Weapons

The best gear in Solistia is not sold in shops, and the three pages of weapons on our wiki are separated by one number: the chance that a given trip actually ends with the weapon in your bag. One of them is a certainty, eight of them are certainties once you reach the right spot, and six of them are a two percent roll you make over and over against the same unlucky townsperson.

Sorting by odds rather than by weapon type makes the planning obvious. Do the guaranteed one when you pass it, collect the fixed ones as the map opens up, and only start the grind when you have the party and the consumables to make each attempt cheap.

Guaranteed: the Azure Sun Sword

The Azure Sun Sword is the only weapon here that arrives at the end of a quest rather than at the end of a search. It is a stolen blade, wanted as evidence against a defendant named Nero, and the guard outside the Timberain courthouse wants it.

The wrinkle is that Meylan gives you a different quest depending on the hour. Talk to him during the day and you get Proof of Innocence, in which a sickly woman's testimony clears Nero. Talk to him at night and you get Proof of Guilt, which is the one that involves the sword. Finishing it unlocks the last of the trilogy, Proof of Justice.

From there it is short. Head south to the fence near the tavern to find a Remorseful Old Man of 75, who is Nero's father and was given the sword to hide. Osvald's Scrutinize or Hikari's Bribe gets the location out of him, and the sword itself sits as a hidden item to the left of the Timberain Inn. Hand it back to Meylan and Nero is convicted. The payout is a Critical Nut (L), which is one of the permanent stat boosts covered in our items guide, and 12,000 leaves.

Findable: the eight Legendary Arms

The eight Legendary Arms are scattered across Solistia in fixed places. None of them is random, and none of them is missable, but four are locked behind something else entirely: a boss, a boat, a chapter, or a party of seven.

Two of those entries are not weapons at all. The Vest of Joy is body armour that shrugs off seven separate status effects, terror and silence among them, and it comes out of the same side story our A Young Girl's Wish walkthrough covers. The Stone of Truth is an accessory that raises spell intensity at the start of every battle, and getting it means recruiting three NPCs with path actions so you have seven travellers, then crossing a rope bridge and deliberately breaking it to fall into the dungeon below.

The other six each carry a signature effect rather than raw numbers: the Double Tomahawk adds an extra attack, the Sunshadow Staff sharpens dark and light, the Fire Dragon's Glaive sharpens fire, the Mooneater Dagger sharpens fire and ice, and the Exorcising Bow has a small chance of cutting the target's elemental attack.

The grind: six Battle-Tested weapons at 2 percent

The Battle-Tested set is the strongest gear in the game and the only gear with no downside attached, which is precisely why the drop rate is two percent. There are two ways to hold each one. The first is a story hand-out from a specific NPC once you finish the right chapter. The second is finding a completely different NPC and duelling them until the game relents, which is how you end up with a second copy.

Most of the NPCs on both sides of that table move between day and night, which is worth knowing before you decide the guide is wrong about a location. Benkei stands by the throne in daylight and by the castle entrance after dark; Cohazeh is out by the crop during the day and in her hut at night; the Sai townsperson waits at the town entrance by day and the Sandflow Pass exit by night; the Canalbrine cleric moves from behind the altar to the leftmost room.

Making the two percent affordable

The way to survive a two percent grind is to make each attempt cost almost nothing, and our guide's method does that with a consumable rather than with damage. Bottled Nightmares inflict confusion, blindness and poison, so you throw one, defend for two turns, throw another, and let the ailments do the killing. Six bottles will see off an opponent without you ever swinging.

They cost 3,000 leaves each and come from the Nun merchant at the New Delsta Flats black market, whose stall is on the right when she is in rotation. Since the vendors change every night, cycling the clock from night to day and back is how you make her appear. Keeping Hikari and Ochette in the party matters too, because their path actions are what let you re-challenge the same NPC repeatedly, and you will need to explore widely to make all the NPC duels available in the first place.

At roughly 18,000 leaves per kill in bottles alone, this is a grind that pays for itself only if your income is already sorted. Our money farming guide covers that, and the Armsmaster job is worth reading first, since a character who can hold all six weapon types is the one who makes a complete Battle-Tested set worth chasing.