Enhance Guide

Enhancing is an interesting alternative to enchanting for improving the grade of your equipment. It allows you to increase the grade of your equipment without a sacrificial item of the same type and grade. The risk is that there is a chance to lose the item altogether. However, for obtaining higher grade items and at higher levels where gear and stones are harder to come by, enhancing is arguably the more viable option. This is just a quickie guide to using the mechanics of enhancing to your advantage.

1) What you need:
Item(s) you wish to enhance, and enhance stones of the appropriate level (I for gear level 30 and below, II for levels 31-60, III for 61-100, etc). The number of stones required is equal to the grade of the item to be enhanced + 1. SO, to enhance a +3 Gilgamesh Sword (lvl 60), you would need 4 Enhance Stone [II]. There is a 1000g fee for each enhancement you attempt.

2) Where to go:
NPC Vulcanus in Rome Bazaar. Just go to Rome, go to the NPC info under the game info tab, search Vulcanus, and auto-move.

3) Before you start:
Sit and watch others at Vulcanus. Look at the Notification Window (above your chat window). You will see all enhancement attempts. Just watch and look for patterns. You will likely begin to see that the process is prone to streaks of successes or failures.

4) How to work it:
Get your stones and items and get to Vulcanus. Watch the notifications. Wait until you see a streak of 4 or 5 failures without a success, and then give your item a shot. keep watching the notifications as the bar fills up. If you see two successes or a success followed by a fail before your enhance goes through, it may be wise to cancel the enhancement and save your item.

Another strategy is to visit Vulcanus at a slow time and bring a lot of spirit gear and level [I] stones. Go crazy on the spirit stuff until you get a favorable streak of multiple failures (again 4 or more). Then put in the item you really want to enhance and have at it.

Some advice:
Watch and learn. Before risking any big items, spend ample time observing others and practicing with lesser items. Like other gambling, there is no surefire way to get what you want out of enhancing, but you can tip the odds in your favor by a significant amount. It is important to get a feel for the mechanics. Sometimes Vulcanus is fairly predictable, and sometimes he goes haywire. If you are patient and watch, you will begin to develop an instinct on when he is in a good mood and handing out successes in a regular manner. When he goes haywire, get out. Always know when to quit. If you get your 5 fails in a row, then try your big item and fail, don't get into the mindset that the next one will be a success. I have gotten strings of 9+ fails and killed some good items thinking this way. Better to cut your losses and come back another time.

It seems enhance stones require spectacular luck to be on your side.. I was never lucky so I don't dare gamble except maybe with Atlas Ores. Even then it's very expensive and risky. See what G1cannon did on this example http://g1cannon.blogspot.com/2010/05/atlantica-online-atlas-ore-adventure.html.

Personally I will enhance BK and Gilgamesh equips that I crafted that I don't really care about. Usually you craft in big batches so with law of averages you are more likely to come out closer to an even 50% success rate. If you get ahead early, get out early. If you're down early, be patient or come back later.

And I think it's important to measure the value of your item vs. the value of enhance stones. You can buy enhance IIs for 30-40k normally, sometimes at 20k. Compared to BK and Gilg items going 400k-500k or more that's pretty negligible I'd say. Now enhancing lvl 70 and 80 gear that go for less than 250k at times (50k even) doesn't make much sense to me when enhance IIIs sell 120-175k. Even if you hit 50% success rate in this scenario you are down quite a bit. Doesn't make sense to me for lvl 90 gear either when the non body armors go for around 350-450k. I'd only consider at the conqueror and up where they're valued around 1.4-1.5m for non body armor and freezing I think is around 2.75m +. The 125-175k pricetag of enhance III in that case is relatively not that much.