Ragnarok Online 2 (Part Four) ~ All You Need to Know About Games

Upgrading & Disassembling

After fooling around quite a bit in Ragnarok Online 2, I've found out that this fella called the Disassembling Expert appears to play a central part in improving and upgrading your equipment. However, I do have to warn you that upgrading can only be performed upon equipments of level 25 and above. Furthermore, you would need to know that although the process is simple and easy to understand, the actual carrying out of this task can be quite tedious and risky.

Equipment upgrading (a.k.a. refining) is generally divided into two types, Armor Upgrading and Weapon Upgrading. Each of these types would require a different ingredient for refinement, Ernium and Oridecon. And as the level of refinement increases, the quantity of ingredient needed would increase as well. For example, upgrading an armor from 0 to +1 requires 1 Ernium, while upgrading the same armor from +1 to +2 would require 2 Erniums.

Next, Ernium and Oridecon each have three forms, powder, crystal and piece.

In powder form, they are used to upgrade equipments from level 25 to 39.
In crystal form, they are used to upgrade equipments between level 40 to 49.
In piece form, they are used to improve level 50 equipments.

As far as I know, there are no "safe upgrade zones" in RO2. Each and every time you perform an equipment upgrade, you will carry the risks of failing. And upon failure, your item will either drop in upgrade levels or break and be gone forever so the general rule of thumb is to use Karniums to upgrade stuff that you cannot afford to lose. This is because upgrading equipments using Karniums not only prevents the item from breaking but also raises the success rate by 10%. Be warned though that Karniums are very expensive and hard to obtain so most people only use them to upgrade max level or rare items.

Now if you were wondering, Ernium and Oridecon (in powder form) are both obtained from disassembling armors and weapons (of level 25 and above) respectively. And depending upon the rarity of the item being broken down, the chance of obtaining more Ernium/Oridecon and useful ingredients will increase (as shown in the screenshot). However, as I've only tested low level green rarity items, I'm not sure how the higher level and rarer items perform. Perhaps they may give crystal and piece forms instead?

Anyway, what I do know is that from there onwards, the Ernium and Oridecon in powder form can be made into crystal and piece form through the help of a high profession level Alchemist. And as far as it goes, you would need 4 powders to make 1 crystal and 4 crystals to make 1 piece.

As for Karniums, I have basically only encountered it once during the CNY event where we traded in special drops for red packets and in turn, those red packets could be exchanged for a Karnium if you had enough of them. Apart from that, I heard that there is a tiny chance of obtaining Karniums at random from opening "Munil's Treasure Chest" (not sure if its the yellow one or beige or both as they're both worded the same in their descriptions). However, these are sold in the RO2 Cash Shop and apparently the word is that someone opened 50 of these boxes only to get 4 Karniums.

(By the way, do I hear someone shouting..."All this information is fine, but how the heck do we disassemble an equipment!?")

Well essentially, to disassemble an item, you would need to approach a "Disassembling Expert" and acquire one of the stones that he is selling. The fairy stone is used to break down level 25 to 39 equipment, spirit stone for level 40 to 49 equipment and magic stone for level 50 equips.

Upon purchasing the appropriate stone, just open your inventory and right click on the stone before selecting the desired equipment to break down. Its as simple as that.

Card Synthesis
Since we just touched upon a risky subject of upgrading equips, I reckon that I might as well introduce to you an equally dangerous one, combining your cards. But before I go into the actual combining procedure, I wish to first touch upon card ranks.

In Ragnarok Online 2, cards are classified into 3 general ranks, Green (Normal & Normal+), Blue (Silver) and Yellow (Gold). While green cards can be obtained fairly easily by farming the corresponding field monsters for it, getting the blue and yellow cards would prove to be a tougher challenge simply because of either the "lack in quantity" of those kinds of monsters that drop them and/or difficulty in killing them (usually since they are boss type mobs). So in order to obtain these "rare-ranked" cards, we turn to card synthesis or otherwise known as combining cards.

To combine cards, you would first need to gather at least five different cards. And if I'm not wrong, they would also need to be of the same rank as well. Next, find the "Card Master", purchase a Card Synthesis Stone and then open up the card combination window as shown (also done via the Card Master NPC). Finally, together with the Card Synthesis Stone, slot all the five cards into the window, click "Combine" and hope for the best.

There isn't much information with regards to this since the game is still relatively new (OBT released on Jan 2013). So anything below is a mixture of hearsay, facts and guessing. Be Warned.

If you fail, all the cards used in the synthesis would be destroyed. But in the event that you do succeed (which is only a 50% chance), then either one of the five Normal ranked (Green) cards you've placed would become a "Normal+" (still Green) at random or you would gain a random Silver ranked (Blue) card.

If the five cards you've placed were Silver ranked cards, then I guess there is a chance that it would still follow the same system as when combining Normal ranked cards, that is that, one of your Silver ranked cards would turn into a "Silver+" at random or you would gain a random Gold ranked (Yellow) card.

Naturally this is all just guessing of course, since due to their rarity and difficulty to obtain (need five), blue cards aren't quite really used in this sort of combining test yet. Furthermore, I still haven't observed any traces of "Silver+" or "Gold" cards being sold on auction either so do take all these with a pinch of salt.

Finally, I wish to talk about this curious object that I've found sold in the RO2 Cash Shop, the "Card Designated Synthesis". Apparently, from articles I've found on the web, it states that this object when used in the card synthesis would allow you to specify which card you would like to be returned to you upgraded, in the event of a success.

However, the funny thing is that in the item's in-game description it actually states something else instead. And from what I feel after reading the description, I tend to get the idea that this "Card Designated Synthesis" thingy actually serves to just "protect" your chosen card such that it doesn't disappear if the card synthesis fails so do take note of this possibility if you ever do decide to use one of them.

That is all. Good Luck on your card synthesis.

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