Runes of Magic Equipment Upgrade Guide

Runes of Magic Equipment Upgrade Guide by Adhesive

This guide is intended to help players understand the various methods available to improve your equipment in Runes of Magic. All of the information provided can be found by searching through multiple posts on the official RoM forum, but I wanted to bring it all together into a single post for ease of use.

I’ve tried to organize the information into a more coherent form, and you will notice that the methods of upgrading equipment are listed in order from the simplest to most complicated. Pictures will follow shortly. Please feel free to offer corrections, and if you think that I’ve used information that you’ve contributed without giving you credit, please let me know.

I. DURABILITY

A. Rule: Every piece of equipment with a dynamic durability above “100” receives a 20% bonus to all of its stats.

i. Dynamic Durability: The number on the left side of your equipment’s durability rating, which decreases as you take/deal damage, and can be increased via repair (80/100).
ii. Static Durability: The number on the right side of your durability rating, which never changes (80/100).

B. Method:

i. Vendor Repair: Paying gold to an appropriate vendor will repair your equipment’s dynamic durability back up to its static durability. A piece of equipment with an 80/100 durability rating will be repaired back to its original 100/100 durability.
However, doing this will never bring your dynamic durability above 100 because you can never repair your dynamic durability above your static durability via the vendor, and so you will not receive the 20% bonus to your equipment’s stats.
In order to be able to vendor repair your dynamic durability above 100, you need to be repairing a piece of equipment that already has a static durability over 100. For example, a piece of equipment with a durability rating of 80/110 will be repaired to 110/110 every time you use a vendor repair, allowing you a dynamic durability over 100 and thus granting you the 20% bonus to all of its stats. This is why equipment with a static durability over 100 is so highly sought after, because you can always get a 20% bonus to its stats via a cheap vendor repair. NOTE: Equipment with a static durability over 110 currently does not display the 20% bonus that you receive when its dynamic durability is over 100 via vendor repair, but you do in fact receive a bonus.

ii. Golden Repair Hammer: For equipment with a static durability rating that is 100 or less, the only way you can approve the dynamic durability over 100 is to use a golden repair hammer. This will double your maximum dynamic durability and grant you a 20% bonus for as long as your dynamic durability stays above 100. For example, a piece of equipment with a 100/100 durability rating will receive a 200/100 rating after repairing with a golden repair hammer. However, once the dynamic durability drops below 100, through taking/dealing damage, you lose the bonus, and repairing the equipment via the vendor will only bring it back up to its static durability rating, which never changes. Unfortunately, you cannot use a vendor repair to maintain your equipment’s dynamic durability above 100 if its static durability is not above 100. You will have to use another golden repair hammer on the piece of equipment. Fortunately, this can be repeated as many times as you’d like.

II. REFINEMENT JEWELS

A. Rule: Applying refinement jewels to your equipment grants you a chance to refine it by one level. Equipment starts at a refinement of +0, and can be refined to a maximum of +6.
In addition to increasing your refinement level, refinement jewels have a chance of decreasing your level by one, upon failure.
Keep in mind that in order to refine a piece of equipment, you need to use the type of refinement jewel that corresponds to the equipment type and level.
The benefits that you obtain by refining your equipment will depend on the equipment itself, but in general you gain an increase to its current stats, in addition to unlocking hidden stats such as +crit chance, etc. The following is a chart by Konrag detailing the types of stats unlocked when refining armor:

REFINEMENT  | CLOTH | LEATH | CHAIN | PLATE |
____________|_______|_______|_______|_______|
HEAD        |  INT  |  DEX  |  STR  |  STA  |
UPPER BODY  |  INT  |  DEX  |  STR  |  STA  |
BELT        |  WIS  |  STA  |  STA  |  INT  |
LOWER BODY  |  WIS  |  STA  |  DEX  |  STR  |
SHOULDER    |  STA  |  STR  |  STA  |  STR  |
HANDS       |  INT  |  DEX  |  STR  |  STA  |
FEET        |  STA  |  STR  |  DEX  |  INT  |

B. Method:

i. Vendor Jewels: Jewels bought from refinement vendors can be used to refine your equipment to +6, theoretically, but due to the high chance of failure and downgrade, they will typically only be used to reach +2. On average, equipment can be refined to +1 by using ~10 vendor jewels and refined to +2 by using ~30 vendor jewels.

ii. Item Shop Diamond Jewels: Jewels bought with Diamonds via the Item Shop have a higher probability of success, and less chance to downgrade upon failure. Typically, an item can be brought from +2 to +5 with ~15 jewels.

iii. Item Shop Ruby Jewels: Jewels bought with Rubies via the Item Shop grant a 100% chance of upgrade.
NOTE: Your success rate may vary; these are simply what the rates have been in my experience. It is unknown whether anything can be done to increase your probability of success.

III. RUNES

A. Rule: Inserting a rune into an available rune slot on a piece of equipment will grant you whatever stat is attributed to that rune.

B. Method:

i. Drilling Rune Slots: If your equipment doesn’t already have an available rune slot, you must use an Item Shop equipment driller to drill one. If you want more than one, you need to use an advanced driller, and if you want more than two slots, I believe a Ruby driller is required.

ii. Dropped and Bought Runes: The simplest way to upgrade via runes is to stick in a rune that you’ve obtained from looting a corpse or that you bought from the Auction House or another player. However, dropped runes are typically rather low in level.

iii. Rune Creation: Higher level runes can be created via the Arcane Transmutor by inserting a combination of runes and transmuting them together. The simplest recipe is to transmute together five of any level rune of the same type to create a single rune of that type which is one level higher than your five starting runes. If you haven’t learned how to use the Arcane Transmutor yet, this link provides a good tutorial. The following link lists the different rune recipes currently known: http://theromwiki.com/index.php/Transmutation_Chart

IV. TIERING

A. Rule: Every tier you increase a piece of equipment grants a 10% increase to its base damage or defense. For example, brining a tier 3 sword to tier 6 will increase its damage by 30% over base. Theoretically, there is no limit to how high you can tier equipment, but due to the exponential increase in gold and resources required to increase to a subsequent tier, it is prohibitively expensive.

