Item Merging Guide

How item tiers, duplicate copies, and Motes of Potential add up, and the cheapest way to take an item you can get repeatedly, such as a quest reward, to +10.

How merging works

• An item gains tiers by collecting experience. Each tier costs twice the one before, so +10 takes 1,023 in all.
• Merging a copy into your item adds the experience the copy holds, plus 1 for the copy itself. A bare +0 copy is worth 1; a +4 copy holding 15 is worth 16. Nothing is lost if a copy sits partway through a tier.
• Progress carries over between merges, and an item's stats rise with its experience, not only at tier boundaries.
• A mote adds a fixed amount of experience, and each grade stops working once the item is above that grade's tier.

Motes of Potential

The same mote is worth far more on a spell than on an item, where every grade adds only a few points. Items also limit which grades they accept: a mote stops working once the item is above that grade's tier. Spells have no such limit and take any grade at any rank, along the same experience curve (1,023 to reach +10), so high-grade motes are best spent on spells and low-grade ones on item copies.

The tier limits are in the game's own text: each mote "strengthens the potential of an item up to rank" one above the tier shown here, from rank 1 for an Infinitesimal to rank 10 for an Infinite.

Condensing motes

The Constructed Potential NPCs in cities combine two motes of one grade into one of the next. For spells this never changes anything, because spell experience doubles with every grade. For items it usually throws experience away, because item experience barely grows: two Major motes are worth 10 to an item and the Greater mote they become is worth 6. Only Minor and Lesser motes condense without loss. What condensing buys for items is reach, since the higher grade still works one tier further up, so treat it as a last resort for an item that has outgrown your motes.

Void-Touched Potential

A raid reward that advances an item or spell one full tier, whatever its progress. At most 3 can be earned each week from solo and group raids combined, and only 3 can be held at once. Since it always grants a whole tier, it is worth the cost of the tier it is spent on: 1 experience on the step to +1, but 512 on the step to +10. Save it for the last tiers.

Where motes come from

Any monster that gives you experience can drop a mote. The grade that drops rises with your level as shown below, harder zones raise the minimum grade, and yellow and red difficulty, multiclass, rare, and raid monsters improve the chance.

The trick: mote the copies, not the keeper

Merging bare copies to +10 takes 1,024 of them. But a copy is worth whatever experience it holds, so a few cheap motes on each spare copy multiply its value before you merge it. Three Major motes turn a copy worth 1 into a copy worth 16. Spending the same motes on the item you keep gains less, and they stop working on it once it passes the grade's tier, while fresh copies always accept them. Building copies higher trades motes for fewer copies: with Major motes, each copy taken to +5 instead of +4 costs four more motes and replaces a little over two +4 copies.

Calculator

Copies to merge are in addition to the item you keep.

Routes from +0 to +10 by mote grade

Each row builds every spare copy to one tier with the fewest motes of that grade, brings the kept item to the same tier, then merges. The first row of each grade uses no motes.

Infinitesimal 1 experience, usable up to +0

Minor 1 experience, usable up to +1

Lesser 2 experience, usable up to +2

Potential 4 experience, usable up to +3

Major 5 experience, usable up to +4

Greater 6 experience, usable up to +5

Superior 7 experience, usable up to +6

Grand 8 experience, usable up to +7

Ascendant 9 experience, usable up to +8

Infinite 10 experience, usable up to +9

Before you commit

• Check that you can hold a spare copy. If the item is lore, you cannot keep a second one to put motes on, and every copy can only be merged bare, for 1 experience each.
• These numbers come from player write-ups and in-game checks, not from the publisher, and may change with a patch. Try a route on one copy before buying motes for sixty.

The merging rules and the mote table come from player write-ups, and the rule that a merged copy counts for all the experience it holds was checked in game. Where these numbers come from.