This paper is dedicated to the study of weight complexes (defined on triangulated categories endowed with weight structures) and their applications. We introduce pure (co)homological functors that "ignore all non-zero weights"; these have a nice description in terms of weight complexes. For the weight structure w G generated by the orbit category in the G-equivariant stable homotopy category SH(G) the corresponding pure cohomological functors into abelian groups are the Bredon cohomology associated to Mackey functors ones; pure functors related to motivic weight structures are also quite useful. Our results give some new weight structures and the conservativity of certain weight-exact functors; so they can be used to prove that a theorem of J. Ayoub implies the conservativity of realizations of Q-linear geometric motives over characteristic 0 fields. We also prove that certain functors "detect weights", i.e., check whether an object belongs to the given level of the weight filtration.