Zodiac Online Item Upgrading Guide

Zodiac Online Item Upgrading Guide by Blackout

Preface:
Zodiac Online has a relatively complex but interesting item upgrading system comparing with other games. So I tried to write a manual to tell our players how to create upgraded equipments. Hope it will help. OK now let’s get it straight.

Chapter 1, Weapons
1-1 Attributes of Weapons
First let’s take a look at the attributes of a good weapon.

The yellow circled part is a prefix, this prefix goes with the additional attributes (the blue circled part). The red circled part is the name of the weapon, and the green part, is its quality. The additional attributes (the blue circled part) plays a very important role in item upgrading. The rest parts of the weapon description, like the ATK, MATK and durability, are called the base attributes.

1-2 Souls
Most of the item upgrading procedures are done at the Blacksmith in cloud city (his location is 240, 233). Look at the pic below, the muscleman is the one you need to find.

To make a weapon upgradable, you’ll need a Growing Weapon Stone. There’re 2 kinds of Growing Weapon Stones, as below:

A Growing Weapon Stone (MATK) is used to increase a weapon’s magical attack ability, whereas a Growing Weapon Stone (ATK) is used to increase the physical attack ability. This time I’m going to use a physical attack weapon as an example, so I choose the one for ATK.

Now talk to that strong guy and choose “Compose Growing Weapon” option.

This window pops up.

Now I’m going to put the weapon in the Equipment position (red circled) and put the Growing Weapon Stone (ATK) in the Soul slot (blue circled), like this:

Now the Refine button is available to click. Please note the success rate and the gold requirement on the top, and then click Refine.

Let’s see what happens to the weapon:

This weapon now becomes a Soul Weapon, also known as a growing weapon. The red circled parts can only be found on a growing weapon.
Aptitude Growth is the growth rate. You can upgrade this growth rate with these 2 items:

Right click any of the above and then left click the Soul Weapon to make a try to increase its growth rate. The growth rate goes up by 1 after a success. The difference between the above 2 items is, the left one offers a success chance of 70%, but the growth rate goes back to 0 after a failure; the right one only offers a success chance of 50% but the growth rate only goes down by 1 after a failure. The maximum growth rate for a weapon is 15. So which one to use? It’s up to you. You do not have to upgrade this value at this moment, you can do it at any time and it makes no difference.

Improve physical attack: this is the increment on physical attack ability. This value goes up with Aptitude Growth and Grade (aka, the succeeded times in upgrading, will be introduced later).

Soul Points show how many upgrading failure times are allowed for this weapon. This value goes down by 1 after a failure, when the value becomes 0, the weapon is destroyed. You can upgrade this value with:

Right click a Soul Point Crystal and then left click the weapon. This procedure will never fail.

Note: Soul Points and Soul Crystals are used to keep the equipment safe from destroying after a failed upgrading. However, they have nothing to do with the Aptitude Growth, which means the results after using a Weapon/Armor Aptitude item or and Adv. Weapon/Armor Aptitude item only go with the description of themselves, Soul Points CANNOT keep the equipment’s aptitude growth from reducing after a failure.

EXP: this is the exp you need to full fill before the next step. It’s gained from battles.

1-3 Weapon Upgrading
Now the very important part of the item upgrading system.
This time you need to find another good weapon, for example, this one:

And i’ve done something to the soul weapon we’ve just created, mind the exp:

Let’s put this weapon and the soul weapon into the compose window like this:

And then click Refine, the furnace becomes:

See? The soul weapon is gone and all its soul attributes except for the exp are attached to the furnace, and the furnace becomes +1. Look at the Improve physical attack part, now it has an increment of 5.

Let’s do it again. I found another weapon like this:

Now let’s put them into the compose window as below:

Click Refine and I get this:

So the increment on physical attack goes up higher. Please note that the increment goes not only with the Grade, but also with the Aptitude Growth who has been introduced above. For example let me use this:

Succeeded! Now the increment on physical attack goes up again:

These are the procedures to upgrade a weapon. When upgrading from +3 to +4, the compose window is like this:

Mind the words on the top: Lack of Spirit Stone! Need 1 Spirit Stone! So this time I need a Spirit Stone:

Now put the Spirit Stone in any green slot.

And Refine. It’s upgraded to +4.

Put it on and it glows from now on.

Let’s try to make it +5. Look at the success rate in the compose window:

This time I have only 70% chance to succeed. If I fail, the Soul Point on the weapon will go down by 1. I don’t want that to happen, so I need something to increase the success rate, these are the items I want:

Larger ones increase more success rate.

Let me put some of them into the purple slots:

Now I have a 95% chance to succeed, I think it’s enough.

Click Refine and I get this:

I’ll face with more risks of failure if I continue upgrading it.

1-4 Attribute Preserving

How to preserve the additional attributes:

Now I’m going to use this weapon as the soul:

It’s really good and I want to make this furnace a +7 one:

As you can see, the furnace has a bad additional attribute. According to my manual above, if I upgrade my Petal Fan with this thing, my Double Hit skill enhancement will be replaced by that Fire Ball enhancement, I don’t want this to happen, is there a way to preserve the soul weapon’s additional attribute? The answer would be YES! I need this item:

Now let me put everything into the compose window:

The Curse Spinel should be set into the Spinel slot as shown in the picture.

Now Refine. I get this:

The Double Hit enhancement is preserved as I want.

How to preserve the base attributes:

Now I want to change the additional attribute to Easy Attack enhancement, so I found this:

If I compose this weapon with the +7 soul above to create a +8 one with Easy Attack enhancement, I don’t need to use a Curse Spinel anymore. But sadly this weapon’s base physical attack is lower than the soul’s. Can I keep the soul’s base attributes? Of course YES! This time I’ll need a Devine Spinel.

