Your weapon is the one gear slot that decides how you attack. Every weapon in Soulbound: Online belongs to one of four classes, and the class fixes your basic attack pattern, its cooldown and the damage type it deals. Because the game has no fixed classes, swapping weapon changes how you fight rather than just the numbers on your sheet: pick up a staff instead of a hammer and you go from a melee shockwave to a ranged detonation, with different skill requirements attached.
Weapons are forged at the Weapon Station or pulled out of dungeon chests. A crafted copy arrives with its base stats at its base rarity. A dropped copy rolls a bonus package on top of those base stats and can come out at a higher rarity, and only a dropped copy can carry a legendary effect.
The Four Weapon Classes
There are four classes and every weapon belongs to exactly one of them. Swords and greatswords are the two blade classes, hammers cover blunt weapons and axes, and staves are the only class that attacks at range.
Class | Basic Attack | Cooldown | Damage | Sets It Appears In |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Sword | Fast slash in an arc in front of you | 1.1 seconds | Physical | Foundation, Virelda |
Greatsword | Slower area strike landing in two impact zones | 2 seconds | Physical | Neotilus, Virelda |
Hammer | Ground pound with a wide shockwave and knockback | 2 seconds | Physical | Lunar, Neotilus |
Staff | Ranged sphere that detonates on impact | 1.5 seconds | Void | Foundation, Lunar |
Hammers are the heavy class, and the class covers axes as well as hammers. The studio uses "heavy" rather than "hammer" when it lists the main-hand types the game shipped with, so the two words mean the same thing here. Staves are the odd one out twice over: they are the only ranged class and the only one that deals Void damage, while the other three are melee and physical. Every staff carries the Will and Focus primary stats.
Tiers and Sets
Each class runs from Tier 1 to Tier 6, and the higher tiers ask for higher combat skill levels before you can equip them. Tier 1 and Tier 2 weapons generally belong to no set. From Tier 3 upward each tier generally offers one weapon in each of that class's two sets, which is why the table above lists two set names per class. There is at least one documented exception. Player documentation splits the Lunar set's eight weapons into four hammers, three staves and one greatsword, so a Lunar greatsword exists even though greatswords otherwise sit with Neotilus and Virelda. The four sets and what they lean toward are covered on Gear Sets.
The skills a weapon asks for follow its class rather than its set. Player documentation records swords leaning on Marksmanship plus Technology or Strength, greatswords on Strength and Dexterity, hammers on Strength and Dexterity with Technology added from Tier 3, and staves on Knowledge and Technology with Marksmanship added from Tier 3. Those are combat skills, not stats, and the two systems are easy to confuse: Classes and Abilities covers what each skill governs, and Stats and Attributes covers the separate six-stat layer that sits on the gear itself.
Getting a Weapon
Forty of the game's forty-three weapons can be forged at the Weapon Station. The documented roster names three that cannot: the Iron Cutlass, the Basic Claymore and the Basic Hammer, all Tier 1 pieces that arrive as drops instead. Every weapon in the roster, the three uncraftable ones included, can also come out of a dungeon chest.
Crafting time stopped being a consideration in the Patch 4 crafting pass. Weapon and armour recipes now finish in five seconds at every tier, and station upgrade timers were cut to zero. Ore smelting was deliberately left out of that change and still runs on its own long timers, which is the part of the pipeline covered on Crafting Stations.
A dropped copy is where the variety lives. The drop picks one of the item's predefined bonus packages, which arrive as a fixed set rather than being rolled stat by stat, so two copies of the same weapon pulled from two chests are rarely identical. Rolls are weighted toward the lower rarities. What each chest can produce is tied to the rung of the run that dropped it, which is laid out on Dungeons.
Legendary Effects Are Drop-Only
A legendary effect is a triggered power carried by a Legendary-rarity drop. Effects fire off a trigger rather than running constantly: on a cast, on a critical strike, on a heavy hit, on an enemy kill, on sustained hits against one target, or on helping an ally. They cannot be crafted, and a lower-rarity drop never carries one.
That rule wobbled for exactly one week. Patch 3 made crafted copies receive an effect, and Patch 4 undid it on the grounds that the change had devalued Legendary dungeon drops. Crafting now yields base rarity again, and the drop-only rule described above is the current state.
Effects sit on specific items rather than rolling freely across the roster. On the weapon side that means an Echo Blade that follows a greatsword swing with a delayed phantom swing, a Stormcall that gives a cast a chance to arc chain lightning at the nearest enemy, or a Momentum Engine that shortens your cooldowns after a heavy hit. The catalogue players maintain still carries an incomplete notice, so treat any full effect list as provisional. Which effects attach to which set is covered set by set on the gear sets page.
Weapon Stats
Weapons carry the same stat vocabulary as the rest of your gear: the six primary stats, plus secondaries such as Critical Strike Chance, Critical Strike Damage, Attack Speed and Heavy Hit Chance. Set membership leans those numbers a particular way, and the sword line is the clearest example. Every Foundation sword carries Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed; every Virelda sword carries Critical Strike Damage instead. One set makes you crit more often, the other makes each crit hurt more, and the choice between them is a real build decision rather than a straight upgrade.
Two Patch 4 changes are worth knowing about here. Skill scaling for weapons and abilities was repaired, so a higher combat skill level now produces more damage than it did at launch, and the item level calculation was adjusted to better reflect a piece's actual power. If you compared two weapons before that patch, the comparison is worth redoing.
Cosmetic Weapons
The weapon you fight with and the weapon you are seen carrying do not have to be the same object. Regular gear and cosmetics can both go into either the regular slot or the Cosmetic slot, so you equip the weapon you want for stats in one and the weapon you want for looks in the other, and you keep the stats either way.
There is a trick for showing off a cosmetic weapon from a different class than the one you are actually using. Put a weapon of the cosmetic's class in the gear slot first, then put the cosmetic weapon in the Cosmetic slot. Open your bag with B, right-click the weapon you actually want to fight with, and choose Equip. More on the cosmetic layer is on Gear and Cosmetics.
Upgrading a Weapon
Weapons can be permanently upgraded outside a run, and the upgrade does more than raise a number: it also widens the relic paths that weapon can offer you once you are inside a dungeon. The relic side of that loop is on Relics and Builds, and the workshop that handles them sits in Arcadia.
Still on the Roadmap
A gun main-hand type is on the studio's published roadmap for the fourth quarter of 2026, described as joining staff, sword and heavy. It is not in the build, and no gun appears in the current weapon roster. Modules and chipsets, which would let you slot stat and effect changes into a weapon after you own it, sit on the same roadmap rather than in the game. Both are tracked on Early Access and Roadmap.
Weapon damage, cooldowns and skill requirements are all being tuned during Early Access, and the Combat page tracks the balance work as it lands. For the rest of the loadout, see Armour and Accessories; for what you will be swinging at, see Enemies and Bosses.