The equipment interface in Avowed provides direct access to upgrades.
Certain equipment in Avowed may be upgraded, which improves their stats and their effectiveness in combat, allowing the player to continue using their weapons, armor, shields, and grimoires as they move to newer regions and fight more difficult enemies.
Adjacent to upgrades is the enchanting system, which modifies the effects of enchantments on weapons.
Quality[]
The quality upgrades available on a unique item. This item's quality level is "Common Quality, +3/3.
All equipment (weapons and armor), is available in five different qualities: Common, Fine, Exceptional, Superb, and Legendary, denoted using a roman numeral (I, II, III, IV, V). Each quality itself has a base level (0), and then three ranks of improvement. The notation for an upgraded item reflects both the base quality tier and the upgrade rank, for example, "Common Quality, +1/3" signifies a common quality item that has been upgraded once.
There are two types of items that can be upgraded:
- Normal items: Have an initial quality, typically denoted as a quality prefix to the item name, e.g. "Common Wand"). They may be upgraded across qualities with coppers, which changes their prefix, but only to Superb +3/3 before they reach their maximum effectiveness.
- Unique items: Unique items can also be upgraded across qualities, but doing so requires additional adra (or one of its variants). Unlike normal items, uniques are able to reach Legendary quality, the highest available tier.
For any given type of equipment, quality upgrades will increase the same type of stats, and by the same amounts linearly across all upgrades within the same quality level. For example, all Light Armor will be granted +1 Additional Damage Reduction at every Common upgrade, although Fine upgrades (between +0/3 and +3/3 inclusive) grant +3 ADR, and so on. One exception is at Common Rank +0/1, which has no value increment, while all other qualities have 4 value increments (0-3), since upgrading between qualities counts as an increment in the higher quality level.
Upgrade Materials[]
To upgrade an item, you must have the appropriate Upgrade Materials in your inventory. These materials may be bought, gathered, looted, salvaged, crafted, or acquired by breaking down weapons and armor.
Upgrades are crafted using a combination of specific Upgrade Materials and an amount of Currency , which varies depending on the type of item and the quality of the upgrade. Higher quality weapons and armor will require equivalently exotic materials to upgrade.
The type of materials used depends on the type of equipment being upgraded:
- Armor - requires armor material and herb
- Weapon - require materials that match the type of the weapon being upgraded:
Within a single quality, each upgrade has a linear increase in amount of resources required for each level. But the upgrades between quality levels (for example from Common +3/3 to Fine +0/3) differ:
- Normal items cost a set amount of Currency in addition to the upgrade materials.
- Unique items require an adra type material, but forgo the need for upgrade materials and currency at those levels, with the exception of Legendary quality upgrades which require currency at every level.
Once an upgrade is applied, a subset of the resources used to add the upgrade are included in the item's break down results, allowing you to salvage the resources (but not the Currency) back at a later point.
| Category | Type | Material type | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Armor | All armor | Armor Material | Herb | Adra (uniques only) |
| Weapon | Melee weapons | Metal | ||
| Ranged weapons, off hand items | Wood | |||
List of upgrade materials[]
- Wood
- Softwood Branch (Common)
- Hardwood Branch (Fine)
- Petrified Wood Branch (Exceptional)
- Blackwood Branch (Superb)
- Glasswood Branch (Legendary)
- Herb
- Paradisan Ladder (Common)
- Hylea's Talon (Fine)
- Admeth's Wyrt (Exceptional)
- Cave Coral (Superb)
- Bloodwrithe Toadstool (Legendary)
- Metal
- Iron Chunk (Common)
- Steel Chunk (Fine)
- White Steel Chunk (Exceptional)
- Living Iron Chunk (Superb)
- Living Steel Chunk (Legendary)
- Leather
- Pelt (Common)
- Tanned Hide (Fine)
- Stelgaer Leather (Exceptional)
- Balarok Skin (Superb)
- Dragon Hide (Legendary)
- Other
Cores[]
Cores are a special item that can be socketed into non-unique equipment of Fine quality and above, giving the item a specific magical or mechanical effect.
An item's current core is represented by an icon to the right of the item name in the equipment window. An empty circle indicates that the item can be modified with a core, but does not have one equipped. The effects of an equipped core are shown under the item stats.
Behind the scenes[]
- Cores are likely based on the modifications system in The Outer Worlds.
- Development versions of the game omitted the Superb quality, only having Common, Fine, Exceptional, and Legendary.
- Additionally, certain weapons were able to benefit from an increased Critical Hit chance as they were upgraded.
- Later development versions limited normal items to only their initial quality, so a Fine Wand could only ever max out at Fine +3/3. In the release version of the game, this was changed so that all normal weapons could be upgraded across quality levels, to a maximum quality of Superb, while uniques are the only items that can be legendary.
- In the preview version of the game sent to reviwers on November 21, 2024, all upgrades had no currency cost.