Tree of Savior Forum

Edo’s Ichoring Guide

Introduction

“Ichoring” is the process of extracting the stats out of certain pieces of equipment and putting it into an “ichor” which can then be used to confer those stats onto other pieces of equipment. This system has a lot of rules and can be daunting for new players. Even for more experienced players, ichoring can be very expensive and wasteful as it isn’t exactly always clear what the best approach is. In this guide I want to discuss the basic concepts of ichoring, and explore different strategies for making ichors.


Image 1: A fixed stat armor ichor (left) and a random stat weapon ichor (right)

Updates

3/6/2020

  • Changed numbers to account for the 5% to 10% ichor extraction change.
  • Replaced pictures and numbers to account for transmutation requiring two instead of three equips.
  • Adjusted some recommendations since the value of powder and certain equips are very different from when the guide was initially written.

Ichoring Basics

The Blacksmith Teliavelis

Before you do anything with ichoring you should know about the blacksmith in Fedimian. He’s the only NPC in the game that does anything with ichors. You’re going to need to go to him for all of your ichoring needs (as well as a few things that have nothing to do with ichors).




Image 2: Map showing where Teliavelis is in Fedimian (top), my character standing next to Teliavelis (middle), and the dialogue that pops up when you interact with him (bottom).

Why Ichor?

Many of the strongest equipment in the game are ‘missing’ stats. These legendary equipment have great attack/defense stats, but lack the secondary stats that most equipment have. In order to create the ultimate set of gear, you will need to make ichors and apply them to these legendary equipment in order to maximize their potential.


Image 3: A velcoffer dagger without any ichors (left) and a velcoffer dagger whose two ichors are circled in red (right).

Before you ichor, make sure you get good equipment worth using ichors on! Ichoring is very expensive, and you can get a lot more out of your equipment focusing on a lot of other aspects first! Mainly, you want to get a good enhancement, put in some transcendence, try a bit of enchanting, maybe get some gems, and maybe get a set bonus. Upgrade priority is worth an entirely separate discussion of its own, so I won’t go into that here.

What Uses Ichors?

Most equipment in the game doesn’t require ichors. In fact, you could probably get through most of your ToS career without ever touching the ichor system as long as you play pretty casually. However, if you have any interest in working on ‘endgame’ equipment then you’re going to want ichors. Currently there are three sets of equipment that use ichors: Velcoffer, Savinose Legva, and Skiaclipse Varna.

Velcoffer equipment were the very first set of equipment that use ichors. They are the reward for the level 360 legendary raid, Velcoffer’s Nest and require that your character is level 360 to equip. These equipment can accept a “random ichor” and a “fixed ichor” (we will discuss what this means in the next section) for a total of two ichors per equip. Since these equipment are older, they’re somewhat weaker than the other sets. Mostly only older players that have heavily invested in this set will be still using it. Newer players shouldn’t be working on making this set from scratch, though it doesn’t hurt to use this set it can be obtained cheaply from another player.

Savinose Legva equipment are level 400 equipment crafted using planium. Planium are dropped from any level 390+ field map and are typically farmed through doing challenge modes. Unlike other equipment, Savinose Legva come with random stats and therefore can only accept a single fixed ichor. The random stats can be changed using magnifiers and rerolling using powder. Savinose Legva equipment have random stats that are much lower than the newest 430 primus, so they are seen as a weaker option to getting ichors.

Skiaclipse Varna equipment are level 400 equipment crafted from planium and the reward from the Legend Raid: Tomb of the White Crow. They also can drop from the raid completely crafted. Skiaclipse Varna equipment, like Velcoffer, can accept two ichors (a random and a fixed). This set have the same attack/defense as Savinose Legva, so which set to invest in should come down to which set has more appealing set bonuses.

To review, Velcoffer and Skiaclipse Varna can use both random and fixed ichors while Savinose can use only fixed ichors.

It is worth noting here that you can only put ichors into equipment of the same type that the ichor was made from. So a bow ichor goes into a bow, but a bow ichor can’t go into boots. However, an ichor made from a cloth or plate boots can be put into leather boots. With tons of equipment in the game, this gives a certain degree of customization regarding what stats you want. Also note that the level of the equipment that an ichor was made from does not affect what it can be applied to.

What can be made into an ichor?