Now put all required things into the compose window:

Guess what do I get?

It’s perfect, just as my wish.

Note: If you don’t use any spinel to preserve the Soul Weapon’s attributes, only the soul parts will be preserved and attached to the weapon in the middle of the compose window and you’ll lose all the other parts of the Soul Weapon. So actually in weapon upgrading you’re not supposed to make your best weapon to be the soul in the very beginning. For example if you’re willing to upgrade your best weapon to +6, you can make a +5 Soul Weapon with quite normal weapons, because you only want the soul parts on it. You need spinels only if your favorite base attributes and additional attributes are on different weapons.

1-5 Elements on the Weapon
There’re 4 kinds of elemental stones:

If you want to put an elemental stone on a weapon, all you need to do is to right click the stone and then left click the weapon.

But there is a question, what element to put on? That depends on what skill you want to enhance. For example, I want to enhance my Easy Attack skill. Let’s take a look at the description of this skill.

So the element of this skill is Wooden. That means if I want to enhance Easy Attack skill, I should put a Wooden Stone on my weapon. For example, this weapon:

Now after a right click on the Wooden Stone and a left click on the weapon, I got this:

You must want to ask, what’s the difference between the 2 circled enhancements on Easy Attack?

The elemental stone adds an additional damage, but the additional attribute “Enhance Easy Attack Skill” increases the chance to trigger the special effect of Easy Attack:

After putting the weapon on, you’ll see it glowing green light. The weapon only glows the elemental colored light at +4 or higher.

The element on the weapon can be covered by a new element. If I put on a Lgneous Stone, the weapon glows purple light.

A +4 or higher weapon without any element glows red light.

Note:
a. The additional elemental damage can stack up to 200, which means you can put at most 20 elemental stones of a same type on your weapon. But there’ll be a certain failure chance. The failure chance gets higher by the elemental damage goes up. Once it fails, the elemental damage will go back to 0. In a general way, you have only little chance to fail if you don’t put on more than 5 stones.
b. The element on the soul weapon is treated as a base attribute, it can be preserved using a Devine Stone like other base attributes (minimal and maximum ATK, MATK, Durability etc.).

Chapter 2 Armors
2-1 Armor Upgrading Overview
Most procedures in upgrading an armor are similar to the ones in upgrading a weapon.

You need a corresponding armor part growing bead instead of a Growing Weapon Stone.

You need to use Equip Aptitudes and Adv. Equip Aptitudes instead of Weapon Aptitudes and Adv. Weapon Aptitudes to increase a soul armor’s Aptitude Growth.

Just like the Weapon Aptitude items, right click them and then left click the Soul Weapon to make a try to increase its growth rate. The growth rate goes up by 4 after a success. An Equip Aptitude offers a success chance of 70%, but the aptitude growth goes back to 0 after a failure; an Adv. Equip Aptitude offers a success chance of 50% but the aptitude growth only goes down by 4 after a failure. The maximum growth rate for all armor parts are 60.

Except for all these things similar to weapon upgrading, there’re 2 more intrests in armor upgrading, gender changing and drilling/insetting.

2-2 Gender Changing

Now I’m using a female character wearing this:

And I found another good garment but for boys.

Can I upgrade this garment for boys and change the gender so I can wear it? Fortunately YES!

According to my manual, if I use the orchid robe as a soul armor to upgrade the valiant robe, the product will be the valiant robe with orchid robe’s attributes. We need to preserve the gender requirement. Smelled something? Yeah the spinels. Gender is one of the base attributes, so I need a Devine Spinel.

Go to the Blacksmith in Cloud City and put my stuff on the compose window:

This is the product. See? It is a orchid robe for girls with the valiant robe’s additional attribute.

2-3 Drilling and Insetting
We can create at most 2 gem sockets on an armor (whether it is a soul armor or not). We need these items:

There is a certain success rate as shown in the picutures above, but don’t worry, you only lose the Gimlet after a failure. Let’s have a try.

After using some Gimlets for garments, I created this:

There’re 2 sockets saying Dragon Embeddable. So what does it mean? And what kind of gems can be inset?
Dragon is the socket type. The embeddable gems include: Pluto Gems, Neptune Gems, Uranus Gems, Saturn Gems, Jupiter Gems and Mars Gems.
These gems are created by life skill “Gem Machining”. Only Dragon Socket embeddable gems can be set into a Dragon Socket, for example:

The prefix of the gems go with their bonus attributes.

To set the gem into the socket, just click the armor with Shift key pressed to open a window like this:

And then put in a gem. Please mind the descriptions on the gems. High level gems can only be set into a high level armor. With my orchid robe for level 10 characters, I can only use Pluto Gems. There is a failure chance but you only lose the gem after a failure.

I succeeded. With the Pluto Gem shown above inserted, I created this:

The bonus attribute came from the gem and the socket itself are treated as addtional attributes. So they can be preserved by a Curse Spinel in further upgrading.

The matchup of armor parts and socket types:
Caps – Gloom Embeddable sockets
Garments – Dragon Embeddable sockets
Belts – Faith Embeddable sockets
Boots – Death Embeddable sockets

Super Tip: How to Create More Sockets on An Armor
Find another armor, for example, this one:

It is not a soul armor. But we can still create sockets on it. Let’s do it.

Then find any soul armor, for example this one:

Put them into the compose window, mind the soul armor’s exp and don’t forget to put in a Devine Stone:

This is the product:

Now we can find some more Gimlets and drill more sockets on it.

In this example the 2 sockets on the valiant robe don’t take the places of the 2 creatable sockets for the new upgraded orchid robe, so we can create 2 more sockets on the new robe. 4 sockets will be the final limit on an armor, we cannot create any more sockets by any means.