Items

The most useful thing to know about a piece of gear in The Witcher 3 is not its damage number. It is whether the item has a future. Witcher school gear is a rung on a ladder you will climb five times, each rung feeding the next; a handful of sets are finished the moment you own them and will never improve; and a third group is not equipment at all but ammunition you burn and remake. Those three behaviours want three different attitudes to your crowns, and mixing them up is how players end up broke at level thirty with a chest full of obsolete armour.

The ladder, and the fact that it eats the rung below

Behind every witcher school set sits a Scavenger Hunt, filed as a secondary quest, which scatters diagrams across the map and only lets you forge the set once you have collected them. The set then upgrades four more times, and the crucial detail is in the recipe: an Enhanced piece takes the Basic piece as an ingredient, a Superior takes the Enhanced, and so on. You do not keep the old armour. It is consumed, which means selling a set you have outgrown is a mistake you cannot undo.

The craftsman column is the part people trip on. A diagram in your inventory is worthless if the nearest smith is an amateur, and no amount of money changes that. Our upgrade armour and upgrade swords pages set out the four requirements you have to satisfy at once, diagram, grade, components and crowns, and the blacksmith locations page tells you who is graded what.

The four schools that climb the whole way

Four sets run the full ladder, and they are the ones your build should be picked around, because you will be wearing the same silhouette for eighty hours.

The Wolven line is the one the folder documents tier by tier rather than in a single page, so if you are midway through it the Superior Wolven page covers the six diagrams across Skellige and Kaer Morhen that need the base and Enhanced sets plus level 29, and the Grandmaster Wolven page covers the last six, all of which sit in one cave behind the Termes Palace Ruins and a portal that wants a ruby.

The Bear set is the only one of the four that includes a crossbow diagram, which matters more than it sounds given how much of underwater combat is crossbow work. If you would rather compare all of them side by side before committing, the school gear overview ranks the seven sets by playstyle and the grandmaster gear guide handles the top rung of all five grandmaster sets in one place.

The two sets that arrive at the top

Two witcher sets sit outside the ladder entirely because they are already grandmaster grade. There is nothing to upgrade, which makes them endgame purchases rather than investments.

Manticore gear is the alchemy set, arriving with Blood and Wine and asking for level 40. Wear three pieces and your critical bonuses start applying to bombs; wear the whole set and every alchemy item carries an extra charge. Its diagrams are scattered across three separate Toussaint locations rather than one, and it is cheaper to forge than the other grandmaster sets because it takes plain Dimeritium and plain cured draconid leather.

Viper gear is the strangest entry in the bucket. Its two Serpentine swords are the first craftable weapons in the game, sitting in the White Orchard graveyard and the castle ruins where a level seven wraith and some bandits guard them, but the armour itself needs Hearts of Stone and level 39, and the diagrams run to around 1,200 crowns. It also contains the game's easiest permanent loss: the Venomous Viper silver sword diagram appears only in the expansion's final quest, cannot be found anywhere else, and is gone if you finish that quest without it.

Sets with no diagram at all

These are bought or looted whole. None of them can be crafted, none of them upgrade, and every one is defined by the level at which it becomes available and the level at which it stops being good enough.

Temerian is the one to buy without hesitating. It is the best armour available in the opening hours, it includes barding for Roach, and it costs less than the time you would spend surviving without it. It also has an obvious expiry date: once you hit level 12 the Griffin hunt is open, and that is its replacement.

Tesham Mutna is the opposite kind of purchase, in that you do not purchase it. It is a late reward that gives resistance to everything at once and no sword worth speaking of, which makes it a defensive answer to Blood and Wine rather than a set you build around.

The one weapon that upgrades itself

Aerondight deserves its own section because it breaks the rule this entire page is built on. It has no diagram, cannot be crafted, and is not in any chest. It comes from the Lady of the Lake at the end of There Can Be Only One, once you have proved compassion, generosity, honour, valour and wisdom, and beaten the Hermit at Lac Celavy.

What makes it the best sword in the game is that it grows. Every hit charges it, a full charge guarantees critical damage, and killing something at full charge raises its damage permanently. It is the only weapon that keeps scaling with your level, which is exactly why it is the sword to have before starting New Game Plus. The virtues themselves are collected in ordinary quests you were probably going to do anyway: sparing the shaelmaar or answering the riddle in The Beast of Toussaint, tipping the boy in full after Blood Run, duelling Prince Anseis in The Warble of a Smitten Knight, lifting the curse in A Knight's Tales, sparing or slaying the basilisk in Mutual of Beauclair's Wild Kingdom.