Any armor or weapon that is at least level 330 and is of rare, magical, or unique rarity can be made into an ichor. So quirky low-level equipment can’t be turned into ichors. Legendary equipment (like Savinose Legva or Solmiki) can’t be turned into ichors either.

A Random Stat Ichor is made from a piece of equipment that, well, has random stats. Usually these equipment are dropped from fields or hunting grounds. More often than not, these equipment don’t come with exactly the stats you want, so the stats will need to be rerolled into the ones you want. Rerolling is an involving process that deserves its own post, so I won’t go into that here.

Random stat equipment vary in rarity, and have different prefixes depending on the rarity. Magic rarity will be blue with no prefix, rare equipment will be purple with the “berthas” prefix, and unique rarity will have the “primus” prefix. Often people will use primus equipment to make random stat ichors as they can have the highest minimum stat rolls, even though all equipment of the same level have the same maximum. Primus have 80% to 100% of the maximum stat while Berthas have 40% to 100% of the maximum. However, sometimes people will use berthas to make ichors since berthas are cheaper per reroll. Primus require both sierra powder and nucle powder to reroll while berthas require only nucle.

A Fixed Stat Ichor is made from a piece of equipment that has predetermined stats. Often these equipment require that they be crafted from recipes, but that’s not always true. These equipment usually come from unique raids, which require raid portal stones to enter. A major exception to this are Vaivora equipment, which come from elites out in the field.

When looking at ichors, you will find that some are called Stiprus Ichors while others are called Astri Ichors. Stiprus ichors are armor ichors, and applies to all armor types (top, bottom, gloves, boots, and shoes). Astri ichors are weapon ichors. The naming has nothing to do with whether they’re random or fixed stat. The name in brackets tells you what equpment the ichor was made from.

To tell the difference between a random stat ichor and a fixed stat ichor is to check and see if they have the random stat orbs next to each line. If those orbs exist, then it’s a random stat ichor. Also, random stat equipment never have special effects, so that’d tell you that a piece of equipment is a fixed stat ichor, though sometimes fixed stat ichors are just an assortment of stats that you could get using random stats.

How do you make an ichor?

You make ichors at Teliavelis in Fedimian. There are two main methods of ichor generation: “extracting” and “transmuting”. Typically extracting is understood as being a gamble while transmuting is seen as the guaranteed option, but the decision to use one method over another shouldn’t be as simple as saying, “I don’t like gambling.” We will discuss this more later in the ichoring strategies section.

Ichor extraction is the original method. For a long time it was the only method. Extracting requires an ichor extraction kit . The basic kind can be bought from Teliavelis for about 100k silver (the price fluctuates with taxes), and a certain amount of sierra powder depending on the rarity and level of the equipment. For a unique level 430 equip, 143 sierra powder is required. Each attempt at extraction has a 10% success rate and failure reduces the potential of the item by 1. A successful extraction destroys the item to produce an ichor. An attempt can be made on an equip with zero potential, but it will also be destroyed , regardless of whether or not it succeeds. Because ichoring irreversibly ‘ruins’ or destroys equipment, generally only un-upgraded equipment should be used.

There are some minor variations to ichor extraction depending on what kind of ichor kit is used. Besides the basic kit that is sold by Teliavelis, there also are silver kits and golden kits. Silver Ichor Extraction Kits get rid of the sierra powder cost. They can be acquired in-game as a reward to doing Gemstone Feud. They also come from Leticia’s Secret Cubes (a TP item) and can be traded between players if acquired this way. Golden Ichor Extraction Kits allow you to make an attempt on a zero-potential equip where the equip is not destroyed if it fails. Golden kits can also come from Leticia’s Secret Cubes and the occasional event. Using these alternative kits does not change the success rate of extraction.

Ichor transmutation uses two of the same kind of equip and gives a success rate based on the total remaining potential. For example if the equips have 0/12 and 13/13 potential, the overall success rate is 13/25 = 52%. The two items must correspond to the same slot, but can differ in level, rarity, and stats. If equipment with different stats are used, it will randomly choose the stats from one of the two items to turn into an ichor. A transmutation costs seven times the sierra powder of an extraction attempt and requires an Ichor Transmutation Kit , costing about 3m silver at Teliavelis.

Ichors can be Unequiped and Transferred!

