Lost Ark Gear Honing and Gear Transfer Guide: how it works (2024)

Most of Lost Ark’s endgame progression comes from upgrading your gear. This guide teaches you how Gear Honing and Gear Transfer works!

What is Gear Honing and how to do it

Gear Honing is simply the act of taking your gear to the Gear Upgrade NPCs found in Luterra, North Vern, Arthentine, Rohendel, Yorn, or Annika’s main cities.

The process uses a few sets of materials, and each tier of content has its own respective material to hone with. They each consist of a similar set of five materials with slightly different names.

Through the use of these materials, you can upgrade your gear to a maximum Honing Level of +20 – 25, which raises their item level by 20 each time for a total of 400 – 500 average gear score after fully upgrading. The Item Level increase is reduced to +5 per upgrade in Tier 3. This is important for progressing into each new “Tier” of content, which is gated by these upgrades. Currently, only +15 is needed to reach a new tier or unlock further content.

The first step is to visit a Gear Honing NPC, located in every major city. Once here, talking with the NPC will open the menu for Gear Honing and Transfer.

Next, we choose the item from the left-hand side that we want to upgrade and feed it Item XP via XP Shards, this only needs to be done once per Honing Level. This will only reset when a Honing attempt is successful and you reach the next item level for a piece of gear. This usually costs several thousand XP Shards.

The next and optional step is to add Success Materials. These can increase your honing chance by a maximum of 20%. These are not necessary for honing but can be very helpful in the later stages of honing, as honing costs increase as Item Level increases. Tier 1 and Tier 2 have a single Success Material, while Tier 3 has three different rarities of them.

Finally, is to confirm the Honing, which will consume Destruction or Guardian Stones, whether you’re honing a weapon or armor respectively. Honing also requires both Leapstones and additional XP Shards to perform each Honing.

The Honing will succeed or fail based on your Honing chance. However the Destruction Stones, Guardian Stones, Leapstones, and additional XP Shards will be consumed per attempt at Honing, regardless of the result.

Honing Materials and where you get them

Below we detail each of the five materials used in Gear Honing.

XP Shards

The first honing material can be referred to as XP Shards as that is how they function. In Tier 1 these are called Harmony Shards, In Tier 2 they’re called Life Shards, and in Tier 3 they’re called Honor Shards. These grant Item XP to enable you to hone and are additionally used to attempt the Honing process once an item has been given enough XP.

XP Shards can be obtained from most daily and weekly level 50 content. This includes Abyss Dungeons, Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, Secret Maps, Towers, and Una’s Tasks. Chaos Dungeons will provide the most XP Shards on a daily basis, usually granting several thousand.

On a weekly basis, a limited quantity can be purchased from the Tea and Libra Guild Vessel found near the major ports. Similarly, Chaos Dungeons will drop a currency when run after exhausting your Aura of Resonance. This currency is roster bound and can be traded in for additional materials, with each Tier of content having its own unique pair of currencies. These are traded to the Chaos Exchange Vendor, found near the Chaos Dungeon Entrances in major cities.

Honing Stones

The Second pair of Honing Materials are Honing Stones, which come in both Destruction (Weapon) and Guardian (Armor) variants. These are used alongside XP Shards and other materials to attempt honing. In Tier 1, these are Destruction/Guardian Stone Fragments; In Tier 2, they are Destruction/Guardian Stones; In Tier 3, they are Destruction/Guardian Stone Crystals.

Much like XP Shards, Honing Stones comes from a variety of Level 50 content. This includes Abyss Dungeons, Chaos Dungeons, Guardian Raids, and Towers (not on first clears). Chaos Dungeons are also the best daily source for these materials, usually granting a few hundred daily.

Similar to XP Shards, a limited quantity can be purchased from the Tea and Libra Guild Vessel found near the major ports. These can also be acquired with the currencies acquired from Chaos Dungeon by talking to the Chaos Exchange Vendor.

Leapstones

Leapstones are an additional currency used to attempt the honing process. These are required for each and every attempt, and will often be bottlenecks for progression. In Tier 1, they are called Harmory Leapstones; In Tier 2, they are called Life Leapstones; In Tier 3, they are either Honor Leapstones or Great Honor Leapstones as you get higher in Item Level.

