A detailed description of the mess that is the current upgrade system

[omgFIREBALLS]

For a brief intro:

• Weapons and armor have quality tiers, going from Common +0 all the way to Legendary +3.
• Each tier improves the item's stats, and if the "tier difference" between you and your opponent is large enough (4), the one with the better equipment gets an additional 35% bonus. As in, my weapon is so much better than your armor that on top of the impressive damage my upgraded weapon is doing against your weak armor, I get an extra 35%.
• So, having upgraded gear makes the game a lot easier. And, to go between tiers, say from Fine +3 to Exceptional +0, you need Adra or its upgrades (Awakened Adra etc). This is a bottleneck. Update: Only applies to uniques. Since uniques are pretty much objectively better than plain equipment however, we still want to do this.

On my first playthrough I tried to upgrade my starting gear... I spent all of Dawnshore struggling to reach Fine (while a lot of monsters have Fine equipment). Then I spent all of Emerald Stair struggling to reach Exceptional (which monsters tend to have there). Then I just started buying upgraded equipment as soon as I got into a new zone instead, and started preaching this method too.

People discovered that uniques you loot will scale up to whatever you currently have equipped (or maybe in your possession). You have Exceptional armor; you loot Exceptional unique armor. Someone on Reddit galaxy brained how to best take advantage of this. Inspired by this post, I started a PotD run. I avoided all uniques until I was able to buy a Fine armor and weapon (Update: If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, I've been informed it's cheaper to upgrade plain items to Fine, and that requires no Adra). Then I selected one weapon and one armor that would be my equipment for Dawnshore and broke down all other uniques. Since I looted them as Fine, breaking them down gave me Adra, which I turned into Awakened Adra, which eventually allowed me to (combined with buying Adra from merchants and looting it here and there) upgrade my weapon and armor to Exceptional before even leaving Dawnshore.

Had I played normally, I would have had Common equipment when looting these uniques and not received any Adra for scrapping them. I also would have probably saved some of them because hey, maybe I'll want to use them, or I want to keep them for transmog. And this is where you say, hey that's what I'm doing and experiencing. I feel you. You're struggling to upgrade because you didn't metagame. Anyway, it gets a little worse.

What I'd done in Dawnshore wasn't even fully optimal. Even better would be to pick one slot to focus on (I choose armor because I'm very passionate about not getting oneshot), looting my desired armor, then looting all the uniques for the other slot (weapon). Not until I had upgraded my armor to Exceptional would I loot all the other unique armor, which would then, you guess it, drop as Exceptional. What's it matter? Well, Exceptional armor breaks down into Awakened Adra directly - if I loot it as fine I only get 1/3 of that since it takes 3 Adra to make 1 Awakened Adra. That would make it a lot easier to upgrade my weapon and I'd finish the zone with more [Awakened] Adra. I'm even thinking about starting over and doing this. I will, either way, play Emerald Stair like that.

I expect to finish Emerald Stair with Superb +1 or +2 equipment. I expect anyone who is playing Emerald Stair right now without research or metagaming is struggling to reach Exceptional (unless they bought it). Which I am about to waltz in there already sporting.

The light at the end of the tunnel here is that playing like this doesn't actually get you something you cannot get with a sane playstyle, but you get there sooner and you have a more pleasant journey except for the starting ritual of avoiding uniques. "There" meaning Legendary +3 equipment.

I'm not looking to start a riot here. I don't believe Obsidian are happy with this either. Let this post inform your decisions, and feel free to post ideas for how to solve this mess. I can think of an easy one - let transmogs just be a catalog of appearances you've looted rather than requiring you to keep the item around. I like how my armor looks right now, but I will be replacing it in Emerald Stair, and keeping the old one afterwards means I'm not getting Awakened Adra out of it.

P.S. You want to get even more degenerate? Loot no uniques in Dawnshore at all, buy Exceptional equipment in Emerald Stair, then loot Dawnshore

Edited February 21 by omgFIREBALLS

[Lonlon]

 

I tested this feature extensively and I must warn you that it makes the game way too easy (even in PotD). When I reached act 2 I just stopped metagaming around unique scaling because it completely broke the game.

