Martial Arts Level—essentially Where Winds Meet’s gearscore system—is one of those metrics that looks simple on the surface but actually reflects an incredibly intricate web of progression systems. It’s not just about equipment. It’s not just about character level. It’s the amalgamation of everything you’ve done to strengthen your character: gear, martial arts, abilities, passive trees, and more.
Understanding how Martial Arts Level actually works reveals the game’s genuine depth. Every system contributes to your overall power in some way. You’re not just grinding one thing in isolation—you’re feeding multiple progression paths simultaneously, and they all feed back into this single number.
What makes this even more important is that there’s a hidden feature most players never discover that can streamline this entire process significantly. Once you know about it, upgrading becomes exponentially less tedious.
What Martial Arts Level Actually Measures
The Gearscore Concept
Martial Arts Level is Where Winds Meet’s way of numerically representing your character’s overall combat power. It’s a composite score that factors in dozens of different upgrade sources rather than just one or two metrics.
Why It Matters:
- Serves as a quick reference for your progression
- Affects matchmaking and difficulty scaling in certain modes
- Helps you understand where you actually stand compared to the game’s progression curve
- Reveals which systems you’ve neglected
The Key Distinction:
In Solo Mode, increasing your Martial Arts Level does NOT cause enemies to become stronger. You can farm and upgrade indefinitely without triggering difficulty scaling. However, in Online Mode and specific Solo Mode Difficulty Tiers, enemies scale with your progression—reaching a new breakthrough tier increases world enemy difficulty.
This is an important distinction. Your solo farming isn’t making the game harder; you’re genuinely getting stronger relative to your challenges.
How Martial Arts Level Is Calculated
The Component Systems
Martial Arts Level aggregates input from multiple distinct progression systems. It’s not a hidden formula—it’s a sum of multiple visible progressions:
Equipment & Gear:
- Your weapons and armor have individual gear levels
- Enhancement levels on weapons contribute
- Tuning levels add to the total
- Set bonuses from wearing matching gear provide stat boosts
Martial Arts (Combat Techniques):
- Each martial art you’ve learned contributes
- Your equipped martial arts contribute more
- Leveling martial arts increases their power tier
- Breakthrough levels in martial arts grant +100 to +150 bonus per level
Mystic Skills:
- Similar to martial arts—each skill you’ve unlocked counts
- Equipped Mystic Skills weighted more heavily
- Leveling and breaking through Mystic Skills increases contribution
- Major breakthrough gains: +100 to +150 bonus per level
Inner Path Passives:
- Each passive node you unlock in the Inner Path trees contributes
- These are permanent additions to your power
- More nodes = higher gearscore
Melodies of Peace Passives:
- The Melodies of Peace tree (unlocked through Oddities) contributes
- Each passive node adds to your total
- Vitality upgrades, stat bonuses, and special abilities all count
Character Stats:
- Base stats from leveling your character
- Stat gains from professions
- Set bonuses and other sources
- These all feed into Martial Arts Level
How Character Leveling Feeds In:
Every time you level your character, you gain a fixed amount of Martial Arts Level automatically. Additionally, gear leveling, passive unlocks, martial arts progression—all of these grant bonus Martial Arts Level on top of your base progression.
Breakthrough Progression: The Major Power Spike
Understanding Level Caps and Breakthroughs
Where Winds Meet uses a tiered progression system. You can’t just grind to unlimited levels. Instead, you hit level caps that force you to complete Breakthrough challenges to progress further.
How It Works:
- You reach a level cap (e.g., level 15)
- A Breakthrough challenge becomes available
- Completing it removes the cap and gives you the next tier of gear
- You can now level up to the next threshold (e.g., level 20)
The Gearscore Jump:
When you complete a Breakthrough:
- You receive a full set of new tier gear (automatic gearscore boost)
- Martial Arts and Mystic Arts also have Breakthrough tiers
- Breaking through Martial Arts/Mystic Arts grants +100 to +150 bonus to MAL
- These breakthrough bonuses are substantial—completing them is always worth prioritizing
Scaling Differences by Mode:
- Solo Mode: Enemies stay at the same difficulty; you genuinely get stronger
- Online Mode/Solo Mode Tiers: Enemies upgrade with you; breakthrough matters for staying competitive
Every Way to Increase Martial Arts Level
A Comprehensive Breakdown
Since MAL is composite, here’s every system that contributes:
Fastest Gains:
- Character level ups (direct MAL gains per level)
- Breakthrough completions (instant tier-wide gear and skill upgrades)
- Martial Arts breakthroughs (direct +100/+150 bonus)
Medium Gains:
- Weapon enhancement and tuning (cumulative but steady)
- Mystic Art leveling and breakthroughs
- Inner Path passive unlocks
Steady Gains:
- Melodies of Peace passive progression (requires Oddity collecting)
- Profession leveling (provides stat boosts)
- Martial Arts leveling (steady increase, not breakthrough)
- Gear upgrades and replacements
Long-term Gains:
- Set bonuses (require collecting matching gear pieces)
- Stat accumulation from various sources
The Hidden Feature: Develop Menu & Quick Enhance
What Most Players Never Find
There’s a menu option buried in Where Winds Meet that streamlines the entire upgrade process. Most players never discover it, which means they’re manually upgrading individual items one by one—inefficient and tedious.
