Hi everyone! IMC recently released an equipment guide that is sort of like a flowchart to help players generally decide where they should go looking for equipment upgrades. Those of you that might know me would know that I really like looking at numbers, like when I did a bunch of enhancement simulations. This is a guide that assumes you know the basics of how to upgrade and you’re looking for a comparison between different upgrade options.
This guide will focus on how much upgrades will improve the primary stat of your equipment. For a weapon, that’s the physical and magic attack of the weapon. For equipment that’s the physical and magic defense. I’m assuming all other things equal, since all the other stats and effects really depend on your build. When in doubt, usually you won’t go wrong prioritizing attack, if you’re interested in doing damage.
Basic Information
Here’s some basic information that you might need to know.
Item Description Details
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Rarity: This generally describes how difficult it is to acquire this particular item. Within the same level bracket, equipment with higher rarity will have a higher main stat and generally have more interesting secondary stats. Rarity is indicated at the top of the item description, but an item’s background will also reflect its rarity. Rarity is ranked such that Normal < Magic < Rare < Unique < Legend.
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Level: This tells you what level is required to equip a piece of equipment. Generally higher level equipment is stronger, but sometimes high rarity equipment can outclass higher level equipment. Typically, that is the case for legendary equipment, since the huge investment to acquire them make them strong enough to use for a very long time. The highest three level brackets right now to be 361-390 (rank 10), 331-360 (rank 9), and 301-330 (rank 8).
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Primary Stat: The attack of a weapon or the defenses of a piece of armor the “primary stat” of the piece of equipment. You will get more of this stat with higher enhancement levels and higher transcendence stages. How much you get from enhancement depends on the item’s level and rarity while how much you get from transcendence depends on the item’s base stats (the primary stat without any upgrades).
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Secondary Stats: The other stats you get from a piece of equipment secondary stats. Sometimes they’re very important, but you can’t affect them using enhancement and transcendence.
Why the Primary Stat is so Important
Your ability what you can do in the game and how quickly you can progress. For most players, you won’t be able to challenge difficult content or farm effectively if you don’t do damage. Of course, there are exceptions when you’re a support, but many support builds in this game also can do respectable damage. Most builds’ damage scales most strongly off of physical attack and/or magic attack (these are what I call the primary stat of your weapon), so that will often be the main focus when upgrading.
Even though I will emphasize the importance of your primary stat, you need to make sure you have enough DEX and SPR to attack smoothly or not run out of SP when fighting. You also need to make sure to have enough CON to not die. How much these stats contribute to your build is hard to say, so I will avoid going into specifics, but I will say that giving up some DEX, SPR, or CON in favor of higher overall attack won’t really hurt most builds as long as you have ‘enough’.
STR and INT are secondary stats that increase your primary stat. 40 STR is about 100 attack while 40 INT is about 100 magic attack. STR and INT give other effects, but they’re not too important. For instance, STR gives accuracy but it’s easy to have enough accuracy to always hit, so we don’t really think about it. As we will see later, 40 STR or INT will give you about half a stage of transcendence or one level of enhancement, but that really pales in comparison to what you get out of enhancing through a break point.
Base Primary Stat and Transcendence
Transcendence is the upgrade process that eats up blessed gems to improve your weapon. Other than emphasizing that you should never gamble to transcend equipment, I won’t go into the details on how to actually transcend something. Transcendence gives you +10% attack, based on the base primary stat of the equipment. It caps out at level 10, so it is possible to get +100% attack, which doubles the attack on a weapon with zero enhancement. You can see an equipment’s stage of transcendence by pressing shift when examining an equip’s details.
Note that different equipment have different base primary stats. Generally speaking, two-handed weapons will have a higher base stat than one-handed weapons while one-handed weapons have a higher base stat than secondary weapons. As for armor, leather will have the lowest base defenses. Cloth will have twice the magic defense of leather while plate will have twice the physical defense of leather.
Below I’ve organized the general groups of high-level equipment based on their base primary stat and grouped them based on level and rarity. Two equipment with the same level and rarity will have the same base stat as long as they’re of the same equipment type.