The breakpoint for me is when you start to NOT loot uniques to let them upscale and THEN you come back later to salvage them. If you do that, you will have access to way more high level materials/adra than you should and you will completely destroy the game. Dont salvage uniques, it will just spoil your experience. This is my own rule now :  I never salvage uniques.

That's my advice, you do you, but you've been warned 

EDIT: on the other hand, if you are willing to exploit this "feature" to the max, you SHOULD be able to upgrade a weapon all the way to Superb +3 mid act 2 (or even late act 1 if you're a gamer but i'm not sure whether the unique "pool" is large enough to achieve that or not). I'm sure you can imagine how this would break the game...

EDIT2 : if you can craft Adra Ban with corrupted adra (I doubt this knowing how previous adra recipes unlock), you may even be able to reach Legendary as early in the game... Scavenger rank 2 will help a ton here.

Edited February 21 by Lonlon

[Lonlon]

The exact route you have to follow in order to achieve Superb +3 ASAP is the following :

1) Choose a non-unique weapon you will upgrade all the way to Superb (this does not require adra, only gold). Preferably a one hander because it's less expensive. Let's call this weapon your "Template". Note that you can buy a Fine weapon from an act 1 vendor, could be better (in terms of gold/material economy) than starting from scratch (this I cant tell but it shouldn't make a huge diff).
2) Skip all lootable unique weapons in the game (you need to make sure you NEVER display their tooltip because, as soon as you make the game "load" their tooltip, their quality will be set forever and they will stop scaling with your Template's quality). (Note : vendor uniques upscale the same way but they cost a lot more gold when upgraded... not worth imo)
3) As soon as you are able to pick the scavenger rank 2 talent (cant remember the exact level), start upgrading your Template as a madman. The key part here is you can upgrade any material *3 for 1 material of the tier above.
4) When you are short on mats, go ahead and pick-up some unique weapons you left behind in order to scavenge them (they should've upgrade to match the quality of your Template), but not all of them, just enough to have the materials you need to upgrade your Template to Superb.
5) As soon as your Template reach Superb, go loot THE unique weapon you want to use for your build, along with any other unique you left behind. Salvage those useless uniques and upgrade your weapon of choice to Superb +3.
6) GGs you broke the game.
 

Note 1 : you now have tons on adra by salvaging all those Superb uniques so you could upgrade any other unique you want.

Note 2 : you can do exaclty the same with armors...

Note 3 : upgrading your Template will cost you about 15k gold (in PotD) so spare your gold accordingly, you dont need to salvage everything you loot, just enough to upgrade your Template, vendor all the rest. Also you could use a unique weapon as your Template, this will cost you adra instead of gold BUT you will be stuck at Exceptionnal +3 until you learn how to craft Corrupted Adra (and I wont spoil when that is).

Edit: There might be a better route but this is how I achieved it quite early in the game (before reloading because the game was way too trivial  )

Edited February 21 by Lonlon

[thelee]

6 hours ago, omgFIREBALLS said:

Each tier improves the item's stats, and if the "tier difference" between you and your opponent is large enough (4), the one with the better equipment gets an additional 35% bonus. As in, my weapon is so much better than your armor that on top of the impressive damage my upgraded weapon is doing against your weak armor, I get an extra 35%.

where are you people getting these numbers? honest question! i've been scouring around for these numbers, and this is actually the third distinct number i've seen. (poe wiki says 60%. i saw a reply to one of my posts on reddit saying 20%. this is the first time i've seen 35%) i don't see any tooltips in game that illustrate this. (before the day 1  patch i would get really weird tooltips that told me i got 0%)

 

anyway, i think it's clear waht the intent of the unique scaling was (to avoid "wasting" resources on upgrading mundane items only to find a better unique that now you need to invest in), but it's a shame that it's so easily metagamable.

my only thought is they should probably make resources a bit more plentiful and that you get back more resources when you break down upgraded items, and then not have uniques scale at all. this issue exists as it does right now because resources for upgrade are surprisingly scarce, even with thorough exploration.

