How to upgrade Witcher Gear to Grandmaster

In the Blood and Wine Witcher 3 expansion, you have the option of upgrading your mastercrafted Witcher gear sets to an additional tier: Grandmaster. This gear is not only higher quality and level (40), but also provides you with two unique set bonuses.

The process of obtaining it is the same as previous sets — you will first need to find the diagrams, and then craft the gear at the armorer/blacksmith. You’ll also need the mastercrafted set pieces since they’re required as crafting materials.

How to Get the Grandmaster Diagrams

To find the diagrams, talk to the Grandmaster Smith Lazare Lafargue in southern Beauclair – he will start the Scavenger Hunt quests for finding the Grandmaster upgrade diagrams for Wolf, Griffin, Cat, and Bear school gear.

For detailed walkthroughs of each quest and the map locations for each grandmaster diagram, you can check out the Bear, Griffin, Cat, and Wolf grandmaster gear guides.

grandmaster smith location toussaint beauclair
Grandmaster Smith location in Toussaint, the main setting for the Blood & Wine expansion

A word of caution, however: grandmaster gear is very expensive, especially if you don’t want to gather all the required materials yourself and would rather buy them from merchants.

If you don’t have the cash, check out our Witcher 3 money-making guide with many tips and strategies. Another lazy workaround is to install the Witcher debug console and use the addmoney (#) command.

How to get the Manticore Witcher Gear Set

The Blood and Wine expansion also introduces the completely new  Manticore Witcher School gear set. This set comes in only one level 40 tier, so you don’t need to upgrade it. Here’s a guide to getting the Manticore Witcher gear.

24 thoughts on “How to upgrade Witcher Gear to Grandmaster”

  1. I’m trying to get the Wolf Armor. I have the active quest but can’t get past the Signal Tower. Can anyone give me some insight as to why there’s is no crystal in the signal tower. Even did the wall jump glitch down to the cave opening, killed the Wraith but still no gear. Is this glitch something that buying the DLC will fix? Thanks.

    Reply
  2. I’m trying to get the Feline (Cat) armor set but I’m unable to. I completed the quest to get the diagrams, but I can only upgrade to “Enhanced”. I think what comes after that is “Mastercrafted” but there is no option for that in the Crafting menu. I then assumed I didn’t have the diagram for Mastercrafted, but there is nothing that indicates I’ve missed it, and if I have, I don’t know where it is.
    Any suggestions?

    Reply
  3. I wouldn’t call the Debug option lazy. The monetary system in Witcher 3 is brutal and totally broken. Most merchants only give a small fraction of what the item’s value is and when you buy anything you can pay 2 or 3 times what the items value is. You can negate some of this by selling and buying at different merchants , because they buy and sell different items at different rates , but who wants to spend a couple of hours searching for the best merchant to sell a specific piece to? I tried several methods for overcoming this LAZY DESIGN, the first of which was the bottle merchant “exploit” ( I put exploit in quotes because this is a method that actually lets you get full value for your merchandise rather than a small percentage ) .This unfortunately had been patched so that if used you would only get 1/3 the value of your items . Next I decided to try a mod that would rebalance the trading system. I tried TRADEMAN but was having trouble with the install . After several attempts of trying to install it both automatically and manually , I finally got the sliders for the trade parameters to show up in game. Unfortunately after testing several merchants , with several different settings , I found that the mod had zero effect on what the merchants were selling or buying for. I had intended to set the buy/sell rate at 100% of the value so I was buying at the same % I was selling at ( seems fair right?) I researched the mod page and found that the version of the mod was out of date with the version of the game , so that explained why the mod was not working correctly. Finally after several hours of trying , I decided to just go with the console debug as I had exhausted every method I had to fix the devs f#&k up. If I was stuck with a console version of this game , I would be so done with it by this point, because the problems with the money system.

    Reply
    • There’s an updated version of Trademan on Nexus, made by a different guy.
      Works 100% fine after installing it for the first time, I just started modding 3 days ago.
      Just use Script Merger afterwards and you’re golden.