By paying Teliavelis a silver fee, ichors can be taken out of legendary equipment at no risk. This is through the “Unequip Ichor (Fixed)” and “Unequip Ichor (Random)” options. It is extremely cheap, costing as about 40k silver to get back your ichors. What this means is that ichors are great long-term investments because you can easily move them around between different sets of equipment.

Something else to note is that ichors cannot be directly traded between players (market only), but crafted velcoffer equipment can be directly traded, even if that equipment has ichors equipped. So, velcoffer equipment can be used to direct trade ichors as long as you’re willing to eat the ichor unequipping cost to avoid using the marketplace.

Summary of the Basics

  • Ichoring is for endgame, where you want to get extra stats on your legend gear
  • There are two kinds of ichors, random and fixed
  • Stiprus Ichors are for armor while Astri Ichors are for weapons
  • Velcoffer and Skaiclipse Varna use 1 random ichor and 1 fixed ichor
  • Savinose Legva use only a fixed ichor because they already have random stats
  • You can make ichors only out of level 330+, non-legendary equipment
  • Ichoring requires a lot of silver and sierra powder
  • Ichoring basically destroys your equipment, so use full potential, un-upgraded equipment
  • Classic ichor extraction has a 10% success rate
  • Ichor transmutation can be made to have a 100% success rate, but costs more items while costing less powder overall
  • You can pay Teliavelis to unequip ichors, no risk involved

Ichoring Math

This section explains the basics of calculating the probability of succeeding at extraction. It’s a pretty straightforward calculation if you know any probability or statistics. The general takeaway can be summarized in the table below, where higher potential equipment (around level 330) tend to have a 3/4 chance of succeeding while lower potential equipment (the newest, Vaivora weapons have 5 potential) have about a 1/2 chance of succeeding.

Potential Chances of making an ichor with extraction alone
13 77.1%
12 74.6%
11 71.8%
10 68.6%
9 65.1%
8 61.3%
5 48.9%

Calculating Probability

We’re going to start off assuming that each extraction attempt is a random independent event. That means that the chances of an attempt is the same no matter what has happened before. That means there’s no magic, no ritual that you can do to improve your chances! If you believe in that you probably don’t care about these strategies anyway…

To calculate the chances of two events happening in a row, you take the product the two events. Let’s consider flipping a coin. It has a 50% chance of coming up heads and a 50% chance of coming up tails. If you want to calculate the chances of getting two heads in a row you do:

0.50 * 0.50 = 0.25

and find that it’s a 25% chance of getting two heads in a row. Similarly, for three heads you do:

0.50 * 0.50 * 0.50 = 0.125

and find that it’s a 12.5% chance. If we’re doing a lot of the same action over and over, it’s easier to write it as an exponent, so 8 heads in a row would be written as:

0.50^8 = 0.00390625

which tells us there’s a less than 0.4% chance of getting 8 heads in a row. That’s very unlikely!

But we’re not really interested in a ton of successes in a row. We really don’t expect that to happen when we ichor. Instead, if we were to think of getting heads as ‘succeeding’, we should be asking what are our chances of getting heads at least once. Let’s consider the simple example of flipping coins twice. We could enumerate every combination of heads and tails and count up every time we get heads. It would look like this:

HH
HT
TH

TT

We’d find that there are 3 cases where we get at least one heads, and one case where we don’t. That means there’s a 75% chance of getting heads at least once. Conceivably, we could write out every possibility, but that’ll get very overwhelming very quickly. If we’re looking at the highest potential scenario (13 potential, or 14 attempts), we’d be looking at 2^14 = 16384 different scenarios to enumerate. That’s pretty unreasonable! This strategy also becomes a lot more complicated if the chances of success and failure are different, which is the case for ichoring!

However, there is some hope. Instead of asking what are the chances of at least one success, we can just calculate the chances of all failures. This is a lot easier than figuring out all the different combinations of successes and failures and the unique chances for each scenario. If we know the chance of all failures, we can find the chance of at least one success by:

[Chances of any successes] = 1 – [Chances of all failures]

because if we don’t fail every attempt, then we succeed.

