🛡️Equipment Tier List

Blade Rising has five equipment pieces: Sword, Helmet, Chest, Leggings and Boots.

Each piece carries three upgrade tracks — a Foundation stat, a Mechanic stat and a Mastery stat — for fifteen tracks in total.

Foundation stats give reliable, always-on value. Mechanic stats add a chance for something to happen. Mastery stats increase how large that something is when it happens.

Every track can be levelled up to level 100, and each level is paid for with the resource branch that track belongs to.

You do not choose your first piece — the game gates them in a fixed chain.

Sword is available from the start. Helmet unlocks once any Sword track reaches level 1. Chest unlocks once a Helmet track reaches level 5. Leggings unlock once a Chest track reaches level 5. Boots unlock once a Leggings track reaches level 5.

Within a piece, a track also needs the previous level range established before deeper levels open, so spreading a handful of levels across a piece is cheaper than pushing one track alone.

The practical takeaway: rush the cheap unlock levels on every piece first, then come back and deepen the tracks that matter.

S-Tier — Sword: Damage, Helmet: Attack Speed, Helmet: Combat Mastery. These three decide how fast enemies die, and enemy kill speed is what gates every other system in the game.

A-Tier — Sword: Critical Chance, Sword: Critical Damage, Chest: Damage Reduction, Leggings: Health Regen. The crit pair together is the largest damage multiplier available on gear, while Damage Reduction and Health Regen are the two survivability stats that scale into boss fights.

B-Tier — Boots: Evasion, Boots: Opportunity Chance, Boots: Opportunity Damage, Leggings: Vamp Chance, Leggings: Vamp Healing, Helmet: Boon Power. Strong once your damage core is online, and excellent for long uninterrupted runs, but weak as an opening investment.

C-Tier — Chest: Reflect Chance, Chest: Reflected Damage. Reflect scales off damage you take, which means it pays out most when you are already losing the fight. Level it only after your core is finished.

Use the tool below to sort all fifteen upgrade tracks by tier, piece, early-run value, late-run value, offense or defense.

Filter by equipment piece or by stat role, then tick up to three tracks to compare their unlock requirements and value profiles side by side.

Damage (Foundation) adds flat damage to every hit and is the single best first purchase in the game.

Critical Chance (Mechanic) is the chance for a hit to become a critical strike.

Critical Damage (Mastery) increases the multiplier used when a critical strike lands.

Level these as a set. Critical Chance without Critical Damage adds very little, and Critical Damage with almost no Critical Chance almost never triggers.

Attack Speed (Foundation) reduces your attack interval, so you land more hits per second — it multiplies every other damage stat you own.

Boon Power (Mechanic) increases the strength of combat boons.

Combat Mastery (Mastery) is a global damage multiplier applied after flat damage bonuses, which makes it the strongest late-run damage track on gear.

Because Combat Mastery multiplies your Sword investment, it is worth more the more Sword Damage you already have.

Damage Reduction (Foundation) cuts incoming damage before it hits your HP and is the most reliable defensive stat in the game.

Reflect Chance (Mechanic) is the chance to send part of incoming damage back to the enemy.

Reflected Damage (Mastery) sets how much is sent back when Reflect triggers.

Take Damage Reduction whenever a floor starts killing you. Treat the Reflect pair as a late-run luxury.

Health Regen (Foundation) restores a percentage of max HP on every regen trigger and is what lets a run continue unattended.

Vamp Chance (Mechanic) is the chance to heal after dealing damage.

Vamp Healing (Mastery) is the percentage of dealt damage restored when Vamp triggers.

Vamp scales with your damage, so it becomes far stronger after your Sword and Helmet cores are built. On a high-damage build the Vamp pair can outperform Health Regen entirely.

Evasion (Foundation) is a chance to fully avoid an incoming attack — it is the only stat that removes damage completely rather than reducing it.

Opportunity Chance (Mechanic) is the chance to trigger bonus damage on hit.

Opportunity Damage (Mastery) sets how much extra damage that trigger deals.

Boots unlock last and are best treated as a second pass once every other piece has its Foundation track levelled.

Equipment advances through five visual and functional tiers driven by accumulated mastery.

Tier 2 begins at 25 mastery, Tier 3 at 75, Tier 4 at 150 and Tier 5 at 240.

Because the thresholds count total mastery rather than mastery on one track, spreading levels across a piece reaches the next tier at the same pace as focusing a single track — but a spread build converts into more usable stats along the way.

Upgrade costs start at 10, 25, 60, 150 and 400 for the first five levels, cross 1,000 at level 6 and reach roughly 100,000 by level 20.

By level 30 a single level costs about 1 million, by level 40 about 10 million, by level 60 about 750 million, and level 100 costs 2 trillion.

In practice this means the first twenty levels of any track are almost free relative to their benefit, while levels past forty are a serious commitment that should only go into S-tier and A-tier tracks.

When a level costs more than roughly ten minutes of your current income, that resource is usually better spent on a lower-level track on another piece.

Early run: buy the first five levels on Sword, then Helmet, then Chest, Leggings and Boots to satisfy every unlock rule.

Then take Sword Damage to around level 20, followed by Helmet Attack Speed to a similar level.

Add Chest Damage Reduction and Leggings Health Regen the first time a floor stalls you on survivability rather than damage.

Mid run: build the Sword crit pair together, then push Helmet Combat Mastery as your global multiplier.

Late run: fill in Boots Opportunity and Leggings Vamp as damage converters, and leave the Chest Reflect pair for last.

Equipment upgrades are funded by the resource branches you build through Gathering, so gear progression and Gathering progression advance together.

Ascension resets the current run, which makes cheap, fast-to-rebuild equipment levels more valuable than expensive single-track investments you cannot recreate quickly.

Atlas of Ascension regions multiply what your gear does — Temple of Precision amplifies your Sword crit pair, Fortress of Steel amplifies Chest, and Wild Frontier funds the whole system faster.