anon's weapon reforging guide

>I want to make weapons like these http://imgur.com/a/lJxHN
>how do I do it?

Before you attempt reforge anything, it is HIGHLY recommend that you collect all five Kagatsuchi Magatama. Giving these magatama to Tome increases the luck of stat rolls when forging or reforging gear. They are not random and all have set locations. They are not normal accessories and are more equivalent to key items. You automatically give them to Tome after the mission and can check if you have collected all of them by confirming that all entries of Tome's backstory in the character directory have been unlocked.

Kagatsuchi Locations:
Sub-mission reward: The Magatama of Fire
Sub-mission reward: A Fiercer Flame
In The Malefactors, in a chest in the house near the cave entrance.
In The Silent Crow, in a secret room reachable through a hole in the wall from the rafters.
In Ghosts of Sawayama, in the underground prison area.

Once you've unlocked Way of the Strong, you now have the option to use divine fragments instead of spirit iron chunks when reforging in the reforge menu. Press triangle to toggle between the two. Divine fragments have a substantially better chance of getting yellow, blue and purple rolls over spirit chunks, but sometimes that isn't actually preferable if the roll you want is just a white e.g 19.9% final blow damage. Divine fragment rolls also have a higher gold cost.

Now, the first thing to understand about reforging is that stats rolls are calculated by a weapon's internal seed. Every weapon has a seed and if you've ever picked up duplicates of the same exact weapon from revenants, the seed of all of the duplicates is identical.

>what does this actually mean in practice?
Every stat roll from reforging will appear in the same order with the same percentages. You can partially avoid this by reforging stats on the weapon in a different order, but there is a pattern. Because of this seed, it is borderline impossible to get certain rolls on certain weapons. e.g. you may be able to get a Change to Attack Stamina, Body, or Dexterity A on a weapon you're attempting to reforge but even after investing thousands of divine fragments you may never be able to get a CtA Skill A roll.

>but how do I avoid this?
If you've considered savescuming and happened to try to reforge a weapon you've already created or found repeatedly, you've probably noticed that you're not really getting anywhere with the rolls you want. This is because the seed of the weapon doesn't change after you reload the save, so the rolls are going to be the same. The suggested method to get around this is to accumulate 999 divine fragments and 22 million gold, make a backup save to usb or PS+ cloud, forge the weapon from scratch then try for the stats you want, all in one go. If you fail, just reload and try again.
Forging a new weapon assigns it a new seed, which will guarantee you a completely new and random pool of stat rolls to pull from. The rest is up to luck and time.

>how do I even begin to farm that much gold or that many divines?
Doing runs through Demon's Daughter just about the most optimized gold farm in the game. 160k per run. This is the route:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xlpWKzWNqU
If you haven't gotten a yasakani yet, this is also a very nice way of passively farming for one as it's a possible mission reward. Suppa scrolls and tiger running scrolls are recommended.
There is no better method to farming divine fragments than to disassemble divine gear acquired from revenants.  You can either farm revenants in Demon's Daughter while gold farming or picking a mission with many graves like The Battle of Ohashi Bridge or one of the current twilight missions, or a common revenant trading spot like the beginning of Isle of Demons. Whatever you decide, revenant difficulty (the number of swords next to the revenant's sign) plays a huge factor in the amount of gear dropped, so for optimal farm it's not a bad idea to artificially inflate the revenant's difficulty rating by optimizing your build and respeccing to decrease your level proportional to theirs (e.g most of the revenants in this mission are 200 so I'm not going to level beyond 150). Avoid revenants with a one or two rating and prioritize revenants with three or more. I've also heard making a farming set with 25% (ideally) equipment drop rate on each piece works for revenants, but haven't tested it.
Selling revenant gear is also a good way of accumulating gold if gold farming Demon's Daughter is just too repetitive.
You can refresh revenant graves by resting at a shrine or dying. Keep in mind there is an internal cooldown of 5 minutes before revenants appear after leaving and re-entering a mission.

>I don't think I care enough to farm that much
How much you want to invest into a weapon is entirely up to you. But even if you don't want to accumulate that much in gold and fragments,  the methods for farming are still useful for any investment put into a weapon whatsoever. The advantage of going all the way to 1k divine fragments and savescuming is that you likely won't, if at all, have to invest anything else in the weapon again aside from soul matching it to 160+10. The weapon is completely finished with reforging at the time that you make it. You never have to suffer with the experience of getting a weapon to +8 before realizing that no matter how many fragments you put into it, you can't seem to get the rolls you want.

