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Privateer Set
April 22, 2026 at 08:33 PM
Removed em-dashes per style guide (2026-04-23)
Privateer Set is the critical-hit specialist armor. Its 2-piece grants a flat +10% critical hit chance, and its 4-piece scales critical damage up with the number of nearby enemies. It is the centerpiece of any dedicated crit build.
2-piece: +10% Critical Hit Chance.
4-piece: +10% Critical Damage per nearby enemy, up to +30% total. The scaling caps at three enemies, so crowd-fights fully saturate the bonus.
Five slots. Privateer is a cloth set upgraded with Linen Fabric produced from Flax Fiber at the Spinning Wheel.
Critical-hit builds stack 2-piece Privateer + Razor rapier + Mastery allocation + Taco (Epic) for dense crit scaling.
Crowd combat specialists the 4-piece scales with the number of enemies you engage at once, making it strongest in pirate camps and Foothills patrols.
Boss-dueling crit hybrids solo bosses do not saturate the 4-piece, but 2-piece + separate 4-piece (e.g., Flibustier) still delivers the +10% crit baseline.
Privateer pieces use an officer-formalwear profile with hidden plating. The signature elements are a feathered tricorne trimmed in gold, a tailored doublet with embroidered sleeves over concealed armor panels, fitted pants with boot cuffs, and polished leather boots. The base-tier palette is Coarse Fabric in restrained tones; the Tarred Fabric top tier deepens the palette toward black, maroon, and antique gold. The set is styled to look like a state-sanctioned captain rather than a common crew member, which reinforces the flavor of the 4-piece crit-per-nearby-enemy bonus: the wearer fights openly in the thick of a boarding action rather than ambushing from cover.
Headshots against animal and human targets in Windrose register as guaranteed Critical Hit, regardless of the character's base crit chance. For a build that consistently lands headshots with pistols and muskets, the 2-piece +10% critical hit chance adds nothing to those shots because every headshot is already critting at 100%. The 2-piece bonus therefore only helps the body-shot filler between headshots and the melee swings from the paired main-hand weapon, which is usually a small fraction of the damage output.
The 4-piece is still strong. The +10% critical damage per nearby enemy bonus (up to +30%) scales with crit damage rather than crit chance, so it directly amplifies headshot hits. A firearm build fighting clustered boarding crews or a pirate camp saturates the 4-piece stack and lands 30% more damage on every headshot crit. The question is whether to take all four Privateer pieces or to take only two and mix in the Flibustier 2-piece stamina reduction or the Marksman Set 2-piece movement stamina reduction for kiting uptime.
When to go full Privateer. Full four-piece Privateer is strongest for melee-focused crit builds that cannot land guaranteed headshots, such as the Sturdy Halberd full-crit gameplay using weapon-intrinsic +10% crit chance plus Privateer 2-piece and Razor-style effects. A halberd swing does not auto-crit the way a pistol headshot does, so the crit-chance 2-piece bonus has real work to do. For a pure headshot firearm build, Flibustier plus mixed 2-piece pieces usually outperforms a full Privateer set.
Ring choice is still crit damage. Even on a full Privateer build, the single best ring for maximizing damage per shot is the flat +30% critical damage ring. More crit chance on a character already averaging 30% or higher is worth less than a multiplier on every crit that lands. See the Rings article for the full ring selection and the reasoning behind the flat-multiplier pick.
