Upgrading ARMs - Wild Arms 3 Walkthrough

This page contains information about the ARMs in Wild ARMs 3, I included everything that I think you need to know about how they work and how to upgrade them. ARMs (Artifacts from Ruins Memories) are the only pieces of equipment that you'll get in this game and they're never replaced throughout the entire game.

Instead of constantly replacing your equipment as you find new pieces - in this game you'll be upgrading your ARMs as you earn more Gella (money). You can upgrade your ARMs by visiting an ARM Smith in many of the different towns throughout Filgaia. One thing to note is you can only upgrade an ARM a total of 15 times; I will talk about this more further down the page.

When you visit one of these ARM Smiths you'll be able to upgrade each stat on your ARM (as shown above). I've included a list below of each stat and what it does so you can have a better understanding when it comes time to upgrade your weapon.

 

SHT: Is the abbreviation for Shot and it measures the attack power of your ARM. Upgrading this stat will increase the amount of damage you deal. This is a good stat to raise for all of your characters, some characters (like Jet or Clive) will benefit more from it than others.

HIT: As the name suggests, this stat measures the chance to hit when attacking with your ARM. When you upgrade this stat it will make your attacks miss less often. I'd recommend you invest no points into this stat since your characters rarely ever miss an attack in this game anyway.

BLT: BLT stands for Bullet and when you increase this stat it increases the Bullet Capacity of your weapon.

WGT: This stat changes the weight (WGT) of your weapon. Decreasing the weight of your weapons will allow you to hit your target more with Gatling and decrease the FP used when activating the skill. One thing to note is that every ARM has a different default WGT and -2 Weight on Virginia's weapon won't do the same thing as -2 Weight on Clive's.

CRT: CRT stands for Crit and as you can probably guess it will increase your chances of scoring a Critical Hit.

 

Now that you know what each stat does in this game it's time to talk about what upgrades are the best to do for each character. Before we jump into that I would like to explain one last thing and that is the Initialize Upgrade option which you see at the bottom of the ARM Smith's vendor list. Choosing this option will reset all upgrades that you previously put on your ARM and put it back to the default ARM for that character.

Essentially, Initialize Upgrade is your reset button incase you mess up when upgrading an ARM or you want to experiment with a different combination.

 

(Early Game Setup 1) Virginia: You can put 10 points into WGT and 5 into BLT to make her a Gatling machine if you'd like. Alternatively, if you'd rather her be support (her Mystic ability is amazing for healing the whole team) I would recommend 5 SHT, 5 CRT and 5 WGT.

(Early Game Setup 1) Clive: A few upgrades into BLT to upgrade his bullet count and some into SHT and CRT are what I would recommend. You can put a few into WGT too since it's so insanely cheap. Early in the game this is the cheapest and best way to make Clive better.

(Early Game Setup 1) Gallows: The best things to upgrade for Gallows early on would be CRT and WGT since both are cheap and help out. 5 into each would be find and then 5 into SHT too if you have the money. For the most part Gallows is your magic user in this game but he can put out some damage too with the right ARM upgrades.

(Early Game Setup 1) Jet: I'd recommend dumping 5 or so into WGT and the rest into SHT and CRT depending on what you can afford.

 

(Setup 2) Virginia: 5 SHT, 5 CRT, 2 BLT and 3 WGT is what I like to do with Virginia. This makes her a well balanced support character - most of the time during hard fights I use Virginia for Mystic primarily.

(Setup 2) Clive: 15 into SHT; this will make Clive hit like a freakin' truck and do insane amounts of damage.

(Setup 2) Gallows: 5 CRT, 8 SHT and the rest into BLT or WGT depending on what you want. I find that I don't ever use Gatling on Gallows since it doesn't do good damage and he needs some FP at all times for magic. Since Gatling consumes FP I try not to use it on him.

(Setup 2) Jet: In my opinion the best combo for Jet is 10 into SHT and 5 into CRT