360 Legend
- Velcoffer equipment
380 Unique
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Primus Zvaigzde (weapon)
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Primus Ukas (leather armor)
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Primus Planeta (cloth armor)
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Primus Galaktikos (plate armor)
330 Legend
- Solmiki equipment
350 unique
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Primus Raffye (weapon)
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Masinios (weapon)
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Primus Jevenellis (leather armor)
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Fietas (leather armor)
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Primus Irellis (cloth armor)
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Laitas (cloth armor)
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Primus Basticle (plate armor)
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Ausura (plate armor)
380 Rare
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Berthas Zvaigzde (weapon)
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Berthas Ukas (leather armor)
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Berthas Planeta (cloth armor)
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Berthas Galaktikos (plate armor)
315 Unique
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Various recipes requiring 2 practonium (weapon)
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Primus Pevordimas (weapon)
350 Rare
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Berthas Raffye (weapon)
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Berthas Jevenellis (leather armor)
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Berthas Irellis (cloth armor)
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Berthas Basticle (plate armor)
380 Magic
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Zvaigzde (weapon)
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Ukas (leather armor)
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Planeta (cloth armor)
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Galaktikos (plate armor)
350 Magic
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Raffye (weapon)
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Jevenellis (leather armor)
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Irellis (cloth armor)
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Basticle (plate armor)
315 Rare
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Various recipes requiring 1 practonium (weapon)
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Berthas Pevordimas (weapon)
Note that generally going up a tier in rarity will put you at a higher primary stat than going up a level bracket. For example, a level 360 legend equip has a higher primary stat than a level 380 unique equip. Level 315 Rare equipment is an unusual exception to this rule, and I’m not sure why this is the case. IMC’s equipment guide site serves a similar purpose to this listing of equipment, but I find it useful seeing it all organized in a list like this.
As a bonus, here’s a table with the base attack of various staves, for comparison
Enhancement
Enhancement is the main luck-based upgrade that you can perform on your equipment. It is represented by a “+” in the front of an equip’s name and can be further examined by pressing shift when examining an equip’s details.
Enhancement is the step that might stop you in your tracks, so you should go about this carefully. Enhancement, no matter how you go about it, will depend on your luck and you have a limited number of tries (this is the equipment’s potential). Once you use up your tries, your weapon is effectively ‘spent’ and you won’t be able to enhance it further. If enhancement doesn’t go well, the final overall strength of the weapon will feel limited. Because of this, you should see how well enhancement goes before making further decisions on how to upgrade a weapon.
An interesting detail to note is that how much primary stat you get out of enhancement depends only on the level and rarity of the equip. A pistol gets as much out of enhancement as a bow would. Since a pistol of the same level and rarity has less attack than a bow, it has a greater relative benefit! Getting good enhancements is more important on weapons that have lower base primary stats.
The amount of bonus attack from enhancement gets better with enhancement level and jumps at certain levels. At +6, +11, +16, and +21 (you don’t get this bonus after +21) you get an extra-huge spike in bonus attack. Because of these jumps, we consider these enhancement levels break points, levels that you target and levels that are good places to stop trying to enhance. Because they’re such a big deal, I will later only compare equipment at these break points. I’ve included some tables that show how much bonus attack you get from enhancement, and a graph to visually show how significant those jumps are.
Enhancement Tables
Choosing an Upgrade
At the end of the day choosing an upgrade depends on the balance between how much you want to invest and how much stronger you want to get. Getting to a high enhancement legendary equip would usually give you the best results, but take the most investment. We’re talking weeks upon weeks of work here. Settling for a lower enhancement Legend equip or a high enhancement unique equip could yield similar (but somewhat worse) results. Hopefully the following tables will help in deciding exactly how strong of a weapon you need to get something that counts as an attack upgrade. The tables are for staves, so transcendence for the weapons compared here is more effective than transcendence for something like a pistol.
Comparing No Transcendence
How to use: Pick your current weapon on the left and pick the weapon you’re considering upgrading to on the bottom. If the block for that pair is blue, it’s not an upgrade. If the block is red, it’s an upgrade.
