Runes of Magic Guide: Tiering

Tiering your gear is an important aspect of Runes of Magic. For each tier, you gain stat boosts. I’ve been playing the game a year and have only tiered a couple items. I planned on doing more later, but never got around to it…yet.

This is a small guide to help you understand and start tiering your equipment, be it boots, swords, etc…

* For every tier you add to a piece of equipment, you raise that equipments base damage, or defense by 10%. Taking a hammer, sword, bow, etc… from tier 1 to tier 4 will grant a 30% increase in damage, over base damage.
* To actually change the tier of a piece of equipment, you’ll need to use the Arcane Transmuter that every player gains access to at level 10. You find it by opening your bag, and selecting the corresponding button below your item slots(It’s near the button that looks like a gift). You’ll also need to prepare mana stones and fusion stones to complete the process of tiering. Fusion stones can be bought in-game or through the Item Mall. In-game you will find vendors selling fusion stones, and the Item Mall sells Purified Fusion Stones. The only way to gain a mana stone is by creating it yourself from fusion stones or buying one in the auction house. No in-game vendors sell mana stones.
* The difference between in-game fusion stones, and the Item Mall’s purified fusion stones:

Fusion Stones: All Fusion Stones come with at least one predetermined low level stat and two random stats determined after purchase (note: the two random stats may end up being blank, giving you a Fusion Stone with only one bad stat), so anytime you create a Mana Stone with a Fusion Stone, the best you can end up with is a Mana Stone that has one bad stat in addition to whatever unique stats were on the piece of equipment that you chose to transmute with your Fusion Stone.
Fusion Stones with only one bad stat, meaning your two randoms turned out to be blank, are fairly uncommon, and you will typically end up with a stone that has three bad stats attributed to it.You can imagine that after creating three Mana Stones via the more common Fusion Stones, you could be left with a pool of stats that has nine unique bad stats. This means that regardless of the good stats available in the pool, your equipment will end up with six of the nine bad stats.
The trick here is to make sure that the bad stats are all duplicates of each other, which means that all three Fusion Stones used in creating Mana Stones must have the exact same three bad stats.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy Fusion Stones from vendors that come with the same three specific bad stats; at best, one stat will always be random, and you won’t know what it will be until after you buy it. The best thing you can do is either buy three matching Fusion Stones from the Auction House, or buy a few from the vendor and then try to hunt down two more matching ones from the Auction House. Remember, the stats must be identical in type and tier for them to be considered duplicates of each other; a Stamina I, Stamina II, and Stamina III will not be considered duplicates, and can all be transmuted onto a single piece of equipment.

Purified Fusion Stones: Purified Fusion Stones solve this bad stat problem, by allowing you to create a Mana Stone with only the stats that you want it to have, i.e. those stats on the equipment that you transmute the Purified Fusion Stone with to make the Mana Stone. This way, you can create a pool of stats that only has six great unique stats to draw from, which ultimately gives you a piece of equipment with six great stats.

so you buy the stones one way or the other. You are now ready to create a mana stone. What was all that business about 3 mana stones? Well When you want to increase the tier of a mana stone which in turn will increase the tier of your equipment, and continue to maintain the stats that you want, you’ll need to do things in 3’s. Because in order to increase tiers of a manastone to say tier 4, you will need three teir 3 mana stones, and you want them to have all the same stats, so that’s why we talked about using three fusion stones with identical stats.

Let’s say you make your very first mana stone. You’ll need a piece of equipment, which you will lose, and then you need a fusion stone. put these two items into the Arcane Transmuter. You will need to spend charges that you can buy using Phirius Tokens, or bought from the Item Mall. Phirius Tokens are tokens, same with charges. No difference in what a charge is whether you buy it in-game or from the Item Mall. Phirius Tokens are, of course, an in-game currency you get from mainly doing daily quests.

You hit transmute and you get 1 mana stone with the tier that the equipment, you used, was. You also get the stats from the fusion stone.

If I want to take my tier 3 sword to tier 4, I could use a combination of buying fusion stones from AH and from a vendor to get 3 identical fusion stones(to ensure My finished sword will have the stats I want and expect). I then can buy any old piece of equipment regardless of what it is. It could be cloth, plate, boot, belt, etc… The important thing is what tier it is. I can buy tier 3 items so I will need 3 of them. I buy them from a vendor, and put on piece of equipment in the AT with one fusion stone, and create a mana stone. I do this two more times with the other fusion stones and pieces of equipment I don’t want(but have the tier I want), and then I end up with 3 identical mana stones all of tier 3. That’s why I wanted tier 3 equipment. The mana stones used that tier. So now I have 3 tier three mana stone that I put into the AT and create 1(one) teir 4 mana stone.

To finish, NOW I can use the good sword that I don’t want destroyed, and likewise I want the new tier as well as the new stats. I put the tier 4 mana stone and my good sword into the AT and create a new sword that has gone from tier 3 to tier 4 and has the stats I want.

This process is the same regardless of tiers. If I want to go from tier 9 to tier 10, I go through this process. Unfortunately what you will discover, is that you can’t simply by junk equipment that is tier 9, from any vendors in game. I believe the highest tier is 3, sold by vendors, so anything above that requires creating equipment a tier higher(that will be your junk equipment you’ll lose). This whole system can become increasingly expensive with all the fusion stones, equipment pieces, and charges you’ll need to make a higher tiered good piece of equipment you want to keep.

Here is a simple item cost for taking what you will need to take an item from tier 3 to tier 1o

To create one tier 10 item(from tier 3):
Requires 6561 fusion stones (~13,122,000 gold)
Requires 6561 pieces of tier 3 equipment (~10,386,063 gold)
Requires 9841 Arcane Transmutor charges (19,700 diamonds or 2,953 days of dailies)

Don’t let this table scare you too much. Yes if you do the calculations of how much diamonds cost in real world dollars, it can be frightening. However, I personally have had guild mates who’ve never spent a real world dime, and have achieved tier 10 equipment in around 1-2 months. There are many finer subtleties to the game than just transmuting, and it’s hard to accurately place value and determine a static value-x-time chart for every player to do this. Simply, there is just too wide a window of variables to accurately nail this down as to what it will cost you in time, fun, play time, and money(whether real or in-game gold).

As you probably are wondering now, yes, there is a lot of factors that come into play when you consider all the different types of stats in the game that are possible to add to fusion stones. There are rules to what can and cannot be added. You can’t have identical stats, for one thing. I will save the details on stats for another time though.

The number of tiers is also expected to be unlimited. I say expected because to date(a year after the game started), the first server has just made the first tier 11 piece of equipment. I don’t even think anyone of my server has tier 11 yet.

I know I went through a lot of repetition and over explaining with this guide, but I feel it is important when trying to grasp the concept and rules for the first time. Many people have woes about the process, and it can be confusing when trying to get help from multiple sources and reason it on your own.