 

Quote

I expect to finish Emerald Stair with Superb +1 or +2 equipment. I expect anyone who is playing Emerald Stair right now without research or metagaming is struggling to reach Exceptional 

it me. before the day 1 patch that adjusted the scaling, i was hitting a lot of hard gear-check encounters. with the new scaling, i can actually progress through skill alone and incremental subtier upgrades.

Edited February 21 by thelee

[Lonlon]

6 minutes ago, thelee said:

my only thought is they should probably make resources a bit more plentiful and that you get back more resources when you break down upgraded items, and then not have uniques scale at all. this issue exists as it does right now because resources for upgrade are surprisingly scarce, even with thorough exploration.

A simple fix would be to cap the quality of unique in act 1 to Fine, act 2 to Exceptionnal and so on...
This way we would still be able to "invest" in this feature but not break the game, transforming all uniques from act 1/2 to superb is just too much.

Personnally I dont know the exact numbers behind the quality system. Before the patch it was something like 90% reduction/increase i'd guess. But you're right, now it's much smoother.

[thelee]

8 minutes ago, Lonlon said:

A simple fix would be to cap the quality of unique in act 1 to Fine, act 2 to Exceptionnal and so on...
This way we would still be able to "invest" in this feature but not break the game, transforming all uniques from act 1/2 to superb is just too much.

yeah that would fix the unique system, but i got into my mess because i was upgrading different items, not realizing how rapidly expensive upgrades would become. the upgrade system as it stands right now is surprisingly punishing about not picking one weapon and armor and sticking with it, you basically can't experiment.

fine and exceptional gear are also prohibitively expensive. when i was stuck in emerald stair at extreme gear-check levels, i was about to dump my entire net worth (and everything i found so far in dawnshore and early emerald stair) into buying one exceptional bow. because you can only either sell or breakdown most gear, it creates a very scarce economy with the two choices in conflict. while you can respec skills and stats pretty easily, the game being so gear-bound and so gear-scarce actually means you have very little room for experimentation. i wonder if a solution is that in act 1 fine gear is expensive, but then merchants in act 2 sell fine gear for less (and also fine gear in act 1 becomes cheaper), but exceptional is still expensive. at least there's a cheap "floor" for gear in case you go up the wrong path, character-wise.

 

edit: according to the wiki, in early versions of the game you couldn't upgrade mundane items across quality tiers. i wonder if honestly that's a better approach and just make fine and exceptional gear a bit cheaper. upgrading a mundane weapon/armor/shield/grimoire from common +3 -> fine +0 is basically a trap in terms of how ridiculously expensive it is of your upgrade mats.

Edited February 21 by thelee

[Lonlon]

31 minutes ago, thelee said:

fine and exceptional gear are also prohibitively expensive. when i was stuck in emerald stair at extreme gear-check levels, i was about to dump my entire net worth (and everything i found so far in dawnshore and early emerald stair) into buying one exceptional bow.

I agree.
For what it's worth : I heard that vendor prices scale with difficulty. Maybe PotD economy is just supposed to be scuffed  (you can lower your difficulty to easy while bying from merchants then switch it back to PotD but... yeah.. meh)

[thelee]

9 minutes ago, Lonlon said:

For what it's worth : I heard that vendor prices scale with difficulty. Maybe PotD economy is just supposed to be scuffed 

ah if that's the case, then maybe it's kinda OK? PotD is not really supposed to be the "f*** around" difficulty, at least without the "and find out" part. still, was a pretty rude shock. the day 1 patch really salvaged my current run.

[omgFIREBALLS]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

where are you people getting these numbers? honest question! i've been scouring around for these numbers, and this is actually the third distinct number i've seen. (poe wiki says 60%. i saw a reply to one of my posts on reddit saying 20%. this is the first time i've seen 35%) i don't see any tooltips in game that illustrate this. (before the day 1  patch i would get really weird tooltips that told me i got 0%)

Eh, I think something in-game told me, but I can't find it. This article says 35% too.

[Silvaren]

I'm too pretty sure the game told me about 35% damage difference at some point. Probably while I encountered one group from the bounty list.

