How to Upgrade Your Item Level in Lost Ark

The best part of any RPG is finding and equipping your character with the best gear you can find. Lost Ark is no different, but there are some unique systems in play that may be a bit confusing for new players to wrap their heads around. In this guide, we’ll give you a rundown of how to upgrade your item level and gear in Lost Ark. We’ll also explain the basics of how Gear Honing works, in case you were busy spamming the G key and skipped through the tutorial.

How to Upgrade Your Item Level in Lost Ark

To upgrade your gear’s item level in Lost Ark, you will need to visit the Gear Honing NPC in a major city like Vern Castle. You can type [Gear Honing] into the search on the World Map to find nearby NPCs. The Gear Honing location shows up with a blacksmith hammer on the map.

The way upgrading gear works in Lost Ark is that you never lose your Gear Level. If you find gear with better stats, you can simply “Transfer” your Gear Level to the new item. When you reach level 50, you can start by obtaining the free 302 Gear Set and upgrading it using the currency you have available and the currency you farm through dungeons, raids, islands, etc. 

How does Gear Honing Work in Lost Ark?

The Gear Honing menu has two main tabs:

1. Gear Honing
2. Gear Transfer

Gear Honing

The Gear Honing tab is where you can upgrade your current gear using Harmony Shards, Destruction Stone Fragments, Harmony Leapstones, Guardian Stone Fragments, and other currency. Your item level, dictated by the average of your equipped gear item levels, basically determines the difficulty of endgame content you can play. Therefore, there is no reason to hoard currency—spend it when you get it! It is always essential to upgrade your gear because there is no risk of losing it unless you manually dismantle the piece of gear you’ve honed.

The process of honing gear is two-fold. First, you will click on a piece of gear and click on the Upgrade button. If you have enough Harmony Shards, click on the max button to maximize your Gear XP and click on the Upgrade button. After that’s done, the gear will be maxed on XP and ready to hone. You can then click on the Gear Honing button for that item to ascend it to the next item level. You can repeat this process forever, but note that eventually, there will be a chance to fail the Gear Honing process at higher levels. It’s a bad feeling when that happens, but it’s how the RNG works in this game.

What happens when you upgrade a piece of gear and then find another item of the same type with better stats? Well, that’s why the Gear Transfer tab exists.

Gear Transfer

Using the Gear Transfer tab, you can transfer a piece of gear’s item level to a new piece of gear. Select the target gear for transfer (the high item level gear), and then choose the item you want to transfer the Honing level from. The Honing level of the old item will then be transferred to the new item. Now, you’ve got your item that has better stats with the same Honing level as your previous piece of gear. 

When you start doing Abyssal Dungeons, you can make far better gear than you previously had. That’s when you will be using the Gear Transfer tab frequently. 

That’s an overall rundown of how to upgrade your item level in Lost Ark so you can progress through the endgame content. Once you visit the Gear Honing NPC, it should all become clear to you.

For more related content and guides, check out our website’s Lost Ark section.