Enchantments

Enchanting (and especially over-enchanting) is THE feature to get better equipment in Lineage 2.
The best thing about it is that you can always make your weapon better this way--there is no end, even if it becomes harder and harder to make it better.

Performing an Enchantment

Enchanting is done by obtaining an enchant scroll of the right grade (D-grade and up only--there are no no-grade enchants) and type (either weapon or armor).

One can safely enchant anything up to +3. Full body armor can be enchanted safely up to +4. But if one enchants above +3 or +4, you risk your item turning into crystals (of the appropriate grade--equivalent to crystalizing). This is called over-enchanting.

Each over-enchant step has a 70% chance of success. If the over-enchant fails, the item is crystalized; the grade and count of crystals are exactly the same as if a Warsmith would have crystalized the item. This can be used to over-enchant "for free"--get a couple of items and over-enchant them all to +4, +5, and so on until only one is left. You get quite a number of crystals and a well over-enchanted item. If you manage to sell the crystals for theirhard to get, as one has to have won against other players in the Olympiad for getting the currency to buy them. They are also very expensive at higher grades.

Bonuses from Enchantments

Enchantments give the following bonuses:

• +1 on P.Def for armor parts and shields.
• +1 on M.Def for jewelry.
• Over-enchantments give a three times higher bonus on P.Def or M.Def for armor and jewelry.
• The bonus on P.Atk and M.Atk of weapons varies a lot on the highest and lowest grades, especially for bows. See the following table.
• Over-enchantments give a two times higher bonus on P.Atk and M.Atk for weapons.

Methods of Over-Enchanting

There are two methods to over-enchant, we can call them Roulette and Security here.

Roulette means you get a single weapon and over-enchant until you are happy with the result. This is practiced by a surprising number of people who obviously have a faible for games of pure chance. It is obviously only to be used if you dont really need that weapon.

Security yields to much less exciting results, as you often end up with a not that highly enchanted weapon, but you can be sure not to end up with NO weapon. It is basically the idea to get more than one weapon and enchant each of them synchronously and stop when all but one (or the number of weapons you need) have broken.

Enchanting in Practice

One usually only overenchants weapons, as that brings a much more direct (and larger) effect than other items. The second candidate is jewelry, as M.Def lowers the damage dealt by spells as well as the chance to get rooted, slept or cursed.

You should not enchant anything but top items. If you can still get something better on that grade, first work on getting that before you start enchanting. Armor has a so much initially higher bonus than the small benefit from overenchanting, that hardly anyone ever bothers to over-enchant it.

You should concentrate on the cheapest kind of jewelry (rings) or armor (helmet, gloves, and boots) if you want to over-enchant either of them.

There are a number of things one should know about enchanting:

1. It is not very effective to over-enchant D-grade weapons.
2. Mage weapons are more effective to over-enchant than warrior weapons.
3. Enchanting jewelry is a lot more effective than enchanting armor.

This is shown in the following sections.

Enchanting D-Grades

For example, imagine you made two Staffs of Life and succeeded to over-enchant one of them to +16 before the other one breaks. Whow, a +16 weapon. But is that really such a great item ?

• Staff of Life +16: M.Atk 72 (Weapon) + 3*2 (3 Enchants) + 13*4 (13 Over-enchants) = 78 + 52 = 130

You glorious +16 d-grade weapon is beaten by a Ghoul Staff +5 (M.Atk 132), or an unenchanted Staff of Evil Spirit (M.Atk 132). Thats why you shouldn't spend too many resources on over-enchanting d-grades - be happy if you get one such uber weapon, but realize its not the uber tool. You have a great tool for levels 20 to 40, but then you are already only above average, and on b-grade you are actually no longer very exciting. Especially since d-grade shots are cheap, but weight tons.

Imagine the same thing with a Ghoul Staff:

• Ghoul Staff +16: M.Atk 111 (Weapon) + 3*3 (3 Enchants) + 13*6 (13 Over-enchants) = 120 + 69 = 189

This is even better than s-grades and Hero Weapons.

Warrior weapons vs mage weapons

For Warriors, the situation is even harder. This is because the increase in P.Atk of the weapon by enchants are so small in comparison to the initial P.Atk value of it. For exampl,e the top c-grade dual swords, such as Katana*Katana, have P.Atk 190, but gets only +4 per enchantment step. Compared to the Ghoul Staff with M.Atk 111, but +3 per enchantment step, the disadvantage is obvious. If we again get our uber +16 weapon out:

• Artisan's Sword * Elven Sword +16: P.Atk 107 (Weapon) + 3*2 (3 Enchants) + 13*4 (13 Over-enchants) = 113 + 52 = 165
• Katana * Katana +16: P.Atk 190 (Weapon) + 3*4 (3 Enchants) + 13*8 (13 Over-enchants) = 202 + 104 = 306

The uber +16 d-grade is here beaten easily by a normal, unenchanted and average c-grade weapon such as dual Stormbringer (P.Atk 175). The uber +16 c-grade is a lot better, but unlike the mage weapon this isnt better than s-grades, let alone hero weapons.

Jewelry vs Armor

The third rule is obvious, because the benefit from enchanting is always the same, while the absolute values of armor are a lot higher than those from jewelry - the best rings in the game have only M.Def 48. Just getting a d-grade elven ring (M.Def 22) to the quality of an unsealed Majestic Ring +3 (M.Def: 40 sealed, 42 unsealed, 45 unsealed +3) requires only an enchantment to +10 ! That would require only 12 tries on average if we follow the list above.

Of course, earrings and especially necklaces are already a lot different, because their increase in M.Def is much higher. A Elven Necklace has M.Def 45, an Unsealed Majestic Necklace +3 has M.Def 98, so the Elven Necklace would have to be enchanted to +20 to compete.

Armor is already hard to overenchant because there are sets on the higher grades - and the set bonus is much more important than a bit more or less P.Def.