>I don't have the smithing text for the weapon I want to make
If it's part of a set bonus then you can find it on this list:
http://pastebin.com/CayVK8TG
You'll have to farm for the text. If it doesn't have a smithing text, your only option to try with a new weapon may be to get lucky finding the kind you want through hidden teahouse gambling with the weapon type you're looking for. You'd have to do this every time you reloaded the save because the goal is to generate a weapon with a new seed. This may or may not be feasible for you depending on how much glory you have.
If you've collected a bunch of the weapon you're trying to reforge and haven't disassembled them, you could also go through each one, one by one, dumping 1k divine fragments to see if any of them can give you the rolls you want, but you're limited in savescum attempts by the number of non-duplicates you have.

>I'm not exactly sure what the highest possible rolls are
You can find a list of highest possible rolls with minimum and maximum familiarity here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16ATVIr-dSH-n10925y_KLLihv1ucjmYXSSSEg_WqmnU/edit
It's not perfectly accurate, but it is a very good guide.

>I tried reforging before and couldn't get the roll I wanted to appear at all and it wasn't even a rare one
For reforging, it's important to understand that stat rolls are divided into groups and that a weapon can only have one stat per group. The simplest example is that you can't have more than one kind of element on your weapon. You can't stack 19.9% Close Combat Attack (Critical) with 15% Close Combat Damage. There are some exceptions. You can stack Attack Ki Reduction and Attack Ki Reduction (Critical) just fine. A sub-perfect Guard Ki Reduction roll (when it's blue) will conflict with a Low/Mid/High Guard Ki Reduction roll but when the roll is a perfect 25%, the blue becomes a white and the conflict is gone. So you're free to stack 25% Guard Ki Reduction with 20% Mid Guard Ki Reduction. This may or may not be a bug. Some of the groups just don't make any sense at all. For whatever reason, Ki Recovery (X skill) as a weapon stat (and not a set bonus) seems to collide with everything in the same group as CCD. Or at least that's the case for Hozoin Jumonji Spear.

>I've never even seen X roll, how hard is it to get? I decided to go for X and Y rolls and after going through 1k reforges, I still haven't gotten X. Should I reload the save or keep the weapon?
Below is a quick reference list of weapon stat rolls ordered by difficulty to obtain. It's just something I threw together from personal experience, so results may vary. As a general rule, if you fail to get at least two or three of the stats you want by the time you've gone through 1k reforge attempts and they're towards the top of the list, you should probably trash the weapon, reload the save and try again. If you don't get the more difficult rolls out of the way now, you probably won't get them at all. I emphasize this; if you fail to get the rare rolls you're looking for within the first 1k reforges, your chances of ever getting them have substantially dropped.

These values are listed at minimum weapon familiarity with their respective increases at max familiarity.
Close Combat Attack Ki Reduction (Critical) 25% (+5%)
Your Preferred Element +17 (+5)
CtA (Change to Attack) A (A+) Of Preferred Stat
Guard Ki Reduction 25% (+5%)
Close Combat Attack Ki Reduction 20% (+5%)
CCD (Close Combat Damage) 15% (+5%)
Low/Mid/High Guard Ki Reduction 20.3% (+5%)
Final Blow / Grapple Damage 19.9 (+5%)
Any white roll that caps at 19.9% 19.9% (+5%)
Your Preferred Element +16 (+5)
Close Combat Attack Ki Reduction (Critical) >=21.5% (+5%)
Close Combat Ki Damage 8.9% (+3%)
Skill/QAtk/SAtk/Low/Mid/High Ki Damage 9.9% (+3%)
Familiarity Damage Bonus A (A+)
Your Preferred Element +15 (+5)
Close Combat Ki Damage >=8.0% (+3%)
Any white roll that caps at 19.9% >=17.5% (+5%)
Break +14 (+5)
Parry +14 (+5)

That should give you a rough idea of what to expect.

Keep in mind that just because you got a rare roll, doesn't necessarily mean you want it in the first place. For example, 25% Attack Ki Reduction may be insanely good on a spear or axe, but on a single katana it's not as great as it looks at first glance and you might be better off with break +14. You have to decide for yourself what kind of stats you want, don't just go by rarity. 19.9% Final Blow is one of the best rolls to have on an Atagi, as is 19.9% Close Combat Attack (Critical) on a Hikoemon and those are just white rolls, albeit perfect ones.

Whatever weapon you're making, unless it's going to fill a niche roll, you're almost always going to want CtA A of your highest stat and 15% CCD (or Familiarity Damage Bonus A in a pinch). Those are the most important no matter the weapon. You also have an inheritable slot to work with to give you some leeway with RNG. I've had to use a CCD 15% inheritable multiple times because I've gotten almost all the right rolls but failed to get CCD. Some people like to reserve the inheritable slot just for CtA because it allows them to completely change the weapon's scaling whenever they want so that they don't need to make an entirely new weapon when they switch builds, so long as they have the right CtA inheritable lying around.