B. Method:

i. Changing Tiers:To change the tier of a piece of equipment, you simply transmute the item with three Mana Stones of the same tier that you wish the equipment to become. For example, if you want your Tier 3 sword to become a Tier 6 sword, you simply place it in the Arcane Transmutor along with three Tier 6 Mana Stones and spend one transmutor charge to transmute them together. Likewise, if you wanted your Tier 2 sword to become a Tier 6 sword, you would follow the exact same procedures. Your equipment’s starting tier doesn’t matter. However, you cannot buy Mana Stones from vendors or the Item Shop, so you need to buy them from other players or make them yourself

ii. Mana Stone Creation: To make a Mana Stone, you need to transmute a piece of equipment with either a Fusion Stone, which you can buy from a vendor, or a Purified Fusion Stone, which you can get from the Item Shop. The basic rule is that a Fusion or Purified Fusion Stone will become a Mana Stone of whatever tier the equipment is that you transmute it with.
For example, transmuting a Fusion Stone with a Tier 3 belt will give you a Tier 3 Mana Stone. Transmuting three Tier 3 Mana Stones together will give you a single Tier 4 Mana Stone, and so on. As you can see, each additional tier that you want to increase your equipment to requires three times as many Mana Stones as the subsequent tier, which necessarily requires three times the amount of transmutor charges, Fusion Stones, and pieces of equipment.
So, a Tier 6 item “costs” three times as much to make as a Tier 5 item. The following Excel spreadsheet posted by Mavoc allows you to calculate the cost and benefit of increasing the Tier of equipment: http://forum.us.runesofmagic.com/att…4&d;=1243925232

V. STAT TRANSMUTING

A. Rule: In addition to the stats added by either unlocking hidden stats via refinement, or sticking runes into rune slots, every piece of equipment can be transmuted with 6 stats. Most green stats give you one type of stat increase; however, some green, and all yellow, stats give you an increase to two different stats. Therefore, at best, you can have 12 stats increased by transmuting a single piece of equipment correctly, in addition to any stat increases you’ve obtained by adding runes and refining.

B. Method: Transmuting stats onto a piece of equipment requires transmuting the equipment with three Mana Stones of the same tier. Very simply, the Arcane Transmutor will take the 6 lowest stats from your stat pool and apply them to your piece of equipment. Your stat pool consists of every stat on your three Mana Stones, in addition to every stat on your piece of equipment.
This means that if you have a pool of 3 great stats and 9 bad stats, you will unfortunately be left with a piece of equipment that has 6 of the bad stats and none of the good ones. However, the important thing to remember here is that duplicate stats will be treated as a single stat from which to draw upon. Therefore, if the 9 bad stats you have in your pool are duplicates of the same three different stats (for example you have three “Stam I”, three “Dex I” and three “Wisd I”stats), the Arcane Transmutor will see that as only three bad stats to draw from, and you will end up with three unique bad stats and three unique good stats on your piece of equipment

Note: This slide show posted by nemecis illustrates strat transmuting via vendor-bought Fusion Stones.

i. Fusion Stones: All Fusion Stones come with at least one predetermined low level stat and two random stats determined after purchase (note: the two random stats may end up being blank, giving you a Fusion Stone with only one bad stat), so anytime you create a Mana Stone with a Fusion Stone, the best you can end up with is a Mana Stone that has one bad stat in addition to whatever unique stats were on the piece of equipment that you chose to transmute with your Fusion Stone.
Fusion Stones with only one bad stat, meaning your two randoms turned out to be blank, are fairly uncommon, and you will typically end up with a stone that has three bad stats attributed to it.You can imagine that after creating three Mana Stones via the more common Fusion Stones, you could be left with a pool of stats that has nine unique bad stats. This means that regardless of the good stats available in the pool, your equipment will end up with six of the nine bad stats.
The trick here is to make sure that the bad stats are all duplicates of each other, which means that all three Fusion Stones used in creating Mana Stones must have the exact same three bad stats.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy Fusion Stones from vendors that come with the same three specific bad stats; at best, one stat will always be random, and you won’t know what it will be until after you buy it. The best thing you can do is either buy three matching Fusion Stones from the Auction House, or buy a few from the vendor and then try to hunt down two more matching ones from the Auction House. Remember, the stats must be identical in type and tier for them to be considered duplicates of each other; a Stamina I, Stamina II, and Stamina III will not be considered duplicates, and can all be transmuted onto a single piece of equipment.

ii. Purified Fusion Stones: Purified Fusion Stones solve this bad stat problem, by allowing you to create a Mana Stone with only the stats that you want it to have, i.e. those stats on the equipment that you transmute the Purified Fusion Stone with to make the Mana Stone. This way, you can create a pool of stats that only has six great unique stats to draw from, which ultimately gives you a piece of equipment with six great stats.

Note: This post by xtwilightseerx provides a good example of stat transmutation, and this post by nemecis explains in great detail what each stat actually translates to in terms of HP, Physical Defense, etc.