Masteries

Masteries are Grinweld's per-type skill system. They rise as you fight and raise your hit chance, crit, AC, and extra-action odds — so a character who commits to a few weapon/spell types ends up far stronger than one who keeps switching.

The twelve mastery categories

• 5 weapon masteries — one per weapon type: Sword, Axe, Mace, Staff, Bow.
• 5 spell masteries — one per spell type: Fire, Cold, Air, Arcane, Drain.
• Armour — one shared mastery.
• Doublehit — one shared mastery (hard-capped at 100).

Each is tracked per character and only ever goes up.

What they do

These compound with everything else. 100 weapon mastery doubles your base hit term and pushes crit to ~37%. 100 Armour mastery divides incoming damage by roughly ×38 via the class curve. Doublehit near 100 effectively doubles your damage output.

Caps

Each mastery has a ceiling:

cap = race_cap[category] + rank_bonus + accessory_bonus

• Race sets the base ceiling — your race's signature masteries cap highest. This is the main reason to pick a race.
• Ranks add a flat mastery-cap bonus to every category as you ascend (up to +170 at Legend).
• Accessories can raise specific caps.
• Most caps may exceed 100. Doublehit is hard-capped at 100 no matter what.

How you gain mastery

Mastery ticks up on qualifying events, and the chance to tick gets steeply rarer the higher the mastery already is — so the first 50 points come fast and the last 50 are a long grind.

The key design wrinkle: you cannot train Armour or Doublehit by one-shotting trash. Armour only trains when something hits you; Doublehit only trains in fights that last several rounds. That's the entire reason "training" monsters exist.

Howlite gem raises your mastery-gain chance (+2.5%/+5%/… per grade), and the Elder special monster grants a big mastery-gain burst on death. Both speed up the grind. See Gems & Enchanting and Special Monsters.

Training strategy

• To train a weapon/spell: just use it. Keep hitting things near your tier so your hits land (misses don't train). Don't switch weapon types if you want to push one mastery to its cap.
• To train Armour: find tanky, low-power monsters that hit you often but can't kill you — the Mossback Warrens (tank zone) and the Master special (a 500,000×-HP punching bag) exist for exactly this. Drop your damage, equip armour, and soak hits.
• To train Doublehit: you need long fights, again on durable mobs — the same tank-training spots. The Master special is the classic doublehit dummy.
• Use a heal/drain slot while training so you can stand in the damage safely.

Checking your masteries

Your masteries are hidden by default — the Character sheet shows every category as 0 until you pay to have them read. Visit a Mastery Tester POI (e.g. the Proving Post at Lanternwatch Cross) and pay level × 100 gold for a reading.

A reading takes a snapshot: the Character sheet then shows those numbers, frozen as they were when you paid. They don't update as you keep fighting — when you want fresh figures, pay the tester again. (Your masteries are always working in combat; only the display is gated behind the reading.)

Why masteries reward commitment

Because caps are per-category and gains slow down near the top, the optimal play is to commit to a small set of weapon/spell types and push them to (and past) 100, rather than dabbling. A focused Bow Thistrel or triple-element Glimmane out-performs a jack-of-all-weapons of the same level.

Next: Ranks → Combat → Build Guide