[Baraz]

I feel very uneasy with this system.  The extra buff/debuff in addition to your gear not being up to par.*  The meta-gaming being too rewarding to the normal immersive playthrough. 

* "Tier difference rules now only apply when there is a +/- 4 level gap."
* "Reduced damage reduction when player weapons are closer in tier to an enemy." (Eh, this line implies you do less damage even if you are less than 4 in tier difference!) 

Some aspects of this system does not feel intuitive or immersive or logical. 

There are notably Tier 2.1 or 2.2 enemies in Dawnshore, where materials only allow upgrading to Tier 2.0 (Fine baseline).  So not only do those enemies do massive damage (I play PotD), our own damage is very much reduced. 

For my fun, I adapt to it, somewhat, without meta-gaming ; that is making sure this odd system does not break my fun/immersion. 

[Baraz]

I would add that, as someone focusing on magic, I have many grimoires... upgrading all of them does not seem possible.  BUT, on the other hand, is my spell damage gimped if I use a lower tier grimoire or no grimoire at all?  Do I just need to have one single high-tier weapon equipped? (or armor?)  Go figure: it is rather occult. 

Edited Tuesday at 03:51 AM by Baraz

[patronkus]

12 minutes ago, Baraz said:

I would add that, as someone focusing on magic, I have many grimoires... upgrading all of them does not seem possible.  BUT, on the other hand, is my spell damage gimped if I use a lower tier grimoire or no grimoire at all?  Do I just need to have one single high-tier weapon equipped? (or armor?)  Go figure: it is rather occult. 

From what I understand from @thelee, your gear does factor into your spell damage. It seems like, the game calculates an average "gear score" from all your equipped pieces and then used that to calculate your spell damage. 

[Baraz]

1 hour ago, patronkus said:

From what I understand from @thelee, your gear does factor into your spell damage. It seems like, the game calculates an average "gear score" from all your equipped pieces and then used that to calculate your spell damage. 

Oh, average equipped gear : ok, that is important to know. 

[patronkus]

19 minutes ago, Baraz said:

Oh, average equipped gear : ok, that is important to know. 

Yes, you can't just ignore it. Something else that has been tested however is that the summoned weapons appear to scale based off your level. Hence, you could try ignoring having an upgraded weapon and summon say the Spirit Lance and use that to ostensibly push your gear score higher while preserving some resources.

[omgFIREBALLS]

2 hours ago, patronkus said:

From what I understand from @thelee, your gear does factor into your spell damage. It seems like, the game calculates an average "gear score" from all your equipped pieces and then used that to calculate your spell damage. 

I tried nuking the same target with the same spell with various upgrade levels on my wand/grimoire and saw the same damage.

But, seeing how my melee damage scales, there must be some form of spell scaling (other than might) or spells would be extremely weak in the endgame. Maybe just character level.

[Silvaren]

4 hours ago, Baraz said:

I feel very uneasy with this system.  The extra buff/debuff in addition to your gear not being up to par.*  The meta-gaming being too rewarding to the normal immersive playthrough. 

* "Tier difference rules now only apply when there is a +/- 4 level gap."
* "Reduced damage reduction when player weapons are closer in tier to an enemy." (Eh, this line implies you do less damage even if you are less than 4 in tier difference!) 

Some aspects of this system does not feel intuitive or immersive or logical. 

There are notably Tier 2.1 or 2.2 enemies in Dawnshore, where materials only allow upgrading to Tier 2.0 (Fine baseline).  So not only do those enemies do massive damage (I play PotD), our own damage is very much reduced. 

For my fun, I adapt to it, somewhat, without meta-gaming ; that is making sure this odd system does not break my fun/immersion. 

For me it seems to be designed by adapting some of PoE mechanics.

In PoE1 we have armors with fixed damage treshold. It scales badly in late game. In PoE2 we have percentage damage reduction which scale much better through entire game. In Avowed we have combination of both systems. And I see how Deadfire's penetration vs armor rating mechanic is similar to correlation between tiers of equipment and tiers of enemies in Avowed. The difference between penetration and armor scale the damage done, the difference between enwoy's weapon and his enemies armor scales the damage done and vice versa. Armor in PoE1/Deadfire is slowing character, the time between consecutive actions is longer because of that. In Avowed armor lowers enwoy's stamina/essence, so enwoy become tired much quickly, making the pause between consecutive series of attacks longer.

