Upgrading gear: DragonBalls, Meteors and the artisans

In short: Artisan Wind in Twin City (420,351) opens the forge window -- a DragonBall raises an item's QUALITY a grade, a Meteor raises its LEVEL a tier, each with a chance and each spent win or lose. The Market's artisans sell certainty for more materials.

Every piece of gear has two ladders. Quality runs Normal -> Refined -> Unique -> Elite -> Super and is climbed with DragonBalls. Level runs through the item's tiers (a level-60 blade becomes a level-65 blade) and is climbed with Meteors. The stats of each step are the real catalog stats of that item, so the tooltip you see is what you get.

The forge window: Artisan Wind, Twin City

Click Artisan Wind and the game's own upgrade window opens. Drop the piece in the top slot and the material below it, and confirm.

• The material is spent whether the attempt succeeds or fails. The item itself is never lost; on a failure it keeps its grade.
• A failed LEVEL attempt halves the item's durability, and a damaged item must be repaired to full before the next attempt (any shop repairs for silver; the Godly Artisan on the Market for one Meteor).
• The next step must exist: a Super item cannot go higher, and a level ladder ends where the catalog does. The window tells you when there is nothing to do.
• Lucky Time adds ten percentage points to every roll below (blessings).
• The golden reagents do not upgrade at all. A SuperMeteor in the Meteor slot opens the item's first socket and a SuperDragonBall in the DragonBall slot its second -- always, with the level and quality untouched. See sockets.

Quality with a DragonBall

Above item level 70 the odds shrink with the level: multiply by (100 minus the levels over 70) percent. A level-100 piece rolls Unique -> Elite at 17% and Elite -> Super at 10%; a level-120 piece at 12% and 7%; a level-130 piece at 10% and 6%. Lucky Time adds ten points to each, and a DragonBall is spent on every attempt -- a Super piece is meant to be rare.

Level with a Meteor

The chance depends on the tier the item is leaving, then on its quality.

Weapons, necklaces, rings, boots (the level the item has now):

Armour, helmets, shields:

Then the quality penalty: Refined x0.9, Unique x0.7, Elite x0.3, Super x0.1 -- and the server doubles the result (never above 100%, never below 4%). So:

• a Unique level-80 blade: 75 x 0.7 = 52 -> 100%;
• an Elite level-100 blade: 55 x 0.3 = 16 -> 33%;
• a Super level-100 armour: 20 x 0.1 = 2 -> 4% (the floor; Lucky Time makes it 14%);
• a Super level-110 blade: 45 x 0.1 = 4 -> 9%.

That last line is the whole reason the Market exists: the finer the piece, the longer the odds, and past a point a gamble costs more than certainty.

The Market: certainty for a price

• Magic Artisan -- guaranteed, at a fee that follows the odds: 1 + 100 / chance materials (quality: Refined -> Unique 3 DragonBalls, Unique -> Elite 5, Elite -> Super 7 -- and because the fee reads the same level-scaled chance you would have rolled, that last step is 15 on a level-120 piece; level steps are counted on the classic chance before the forge's doubling, so a 4% step costs 51). His level work stops at item level 120.
• Weapon Master -- the road past 110: raises a WORN piece one level tier, guaranteed, for 1 DragonBall per step, on gear of level 110 and up, all the way to 130.
• Godly Artisan -- repairs any worn piece to full for one Meteor, even at zero durability. The forge's failed attempts send you here.
• Cloud Saint -- the +N ladder's last three rungs (+10, +11, +12) for Conquer Points (+N guide).

Durability: what fighting costs you

Fighting wears your gear down, and which pieces wear depends on what you are doing:

• Landing a blow or a cast wears the fighting side: weapon, left hand, ring and boots.
• Taking a hit wears the armoured side: helmet, necklace, armour and garment.
• Nothing else wears either piece: if you kill at range and are never hit, your armour stays whole, and that is exactly right - nothing is hitting it.

Wear works as it did in the original game, at half the pace on your weapon side: every blow or shot you land costs the weapon, ring, boots and left hand half a point of durability, every spell or weapon skill five times that, and every hit you take costs the armoured side a full point. On the tooltip (which shows durability in hundreds) an endgame bow at 70 lasts about an hour and a half of non-stop farming and a caster's weapon about three quarters of an hour, so a repair is part of every hunt -- and it is cheap. Two things make it faster: a blow your target almost entirely absorbs, and a hit that takes more than a quarter of your health, each of which costs ten times as much. Kylin gems slow all of it down, and a full set of super Kylins stops wear altogether.

A worn piece keeps every point of its stats, right down to zero -- durability costs you silver, never power. Repair at any shop for silver (the fee is the share of durability you lost, so topping up often is no dearer than letting it run down), or at the Godly Artisan on the Market for one Meteor at any level of damage. Nothing wears on the Training Grounds.

Where the materials come from

• Meteors fall from any monster, more often the stronger it is (Bird Island about four per thousand kills; the Meteor Zone half again) and from Ganoderma and Titan every time (drop rates). Ten fold into a scroll at the Banker.
• DragonBalls are about twelve times rarer than Meteors from the same monsters, drop from the world bosses, come out of Lady Luck's wheel, and sell in the mall for 220 CP.
• Every Meteor spent at Artisan Wind also rolls for a socket on the piece -- see sockets.

How our version differs

• The level odds are the classic 5065 formulas doubled -- a deliberate part of this server's economy. The quality odds are LOWER than classic (Unique -> Elite 25% instead of 33%, Elite -> Super 15% instead of 20%) and are not doubled: a Super piece should be rare.
• A failed level attempt halves the item's durability (classic) and the item must be repaired to full before the next try -- so a failure has a price in silver or a Meteor, not only in the lost material.
• Every Meteor spent in the forge rolls for a socket on any piece of gear. No classic server did that.

Where to find them