Lost Ark Armor and Weapon Enhancement Guide

Boosting equipment is a very important aspect to advance in PvE in Lost Ark . This guide tells you everything you need to know about it.

What is Equipment Enhancement?

Gear Enhancement, also known as the Honing System, is used to enhance gear. If you upgrade an item, it increases in level. This is also referred to as +1, +2, etc. +20 is the highest level that can be reached.

These upgrades increase defensive stats on armor items and damage on weapons. In this screenshot, you can see the difference between an unupgraded crossbreed pant and the same pant upgraded to +7.

In addition, upgrading increases the item level of the items. Since more difficult content has minimum requirements for your average item level, you won’t progress without boosted gear.

 Where can I strengthen my equipment?

In Castle Vern in the Artisan Quarter (bottom right of the map) you will find the NPC with a hammer symbol: Senard.

Speak to him for anything related to gear boosts. He also has the Gear Transfer, which allows you to transfer your upgrades to other items.

3. What materials for equipment reinforcement?

For Tier 1 Content, you will need these Equipment Enhancement Materials:

• Destruction
  Stone Fragments Necessary for weapon upgrades.
• Watchstone Fragments
  Required for armor upgrades.
• Harmony
  Jump Stones Required for all upgrades.
• Harmony Fragments
  Required for all upgrades.

The items can no longer be used for upgrades in T2. There are new items that have almost the same name and function identically. For example, weapons in T2 require Destruction Stones instead of Destruction Stone Fragments.

You get the material for Daily Quests, Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and similar activities. Especially recommended – but only feasible once per server – is this island farm route for upgrade materials.

4. How does upgrading work?

Visit Senard in the Artisan Quarter and speak to him. Now you can select the item on the left that you want to upgrade.

In the middle, you will see a large percentage. You have to bring this to 100%. To do this, click on “Upgrade” and put in as many Harmony Fragments until the maximum is reached. If you now click on Upgrade, your item has enough Equipment EXP to upgrade it in the next step.

Now comes the actual upgrading. You need Guardian Stone Fragments for armor and Destruction Stone Fragments for weapons. In addition, all items require harmony jump stones. If you have enough of them, you can click on “Equipment Reinforcement”.

In the final step, you will be given the success rate. Up to and including +6 it is always 100%. After that, it steadily decreases. With suitable additional materials and master craftsman energy, the success rate can be increased again. We will publish more details on this later.

What is Reinforcement Success Rate?

From +7 the chance of success drops below 100%. Ie the upgrade can fail. You lose the upgrade materials. However, the item remains and the upgrade XP remains at 100%. So you can just try again.

In this table you can see what the upgrades change for weapons:

Success rate and damage when upgrading a weapon in Lost Ark.

Chances of success or damage numbers could be different in our release version. I’ll update it accordingly, but it should be useful for clarifying how gear boosts work.

6. Master Artisan Energy

You may have noticed the master craftsman energy in the screenshot for step 3 above.

Every time an attempt at reinforcement fails, this energy increases for your character. When the Master Craftsman energy reaches it’s maximum, your next attempt at a boost is guaranteed to succeed.

You should then spend this energy on your highest item, as this has the lowest base success rate.

7. Caution: Don’t upgrade too much

The biggest mistake would be upgrading items to more than +15 now.

Why?

Because your average item level will be 600 with +15 items. This is high enough to tackle the next tier. The cost of upgrades from +16 to +20 is very high compared to what you get for it.

Items with item level 802 drop directly in T2. ​​T1 items with +20 would only have iLevel 725. That means you replace all of your equipment anyway after your first T2 chaos dungeon.

After reaching +15, your time and resources are better used for e.g. another character to help you farm for gold, etc.

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