In among all the big marquee changes that debuted on Tuesday morning with the launch of Storm Legion a new feature slipped in that we hadn’t heard much about before now: upgradable armor and weapons. This new type of item can be upgraded by using special components and promises to add extra fine tuning to gear customization for players.
Upgradable items can be obtained through quests, dungeons, or merchants. (Completing the Cape Jule story questline rewards an upgradable cloak, for example.) The icon for these items will have a small double arrow in the top right corner, and alt-clicking on it will open up the new Upgrade Item window.
Each upgrade uses up the original item and a special component. The upgrade can also increase the minimum level requirement of the piece, so check ahead while leveling! It’s possible for an item to have multiple upgrade options, which opens up a lot of interesting opportunities to tailor a piece of gear to a certain soul build. Opening the Item Upgrade window will display all possible upgrade paths and show the additional components needed.
As for those components, they’re available through crafting, drops, quest and event rewards, or at a merchant. Although there’s been no mention of it yet, it seems pretty likely that epic PvP and raid components are out there somewhere for the dedicated.
The best place to check out the new upgrading system is your nearest Adventure Dealer, who is also new in Storm Legion. Empyreal Sourcestone is a new blue-quality currency given out for completing Carnage Quests, Instant Adventures, and “defeating rare and powerful enemies”, and players can use it at the Adventure Dealer to purchase upgradable armor and weapons and upgrade components.
The first items are available at level 50 and are a mix of blue and green quality. They can be upgraded once to level 54 items with overall better stats, and most likely beyond that again until level 60.
It will be interesting to see how the upgradable items appear in general once more of the population is at the new level cap — are they a flexible gear system for leveling characters, a new way for optimizers to fine tune their gear, or all points in between?
