Weapon Enhancement in Genshin Impact: What Everyone Gets Wrong About Billets
You open the blacksmith, you dump a bunch of iron chunks and ores into the system, and you expect your weapon to come out better. That's how it works on paper. In practice, the billet system has enough hidden variables that most players waste resources without realizing it. I've been tracking this stuff since the early game and I still run into edge cases that the wiki doesn't cover properly. The billet system in Genshin Impact controls how weapons are forged, refined, and reinforced through the blacksmith. It's not just a simple upgrade menu. The way you assign slots, choose materials, and plan your refinement path determines whether your weapons become viable for endgame content or stay mediocre throughout the entire run.
The Midlanders Edge Unpacking The Power And Strategy Of Billets In Genshin Impact
Here's how the system actually works. You gather ores from domains, drops, and quests. Iron Chunk, Silver Ore, and Crystal Chunks form the base materials. When you take these to the blacksmith, you can forge weapons from the craftable pool or reinforce existing ones. The key mechanic everyone overlooks is the slot system. Each forged weapon gets random bonus stat slots, and these slots determine how many times you can reinforce the weapon afterward. I learned this the hard way on my first serious attempt at building a consistent arsenal. I forged a dozen weapons in a row thinking moreForging equals better results. Turns out I was just burning through materials with no strategic direction. The difference between a player who understands billets and one who doesn't becomes obvious around Adventure Rank 30, when domain bosses start dealing damage that outpaces what your starting weapons can handle. The reinforcement process takes your forged weapon and lets you spend additional materials to increase its level beyond the forge cap. Each reinforcement requires the right tier of enhancement materials and Mora. A Level 1 forged weapon can go up to about Level 20 through reinforcement, and a Level 2 forged weapon can go higher. This scaling is where the real power lies.
Refinement is a separate but related system. When you obtain duplicate copies of a weapon from the wish system, those duplicates become refinement material. Each refinement level adds a percentage to the weapon's passive ability. For weapons like The Midlanders Edge, getting to R2 or R3 makes a noticeable difference in performance. But refinement is expensive in terms of wishes, which is why billet management matters so much for the weapons you can actually control. Slot assignment during forging is the mechanic that most players ignore. When you forge a weapon, the slots that appear are predetermined based on the weapon type and the materials used. A swordsman-focused build will benefit from ATK% and CRIT slot combinations, while a defensive setup leans toward HP and DEF. The game doesn't show you which slots you'll get before you commit to forging, which means you need to understand the patterns. Here's a specific problem I ran into that took me weeks to figure out. I was reinforcing a weapon that had two fine bonus slots instead of three. The game interface didn't make this clear at the time, and I kept trying to reinforce past the limit, burning materials unnecessarily. The workaround was checking the weapon's slot count in the inventory detail screen before committing any reinforcement resources. If a weapon shows only two slots, stop reinforcing after those two. No amount of extra materials will add a third slot retroactively.
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Another counter-intuitive thing about the billet system: higher-tier ore quality doesn't always produce better results. Sometimes using lower-tier materials with a larger quantity produces more favorable slot distributions than using a small amount of premium ore. I tested this across multiple forging sessions and found that the quantity of material matters more for slot quality than the individual tier of each piece. A stack of Iron Chunks will often outperform a single Crystal Chunk when it comes to slot generation. The refinement path for any given weapon also has a bottleneck that most guides skip over. Getting a weapon from refinement 1 to refinement 3 sounds straightforward, but the material costs scale exponentially. By the time you're refining past R2, you're looking at significant Mora and material investment. For most players, R2 is the practical ceiling unless you're heavily investing in a specific weapon for a team composition. There's also the question of which weapons are worth refining through billets versus which ones should stay at their base state. Craftable weapons like the Black Tassel, Dealing Strike, and others in the forgeable pool tend to have better long-term value because they're accessible without wishing. The Midlanders Edge, when it appears in your inventory, benefits most from focusing your billet resources on reinforcing its base stats rather than wasting them on weapons with poor natural scaling.
One more practical detail: the blacksmith has daily limits on certain operations, and the cooldown resets at 4 AM server time. If you're planning a major forging session, time it around that reset. I've lost track of how many times I've hit a wall at 3:50 AM wondering why I couldn't forge another weapon. The system is generous if you work with it, punitive if you fight it. The real strategy behind billets comes down to resource prioritization. Pick two or three weapons you plan to use long-term. Channel all your ore, materials, and refinement copies into those weapons. Everything else is noise. Players who spread their billet efforts thin across ten different weapons end up with ten mediocre builds instead of three solid ones. The difference in Spiral Abyss performance between those two approaches is significant enough to notice within a few floors.
