Aika (Part Five)

Crafting

The crafting system in Aika is pretty simple in my opinion and it doesn't involve the grind that you would often find in other MMOs. Any player, whether your a first-timer or a veteran crafter, can successfully forge an item and sometimes there's even a chance for you to create a superior item. In other words, everyone is equal because there is simply no leveling system in crafting. You don't need to grind to a "particular crafting level" in order to make something.

To craft an item, all you need to do is gather the necessary materials and then access the "Anvil" which can be found in major cities like Regenshein. However, some of these materials will often need to be crafted from a combination of raw materials looted off monsters plus some items which can be bought from the blacksmith.

Due to the difficulty in looting items (for crafting) off monsters, it may sometimes be useful for you to disassemble unwanted or old equipments which you may have in order to salvage some usable materials for crafting better items. But owing to the randomness in materials obtained off disassembly, I often find it useful to only disassemble equipments which are low in durability while npcing (selling to npc) equipments which are high in durability (for gold).

Equipments

Equipments in Aika can basically be modified in a few ways. You can reinforce, enchant, level down, change its visual appearance and also increase its max durability.

To reinforce an equipment, you will need to approach the "Alchemist" NPC. Next, place the equipment you wish to upgrade together with the appropriate Pellurite (Hira) or Rubecine (Kaize). For example, a rank E weapon would require rank E pellurites.

When reinforcing, you can also place in liquid extracts of the same rank to "protect" your equipment from being destroyed if the attempt fails. But as far as I know, it is relatively safe to reinforce your equipment without the extract up to around +3 (for normal gears) and +4 (for superior ones).

However, I guess, the fun part starts when you upgrade it beyond +3. From +4 onwards (up to the max of +11), the equipment you reinforced will start to glow. But I read from a post in Aika Forum (gPotato) that this glowing effect is limited to weapons (all) and certain armor sets (unique ones such as Mana, BlackGhost and GrayHawk).

Reinforce Level	+4	+5	+6	+7	+8	+9	+10	+11
Colour of Glow	Faint Blue	Blue	Strong Blue	Yellow	Golden	Red	Pink	Purple Blue

To enchant an equipment, you will need to approach the "Enchanter" NPC. But first, please make sure that the equipment can be enchanted. You can do so by hovering your mouse over the equipment in question.

Next, you will need either one of these items, auralars (vaizans) or magical crystals. There are various qualities of auralars and the better its quality, the stronger the enchantment it will offer. However, the downside of using auralars is that the enchantment it offers will be random.

The only way to control the type of enchantments you impart onto your equipment is to use magical crystals, but these are rare to come by. Furthermore, the enchantment found on the magical crystal might not be what your looking for or it can only be enchanted upon an equipment part which you do not have slot for.

When you have finally decided on which equipment to enchant and the material to be used for the enchanting, place both the items into their respective slots as shown in the above picture. Do note that each equipment only has up to three enchantment slots and enchantments cannot be overwritten or erased (though there is an item to do so in the cash shop).

To level down an equipment means that you pay a certain amount of gold to the blacksmith to modify the item so that you can use it at a lower level. Take for example, your level 22 and you have an awesome item that can only be used when your level 24. You can either wait until your level 24 or you can take it to the blacksmith to level it down so that you can use it now, immediately.

The cost of leveling down an equipment depends on the rank of the item and naturally, the higher its rank, the more costly it will be to level it down. And although there is a chance to fail this process, it is less dangerous than reinforcing. Failing a level down will only increase the item's level requirement (to use). It will not destroy the item. Again, you will need to mouse over the item to check whether it can be leveled down in the first place.

To change an equipment's visual appearance, you will need three items. The first item is the equipment whose stats you desire to keep. The second item is the equipment whose visual appearance is what you want. Lastly, you will need a medium called "Athlon" to perform this process. This medium will be consumed regardless of the outcome (items are unharmed if the process fails).

However, you will have to know that the two pieces of equipment involved in this process must fulfill certain criteria. They must be of the same equipment category and be worn by the same character class. This means that you cannot perform this process to transfer a weapon's stats onto an armor piece (or vice versa). Likewise, you cannot perform this process to transfer a warlock's helmet stats onto a warrior's helmet.

The primary "useful" purpose of this is to trick an opponent into thinking your a low level and thus letting their guards down when engaging you. But I think you shouldn't waste too much effort on this because most of the time people take note of whose a threat by their names more than by their appearance.

Lastly, to increase the max durability of an item, you will need to procure a Hammer of Forging / Durable Hammer (called Normal Durability Increaser in AikaSEA). According to gPotato's wiki, this item can be found in the cash item shop, but from what I heard via fellow gamers in AikaSEA, it can be bought from an NPC in Epheso (Leopold) at a costly price (probably in the range of a million gold). Sadly, I could not verify this information because there was a level restriction to use the air transport to Leopold (required level 51 but I was only level 41).

Anyway, this durable hammer increases the max durability of an item by 10% and there is a restriction whereby an item can only perform this upgrade once. In my opinion, the only purpose of getting this upgrade is so that your items can last longer in battles. This is especially useful on weapons for dual gunners (as they have a skill that increases damage ability at the expense of durability).

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