      Reply
      • Incorrect. However, idiotic comments such as yours has already lost my respect and you’ve already joined my block list of trolls.

        Reply
    • I’ve never had any issue with money in the game, without cheats or anything my amount has always gone up even when just buying the crafting components… Most of the time i had to “buy” things or craft all witcher sets just so the npc’s would have coin to buy all my stuff, to keep me from being overweight.
      So i don’t really understand why you’d complain about the low value you get. It almost sounds like you didn’t bother picking up loot or never collected materials or didn’t do the horse races and fistfights but even if you didnt, If you just pick up every chest from each marker, there’s usually gear in there valued 100-650 by merchants and there’s so many markers lol or just winning the gwent tournament alone gives you 4.5k.
      This game literally keeps throwing money at you and there’s almost nothing to use it for.

      I just started the first expansion with 45k and if i sold my stock herbs, glyphs and other crap i’d probably be around 55k.

      Reply
      • Can’t agree. I’ve hoovered-up everything I’ve found and played on easy, but after saving a small fortune, the broken/unintuitive crafting/alchemy/loot/inventory system drained me of most of it to create master-crafted gear.

        Just because YOU didn’t encounter the problem doesn’t mean it isn’t one.

        Reply
        • I have master crafted gear currently on my first playthrough, currently lvl 34 (which is min req. for MC gear). Never did the horseracing, I did complete the first fighting and Gwent tournies, but other than that, just sold excess gear from quests and undiscovered locations. Playing on Series X Console

          Reply
      • I’ll say that I’m aging through now and they really should have just unlimited selling to merchants. The best ones to sell to are in the cities but while the armorer and blacksmiths always have money thanks to my spending, the herbalists are always broke there since I just sell to them. I could sell it elsewhere but then I don’t get the best price for my stuff which is annoying.

        Reply
      • Exactly. I raid everything and sell everything except ingredients and crafting and alchemy stuff. I just finished the game with 65k with superior gear and just master crafted everything and still have 45k. I had to dismantle a lot to break down to what I needed. I sold everything and kept 30 of each crafting and alchemy items and I’m back to 55k. So y’all never tried at all to loot stuff. I still have about 40 ? Marks to. 25 are the smugglers cache in the outskirts of skelige which I didn’t want to bother with. Then I still haven’t even touch either expansion areas.

        Reply
    • “Lazy design”. It sounds to me that you’re the one that is lazy. The monetary system is not “broken”. I had over 2k gold by level 8. As far as different merchants buying things at different rates, you don’t have to “spend hours searching around”. You sell armor to armorsmiths,weapons to Blacksmiths,and ingredients to Herbalists or generalist merchants. It’s really not hard to make money in this game. Once you get a handle on what crafting materials you need to hang on to and which you don’t, you can make tons of money selling crafting mats.

      Reply
      • My experience is different. I do not like how money works for different reasons. I got tons of money and nothing to spend it for. I am level 20 with like 18k and I am yet to discover anything that would make a dent in my wallet. So yeah, money system is weird. Crafting gear for sail? Nope, it is easier to kill bandits, for crafted stuff not worth sh1t

        Reply
    • Many aspects of this game are either unfinished, or poorly implemented, including the whole inventory, trading, crafting, swimming, etc systems.

      The story is great, but there are games far older than this one that have much more intuitive, cleaner and relevant systems in place.

      Reply
  4. It’s just such a shame griffin and cat armor are so hideous and make Geralt look like a jester, now the bear and wolf armors, that’s how a Witcher, a master slayer of monsters, should look.

    Reply
    • griffin set: the town sheriff, with the big belly
      cat set: assassin’s creed, not lying the armor looks cool, but the hood is so silly
      bear set: THE KING IN THE NORTH
      wolf set: lambert (seriously, I think that the wolf set and lambert armor are the exact same)

      Reply
  5. how a about the combat system. Any flaws to mention? Sometimes I get stuck by some stupid crate while holding my sword and was killed in action by a demonic ghost. That was dull man.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.