I'm not sure about single aspect of upgrade system. I didn't utilize materials conversion until halfway through Shatterscarp and then I managed to instantly upgrade Minoletta's Conduit to legendary (V). Before that I missed the fact that I can exchange lower grade materials for higher tiers. I don't remember how I was able to do it though, what triggered option for making better adra? I obtained adra ban in the world in Shatterscarp? Now in my second playthrough I'm unable to craft awakened adra in Dawnshore, so I guess I need to buy exceptional weapon in Emerald Stairs or find awakened adra there to be able to craft this material or cheese with upgrading non-unique weapon to a higher tier.

Edited Tuesday at 08:35 AM by Silvaren

[Lonlon]

3 hours ago, Silvaren said:

what triggered option for making better adra?

It seems you need to have looted one already in order to be able to craft it.

[Baraz]

9 hours ago, Silvaren said:

[...] And I see how Deadfire's penetration vs armor rating mechanic is similar to correlation between tiers of equipment and tiers of enemies in Avowed. The difference between penetration and armor scale the damage done, the difference between envoy's weapon and his enemies armor scales the damage done and vice versa. [...]

I see your logic, though I had to think it through.  There is a similar logic as you had to upgrade your weapons in PoE2 to avoid doing little damage versus certain enemies.  Some players who really ignored all the cues would get annoyed, but the game tried hard to explain it to the player. 

PoE2 though had the merit that those rules were extremely clear in the game's info and even tried to warn you if you were using a weapon that lacked the "power" (Penetration) to overcome the target's resistances.  In Avowed, the tutorial on upgrading gear is about 5 generic sentences, maybe less.  I am not exaggerating.  Unlike PoE2, they are not explicit values we can see and compare.  We here have to guess how the player's tier is calculated (I still have to do some tests in-game to verify our theories) and we can see if the enemy is Tier 2 for example (though each tier has 4 ranks) and a skull if we are a good amount below.  I prefer explicit stats and of course a better tutorial for something so impactful. 

When I upgrade a grimoire, for example, it only tells me that I improving cost and cooldown, but it probably also affects the whole tier buff/debuff system. 

Mind you, what I just said can easily be fixed in the current game.  The said values exist and a better guide/tutorial page for that can be crafted between one patch. 

The gear found being of our tier is still weird, and I hate the meta-gaming it allows, but I guess it is needed currently (?  It could be pre-determined per region and special for some uniques). 

Edited Tuesday at 06:30 PM by Baraz

[omgFIREBALLS]

2 hours ago, Baraz said:

It could be pre-determined per region and special for some uniques

Yeah, at this point I'm thinking Dawnshore uniques should always drop as Fine, Emerald Stair always as Exceptional, etc. For most part this would buff players, but the system becomes way harder to mess up or exploit - the exploit being something particularly degenerate like not looting Dawnshore uniques until you have Exceptional gear.

[Baraz]

So I did a little test : 

Casting Blizzard with Common +1 Wand and Common +2 grimoire in hand, and then again but with Fine weapon/grimoire instead. 
BUT my second weapon set had Fine +0 mace/shield, which probably screwed my test. That second Fine set screwed my test. 
My armor is also FIne +0. 
RESULT: The damage was the same versus spiders Tier 2 with 2 pips (so 2.2 you could say).  Damage was 15 all the time, even against inanimate objects. 

UPDATE - NEW RESULT : but by removing my second set of Fine gear, the Common +1 wand and Common +2 grimoire were doing only 5 damage with the same Blizzard spell.  This is quite a difference ! 

Note that I also tried with Common armor, but one set Fine weapon/shield, and my spell damage remained 15, so Fine tier nonetheless. 

