Weapons are an important part of The Ascent, especially considering how much of the game takes place inside of combat. Choosing which weapon type to use is already daunting, but it becomes even harder with the many unique choices you have for upgrading each individual weapon.
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However, before you can actually choose how to upgrade your weapons, you'll first have to find the Gunsmith and learn which materials you'll need in order to make your guns more powerful. Here is how to upgrade your weapons in The Ascent and the materials you'll need.
Necessary Materials For Upgrading Weapons
There are two types of items that you'll need to create weapon upgrades for your guns:
Components
The first of these items are called components. Components aren't a regular item; instead, they come in three different tiers, which determine the strength of the upgrade you can craft. The higher the tier of component, the better your weapon upgrade will be. The three tiers are Basic, Advanced, and Superior. The colors for each of these levels are blue, purple, and gold. Finding components is a relatively common occurrence if you're actively seeking them out since they're found inside of chests that are conveniently located on your mini-map.
UCRED
UCRED is another resource that you can use to upgrade your weapons. This currency is much more common since it's the main reward for completing missions and bounties. If you need more UCRED, then consider completing a quest or bounty.
How To Upgrade Your Weapons
Upgrading your weapons isn't a difficult task in The Ascent; however, it's relatively confusing at first because the game doesn't explicitly explain how to do it. To start, you should enter an area with vendors because you need to find the gunsmith NPC and talk to them. The gunsmith NPC is found where the Hammer symbol is located on your map, so it's easy to find even if you've never visited the merchant shop before. You can also purchase new items from the Gunsmith merchant, so it's worth looking through their inventory if you need a more powerful weapon after leveling up. Furthermore, you can sell weapons to this vendor.
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After locating the gunsmith NPC, you have to converse with them and choose to upgrade your weapon. There are 15 different levels for weapon upgrades, starting with MK1 and going up to MK15. All you have to do is choose your upgrade from here; however, it's important for you to choose the correct one because you can't change it for free after upgrading your gun.
You need more materials to upgrade a weapon as you start reaching the higher MK levels; however, you should obtain a lot of materials as you progress through The Ascent, so this shouldn't be a problem for most players. The stats and information about each upgrade are displayed on the side of your screen, which makes it simple to decide which upgrade will fit your needs best. You should make sure to consider all of your options for your weapons before spending your materials on an upgrade since it takes effort to collect a large number of components or UCRED.
How Often Should You Upgrade Your Weapons?
An important question that you may wonder throughout The Ascent is how often you should upgrade your weapon arsenal. It may seem like an unnecessary factor to consider; however, it's all too common to upgrade weapons before you need the damage bonus and accidentally waste precious materials. Although this varies from player to player, especially if you happen to be getting new weapons that you prefer to switch to throughout the course of your adventure, it's still an important thing to consider, especially since UCRED is a valuable resource that you don't want to waste.
The best way to know if you should upgrade your weapon is if you don't get a new weapon that you want to use after finishing a mission. If you still plan to use the same weapon after finishing a quest, then it may be worth upgrading it since it will be your primary source of damage throughout the next quest or set of quests that you aim to complete. However, if you have a weapon that's already stronger than most of the enemies you're facing, then you should wait to see if you obtain a new weapon during your next mission, so you can spend the materials on upgrading that gun instead.
Which Weapons Should You Prioritize Upgrading?
There are tons of unique weapons that you can collect while playing The Ascent, so you may already have a certain weapon or weapon type that you prefer using, which makes the choice of upgrading a weapon fairly easy. However, you may prefer to use multiple types of weapons, which means that there may be many different weapons that you might want to upgrade.
If you do use a large selection of weapons, then your best choice of weapon to upgrade would be an excessive weapon because these weapons often deal a lot more DPS than regular rifles, shotguns, and machine guns. Rocket launchers and miniguns such as The Dealbreaker are excellent choices for high damage weapons.
Another high damage weapon type that should be on your priority list for upgrading is flame-throwers, since these weapons deal a lot of damage, hit multiple enemies at once, and deal flame damage, which many enemies don't have adequate armor resistance against. Overall, there are a lot of choices while upgrading weapons, and you should prioritize the guns that you use the most or weapons that deal the most damage.
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