Improving Equipment

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Improving your equipment

Why improve equipment?

With increasing level, enhancement of equipment becomes a very important aspect in Angels Online. New sets of weapons/armors essentially come every 10 levels, so that equipment sets are usually worn for a long time. Having good equipment can be a great help, both in leveling and - needless to say - in PvP. Good armors will lower the costs of potions/mark portal scrolls used for leveling, and good weapons will make killing, and thus leveling, faster.

What kind of equipment can be improved?

Essentially any piece of equipment can be improved, including armors, weapons, rides and even pets. For rides and pets, the intensification process is identical to the use of pestles on regular equipments, but requires special items named ride feed (for rides, “lucky” version available) and improved pet feed (for pets, equivalent to the lucky pestle). Therefore, intensification of rides and pets are not discussed explicitly in this page; the reader is instead referred to the corresponding sections on pestles for information on the subject.

How to improve equipment?

Angels Online has two main features by which weapons and armors can be improved:

  1. Built-in bonuses (“stats”), which appear randomly either when the equipment is manufactured by a producer, dropped by a monster, or when it is obtained from a lucky bag.
  2. Intensification bonuses which can be obtained by repeatedly applying gems or pestles to the equipment. In this case the value of the enhancement is predictable and determined by the type of gem used for the intensification. Some gems - referred to as “ordinary” below - can potentially, and irreversibly, destroy the target equipment (see section 3).

The total improvement of a piece of equipment from its basic form is shown in green numbers in the in-game description of that item:

Intensifications are shown in purple font on the item description:

Steps in improving equipment

Intensification is obtained using gems (diamonds) or pestles:

  • Setting a gem requires the prior use of a piercing hammer in order to cut a hole in the equipment, after which the chosen gem can be placed in the hole. There are several types of gems, each of which adds a fixed bonus to the target equipment (see gems). It is not possible to pierce a new hole until a gem has been set in the previous hole.
  • A pestle is essentially a combination of a piercing hammer and gem. The bonus obtained from pestles is expressed in percentage of the base statistics of the equipment (all prior bonuses are NOT taken into account when calculating the new bonus from a pestle)

Warning:The steps of piercing a hole and applying a pestle involve a risk of breaking the target equipment (although the first three pestles can be applied with 100% success rate, see section 3.1 below). Whenever one tries to apply a piercing hammer/pestle to a piece of equipment, a confirmation message is displayed that specifies the chances of success. If the intensification fails, the item is irreversibly lost (except when using lucky piercing hammers or lucky enhanced pestles, which, for an extra cost, eliminate the risk of breaking).

1. Piercing Hammers

1.1 Ordinary Piercing Hammers

These piercing hammers can be bought from the “healer” NPC in every main city. The number of stars on the hammer determines the maximum level of the equipment to which it can be applied. The retail price of the hammer increases with the number of stars. Using higher-level hammers also increases slightly the chances of successfully cutting a hole.

Below is a list of currently available piercing hammers and their description:

1.2 Lucky Piercing Hammers

These hammers are only sold in the item mall. They are named “lucky” as their use involves no risk of breaking the equipment. However, if piercing fails, the last previously set gem will disappear (it is not clear what happens if one fails in cutting the first hole).

Lucky hammers are currently available up to 13 stars (for gear under lvl 139), under the “function” tab of the item mall. Below is a list of these hammers and their description:

2. Pestles

2.1 Ordinary Pestle

Ordinary pestles can be obtained from a large number of monsters (both regular monsters and bosses), however they typically have a very low drop probability. Sometimes, pestles are also given out as rewards in events organized by the AO team.

Here is a description of the pestle item as appears in-game:

2.2 Lucky Enhanced Pestles

Similarly to lucky hammers, these items are only sold in the item mall, and are currently available up to 7 stars. Likewise, they eliminate the risk of breaking the target equipment; instead, if the intensification fails, a previous intensification will be removed.

Below is a list of lucky enhanced pestles and their description:

3. Success/failure odds

3.1 Success rate of piercing hammers

3.2 Success rate of lucky piercing hammers

3.3 Success rate of pestles

Three pestles can be applied to any equipment with 100% success rate. For each subsequent pestle, the success rate decreases by 10%. The following table summarizes the cumulative probability of success for applying up to 13 pestles. It appears that there number of pestles that can be applied to a piece of equipment is limited to 10; however, the author of this page has not verified this information.

Target number of pestles Probability of success Probability of failure
1 100.00% 0.00%
2 100.00% 0.00%
3 100.00% 0.00%
4 90.00% 10.00%
5 72.00% 28.00%
6 50.40% 49.60%
7 30.24% 69.76%
8 15.12% 84.88%
9 6.05% 93.95%
10 1.81% 98.19%
11 0.36% 99.64%
12 0.04% 99.96%
13 0.00% 100.00%

3.4 Success rate of lucky enhanced pestles

When using lucky pestles, the picture is slightly different. There is no risk of breaking the equipment, and one will always succeed in intensifying a given number of times provided a sufficient number of lucky pestles are available. However, the number of pestles that one should expect to require in order to reach the desired level of intensification is not very intuitive, and it can be useful to look at the statistics to get a clearer idea.

The following table gives the average number of pestles required, the number of pestles which there is only a 50% chance of exceeding and the number which is exceeded 90% of the time. For example, for a target number of 10 intensifications, although the expected number of pestles need is about 45, there is a 50% chance of using 33 or less, and a 10% chance of using 12 or less.

Target number of intensifications Average number of pestles required 50%-limit 10%-limit
4 1.11 1 1
5 2.59 2 2
6 4.60 3 3
7 7.51 6 4
8 12.28 10 5
9 21.59 17 8
10 45.37 33 12
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