>I made a Bizen and want to reforge that because I don't care about set bonuses
Don't make the mistake of reforging and leveling a bizen. If the weapon class you want to make does not have any weapon set bonuses that appeal to you then decide on a weapon first by any guaranteed rolls it has, and second by its base attack multiplier at +0. Get something that has a guaranteed elemental roll or something, anything to fill the slot. Whatever you decide to settle with, make absolute sure that every stat slot is filled. The only time it's okay for a weapon to have an empty slot is if it doesn't already have an inheritable because you can fill it with one later.

>what do you mean by guaranteed roll?
If you've see what looks a stone hexagon next to an effect, that is a guaranteed roll for that weapon. A Tombo-Kiri is guaranteed to have a 15-17 wind element and the Warrior of the East's Honor set bonus. A Shiranui is guaranteed to have a 9-12 fire element. These effects cannot be reforged but fill additional slots that would otherwise be vacant.

>how does inheritance actually work? I haven't ever done it up to this point
Any stat on a weapon that has an inheritance icon next to it (which looks like ||>|) can be transferred to another weapon. In order to transfer the stat, the weapon with the inheritable stat must have maximum familiarity, must be used as a material durring a soul match and the base weapon must not have a conflicting stat apart of the same group as the inheritable stat you want to transfer. You'll be able to tell if there is a conflicting stat because the inherited stat won't show up on the weapon output preview if there is and a prompt will warn you if you try to continue with the soul match. If the base weapon already has a inheritable stat, the stat will be replaced. If it doesn't, the inheritable stat will be added to an empty slot on the weapon.  The weapon used as a material will be consumed but you can duplicate it if if the weapon was originally found or crafted with that inheritable stat.

>how does inheritance work for armor?
Exactly the same way. And in the same way you can transfer inheritable stats between different kinds of weapons, you can do the same for different kinds of pieces of armor.  This means that while a kote is the only piece of armor that can roll +20 attack, if the stat is inheritable, you can transfer it onto another kind of piece of armor like a kabuto. There are also stats that appear on certain pieces that but will never be inheritable such as elemental damage down and attack damage reduction while critical which only appear on your chest piece.

>how do I duplicate weapons and armor?
When you acquire a revenant's gear, the gear dropped is set to +0 and the stats are set to the state they were in when it was originally crafted or found. If you haven't altered a piece of gear by reforging, that is its original state. Anyone who picks up your gear from your revenant will find that gear in its original state. If you have a piece of gear with a really nice unaltered stat e.g you found or crafted a katana with a CtA Heart A inheritable, then anyone who finds your revenant and gets the drop has a statistically identical katana that they can use to transfer its inheritable stat with via soul matching. If you want to duplicate a weapon in its original state, just intentionally die, have a someone you know summon your own revenant grave, then have them die with the weapon they found on your grave equiped. The weapons carried by your revenant is determined by the weapon in your active weapon slot when you die. It is not determined by whatever weapon is in your first weapon slot.

>I found a CtA of the stat I wanted but it's only C, should I keep it?
There is a large damage difference between C and A stat scaling. I would not recommend settling with CtA C but it's entirely up to you on how close to perfect you want your weapon to be. But if you're going through the trouble of all of this farming and savescumming, it really wouldn't be worth it to settle on CtA C.

>Do I want CtA of a stat that my weapon already scales with innately or not, or...? Does it stack or change the scaling entirely?
CtA adds flat scaling and stacks with the weapon's normal scaling and any scaling bonuses from anything else. A katana with CtA Heart A will have B+ stacked with A+ heart scaling at max familiarity. The 6 piece CtA Body B bonus from Warrior of the East's Honor stacks with CtA on a spear and the spear's innate CtA scaling for B/B+/A+ Body scaling. The same goes for Obsidian. The important thing is to have CtA for your highest leveled stat. If you're using a 2kat and you have 60 skill and 90 dex, you want CtA Dexterity A on the 2kat.

>I don't see any information about life drain but I want it. What kind I should go for?
I'm not a huge fan of life drain so I'm too not to familiar with what kind of rolls to expect for different kinds of it because I generally skip over and ignore them. It's really only something I'd go for if I didn't know what else to put on the weapon, though I have had fun stacking 24 or 25 (+2) skill life drain on an axe with kara jishi which gives you a nice amount of life recovery from grappling (because it's considered a skill) and can net you about 230 hp from an uncharged lumberchop. I'm sure that would also work out well if you use reaper or water sword. Final blow recovery and aya komori might also be nice but quick attack or close combat life drain just seems too low to be worthwhile.