What It Does:
The Quick Enhance feature automatically upgrades all your available gear, martial arts, and passives in one action. Instead of manually going through each system, you hit one button and the game handles optimization for you.
How to Access It:
- Press ‘H’ to open the Develop Menu
- Look at the bottom right corner of your screen
- Find and select ‘Quick Upgrade’ or ‘Quick Enhance’ (exact name varies by language)
- A new menu appears showing every upgradable item across all systems
What You Can Upgrade Here:
- All equipped gear pieces
- Equipped martial arts
- Equipped mystic skills
- Inner Path passives
- Any other system with upgrade materials
How It Prioritizes:
The game automatically prioritizes items marked as “Equipped” by you. If you want to upgrade non-equipped martial arts or mystic skills, you’ll need to manually equip them first through the Develop Menu, then use Quick Enhance.
The Workflow:
- Check which martial arts/skills you actually want to use
- Manually equip them through the Develop Menu
- Use Quick Enhance to upgrade everything simultaneously
- As long as you have the required materials, the game handles it
Why This Matters:
This feature cuts your upgrade time down dramatically. What would normally require opening multiple menus and selecting individual upgrades happens in seconds. This is especially valuable after breakthroughs when you’ve got dozens of things to upgrade.
Optimizing Your Martial Arts Level Growth
Strategic Progression Approach
Priority 1: Character Leveling
- Don’t neglect reaching new level caps and completing breakthroughs
- These provide the most substantial MAL jumps
- Focus on reaching breakthrough tiers before over-optimizing individual gear
Priority 2: Breakthrough Your Martial Arts
- If you use a specific martial art heavily, breakthrough it
- The +100 to +150 bonus is immediate and significant
- Worth the material investment
Priority 3: Equip and Upgrade
- Decide on your core loadout (equipped martial arts, mystic skills, gear)
- Use Quick Enhance to bring everything up to current standards simultaneously
- Don’t spread upgrades too thin across too many weapons/abilities
Priority 4: Passive Trees
- Inner Path and Melodies of Peace contribute, but more slowly
- Progress them as a background activity
- They’re important for long-term scaling, not immediate power
Understanding Difficulty Scaling
Solo Mode Specifics
In pure Solo Mode, your Martial Arts Level is irrelevant to enemy difficulty—enemies stay constant. This is a significant difference from Online Mode.
Why This Matters:
- You can farm freely without making content harder
- Grinding for upgrades doesn’t trigger difficulty creep
- Perfect for players who want to optimize before facing harder challenges
- You can reach very high Martial Arts Levels without consequence
When Difficulty Does Scale:
- Online Mode: Enemies scale with your progression
- Solo Mode Difficulty Tiers: Breakthrough tiers increase world difficulty
- Specific Challenge Events: May scale based on your power
This distinction is important for planning your progression. If you want to farm and optimize in peace, stick to Solo Mode without triggering breakthroughs until you’re ready.
Related Progression Systems
To maximize your Martial Arts Level growth, understand how these interconnected systems work:
- Check out our Dragon Keys guide to unlock powerful early weapons that boost gearscore
- Our Vitality guide explains resource management for Mystic Skill usage
- Our Inner Art guides cover passive systems that contribute to overall power
Each of these systems feeds into your Martial Arts Level in different ways.
Ending With
Martial Arts Level is Where Winds Meet’s way of saying “here’s your overall power.” But unlike simpler gearscore systems in other games, it’s genuinely transparent about what contributes. You can look at your Martial Arts Level and understand exactly why it is what it is—it’s not a black box.
The real breakthrough (pun intended) is discovering that Quick Enhance feature. It transforms gear optimization from a tedious menu-clicking marathon into a streamlined process. Once you’re using it, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.
Focus on breakthroughs first, maintain your core loadout through Quick Enhance, and let the passive systems accumulate in the background. Your Martial Arts Level will climb steadily, and you’ll feel the power growth with every milestone. Before long, you’ll be pushing content that once felt impossible.
The complexity isn’t overwhelming once you realize it’s just multiple systems feeding into one number. Master that single feature, and character optimization becomes intuitive rather than tedious.
Useful Resources
For more information about Where Winds Meet and its mechanics, check out these official links:
- Official Website: Where Winds Meet
- Steam Store Page: Where Winds Meet on Steam
- PlayStation Store: Where Winds Meet on PlayStation
- Wikipedia Entry: Where Winds Meet
