Lost Ark: How to Upgrade Your Gear - All You Need to Know About Gear Honing

When the end game begins at level 50, it becomes important to strengthen your gear in Lost Ark in order to advance. In this guide, we'll tell you why this is so and what you have to pay attention to.

Why you have to upgrade your gear: Up to level 50, it's very easy to increase your gear level because you'll keep earning new gear over time. Unfortunately, from the end game on, it gets a bit more difficult. From now on, you won't constantly get new gear, but you'll have to improve the ones you have.

This is how you improve your Gear in Lost Ark

The first step towards a higher gear level is to do Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids as many times as you can until you finally farm all the Tier 1 armor. This will initially get you to level 302.

Alternatively, of course, you can do the Abyss Dungeon to buy iLvl 302 gear from the rewards at an Abyss merchant in town.

You will now keep this gear for quite a while, and until you have upgraded it 15 times, bringing it to level 600. This is necessary sooner or later to advance in the story and get new equipment.

Upgrading gear in Lost Ark - the basics

How can you upgrade your gear? By completing certain activities, such as Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids, you farm so-called Destruction Stone Fragments, Guardian Stone Fragments, Harmony Fragments, and Harmony Jumpstones. These are the raw materials you need to upgrade your armor at the first T-level. Once you reach the 2nd or 3rd T-level, you will receive the materials corresponding to your level in the respective Endgame activities.

Once you have collected some of them, you can strengthen your equipment with the help of an NPC. On the map, this NPC is indicated by a hammer symbol and is usually located in the city corner with all the merchants.

The gear screen will open automatically. Now select an equipment item on the left side and press "Upgrade". Then drag the slider to the right, go to the "gear boost" field at the bottom and your gear is one level higher.

However, you should only bring your armor and weapons to +15, since higher levels don't help you any further. The stats are increased only minimally, and from +15 you also advance in the story.

Difficulties with upgrading

Upgrading your gear also brings one or two difficulties. In the beginning, everything goes smoothly, up to and including +5, upgrading is still very favorable and cannot fail. However, with every level above that, the cost of upgrading increases, and the probability of success decreases. In the beginning, you should still manage several levels a day. After a while, however, it can take an extremely long time to gather the necessary materials. Especially on the 3rd T-level, this quickly becomes a pain.

If the upgrade fails, your gear stays at the same level, but your hard-earned materials are gone. To prevent this from happening too often over time, there are items that increase the probability of success. A so-called star modem grants you a few extra percentages for upgrading tier 1 gear. For tier 2 you need a moon modem and for tier 3 a sun modem.

If you are particularly unlucky and upgrading an item typically fails, the chance of success increases until you eventually reach 100%. By this point, however, you've already wasted quite a few materials.

These are the chances of success and material costs

Armor:

Weapons:

Transfer of upgrades

It's extremely likely that, over time, you'll stumble across a piece of gear whose base stats are better than those of the armor you're wearing. So what's the next step? You certainly don't want to waste the countless hours of work you've put into improving your current gear.

Fortunately, you don't have to. Just talk to the same NPC who upgraded your gear and switch to the "Gear Transfer" tab at the bottom. Here you can conveniently transfer the buffs from one piece of gear to another for a small silver fee. Your old gear will be completely used up, and your new one will get all the upgrades it contains.

At which level do you already have your gear, or are you desperate? Write us your opinion in the comments!