Like the other materials, Leapstones can be gotten from a variety of Level 50 content. This Includes Abyss Dungeons, Guardian Raids, Towers, and Una’s Tasks. Una’s Tasks and Guardian Raids are the best daily sources for these materials, usually granting a few dozen each. The Weekly PvP Una’s Task alone will often grant several of them, making it worthwhile to test the waters in PvP at least once a week.

These can also be found in Boss Rush Reward chests, but entry tickets for Boss Rush are also RNG Drops from Chaos Dungeons.

While these cannot be purchased from the Tea and Libra Guild Vessel in ports, they are still available in a limited quantity from the Chaos Exchange Vendor.

Fusion Materials

Fusion Materials are an additional item required for honing in Tiers 2 and 3. Similar to Leapstones, they are consumed with every attempt, regardless of pass or fail. They can also be a bottleneck for progression.

These are obtained from limited sources. They can be gotten from some Sidequests, Stronghold Crafting, and the Welcome Challenges. Stronghold Crafting is primary source of obtaining them. The acquisition is only limited by Life Skill materials from Fishing, Hunting, or Excavation, as well as your crafting queue in your stronghold.

In particular, you will need the blue rarity Fishing, Hunting, or Excavation items, which can be gotten in their respective regions. There are two different recipes that allow you to create them as bound items, by using Stronghold exclusive materials; or unbound items, using materials that are not from your Stronghold. It’s always better to make them unbound, so they can be placed in Roster Storage, allowing multiple characters can use them.

Success Chance Materials

The last set of materials is completely optional, and harder to come across. These materials are used before attempting honing to increase your Honing Success Chance by up to 20% for the current Honing attempt and are consumed on each attempt they are used.

In Tier 1, these are called Star’s Breath. In Tier 2, they are called Moon’s Breath. In Tier 3, these are called Solar Grace, Solar Blessing, and Solar Protection.

Unlike most other materials, these are fairly exclusive and don’t come from most of the same sources. These are typically rewarded for completion of a Cube Dungeon, and rarely from Gold or Red Portal events in Chaos Dungeons.

In addition to these, All tiers have additional items that can be used to increase their success by 10%, but only for upgrades between +7 and +15. These are called Honing Books.

These are incredibly rare drops from Abyss Dungeons. Currently they have no other source, but can be just as helpful as other Success Chance Materials.

The Benefits of Honing

There’s really only one key reason to Hone your gear, and that’s to make your character stronger and progress into later stages of the endgame. Not only do you get stronger, but you also get access to harder content like tougher Abyss Dungeons.

Some content you may already be running daily also becomes more challenging and rewarding as well, Like Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids. This helps to accelerate the later stages of progression

What is Gear Transfer and how to do it

Gear Transfer is a process that can be used to take your current Honing Level and transfer it to a new piece of gear. This can be for various reasons, ranging from quality differences to simply carrying over some progress from the previous tier of gear.

Unlike Honing, however, no special materials are actually required. This process only uses silver, but can be expensive and really add up if used frequently. So it’s best to do it when you have a good reason to, like transferring your upgrade from the Rare set of your current gear to a Heroic or Legendary set of gear in the same tier.

Much like with Honing, we’re visiting the same Gear Honing NPC to begin the process. This time, however, we’re headed over to the Gear Transfer option. Due to not requiring any additional materials, this really simplifies the steps to perform Gear Transfer.

First, we begin by selecting the Target Gear Piece (Gear for Transfer), or the piece we’re transferring upgrades to. This will then limit the items on the right side to those that are eligible for Gear Transferring to items of the same slot.

Then select the Gear to be used as the Source Gear (Material Gear) by, or the piece the upgrade will come from, by Right-clicking. This will place it into the designated place in the middle of this UI, like how

The UI will now show how much the Transfer will cost, and the resulting piece of gear in the middle of the UI. Select Confirm Transfer, then accept the warning that indicates that the gear used for transfer is lost and its Honing Level is transferred to the new piece of gear.

Gear of the same Tier will Transfer at a 1:1 Ratio. This means you can carry over any honing level to a new piece of gear in the same tier, regardless of rarity, and make progress on your character that way. This is helpful as Abyssal Dungeons for each tier will give access to crafting materials for both a Heroic set and a Legendary set.

At Honing Level 15, or +15, you can also transfer your gear into pieces of the next tier. However, this will drop the Honing Level back to +1. This saves you a few early materials and lets you get a little bit of a headstart into your next tier of gearing. This is very worthwhile, as gives a nice bump and saves you some of your XP Shards and Leapstones.

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