Sephiria Weapons: All 6 Classes, Unlocks and Upgrades

Last reviewed: 1 September 2026 · Newest patch at review time: 1.0.30 (20 August 2026). Five of Sephiria's six weapons are locked when you start. You begin with Sword & Shield, and every other class has to be bought in the Destiny Inscription tree and then earned by completing a training quest with Moro in the village. That single fact reorders the whole early game: your first twenty runs are not about finding the best weapon, they are about banking enough Sapphires to own more than one.

This page covers what each class actually does, how the upgrade trees work, and where the official numbers disagree with each other.

The six classes

Sword & Shield

The default kit, and the one most veteran players still respect. Its Block is a held guard that drains MP and has a Perfect guard timing window, which is why so many of its upgrades key off blocking: Protection of the Fuzz cuts Block's MP cost by 50% on a successful block, Cold Anger grants +20% all damage for 14 seconds on a Perfect guard, and Star's Twinkle reflects 300% of the attacker's damage (400% on a Perfect guard).

Its special, Cleave, was made noticeably more usable in the 1.0 window: base cost dropped from 20 MP to 15, and guard frames now run from the very start of the animation rather than partway through.

Notable branches include Carrot Sword → Carrotcalibur (normal attack becomes five hits), Frost Shard → Glacial Blade / Blizzard's Eve, and the Magic Wand line, which converts your attack to Magic Missile and then specialises into lightning, ice or fire.

Great Sword

The class the community points new players toward, and not subtly. The recurring advice in Steam discussions is to take the Lightning Greatsword line, pick up the Storm Cloud upgrade, and rush every Anvil you see: "just spam your special attack and let the stormcloud win the game for you." One player calls it a boring build in the same breath as recommending it, which is about the most honest weapon review a roguelite gets.

Its special is Whirlwind, a charged spin. Three separate upgrades exist purely to reshape it — Loving Gaze (−33% cost, +50% cast speed), Hypersensitivity (+20% damage, +50% recharge) and Negligence (+15% damage, charges instantly, slower cast).

The tree also holds the most dramatic rewrites in the game. Bone Gearblade replaces Whirlwind entirely with Reassemble (30 MP): your blade lengthens for eight seconds and every normal attack deals an extra 15 damage. Troubling Delight turns your attacks into lasers. Crimson Thorn applies Wound, and The Inquisitor doubles Wound damage and swaps in a Wound Explosion special.

Dagger

The hardest class to make work, by community consensus rather than by design statement. A dedicated feedback thread argues its melee range is "abysmal" next to Great Sword, Staff and Crossbow, and that the i-frames on Parry and Trance are not generous enough to compensate at Hard Mode tiers 30–50.

It has the most distinctive resource layer: Fury, Trance and Focus, with a border cue that tells you when Fury's block window is live. Patch 0.11.5 buffed it hard — Parry dropped from 10 MP to 6, Parry damage rose 30%, all normal attacks gained +20% final damage — and it is still the class people write improvement threads about.

Upgrade paths worth knowing: Fire Dagger changes the special to a five-dagger throw, Alpine Edelweiss converts your attack to Shuriken Throw, and Difficult Trial removes Parry entirely in exchange for a 20% chance to gain Trance on any attack.

Crossbow

The only weapon with a magazine and a dedicated reload key. TEAM HORAY described the design intent plainly when it was announced: increase fire rate and ammo capacity to spray arrows, or lay mines to hit several enemies at once. It shipped in 0.7.35 with 16 enhancement variants — 6 Tier 2 and 10 Tier 3 — which is the clearest public statement of what a Sephiria weapon tree's shape is.

Its upgrades are all prefixed Colossal Crossbow: — Gunpowder Synthesis, Scattershot Shooter, Frost Veil, Reload Device, Fire Mine, Rapid Freeze Crystal and others. Players report ranged builds having a better win rate generally, which tracks in a game with 60+ enemy types and a lot of contact damage.

Blade

Announced as "Katana" and shipped as Blade in 0.8.11. It alternates between sheathed and unsheathed states, which is the whole class: Sheath grants an invincibility window, Iaido Slash is the drawn normal attack, and Issen and Heavy Slash are the specials. Heidi ties Overheat stacks to your Dash Count.

If you have seen Chinese-language build guides for 火太刀 (fire Blade), they are built around the Solis upgrade family and depend on the Furnace artifact to generate Solar Blade charges — the weapon consumes them, it does not create them.

