Lost Ark Gear Honing guide: How to unlock, upgrade gear, more

Lost Ark provides players with ample content to explore as they progress in-game. This includes the endgame experience in which they can complete various activities such as dungeons, raids, quests and more.

As they're navigating through the endgame content, they require a specific item level for their gear, achieved through upgrading them known as Gear Honing. This guide will explain what this system is how to unlock and upgrade gear in Lost Ark.

What is Gear Honing in Lost Ark?

Gear Honing is an in-game system that allows players to enhance or upgrade gear, including weapons and armour. Like their character level, their weapons and armour will obtain a Level that can only be improved through Gear Honing.

Upgrading their gear, which will obtain an Item Level, will influence the difficulty level of the endgame content. The more activities that can be done and the greater the endgame content tiers can be achieved through Gear Honing.

Starting the endgame content will require a 250-item level to complete the activities to unlock the high-tier content. With the Gear Honing system and obtaining plenty of rewards from the endgame content they'll complete, they should be able to raise their item level cap to 1000.

Therefore, having enough Gear Honing materials to upgrade their gear is essential. The honing materials they will need are Harmony Shards, Stone Fragments and Harmony Leapstones.

As weapons and armour can only be upgraded using the materials mentioned earlier, the type of materials they'll be using depends on which gear to upgrade. Both Guardian and Destruction Stone Fragments upgrade weapons while Harmony Shards and Leapstones for armour.

Likewise, once the weapons and armour reach the second and third tiers, the materials required will adjust. The fragments will become ores or stones, so ensure that they've collected enough honing materials to match the gear type to upgrade.

How to unlock Gear Honing in Lost Ark?

Gear Honing will be unlocked once they have reached Level 50 and have arrived at Vern Castle. This requires players to complete the blue-coloured story quests until they've unlocked the Chaos Dungeons and Gear Honing system.

At this junction, the endgame content will be made available for them to explore, including dungeons, raids, endgame quests, and more. They'll need to complete a handful of these endgame content to obtain their first gear set. From here, start enhancing or upgrading the gear through the Gear Honing system.

How to upgrade gear in Lost Ark?

To start levelling up the gear, players will need to head to the map and locate the hammer icon, which will indicate the Gear Honing NPC, akin to a blacksmith. Speak to the NPC to bring up the menu, which will display the interface and an upgrade button.

Select which gear items they'll want to upgrade on the left side of the interface and click on "Upgrade". This will bring them to the gear upgrade menu, where they can select the number of honing materials and silver to perform the upgrade before clicking "Upgrade" once again.

A meter or orb will begin to monitor the upgrading process. Once the meter reaches 100%, click the "Gear Honing" button to choose additional honing materials, view the upgrades to be made, and their rate for success or failure.

These additional materials are Harmony Leapstones and Guardian Stone Fragments for armour and Harmony Leapstones and Destruction Stone Fragments for weapons. If the honing process fails, it won't damage the item, just the items used.

Instead, it improves the chances of the following successful honing process, which can be viewed by locating the Artisan's Energy. Once they've added the additional materials required, which will improve the upgrade's success, they can select the "Gear Honing" button to complete the upgrade process.

In addition, once their armour and weapons reach Level 6 and higher, they'll require Star's Breath which will improve the success rate percentage of the upgrade. It would be best to use Star's Breath if the success rate is somewhat below 90% or until you progress further in the game when the difficulty increases.

This concludes the guide to upgrading your weapons and armour through the Gear Honing system. Continue completing activities, collecting materials, and upgrading your gear to increase your item level and access to Lost Ark's high-tier endgame content.

We want to thank the YouTube channel, Arekkz Gaming, for the comprehensive guide to Gear Honing and item Level in Lost Ark.

• Read more: What is Knowledge Transfer in Lost Ark?

Featured image courtesy of Smilegate & Amazon Games.