Equipment Systems

Overview

Gear Types

There are four general types of equipment:


Normal Equipment is obtained via crafting, and MVP/MINI drops.  Ancient equipment is obtained through instances and is generally cheaper to upgrade and later, even comes with PvP stats.  Most of us wear Ancient Equipment these days though the recent Phantom Equipment system allows you to wear both.

Upgrades for equipment are covered in the sections below.  Take note that upgrading Ancient Equipment is different so read up on this if you're not familiar with it.

Normal Equipment (Synthesis)

Normal equipment is crafted or dropped by MINI's.  Most of this equipment looks weak at first but requires "tiering" to upgrade to stronger variants.  

Eventually, you can combine a few pieces of gear into a new, stronger variant.  This is known as Synthesis and is the final form for this type of gear and what most people call this type of gear.

These final variants often include a couple of new refining bonuses, sometimes increasing for levels beyond +8, +10, or +12.  In many cases these are usually 5% to 10% better than their normal form.

Synthesized Weapon

Ancient Equipment

This type of equipment was introduced as a way for players to catch up.  It's much easier to upgrade this equipment compared to synthesis equipment and comes in its final form so you don't have to take the extra step to synthesize this gear.  The gear is obtained strictly from instances varying from easy rift challenges up to harder group dungeons that new players won't be able to do alone like Ponape Museum.

What sets this gear apart from synthesis gear are Random Attributes that are rolled when you obtain the gear.  These attributes are quite strong and in some cases make this gear far superior.  The values rolled for these attributes are random but systems introduced in a recent patch even allow you to upgrade these values to their maximum so you won't have to keep running these dungeons every week hoping for the best roll.  Furthermore, on the hardest difficulties, this gear also comes with a PvP damage reduction stat which is very powerful for PvP/GvG.

New players can start obtaining ancient equipment as early as level 20 and I strongly recommend you do so in Rift Dungeons.  You will replace this gear when you reach higher levels with better ancient equipment but it's very strong gear that requires no zeny investment to obtain.

The way you upgrade this gear is different from synthesis gear so read up on Ancient Equipment for these details.

Ancient Equip with a Random Attribute

Headwear

This type of gear is equipped into your head, face, mouth, back, and tail slot.  You can obtain many through crafting recipes, vendors, and even drops.

The most powerful types of headwear come from the Blue Slip Gachapon machine.  You get enough assistant medals for roughly 11 pulls per month and each pull gives you one of the six headwear shown, guaranteed.  Some of the best headwear in the game come from these machines so you may want to save up your tickets for this when something great comes out that compliments your build.

Headwear is refined using the Guild Sewing Machine so you'll have to join a guild if you want to refine this.

I've provided some examples of headwear below.

Ancient Relics

These are a special type of equipment that is obtained much later in the game.  They provide some very strong stat boosts and purple quality relics even offer very strong bonuses at high enhancement levels.  Purple relics fall into the whale territory but blue ones aren't terrible to obtain.  This is not something new players will be looking into anytime soon.

For more details on how to obtain and enhance these read up on Ancient Relics. 

Sample Ancient Relic

Upgrading Equipment

There are various ways to upgrade your equipment such as:

This is so vast that I've separated each of these into a separate page detailing equipment upgrades.  Read up on Upgrading Equipment for these details!

Related Content