So, let’s figure out the chance of succeeding at ichoring an 8-potential item. If the chance of succeeding on a single attempt is 10%, then failure has a 90% chance of occurring. 8 potential means having 9 attempts, including the one at zero potential. The chances of failing all 9 attempts is:

0.90^9 = 0.63024

or about 38.7%. That means the chances of successfully ichoring an 8-potential item is 61.3%. That’s not bad. We can calculate the odds of any other amount of potential using the same approach. The results were summarized at the beginning of this section.


Ichoring Strategies

When making ichors you want a long-term plan. You can’t depend on getting lucky just once since you need to make ichors for at least 6 items. In the case of double ichors, you might make at least 12 ichors. Your luck isn’t going to last all the way, so you’re going to want to adopt strategies that maximize chances, in order to save time and resources. Keep in mind that ultimately you are at the mercy of RNG and you could still have bad luck even if you adopt the mathematically “ideal” strategy. In this section we’ll be discussing why you’d choose a given strategy.

100% Transmutation

This is the ‘guaranteed’ option with two full potential equipment with the same stats. This method should be used on equipment with low max potential. Consider the equipment on the higher end of potential. For that equipment, the chances of succeeding with one piece is about 77% or 3/4. For those, you’ll usually need about 1.3 pieces to get the ichor. So, holding out until you have 2 in order to have the guaranteed option is potentially wasteful. Equipment at the lower end of potential have about a 47% success rate, which is like needing 2.13 pieces of equipment on average to get the ichor. At that rate, it’s pretty close to needing two of the same, so having the guarantee feels nice. However, the equipment that fall into the latter case are extremely rare and expensive, to the point that it may be prohibitively expensive to acquire two.

Generally I might consider this method for some level 430 equipment if you are risk averse. Level 430 equipment have 8 potential and would normally have a 61.3% chance of succeeding. That translates to needing about 1.63 equips per ichor on average. Take this option if trading in about 0.37 equips per ichor is an acceptable cost for consistency.


Image 4: Guaranteed transmutation menu with two gloves.

Standard Extraction

This is the ‘risky’ option since there is no guarantee. You attempt extraction until the item breaks. This method should be used on equipment with high max potential, or equipment you would feel okay with failing. If the potential on the equipment is high enough, extraction’s chances easily look superior to transmutation. In the past I’d recommend finding ways to get silver ichor kits, but currently sierra powder is so cheap silver ichor kits actually seem like a waste of effort.


Image 5: Extraction menu.

Golden Ichor Kit Extraction

This is the ‘endless’ option. Once you hit zero potential, you might choose to continue attempting using golden ichor kits until you finally succeed. Keep in mind that the chances of succeeding will still be 10%, or 1/10, which means on average you’d need 10 golden ichor kits to succeed, though it’s entirely possible for it to take much less or much more.

Since it’d take about 10 golden ichor kits, you should ask whether the item is worth those 10 kits. Golden ichor kits are often expensive on the market, so if you could make a second copy of the item and make an ichor for less than the cost of 10 golden ichor kits, then golden ichor kits are probably a bad idea. Vaivora weapons are a typical target for golden ichor kits.

Full Extraction into Transmutation

This is the ‘yolo’ option since it takes all the risk of standard extraction and all of the cost of the 100% transmutation method. It’s expensive, but probably still less expensive than the golden ichor kit option, but doesn’t have the guarantee of one day maybe succeeding like when you using golden ichor kits.

The strategy here is to do the standard extraction until you hit zero potential. At that point, you then do transmutation with another piece of equipment at full potential in order to have at least a 50% chance of getting an ichor.

Because there is a chance of failure, this method might feel too risky for some fixed stat ichors, but you might consider it for cheaper fixed stat equipment or a random stat equipment. Consider the situation where you get a single equip with random stats that you really like. You exhaust all the potential attempting extraction, leaving it at 0 potential. You can easily acquire another piece of equipment at full potential if you just look for some cheap random stat equipment. It doesn’t matter if the other piece is lower rarity or if it has bad stats because it exists just to be fodder for the final attempt. If the equipment you want to ichor has low potential, you can even choose a fodder with higher potential to try to increase your odds of making an ichor at all.

Let’s say your dream item is at 0/8 potential and you get a fodder at 11/11 potential. The total chance to make an ichor is 11/19, or 57.9%. Assuming that if it succeeds, it then randomly picks one of the two sets of stats to turn into an ichor, there is an overall chance of 11/19 * 1/2 = 29.9% of giving you the ichor you want. It’s a strong final attempt compared against the 10% you’d normally have. Try this as long as you think that the transmutation kit is worth the silver.