CONCLUSION : evidently, as Patronkus said here, the game looks at your equipped gear (best of both weapon sets) to determine your comparative tier for offence.  So even if your grimoire is Common, if you have your best tier equipped in the other weapon set, you are good to go.  Armor did not affect my spell damage in this test, but maybe the game does consider it (?).

Edited Wednesday at 03:57 AM by Baraz
Corrected my test and found the actual conclusion ...

[thelee]

Armor being included into offense calculation seems to be assured. There was an unlisted video that got shared with me where the guy definitively shows him changing armor (and only armor), and getting a skull difference on his test target and his black bow ends up doing different damage.

Im heading to bed but ill try to remember to link it here tomorrow.

Edited Wednesday at 07:30 AM by thelee

[Baraz]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

Armor being included into offense calculation seems to be assured. There was an unlisted video that got shared with me where the guy definitively shows him changing armor (and only armor), and getting a skull difference on his test target and his black bow ends up doing different damage.

Im heading to bed but ill try to remember to link it here tomorrow.

I believe it. 
Just reporting that in my test, removing my Fine armor did not reduce my spell damage in the above set-up. Possible explanation: does the game just check the highest tier among the equipped gear?  Or maybe there are nuances we do not know about. 

[Lonlon]

Maybe there is a different damage scaling formula for summoned weapons and actual spells 

[Silvaren]

On 2/21/2025 at 3:27 PM, Lonlon said:

The exact route you have to follow in order to achieve Superb +3 ASAP is the following :

1) Choose a non-unique weapon you will upgrade all the way to Superb (this does not require adra, only gold). Preferably a one hander because it's less expensive. Let's call this weapon your "Template". Note that you can buy a Fine weapon from an act 1 vendor, could be better (in terms of gold/material economy) than starting from scratch (this I cant tell but it shouldn't make a huge diff).
2) Skip all lootable unique weapons in the game (you need to make sure you NEVER display their tooltip because, as soon as you make the game "load" their tooltip, their quality will be set forever and they will stop scaling with your Template's quality). (Note : vendor uniques upscale the same way but they cost a lot more gold when upgraded... not worth imo)
3) As soon as you are able to pick the scavenger rank 2 talent (cant remember the exact level), start upgrading your Template as a madman. The key part here is you can upgrade any material *3 for 1 material of the tier above.
4) When you are short on mats, go ahead and pick-up some unique weapons you left behind in order to scavenge them (they should've upgrade to match the quality of your Template), but not all of them, just enough to have the materials you need to upgrade your Template to Superb.
5) As soon as your Template reach Superb, go loot THE unique weapon you want to use for your build, along with any other unique you left behind. Salvage those useless uniques and upgrade your weapon of choice to Superb +3.
6) GGs you broke the game.
 

Note 1 : you now have tons on adra by salvaging all those Superb uniques so you could upgrade any other unique you want.

Note 2 : you can do exaclty the same with armors...

Note 3 : upgrading your Template will cost you about 15k gold (in PotD) so spare your gold accordingly, you dont need to salvage everything you loot, just enough to upgrade your Template, vendor all the rest. Also you could use a unique weapon as your Template, this will cost you adra instead of gold BUT you will be stuck at Exceptionnal +3 until you learn how to craft Corrupted Adra (and I wont spoil when that is).

Edit: There might be a better route but this is how I achieved it quite early in the game (before reloading because the game was way too trivial  )

I did a PotD speedrun about 5h long just for test how far can I go in dawnshore doing this and I must say - I didn't do Ralga bounty yet, but I did all quests and I cleared nearly entire map and my results are excellent 1/3 wand. Still 3 unique items left, but non of them give branches. Maybe a wand is a bad choice for this gimmick. There is more metal weapons in first area and only one unique pistol and 2 shields. I think even with metal weapon I would be still missing some herbs for upgrade even if I could buy common weapons to salvage them.

Edit:

Also I think Scavenger 1 perk doesn't do anything. I never salvaged more than 1 material from any item I broke. I picked double herbs from time to time, but I'm sure in my current  "normal" PotD playthrough I did the same without this perk. Scavenger 2 is no brainer, it works for sure.

Edited Wednesday at 05:20 PM by Silvaren