Weapons

Valheim has 128 weapons across 11 classes, and choosing between them is not about damage. It is about damage type, because every biome resists one and folds to another, and about stamina, because a swing you cannot afford does nothing. Below: weapon builds and what settles them, the 11 weapon classes side by side, the 8 damage types and what resists each, and the weapon skill and upgrade quality that beat any weapon on this page.

Builds

There is no class to pick at a menu in Valheim. A build is what you carry, and there are 5 that work:

• One-handed and shield. The default, and the only build that parries. A shield replaces the weapon's own block power, parry force and parry bonus outright, which leaves the weapon slot free to be pure damage. Bucklers parry best and block worst, tower shields block hardest and cannot parry at all, and cost 10% of your movement in hand against a round shield's 5%.
• Two-handed. No shield, so you block on the weapon's own numbers and give up the parry entirely. What you buy is reach and crowd control: a battleaxe swings through walls, and an atgeir has an area spin that a Fuling village exists to be used on.
• Stealth. Knives hit an enemy that has not seen you for 6 times damage, where everything else manages 3. Sneaking decides whether you get that opener: it is scored on the light where you stand, cutting enemy view range to half at skill 0 in full dark and to a fifth at skill 100. The build wants darkness, and it does not want a weapon that glows.
• Ranged. Bows draw in 2.5 seconds at skill 0 and 0.5 at 100, capped at a shot every 0.8 seconds from skill 85. A crossbow is one bolt every 6 seconds, 4 stamina to load and nothing to fire, and a sprint or a jump throws the reload away. Either way the ammunition is added to the weapon's damage before every other multiplier, so the arrow is part of the build rather than a consumable.
• Magic. Mistlands onward, and it runs on Eitr rather than stamina: no eitr food, no spells at all. Elemental magic spends pure Eitr on damage; blood magic spends Eitr and a share of your current health on summons and shields, which is why it can never kill you. Eitr regenerates fastest when the bar is empty, stops dead while you swim, and doubles while Rested.

All Weapon Categories

The Classes

Damage Types

Physical damage is the one you can always deal and almost never the one that hurts most. Counted across the 61 creatures with a published resistance table:

The practical consequence: a weapon that deals a physical type and an element is 2 weapons. When the physical half is resisted, as it is by everything in the Mistlands, the element is the damage that lands.

Damage System

2 multipliers matter more than which weapon inside a class you are holding:

• Skill, up to +141%. Each class is a skill capped at 100, and 100 is +141% damage and knockback with 33% less stamina per swing. No weapon upgrade comes close. It is earned only by swinging, and a death takes a slice of it back.
• Quality, 4 levels. Everything crafted starts at quality 1 and is upgraded 3 more times at the station that made it. Every figure quoted on this wiki is quality 1, so these are floors and not ceilings.

An upgrade rarely raises every type a weapon deals. Which half of a weapon the ladder actually improves is on its own page, and it decides whether upgrading it is worth the metal.