Image 6: Transmutation menu with two different swords, one at zero potential.

Summary of Strategies

  • Use 100% transmutation when you don’t feel like being risky
  • Extraction is the standard initial approach. Use different approaches at zero potential if it doesn’t go well.
  • If you’re willing to throw a bit extra into a final attempt, transmuting with a fodder might save the item.
  • If the item is extremely valuable, invest into golden ichor kits.
24 Likes

ichoring is hell if you are not transmuting
image

2 Likes

Ichoring is just gamble… 5% to become ichor, or die trying XD
while transmute is consuming

1 Like

Thanks for the input about transmutation. I’ve adjusted the guide so that it doesn’t suggest that you need three items of the exact same name.

Edit: Also added a section directly comparing 100% transmutation against extraction into transmutation. I can go into how to calculate the break-even point if someone likes, but I just wanted to demonstrate that there is a point where they feel roughly equivalent.

2 Likes

thanks a lot for your guide :slight_smile:
explaining ichoring to new players is always a pain, it’ll make me save so much time
you earned your popo

3 Likes

Updated the numbers for ichor unequiping. It’s really cheap to get your ichors back and move them around between different pieces of gear. It’s only 36k in silver!

I probably should update the guide to factor in the future ichoring changes. I’ve been busy lately so I might not do it anytime soon (especially since I don’t think we’re getting the changes anytime soon). I’ll put them here for reference, though.

  • 5% chance of success -> 10% chance of success when extracting
  • 3 items to transmute -> 2 items to transmute
1 Like

Apparently some people linked my guide so now I feel pressured to update it. I’ll redo the numbers sometime this weekend. It’ll also be useful for me to actually process the numbers rather than go by my gut feeling, as I have been doing since the advent of Ep12.

3 Likes

Is it easier now to extract weapon/armor Ichors using the standard extraction method?

I’m not a fan of ichoring, but I love this guide.

1 Like

It’s certainly more appealing for a lot of different reasons. The obvious one being that the success rate is twice what it once was (5% -> 10%). This alone is huge and we can calculate the overall success rate of the standard method and find the following numbers:

Potential Old New
13 51.2% 77.1%
12 48.7% 74.6%
11 46.0% 71.8%
10 43.1% 68.6%
9 40.1% 65.1%
8 37.0% 61.3%
5 26.5% 46.9%

It should come as a surprise to nobody that on average you’d break less items using the standard method than in the past.

It’s also much more affordable now. Most players have an excess of sierra powder, so attempts at extraction feel like they just cost the 100k silver for an extraction kit. In the past silver ichor kits did away with sierra powder costs, but they weren’t accessible to most players. But now it feels a lot cheaper to attempt ichoring, so it feels ‘easier’ to afford attempting it.

I also made a spreadsheet to calculate the effective cost of making an ichor. You can make a copy of it and play around with it. What’s surprising to me is that straight extraction is consistently cheaper than all other options, up until the item’s value passes about 75m for the parameters I chose. So, probably over 100m you’d just throw golden ichor kits in the mix. At least that’s what crunching the numbers here seems to suggest. Since most really good things worth ichoring probably are worth upwards of 50m, this just seems like the general strategy.

new server chance is around 24% , from 10 ichor only fail one

It barley costs any RedDust but a lot of Gray. Red are supercheap now too.

Ohh weird, i had 50k+ Reds sometimes (using many too), even sold some, but often the market is full of them for 200s or something, on Klai.

1 Like

Too much excess in Tels nowadays … sadly no one buys it even though it uber cheap on market XDDD they have their own sierra supplies maybe or they dont need to farm and just direct trade with other stuff …

Oh, so more potential the easier to inchor? nice … now I need to farm either velco or varna … I’m into planiums/savinose but its kinda limited now since there’s those 150+ stats on 430 equips to ichor …

More potential = more attempts.
Naturally you’d have higher overall changes with more attempts. Too bad you can’t really choose how much potential your’e working with though.

is it better to transmute or extract vaivora ichor?

Most of them are very rare and expensive now. You gonna get two of them? :roll_eyes:
If it RNG is evil… GoldenKits from PP or (currently cheapish) market.

1 Like

this one?


19900/20= 995 hour