Loading...
Loading...
Mastery
April 19, 2026 at 09:12 AM
Add note that Mastery is largely redundant for headshot-focused firearm builds
Mastery is the critical-hit-chance stat in Windrose. Each point adds 0.5% critical hit chance to the character. Because crit chance also comes from gear sets like Privateer Set and weapons like Razor, most guides recommend allocating Mastery only on dedicated crit builds.
+0.5% crit chance per point.
Does not affect critical damage multiplier (that comes from Privateer 4-piece and weapon effects).
Linear scaling with no documented cap in version 0.10.0.
Mastery pays off most on builds that already have multiple crit sources, because more crit chance on an already-crit-heavy build compounds effectively. Typical breakpoints:
Privateer 2-piece = +10% crit chance baseline.
Razor equipped = additional crit chance via weapon effect.
Taco Epic dish = +20 Mastery for 30 minutes = +10% crit.
Stacking all three with Mastery points quickly pushes crit chance past 30%.
Strength, Agility, and Precision builds without dedicated crit gear should skip Mastery entirely and invest in their weapon's scaling stat instead. Base crit chance on non-crit builds is low enough that Mastery investment feels wasted compared to raw damage scaling.
Taco — Epic dish granting +20 Mastery for 30 minutes.
Privateer Set — 2-piece +10% crit, 4-piece +10% crit damage per nearby enemy (up to +30%).
Razor — crit-scaling rapier.
Mastery follows a 20-point soft cap similar to the main damage stats. Each point from 1 through 20 adds approximately 0.46 percent crit chance, close to the 0.5 percent shown on the tooltip; past 20, per-point returns drop sharply. Cap Mastery at 20 for the clean 9.2 percent base crit chance, then route remaining points into Vitality rather than continuing to stack Mastery past the cap. A flat-chance gear source like the Privateer Set 2-piece adds more crit chance per equipment slot than Mastery points past 20 do per stat point.
Crit chance bonuses in Windrose stack additively, not multiplicatively. A 20-Mastery character wearing the Privateer 2-piece sits at 9.2 percent plus 10 percent flat = 19.2 percent crit chance, not at 9.2 multiplied by 1.1. The same additive rule applies to weapon-based crit bonuses and to talents from the Fencer branch. Because of this, a dedicated crit build can comfortably reach 20 to 30 percent crit chance on the character sheet before stacking more than one Mastery tier worth of points, which makes crit damage (rather than more crit chance) the better target for additional investment past the saturation point. See the Stats and Talents crit stacking section for the full math.
Guns in Windrose have a unique property that makes Mastery largely redundant for dedicated firearm builds. A headshot against an animal or human target registers as a guaranteed Critical Hit, independent of the character's base crit chance. For a pistol or musket build that reliably lands headshots, every aimed shot is already critting at 100%, so the per-point +0.46% crit chance that Mastery provides does nothing to those headshots. The only shots Mastery still helps are the occasional body shots fired when precise aim is not available, and those are a small minority of the damage output.
Route points to survivability instead. Firearm builds that would otherwise have invested in Mastery are better served by routing those points into Vitality (13 HP per point with no observed soft cap) or Endurance (5 Stamina per point until the 20-point soft cap). Both stats improve survivability during reload windows where the character is exposed, which is the weakest moment in any firearm rotation. A 20-Endurance, 20-Precision, and 30+ Vitality build plays noticeably safer than the equivalent build with points funneled into Mastery.
The exception: Sturdy Halberd full-crit gameplay. A Sturdy Halberd build that pairs the halberd with a pistol as a damage booster still benefits from Mastery because halberd swings do not auto-crit the way pistol headshots do. The halberd half of the loadout wants the Privateer 2-piece baseline crit plus 20 Mastery for the full-crit chain, and the pistol half benefits from the Privateer 4-piece crit damage scaling on top of its guaranteed-crit headshots. In that specific loadout, Mastery pulls real weight because it applies to the weapon that does not auto-crit.
