Lost Ark – How to Upgrade Items

Upgrade Items Guide

In order to upgrade items, you must perform the following steps.

• Step 1: Visit any Item Upgrading NPC. They are present in all major cities in the game. They are denoted on the map with a hammer symbol.

• Step 2: Fill the item’s EXP gauge using Fragments of Harmony (T1), Life (T2), or Honor (T3). These materials come from all sorts of contents such as Una’s Task, daily contents, treasure maps from Chaos Gates, and dismantling. Several islands also reward this material as quest rewards. This step only needs to be performed once per upgrade stage, meaning that once you fill up the equipment’s EXP, it does not need to be filled again until you succeed and proceed to the next enhancement level. This step requires Silver.

• Step 3: For every attempt at upgrading, you will need to pay resources and currency depending on the tier of item and stage.

For T1 items, no Silver is used for upgrading. Gold and Fusion Stones are not used for upgrading until starting from +12 and onwards.

For T2 items, no Silver is used for upgrading. Gold and Fusion Stones are not used for upgrading until starting from +7 and onwards.

• Step 4: After you have enough materials to attempt to upgrade, you are brought to a screen that shows you a summary of what you’re going to attempt to do, as well as if you’d like to use Training Auxiliary Materials or Refining Special Material to improve your odds of success. The value in using Training Auxiliary Materials depends on the current cost of refinement materials. Sometimes it’s worth it only on weapons, and it’s almost never worth it on armor. On the right there are the Refining Special Material books which can improve your chance of success by 100% or in the case of gear starting from T3, 10%, up until +15.

Please note that for T1 and T2 items, there is only one type of Training Auxiliary Material.

• Step 5: Confirm your attempt. Pray.

• Step 6: When you fail, your item will have a higher chance to succeed on subsequent upgrade attempts (up to a max limit). For this item in the screenshot, it has a base chance of 10% to succeed +15, and I’ve failed 3 times so now it’s 13%. In addition to failure, you gain Craftsman’s Energy, which is the +5.58% you see in the screenshot. If this amount accumulates to 100%, your next upgrade attempt is guaranteed to succeed. If you succeed before your Craftsman’s Energy reaches 100%, it will reset back to 0%. It is a pity timer. Also the amount of Craftsman Energy you get increases with each failure (in this screenshot it’s +5.58%, but maybe 7 or 8 fails later and you’re getting +10-12% per fail at this upgrade stage).

The game will show you how much Craftsman Energy you’ll gain if you fail as well.

In the above screenshot, this is saying I have 15.34% Craftsman’s Energy on the item currently, and by failing it will gain another 6.04%. You cannot use up Craftsman’s Energy before it reaches 100%, and it has no influence on your success chance prior to reaching 100%. If you use Training Auxiliary Materials to increase your chance of success, it will also increase the amount of Craftsman’s Energy on failure.

Lastly, starting from the Legion Raid items, there is a special refinement material that you can obtain from the Legion Raids. This material can be used in place of normal upgrading materials in order to attempt upgrades on certain gear (mid T3 specifically). The amount needed depends on the current stage of the enhancement.

Using the special training item to attempt an upgrade does not increase Craftsmen’s Energy nor does it increase the base chance of upgrading success. It also uses the base success chance and does not benefit from extra success chances from previous failures. You should see it as additional attempts to upgrade your gear in a given week since you’re actually expected to go beyond +15 on those items. You cannot use Training Auxiliary Materials either when upgrading with these special training materials.

When you succeed into a higher subtier or item tier, you will lose several item enhancement levels. This is because the item has a higher base item level, and by going down to lower enhancement levels you once again have a higher chance to succeed enhancements.

Before referencing the charts below, please remember that Weapon Attack is not 1:1 with Attack Power gain:

• At 20,403 Weapon Attack I’m at 20,975 Attack Power
• At 16,294 Weapon Attack I’m at 18,744 Attack Power
• At 708 Weapon Attack I’m at 3,907 Attack Power

Also, there is no penalty for failing to upgrade. Items do not downgrade or break on failure.

As an aside, via the Expedition Territory, you are able to unlock research that discounts the amount of materials needed to fill an item’s EXP as well as provide a flat +10% bonus to success chance on all upgrades up to +15. This requires you to reach a certain item at least once first before you’re allowed to lear nthe research.

As the server ages as well, automatic boosts to upgrading rates are universally applied to characters, such as guaranteed upgrades to +15 once a tier has become old enough.

Tier 1 Upgrading Chart

* Besides +0 to +1, all upgrades give 216 additional Weapon Attack. +16 to +20 each gives 270 additional Weapon Attack.

Tier 2 Upgrading Chart

* Unlike T1, the amount of Weapon Attack gained is slightly higher at each stage.

Tier 3 Lower/Mid Upgrading Chart

Tier 3 Upper Upgrading Chart

There is no need to upgrade beyond +15 until you get to South Vern in T3. Starting in South Vern, in order to access content in order to continue your character progression, it is necessary to reach +20 median. That means the moment you receive Argos raid gear, you can feel free to blow all your materials on upgrading to at least +20 median if you wish to access all future content.