Crusher, Twilight, Combative, Brutality, Medicant, Fracture, Inspiring, Assault, Flow, and Impetus.

Every weapon has a combination of these 3 stats, and you will want to farm Essences that match all 3 stats, before beginning to etch Essences. However, not every Alluvium can drop all stats, but instead only a selection, like you can see below.

As you can see, this Alluvium cannot drop stats like Critical Rate or Impetus, so make sure to farm the correct one!

Finishing an Alluvium will drop a random set of Essences and their rolls and stats will also be random. This is one of the main gear-grinds in the game, so you will be spending a lot of your Sanity on it.

However, there is a system in place to help make the farm a bit more deterministic: The Engraving System. Engraving requires a specific item called a Valley Engraving Permit, which is only available from the Stock Redistribution terminal by purchasing them with Wuling Stock Bill for Alluviums in Wuling, or Valley Stock Bill for Valley IV Alluviums.

Using the Valley Engraving Permit lets you select a combination of stats, and every Essence dropped will have those stats. This removes a lot of the randomness, although you may still have to farm the same Alluvium a couple of times before getting the Essence you want.

The maximum stat-boost available from Etching is a +6 on your Primary and Secondary stat, and +4 on the Skill (Third) stat. While you can reach the maximum +9 stat-level on the Primary and Secondary stat by leveling your weapon and etching Essences, higher levels of the Skill-stat are only achievable through raising the Potential of the weapon with duplicates, once you've capped out your Essence at +4.

Don't Waste Your Essences!

Every level increase will decrease the chances of success when etching Essences. Make sure to pay close attention to which essences you're using when etching, as any essence you haven't locked is available as fodder, including other Essences you may have already enhanced. Remember to lock your Essences!

Who says a fight has to be fair? If you run power to the area and set up some turrets all around the Alluvium activation point, you can let your turrets do some of the heavy lifting for you. Some examples have even shown some people managing to turn them into AFK farms more or less through the use of turrets. Play your strategy correctly and you'll be able to farm your essences more efficiently!

Keep in mind that each run of Alluviums costs 60 Sanity per run, and with the amount of possible combinations, it might take you quite a few runs to get your chosen Essence. Thankfully you can use the leftovers to try and etch it to the max possible level, although that might take quite a bit of investment. You can also use Sanity Tickets to save yourself some time, allowing you to spend 120 Sanity instead of 60 per finished Alluvium, for twice the reward. If you are using Engraving Permits, you will also need a second Permit.

Otamaton

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Otamaton Is a YouTuber, Gacha Addict, and Dad, who is likely grinding away at his dailies right now. As of late his obsession has been Arknights Endfield where he eagerly awaits his entry Ticket to Talos-II.