Upgrading Equipment

Slot "Enhancement"

Not to be confused with Enchantment, gear Enhancement lets you spend zeny on equipment slots to upgrade the stats of any item equipped to that slot.  This feature is unlocked at base level 15 via the quest "Enhance" after speaking to the NPC Hollgrehenn in Prontera.

Unlock NPC Hollgrehenn

Once unlocked, access this feature by opening your bag and selecting the tab on the bottom right.


In this example, selecting the mainhand slot will allow you to invest zeny to increase atk/matk.  This upgrade is permanent and affects any piece of gear you put in this slot.  Many patches back you had to do this to each piece of gear making it a pain.  Now it simply affects anything that goes in that slot.


Each slot gives different stats so make sure you're upgrading the right slot for the bonuses you want.  The weapon and accessory slots give atk/matk and everything else gives defensive stats.


Note that you cannot refund this so once you pay to upgrade it the effects are permanent.

Accessing the Enhancement Feature

Slot "Reinforcement"

Each slot may also be reinforced which grants you bonus HP when gear is equipped in that slot.  

You may do this by first heading to your guild, then to the far left side to find the Reinforce/Mithril sewing machine.  This feature is tied to guild levels so you may not have this option or other options you're looking for when you visit your guild's sewing machine.

Once here, tap on Reinforce/Mithril and select the Sewing Reinforce option.  This will bring up the reinforcement screen for Offhand, Armor, Garment, and Footgear.  Select the slot you want to upgrade and the interface will show you the zeny and Mithril cost to upgrade.

As this typically does not increase damage for most classes this feature should be considered if you're deep into PvP or have been playing for a very long time and could use the health.

Classes such as Doram benefit from Max HP due to their passive skills so keep this in mind if you play a physical Doram or HP scaling benefits on other classes.

Refunding Upgrades

Before I talk about gear-specific upgrades you should know that you can refund a few of the upgrades we're about to discuss.


To do this, head to Prontera and talk to the stove with the Restore/Card text on top of it as shown on the right here in the eastern part of Prontera.  From here select the Restore Equipment option.

Then select a piece of equipment and some options will pop up underneath it allowing you to perform various actions:


Gear "Tiering"

Many pieces of gear offer the ability to upgrade them through a tiering system.  You can see this information by tapping on the gear and scrolling down to the Equipment Upgrade section.

To the right you can see three tiers to this Mage Coat and I've applied three upgrades already indicated by the text being blue rather than gray.  There is one fourth, final tier for this Mage Coat indicated by the word “End”.  If I tier up this Mage Coat one more time then they will turn into a Robe of Cast, a new item.

To tier the item up click on the Blue up arrows either at the top of your equipment or to the right of the Upgrade Attribute section.  This will show the material consumption screen showing what you need in order to tier this item up.

You can upgrade multiple tiers at once.  You adjust this by changing the Upgrade chance value.  There is nothing chance about this, it’s a poor translation.

This number (currently 1) indicates how many tiers you want to level.  So if I wanted level from tier 1 to 4 then I would change this to a 3 so it would upgrade 3 tiers at once.  The material list will be updated with all the materials needed for every tier to complete this task.

Once you’re ready to proceed click Level Up, however I don’t have the materials so I only see “Fast Buy”

Clicking fast buy will bring up a dialog showing you the price of each item you need and offers the ability to buy all of them immediately without you having to go to the exchange to find them manually.

 Prices are the same as the exchange and there's no cost to use this system so use this to buy any materials you need to upgrade stuff.  Sure you can farm materials yourself but this is exactly what you'll use all that zeny you've been farming.

Fast Buy Interface

A recent patch has added additional tiers to both synthesized equipment and ancient equipment.

Gear "Refining"

At base level 30, refining is unlocked which uses zeny and either Elunium for armor, or Oridecon for weapons & accessories.  You can refine to +4 at 100% success rate using just these materials but going beyond +4 has risk without using the safe refine feature.  Three outcomes will occur with each attempt:

"Break" is a status attached to your equipment that prevents it from being refined until it is repaired.  This status is signified by a red hammer icon shown in the top left corner of any broken gear as shown in the Doom Axe example.  Repairing broken gear requires you to sacrifice a copy of that gear.

You may still use broken gear in combat without any penalties!  In fact, buying broken equipment on the exchange is a bit cheaper and a great option for new players just to get the gear pieces you need to get off the ground.

So what are the benefits of refining?

These special bonuses are what's really important about refining but you have to make sure they apply to you.  A Doom Axe for example, starts giving a bonus at +10 refine but those bonuses only affect arm cannon.  This only helps third job Blacksmith/Mechanics so there's not much value in pushing this until you reach that point.

The bonuses are generally percentage based so early on they aren’t that impactful since your base numbers are still very low.  There are some pieces of gear that give larger bonuses though so take a look at your gear to decide if you should be refining it now or waiting until later when you're more established.  

In the provided example, Wizards Power has four distinct refining bonuses:


Therefore this +12 refined staff is gaining the following bonuses:

In this case you benefit from any refines at all times which is great, especially if you can hit +5 or +10 to get most of the bonus.

