How does Armor work?

[Stargrace]

So how does tempering and regrading work? I have no idea how to upgrade armor or what any of it means. Anyone have any useful guides?  

[Saia]

I'd love to know this too!

[Slurm]

Wonder if it's something you can do at a blacksmith. I know there's different options when you approach one. There's one for the shop, one for something else, and one to mix style pieces with other armor.

I tried doing the style change the other day and found out I needed a certain type of dust which is sold on the marketplace. People are also selling it on the AH so i picked one up for a gold only to find out that the switch actually cost 6 pieces of the dust.

[Zeli]

I don't know these things...

[Saia]

Found this on reddit. Not quite what you were asking but figured this would be the thread to share it in.

www.reddit.com/r/archeage/comments/2hwpm2/guide_to_regrading_socketing_enchanting/

[Slurm]

AHA! (edit: I totally didn't notice that Saia linked to this as well haha)

www.reddit.com/r/archeage/comments/2hwpm2/guide_to_regrading_socketing_enchanting/

Hi guys, I noticed a lot of people in this sub-reddit don't have a lot of experience with regrading / socketing / enchanting and I wanted to share a bit of mine. My backround; I am an experienced alpha player and an active release player on the Aranzeb NA server. On alpha and release I would estimate I've used close to 200 regrade scrolls, and wanted to pass on my advice.

First I would just like to distinguish the three. Here is a random weapon off the AH, it has an enchant, a number of used sockets and appears to have been regraded.

Enchants

There can only be one enchant on an individual item, in this case, its "Magic Skill Damage 3.0% Increase" if one was to use another enchant, or to upgrade the item to a subsequent tier (Magnificent, in this case) the current enchant would be destroyed. Often certain enchants can only be used on certain pieces of equipment, such restrictions include: hands, head, feet, off-hand, ranged weapon and many others. This is to prevent stacking of a certain stat, say, 5.0% Movement speed, if you could apply it to all your gear, would allow you to out-run even the fastest of mounts. Although, that would be fun..

Socketing

Socketing depends on the grade and piece of the item, certain gear pieces have more / less sockets than other, as an example, chests have more than pants, which have more than hands, which have more than waist. You can increase the number of sockets by increasing the rarity of an item. Here is an arcane staff with three socket slots, and a Celestial staff with six sockets.
This is a list of all rarities.
When socketing, the first socket is guaranteed success, however... every subsequent socket has a chance to fail, and if that happens, you'll lose ALL previous sockets. In alpha, I spent more than 25,000 honor trying to max the sockets on my chest. This is very RNG heavy, I know of people who have nailed 6 sockets in a row... and others like me, who despite spending 25,000 honor on special pvp sockets, had 2/6! Be careful with these, don't get greedy.

Regrading

The most infamous and frustrating of the three, please keep in mind at no point has Trion/XL released the rates of regrade great success / success / failure / major failure / catastrophic failure, but most believe it's not pretty.
Regrading is the process of increasing the grade of a weapon, armor piece, or accessory. Increasing the grade grants a further bonus of ALL attributes. Let's begin with an example, some lovely Lake pants, the ultimate in mage DPS.
Here are the arcanes.. and here are the Celestials.. now with the exception of tempering (up to 109% increase in attack/defence attributes) we can see a staggering difference in statistics. They may not seem like a lot on a single item, but the difference a single rarity increase can make over an entire set can be huge!

Let's talk the how's, why's and what's of regrading.

Regrading can be incredibly costly. There are a number of outcomes that can occur, depending on what sort of scroll you use and how RNGesus feels about what you're doing.

There are five potential outcomes.

Great success - Increase in two rarities.
Success - Increase in one rarity.
Failure - No increase or decrease in rarity, the item's rarity level stay's the same.
Major Failure - The item decreases one to two rarities.
Catastrophic failure - The item is destroyed.

Great Success is achieved through use of a Resplendent Regrade Scroll which is made by merging a Regrade Scroll and its respective Lucky Point together (search either lucky moonpoint, lucky sunpoint etc).
This is a list below of what can occur at what rarities, and MY perceived percentage: (please note that what outcomes can occur at what rarities is objective, however, my perceived percentages are subjective. If you disagree with my perceived rates please feel free to write me an angry letter)

Grand > Rare - Success 30%, Failure 70%
Rare > Arcane - Success 30%, Failure 70%
Arcane > Heroic - Success 25%, Failure 75%
Heroic > Unique - Success 20%, Failure 30%, Major Failure 50%
Unique > Celestial - Success 10%, Failure 10%, Major Failure (1 grade) 20%, Major Failure (2 grades) 60%
Celestial > Divine - Success 5%, Failure 5%, Major Failure 5%, Catastrophic Failure 85%

I am going to throw together just a few tips and pointers that you may or may not find useful.

-Regrades are the best gold sink in the game. Got 4,000 gold spare? You're doing it wrong. Moar regrades.
-Heroic is considered the safest rarity, going beyond it allows Major Failure which can set you back vast resources as the item can return to arcane rarity, and it may take 3,4,5,6 further regrades just to get the item back to Heroic.
-Celestial is considered the safest high rarity. Regrading at Celestial gives an incredibly high chance of breaking the item and wasting 1000's of potential gold, it is widely regarded as a bad move. Even on the most mature Archeage servers in the world the highest rarity you will see is Divine and Celestial.
-You can achieve the rarity of Divine by skipping Celestial, doing so also skips the Catastrophic Failure chance if you use a resplendent regrade scroll at Unique rarity. Here is an example of such beauty. Using the resplendent allows you to acheive a great success, increasing two rarities from Unique > Celestial > Divine (No breaking!)
-Regrade charms increase your chance of success. These percentages are not added, they are multipled. As an example, take my previous rates, add a yellow regrade charm with 50% to it and hey, you've got 45% success chance going grand > rare! Not that bad.

If you have any questions or further points for discussion, please respond to the thread. If not, I hope I've been a help to someone out there!

[Stargrace]

So my main question of HOW to do these things wasn't really answers - but I did figure it out! It's just a matter of an annoying UI glitch.

First of all, for some reason if you're trying to right click and use lunastones from your inventory - it doesn't open the UI. That was the first problem I was having. SO in order to open this window, hit the little sword icon on your inventory, the regrade item one. Remove the piece of gear you want to add the lunastone to by placing it in your inventory, and you'll see that regrade window has a few tabs. One is for regrades, one is for lunagems and one is for lunastones. 

You can have one lunastone per item.
You can have as many lunagems as there are slots on the items
You can regrade so long as the gear says you can (with a chance at failing) 
You can temper so long as the gear says you can (https://support.trionworlds.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1801/~/archeage---item-regrade-and-tempering) 

All that being said, there's really no point (and it's quite expensive) to do any of this until you're level 50, except maybe adding components that you have found while adventuring. Handicraft is the profession that makes the lunagems. 

[Zeli]

Stargrace

Halfway through reading your post, I was like, "yep, I'm waiting until I hit 50 for this" and then I read you suggest waiting until 50. I thought... I like her.