What bolts on rather than replaces

Two systems attach to gear you already own instead of replacing it, and both are permanent once committed.

• Runestones socket into swords for damage or a passive effect, in three grades that give two, three and five percent respectively. They cannot be pulled back out once fitted, so put the greater ones in a sword you intend to keep, which in practice means Aerondight or a mastercrafted school blade.
• Glyphs do the same job for armour and feed sign intensity, in lesser and greater versions of all five signs. Most of their diagrams come from the Runewright at Upper Mill.
• Neither has anywhere to go until you have bought the sockets themselves, which is a separate purchase covered on the enchantment slots page. Armour dyes are the cosmetic member of this group and the only one that can be undone with a remover.

What you burn and remake

The consumables are where a prepared playthrough separates itself from an unprepared one, and they cost almost nothing because their charges refill when you meditate.

Oils are the single highest-value item in the game per crown spent, since the class-matched coating adds ten, twenty five or fifty percent attack power depending on tier, and the bosses guide is organised entirely around which one to bring. Bombs are the crowd and utility half of the same toolkit, and the important quirk is that enhanced and superior bomb recipes are never sold, only looted from chests.

Three ingredients get their own pages because they gate everything else. White Gull cannot be bought at all and is required for every superior potion, so the recipe from Herbalist Tomira in White Orchard is an early priority. Cherry Cordial cannot be crafted either, only bought from innkeepers, and the Svorlag tavern on Spikeroog carries more of it than anywhere else. Red mutagens are the rarest of the three colours and the reason people farm shorelines; the mutagens page explains why placing one beside a matching ability doubles that ability's effect.

The lists, the tools and the collections

The rest of the bucket is reference material and one-off objects, useful precisely when you are hunting something specific.

• Crafting diagrams is the master index, split into weapon, armour, runestone and glyph categories across the base game and both expansions, while weapon diagrams narrows to swords, crossbows and bolts with the craftsman grade each one demands.
• The Elite Crossbow set is three master-quality crossbows from a free add-on, sold by vendors rather than found, at required levels 7, 14 and 21.
• The Eye of Nehaleni is not a weapon but a key. Keira hands it over after Nithral falls in Wandering in the Dark, and without it several scavenger hunts and contracts simply cannot be finished, because the illusory walls they hide behind will not open.
• The Magic Acorn from Imlerith's body is worth two skill points if you eat it, or four if you hand it to the villagers and wait thirty in-game days, which is thirty meditations rather than thirty hours.
• Gwent cards number 199 in the base game alone, bought from vendors, won from players and pulled out of quests, and secret treasures collects the chests the map never marks at all.

If you just want to be told what to equip

Four ranked pages exist for exactly that. Best swords covers both blades together and puts Aerondight first with the Viper set behind it. Best silver swords runs fifteen deep with levels and effects for each, from Bloodsword as an early relic up to Aerondight. Best steel swords does the same for the human half of your arsenal, starting at Mourner around level 4. Best armor sets ranks ten sets including the Dol Blathanna medium armour added by the next-gen update, which has no page of its own.

Between them and this page the decision comes down to one question. If a set climbs, buy into it early and never sell a piece. If it arrives finished, buy it when you hit its level and not before. If it burns, keep making more, because it is the cheapest damage in the game. What all three cost in crowns and components is the business of the mechanics guide.

Frequently asked questions

Can I skip a tier and go straight to Mastercrafted?

No. Each recipe consumes the piece one tier below it, so the chain has to be walked in order even if you find the higher diagram first. Finding a Superior diagram early just means you know where to come back to.

Should I dismantle old witcher gear?

Not while its line is still live, because the next tier wants the piece itself. Once a set is fully replaced, the dismantle page is worth reading first, since a few items are worth more as components than as loot.

Which set should a first playthrough aim at?

Griffin if you intend to use signs, Bear if you intend to be hit, Cat if you intend not to be. All three are reachable in the base game, and all three keep climbing, which is more than the bought sets can offer.

Do I need Blood and Wine for the top tier?

For the grandmaster sets, yes, since the only grandmaster craftsman in the game is Lazare Lafargue in Beauclair. Manticore and Viper are the exceptions worth remembering, because they land at grandmaster quality without any climbing at all.