Safe Refine

Refining is very unforgiving and you can easily blow through everything you're worked.  This is especially demoralizing as a newer player since you've worked very hard to get what you had only to risk it all.

The success rate of each refine starting at +4 is 50% and goes down every few levels so it's very likely that you will not get something to +10 on your first couple of tries.   If you're going beyond to +12 or even +15 then you need quite the nest egg of materials and zeny because this gets crazy expensive.

Rather than risk it all using the RNG refining system you can use Safe Refine to guarantee success all the way up to +12!

In order to safe refine you must sacrifice other copies of the same equipment to build up the refine bar with enough experience points to refine to the next level.  Copies of this gear can even be broken or pre-refined and give varying point values depending on their refine level and status.

For example, in the case below I want to safe refine my Southern Lute from +10 to +11.  The highlighted red progress bar says I have zero out of 22 points needed to safe refine this gear.  I need to get several Lute's to sacrifice for points towards Safe Refining this.

Let's say that I decide to use a +9 broken lute and a two +8 clean lute's.   The +9 broken lute is worth 11 points and each +8 clean lute is worth 8 points.  This means I'm using a total of 27 points.  When I proceed to safe refine this to +11,  I get to keep those extra 5 points which are stored on the new +11 Southern Lute which can be used towards a future +12 safe refine on this weapon.

Example of Safe Refining a +10 Southern Lute to +11.  This highlights that the item has 0 out of the 22 required points in order to safe refine.

The table below outlines what you need for each safe refine level.  Most newer players should aim to get their weapon to +10 and may safe refine a few other pieces for some specific bonuses but going from 10 to 12 is quite costly as you'll see below.

This table does not account for the cost of all the copies you will need to get enough points to do this.  This means the cost may be significantly more, often 2-3 times as much depending on what gear you're working on, sometimes more!

Gear "Slotting"

Slots are used to insert cards into and each piece of gear can be given an additional slot with the exception of headwear.  To slot crafted or MINI dropped gear you will need 10 copies of the base item, which can be broken, and 100,000 zenny.  If you’re slotting a piece of gear that only drops from an MVP such as the Chemeti Whip then know that MVP gear only needs 5 copies it in order to add a slot.


Once you have this head to any major city and look for a Socketing NPC to add the socket to your gear.

WARNING: Tiering up a piece of gear to the point where it turns into a new piece of gear removes that extra slot, you are not refunded for it!

For example, adding a second slot to a Crossbow, then tiering it up and upgrading it to a Mystery Bow will remove that extra slot.  This means you should not “upgrade” an item through tiering if you’ve already added a second slot because you’ll be throwing away that investment.  If you’ve done this you should sell the original on the exchange and buy (or create) a new one to upgrade so that you can get some money back by selling the one with the extra slot.

There are times where you would want to add a slot to something cheap such as the crossbow, where that second card slot is more valuable since the damage boost from the extra card outweighs the boost from turning it into a mystery bow.  In that case you’d create a mystery bow and wait to switch over from the crossbow until you're able to add that second slot to the mystery bow, at which point you can sell your double-slotted crossbow.

Gear "Synthesis"

Once you’ve gotten high refined gear, slots, and several other power boosts gear synthesis seems like a good idea.  This is a mid to endgame task since it’s very expensive so consider other options before heading here since for most classes this is only a 5-10% damage increase and will sorely disappoint you if you’re a new player.


The idea behind synthesis is to combine several weapons into a new synthesized weapon.  The gear doesn’t get all the stats from each piece of gear but the base stats are higher and usually this includes a couple of new bonuses which almost always require high refines to activate, another reason to avoid these for a while.


Costs to perform the synthesis task range from 20-50 million on global right now so this is not something you should worry about for your farming alts but your boosted main will need this sooner than later, most likely after you've slotted and refined your weapon to +10 since synth weapons typically contain good bonuses for refines at +10.


Also, note that Synthesized weapons, offhands, and garments now have tier upgrades.

If you're trying to decide of synthesizing a piece of gear you have is worth is please take a look at the Synthesis Gear Comparison Appendix.  This will show you exactly what each synthesis gives you and compares an unsynthed +10 to synthed +10, +12, and +15 pieces of the same gear so you know if and when synthesis is a good idea.

Gear Enchantment

This system adds at least three stats to each piece of gear such as atk, matk, crit damage, and more.  This provides a serious boost as a whole and unique fourth enchants may roll that elevate this further.  These are serious boosts that should not be neglected and can easily be added to all of your gear using Mora Coins from dailies.

Example of the attributes enchantable onto a Body Armor shown by tapping the i icon on the far right of the screen

Example of the fourth enchants obtainable by Backpieces listed at the bottom of the attribute list

There are many details to this system and sources of materials that can increase your changes for great outcomes.  If these examples have gotten your attention read up on Enchanting Gear for these additional details.

Phantom Equipment

A second layer of equipment can be equipped adding even more stats.  The amount of stats transfered depends on how much you've enhanced the gear's phantom progression.  This is currently limited to 15% but will be increased in future patches.

Example of a Synthesized Offhand at 5% Phantom Progress

For a deep dive into this system read up on Phantom Equipment.

Related Content