Staff

The newest class, added with Chapter 5 in March 2026. Its special, Riposte, is a block-counter, and a long player review of the class describes the appeal precisely: "its special attack being a block/counter is quite fun."

Its branches are unusually varied. Staff of Great Might converts 5% of your defense into a slow-charging shield. Ilonica's Spirit Staff sacrifices basic attacks to spray bolt charges. Oracle's Staff, per the same reviewer, fires a frost relic every third hit — he calls it "100% overpowered." There is also a real trap here: the Bolt Barrage path blitzes through your bolt spell casts, and if you have no bolt spells it does nothing at all. Players describe that combination as a genuinely bricked build.

How upgrades actually work

Upgrades are tiered trees, not a random pool. The official phrasing for the crossbow — "16 enhancement tree variants (6 Tier 2 enhancements, 10 Tier 3 enhancements)" — is the model for every class: a base upgrade, then Evolutions branching off it.

They are also not stat bumps. A large fraction of them replace your normal attack, your dash attack or your special outright. Whirlwind becomes Reassemble or Wound Explosion; Parry becomes Throw Dagger; the Blade's special becomes Ice Sliding. Picking an upgrade is closer to picking a subclass.

You get them at the Anvil, a node type that leads to an anvil room. Anvil offers can be rerolled with dice, and since a 2025 patch a rerolled option will not reappear. Anvils are also gated by stage progress — if you skip weapon upgrades early, later anvils can fail to appear at all. Hence the standing community advice: rush every anvil you see and get to max tier as fast as possible.

Two ways to plan without burning a run: the in-game Journal → Weapons tab shows the full upgrade paths, and the Comprehensive Training Grounds (added 0.11.5) has an anvil next to the guard NPC so you can test builds safely.

The number nobody can reconcile

The Steam store says "6 distinct weapons, each with over 50 unique upgrades" — roughly 300 in total. The 1.0 launch announcement says "six weapon branches with over 200 upgrades." Both are official TEAM HORAY statements and they do not agree. We are not going to pick one and present it as fact; the honest summary is that the game ships somewhere in the 200–300 range and only the Crossbow has a per-class count on record.

Weapon changes since launch (1.0.21 – 1.0.30)

There is no published 1.0.20. The sequence runs 1.0 (containing 1.0.19's large balance patch) → 1.0.21 Hotfix → 1.0.22 → 1.0.23 → 1.0.24.

• 1.0.21 — Guillotine of Bitter Cold's UI was showing the wrong skill name ("Blizzard Hammer"). Also retroactively documented the Cleave cost drop to 15 MP and its guard frames.
• 1.0.22 — Breath of Ice (Sword & Shield) was granting +30% dash attack damage instead of the stated +40%.
• 1.0.23 — Solis Iubar fired the wrong special above 150 MP; Minigun's MP cost broke below 1; a multiplayer weapon-effect error was fixed.
• 1.0.24 — Mischievous Prank's special was unusable at 40 MP or lower; the Halberd's attack range was invisible in multiplayer.

The August wave went further than fixes — 1.0.26 (13 August) is the first patch to change a weapon rule: the Dagger's Dash Attack now chains directly into Special Attack: Parry and Special Attack: Fury, and Lightning Flash's Special Attack: Issen grants invincibility while sheathing. The same patch made the Black Iron Halberd's Tier 2 upgrade actually apply (it silently was not) and fixed the Superconductor's missing Storm Cloud warning in multiplayer. 1.0.30 (20 August) removed the Flourish Staff's input gap — holding attack through a Special Attack now resumes attacking the moment it ends. Full context on the 1.0.25–1.0.30 patch page.

The substantive rebalance all landed in 1.0.19, which added upgrades to Great Sword, Dagger, Crossbow and Staff (none to Sword & Shield or Blade) and renamed the "Special Attack Cost Reduction" stat to "Special Attack MP Cost Reduction."

What we are not printing

"Best weapon" rankings here are player sentiment, clearly attributed, not survey data — TEAM HORAY has never published one. We also have no verified MP cost table beyond the five numbers that appear in patch notes, and no confirmed class assignment for several upgrades (Guillotine of Bitter Cold, Minigun, Halberd, Academy Enchanted Sword). Those stay unlabelled until a source says otherwise.