How to Upgrade Gear

Once you reach level 50 by completing the blue-colored story quests and arrived at Vern Castle you will enter Lost Ark's endgame content where you will need to improve your gear through Honing in order to continue progressing in the game. This How to Upgrade your Gear guide will tell you everything you need to know.

How to Unlock Gear Honing

The endgame content of Lost Ark includes activities such as dungeons, raids, and quests but in order to navigate through them successfully it is crucial that you upgrade your gear using a process called Gear Honing. To do this you need to visit the gear vendors that can be found in any major capital in the continent. By going to the vendor you will bring up the Gear Honing menu where you will be able to use Guardian and Destruction Stone Fragments to upgrade weapons and Harmony Shards and Leapstones to upgrade armour.

How to Uprade your Gear

In order to upgrade your gear you will need the required materials and these can be obtained by doing endgame activities like Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, Abyssal Dungeons, and Una's Tasks. You will find that there is a limit to most of these activities in that they can only be done so many times on a daily or weekly basis. Once you have the required materials you need to visit a gear vendor where you will see a list of all the items you have that are capable of being upgraded, you then basically feed the required materials to the item you want upgraded until the EXP bar is full.

Keep in mind that the first few upgrades for each piece of gear will have a 100% success rate but as you continue to upgrade your gear past +6, the chance of success will begin to go down. If your attempt at honing a piece of gear fails you will lose all the materials that you used. However, your next attempt at honing that piece of gear will have a higher chance of success.

How to Gear Transfer

Make sure you do not dismantle or throw away upgraded gear when you find a similar piece of gear that has better stats. This is because you can avoid starting the whole upgrading process again by going to the 'Gear Transfer' tab, here you will be able to essentially feed all your upgrade levels from the old item into the new item destroying the old item in the process.

Take a look at our Currency Guide to learn about the different currencies that are used in Lost Ark and how to obtain them.