Weapon Types

Tides of Annihilation features four weapon types that Gwendolyn can use. Three have been revealed; the fourth remains unannounced. All weapons interact with the spectral knight system, gaining elemental properties when knights imbue them with energy.

The count of four is a developer answer given in an interview, not something footage has shown. The first playable build, at the Chengdu Playtest in August 2026, put only the sword in players' hands. This page keeps what has been reported and what has actually been demonstrated apart, because they are not the same list.

Reported Versus Demonstrated

Two things in the footage are regularly mistaken for a Gwendolyn weapon. The arrows that string ziplines across gaps and shoot down suspended platforms belong to a knight and are used for traversal and puzzles, not chosen from a loadout. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade that appears in clips from the museum's Chinese wing is Guan Yu's weapon, carried by him in a set piece; it is not something Gwendolyn equips.

Her own moveset in that build was deliberately narrow. Players counted four basic attacks driven from a single attack button, with a modifier turning it into a heavy attack, and almost everything else on the pad belonging to the knights. Whether the moveset widens once the other weapon types are in has not been shown.

Swords

The primary melee weapon. Gwendolyn's default sword is actually Niniane in her weapon form, making the main sword literally the protagonist's companion. Swords offer balanced speed and damage with access to the widest range of combo chains. Most pre-release footage shows sword combat, suggesting it is the game's signature weapon class.

Fists

Fists were named by the developers as one of the four types, but they did not appear in the August 2026 playable build and no released footage shows Gwendolyn using them. Nothing has been published about how they handle.

Bows

A ranged option for engaging enemies at a distance. As with fists, the bow was named in an interview and has not been shown in Gwendolyn's hands. The ranged attacks visible in the August 2026 build all came from the knights: some Spectral Knights specialise in ranged work, firing projectiles that create swirling domes of continuous damage or detonate after a delay, and one of them uses arrows to open traversal routes rather than to deal damage.

Fourth Weapon Type

The developers have confirmed a fourth weapon category but have not revealed it. Asked to list the four, they named fists, swords and bows and then said they could not recall the last one. It has not been named since, the August 2026 playable build did not reveal it, and no official information about it exists. This article does not guess at what it is.

Elemental Imbuing

All weapon types can receive elemental energy from Spectral Knights. Confirmed elements include lightning from Sir Lamorak, fire from Palamedes, and ice from an unidentified knight. Elemental imbuing adds damage and visual effects to attacks. Mixing different weapon types with different elements creates a wide array of combat combinations.

Armour, Badges and Outfits

Earlier pre-release material described armour as a purely cosmetic layer with no stat bonuses. The August 2026 build did not work that way. Weapons and armour carried their own affixes: a sword that drained health from enemies, a weapon that raised airborne attack power, armour that reduced the damage taken while airborne. Players were already naming builds around them within days of the event.

Sitting alongside them is a slot system of equippable badges with a hard cap on how many can be worn at once, so a build is defined as much by what is left out as by what goes in. Some badges carry a drawback as part of the trade: one granted a revive in the middle of a fight at the cost of being unable to drink healing flasks. Outfits are the cosmetic layer, collected through optional content and unconnected to combat stats.

What survives from the older framing is the broader point about progression: there is no gear power curve to grind, and hands-on players reported no visible stat growth in the build. Equipment changes what a build does rather than how large its numbers are. See Skill Tree and Progression for the wider picture.

Weapon Roles

Elemental Imbuing

Every weapon type interacts with the spectral knights through elemental imbuing. When a knight imbues Gwendolyn's active weapon, subsequent attacks gain that element until the imbue effect lapses. This produces visible changes in the weapon trail, the impact effect on enemies, and the damage type applied. The strongest visual examples in pre-release footage are Sir Lamorak wreathing the sword in red lightning before a finisher, and an unnamed ice knight launching an enemy with a freezing strike that opens an aerial combo window.

Niniane As the Sword

Because the default sword is Niniane, most combat encounters effectively pair Gwendolyn with her companion at all times even before any spectral knight enters the fight. The shapeshifting framing is presented in the campaign rather than as a hidden detail, and the bond between Gwendolyn and Niniane is treated as one of the relationships the story tracks.

Notes On Mastery

There is no damage-by-equipment curve to climb, so the meaningful gains come from how fluidly the player can swap weapons, chain combos, and choose the right elemental imbue for the enemy in front of them. Because the playable build carried swords alone, that switching is still a described design rather than a demonstrated one. See Skill Tree and Progression for the broader framing.