Item Enhancing | Item Enhancing: Armor | Material Properties

While items made out of normal iron, wood, granite or leather, either crafted or found as loot, lack the special material bonuses applied by using colored versions of the resource, a skilled craftsman still has the ability to enhance the item after the fact.

Plain weapons or armor can be enhanced with special materials using the ‘Enhance’ option on the relevant craft menu. These craft menus are:

• Blacksmithing
• Bowcrafting
• Carpentry
• Stonecrafting
• Tailoring
• Tinkering

Success will add the material’s fixed properties (bonuses) to the item. For a list of properites that can be bestowed upon an item by enhancing it see this page about Material Properties.

This means that once you’ve been lucky enough to find a superior item as loot on a monster, you can seek to improve it by enhancing it with special materials. However, enhancing an already existing item with special materials is difficult to say the least.

Failing an Enhancing attempt will cost you some of your materials, but there is also a very good chance of destroying the item. Once enhanced, the item is considered to have been made out of the special material infused into the item, so it can never be Enhanced again.

The inherent difficulty in Enhancing an item works as a balancing factor, since you already have a superior item with magical properties you undoubtedly desire, and you are seeking to even further increase them. Enhancing is definitely not a choice to be made by a squeamish Crafter, for the chance of destroying your prized possession is high. But the rewards can be well worth it!

The chance for succesfully enhancing an item is increased if you have above GM skill level in Tailoring or Blacksmithy, unfortunately no higher skill is possible for tinkering, bowcrafting, carpentry or stonecrafting. You are also required to have enough skillpoints to to craft items with the materials you want to enhance with. For example, to enhance an item with Valorite ore, you would have to be at or above 99.0 Blacksmithy skill.

To find out just how big a chance you have for succesfully enhancing that great piece of armor you just found, try out the Armor Enhancing Calculator.