Six grades, what each one adds, how the forge climbs them, what a forge level and a temper roll buy, and what disenchanting pays.

Six grades of the same design

Every drop rolls a grade. The design does not change - a Cobalt Helmet is a Cobalt Helmet - but a higher grade carries more of what that piece already does, plus a skill bonus, plus room for more imbues. The chances below are what an ordinary kill out in the world rolls.

• An elite monster multiplies purple, red and gold by 2. The finisher standing at the top of a tier is the best odds the open world has.
• Gold does not drop in the field - it comes from the Descent. The boss at the bottom of a run pays it at 5% a clear, and the dungeon's chests and the token shelf sell it outright. Red has both doors: the field, and every chamber and boss down there.
• Tier 1 is the exception, because it has no dungeon underneath it: it is the one hunting ground that pays both top grades on its own, red at 0.8% and gold at 0.1%.
• Your own level never lowers these odds. A spot you have outgrown rolls the same grades it always did - what falls is decided by the monster, not by you. It simply pays a fraction of the experience and the gear of your own band, so the reason to move on is the ledger, not a hidden penalty.

The Forge

The forge turns a stack of identical pieces into one piece a grade higher - or into nothing. It starts at green and it remembers: every failure on that design raises the odds of the next attempt, so a bad run is never wasted, only expensive.

Every attempt also takes gold - a multiple of what the finished piece sells for, so it grows with the tier - and one piece worth of dust on top of the copies it swallows. The dust is what ties the forge to the enchanter: both of them live off the same gear you were going to break down anyway.

Forge levels

The forge is a building of its own, and it has 18 levels - 3 per tier, named after the metal of that tier. The first attempt keeps the odds in the table above, and that is deliberate: a level never sells you a better roll. What it buys is a shorter road to the guaranteed attempt, and a wider band for a temper roll.

The forge never runs ahead of the character: three levels sit on each tier, and the tier is the only thing standing between you and the next one.

Building a level

A level is not one payment. It goes up in five parts, each bought on its own, each with its own price, its own wall clock and its own effect - so something changes after every payment instead of once per level. The order is fixed and it is fixed in your favour: the three fusing parts come first, so a level left half-built has already paid out that whole half.

A part under construction closes its own half of the workshop and leaves the other one open - a hearth in scaffolding stops fusing while temper rolls carry on. Nothing here takes gems: not the part, not the clock, not the level.

Prices are the same for all three levels of a tier, and they are read off what a character entering that tier earns in an hour. The clock is wall clock, like a profession's workshop - it runs while you are away and no amount of playing shortens it.

When all five parts stand, upgrading the forge costs nothing at all - it is a ceremony, not a bill. The counter resets and the next level starts at its first part.

Temper

Tempering rolls a bonus onto a slot of your character, not onto a single piece. The roll lands on whatever you wear there, so replacing a helmet twenty levels later costs you nothing - the percentage simply starts counting from the new piece, which means the bonus grows with your gear instead of dying with it. An empty slot is the one thing a bonus cannot sit on: there is nothing to take a percentage of, so a roll you already own simply sleeps while that slot stands empty and wakes up the moment you put a piece on.

A roll cannot fail. The new result stands next to the one you already have and you keep whichever you prefer, so what you pay for is the dice, never the risk. From Abyssal I every roll brings two different bonuses at once.

Every roll starts from nothing. The numbers above are what an axis gives at its very best, and how much of that you can reach is decided by the temper band of your forge: at the first level a roll opens only the bottom slice of it, and the full value belongs to the last levels. Every slot can roll three to five of these, so a roll gambles on which axis lands as much as on how big it is - the forge never adds new axes, it only lifts both ends of the window.

The whole set stays under a budget of 7% of power - half of what imbues may carry, because a temper bonus is permanent and an imbue is not. That ceiling is checked when you take a roll, not when you make it, so you always get to see what fell. Crit, haste and leech are deliberately missing: those belong to the enchanter and they stay timed.

A roll is priced off your own level rather than off the piece - roughly half an hour of what a character your level earns in the field, plus a little more for every forge level above the first - and it takes one dust of your tier. That dust is the enchanter's own material, which is the point: the forge and the enchanter draw on one supply line instead of two.

Disenchanting

Anything green or better can be broken down into dust and shards instead of sold. That is the whole supply line of the enchanting profession: the gear you do not need is the material for the imbues you do.

Imbues

An imbue is a timed service, not an item: it sits in a slot on a piece for a stretch of hunting and then it is gone. How many slots a piece has comes from its grade, which is the second reason a gold drop is worth the fuss.