Augmentation and Why You Should Give a Fff About It:
Edit: SoOoOoOo I completely forgot to actually post this and it was just sitting in my drafts and then instead of pressing post I pressed delete so here we are again.
So Iceborne is now 2 days away! YAY! Ah, Master Rank where we’ll all feel like absolute noobs as all these familiar monster we grew to love and appreciate will murder us to death in less hits. Fun!
So by now a lot of us have basically every armor piece and weapon we own augmented but there’s still a lot of new and newish players out there who still need to reach level 50 and do a lot of things and one of those very important things is augmenting your armor. What is it?
On armors augmentation allows you to unlock more upgrading which means you can make a jump from 74 to 92 in armor rating for each independent piece and since there are 5 pieces you can wear it’ll bring the total amount to 460 (if my math is correct). You’ll need to upgrade your armor completely before you can augment. So what do you need in order to do this?
Step 1: Beat the base game’s main storyline. Murder baby alien or as my boyfriend calls it glowstick.
Step 2: Gather tempered monster clues to unlock investigations.
Step 3: Fight some tempered monsters.
Step 4: Leave an offering to RNGesus and pray. Pray like you’ve never prayed before in your life!
…yeah…ya see, tempered monsters will have a strictly RNG based chance of dropping streamstones or gleaming streamstone for armors and warrior’s streamstone or hero’s streamstone for weapons. These are heavily coveted by everyone and that’s what you’ll mostly be doing in endgame. Farming the ever loving fuck out of tempered monsters in investigations.
Now the type of stone you get is based on what level the tempered monster falls under so here is a neat little graph that someone that was not me made to make this a lot easier.
As you can see we have three tiers (1, 2 and 3) and the exception list at the bottom. Yes, there is an Arch Tempered Xeno’jiiva and Arch Tempered Zorah Magdaros but they skipped tempered and went straight into AT so that’s why they’re an exception.
So which tier should you go for? Threat level 2 and 3. Here’s why: the rarity of your armor.
Rarity 1-4 requires 1x Streamstone Shard, 3x Fucium Ore, 3,000z
Rarity 5 requires 1x Streamstone Shard, 1x Dragonbone Relic, 5,000z
Rarity 6 requires 1x Streamstone, 1x Bird Wyvern Gem, 10,000z
Rarity 7 requires 1x Streamstone, 1x Wyvern Gem, 20,000z
Rarity 8 requires 1x Gleaming Streamstone, 2x Elder Dragon Bones, 30,000z
Honestly speaking you’ll be using rarities 6-8, maybe a rarity 5 may sneak in because of a hard to find skill and you haven’t found the decoration for it so you’re forced to use an armor piece for it. You definitely will not be using 1-4 so that’s a waste of time.
Another thing I wanna add is that augmenting armor is extremely expensive, however, it is worth every single penny!
Now moving on to the weapon items which just like the armors is divided in their rarity. Again, make sure your weapon is fully upgraded because you won’t be able to until you do so.
Rarity 6 requires 1x Warrior Streamstone
Rarity 7 requires 2x Warrior Streamstones
Rarity 8 requires 1 Hero Streamstone
Now weapons are handled differently than armors starting with the fact that there are different variations of the Hero and Warrior streamingstones.
Sword are for Great Swords and Long Swords
Blade are for Sword & Shield and Dual Blades
Hammer are for Hammers and Hunting Horns
Lance are for Lances and Gunlances
Axe are for Switch Axes and Charge Blades
Shaft are for Insect Glaives and Bows
Ranged are for Light Bowguns and Heavy Bowguns
With armors you just upgraded their defenses but with weapons you add things to them depending on how many slots there are. Rarity 6 has three slots, rarity 7 has two slots and rarity 8 has one slot.
You have a total of 5 improvements you can do to your weapons:
Attack Increase: raises base Attack Power by 5 with each application.
Affinity Increase: raises base Affinity by 10% the first time you augment and then 5% the second or third time you augment it.
Defense Increase: raises Defense by 10 with each application and applies a passive buff that randomly reduces damage taken. Chance to reduce damage increases with each application, and the buff activates independently from Divine Blessing.
Slot Upgrade: adds a Decoration Slot to the Weapon. Slot level increases with each application.
Health Regen: restores Health with each attack. How much you get back depends on the weapon type and how much damage was dealt. This stacks beautifully with Recovery Up!
So many choices, so many weapons, so much confusion! That’s ok. Listen, I ain’t gonna sit here and yell at you about following the meta or else you’ll die, you know how you play and what your needs are so I suggest you think it over and plan your strategy out and then augment how you believe it’ll best benefit you. However, I’ll gladly give my two cents on the matter.
I never touch defense, slot or attack because I just do not believe it is worth it. Defense is kind of useless unless you max it out and by then you’ll have broken any chance at a good build. Slot upgrade is also a waste because you can easily manage your decorations in the armor and charm sets. Attack can be raised through the use of items you take with you on hunts and through meals as well as through other skills so that’s a waste of resources and time.
Another guide you’ll see a lot is that melee weapons should only be augmented with Health Regen and all ranged weapons should be augmented with Affinity. This isn’t exactly true, I myself use a build with the Anja Arch III bow that has 2 Health Regen and 1 Affinity which is mixed in with the Recovery Up skill just to tackled AT Vaal Hazak and it works perfectly. However, there has been only one HBG I’ve put HR into but it was because it was an experiment and thankfully it worked out in my favor. Again, you do you and what you feel is best for you but also be warned that once you augment a weapon you cannot take it off. You’d need to make the weapon all over again.
So yeah, that’s all there is to augmentation. Not that hard aside from the stinking RNG. Expensive af but like I said it’s worth every cent.
“Um, I don’t have any augmentation options when I speak to the smithy at the workshop.”
That’s where step 4 comes in. You won’t have that option unlocked until you get your very first Streamstone or Gleaming Streamstone. A lot of people suggest hunting threat level 2 tempered monsters but again this is based on false rumors that those drop the items more frequently and again that’s wrong. So get out there and farm those tempered monsters and remember they are VERY, VERY STRICTLY BASED ON RNG!
