Tempering Gear

Drops stop somewhere. Tempering is how you carry on.

Stand at a forge your guild owns with the gear equipped and type lua_temper(). Each tempering costs gold and improves the piece by one step:

• a weapon gains +1 minimum and +1 maximum damage
• a piece of armour gains +1 to its armour class

Rank 4 is the ceiling for drops. Tempering goes to 20.

That is the whole point of it. An affix rolled on a drop tops out at rank 4; a tempered piece keeps climbing to 20, so the best gear on the shard is gear somebody worked on rather than gear somebody was lucky with.

The forge decides what it works on

You do not choose the piece. The forge does:

• an armoursmith hardens your armour
• a weaponsmith sharpens your weapon

And it always takes your least-tempered piece of that kind, so a set comes up evenly instead of you pouring everything into one glove.

What it costs

Gold, and the cost climbs steeply with each rank. The gold is destroyed, not paid to a shop — tempering is a gold sink, and a deliberate one.

What can and cannot be tempered

• The piece must already carry a damage or armour affix. Tempering raises the rank of an affix that is already there; it cannot put one on a plain item.
• Jewellery can never be tempered.
• The forge must belong to your guild.

Why rank matters

Rank is the strength dial every affix modifier already scales on — internally it is read as the number of trains in minMod + ramp × trains. So raising rank is not a separate bonus bolted on top; it is the same number the item was always using, turned up.