Weapon levels

[Siracco]

If we didn't count adding materia slots how impactful is weapon leveling? Like stat wise.

[Shock_&_Awe]

I’d say they’re pretty helpful. They basically allow the weapon to have a specialty (physical damage, magic damage, MP, etc.)

[Sevrojin]

Weapon levels / Character manuals(gives you points to spend on weapon upgrades) are very important for hard mode.

[Zhaidel]

Pretty important since they give

Much of the HP that allows your characters to reach the HP cap for hard mode which will let you use a single HP Plus on most characters.

Eventually all weapons give all 8 materia slots at high enough upgrade.

MP Regeneration which is useful for hard mode where there is no item use and benches only recover hp, not mp.

They help prioritize specific stat skews. Weapons are, ultimately, a type of class system. Physical attacker, pure caster, hybrid, tanky hybrid, tanky physical, etc. The base stats aren't the only important thing to look at as, after a couple of weapon levels, the stats add up quite a lot.

Occasional special effects like Reprieve (allows surviving fatal blow) and various others.

Ultimately, they make it so that weapons remain relevant and don't get out scaled by newer ones, too.

Don't forget you can reset your allocation at Chadley, too.

[valium]

The physical and magic attack boosts add up. The 5% damage increase on various things puts in work. Reduced MP cost on spells is useful. Reprisal on hard mode, but I tend to not use those weapons.