Through Ascending and Re-Forging you can keep many pieces of your Destiny weapons and gear stats up to House of Wolves standards. Ascending is the process of upgrading your gear and weapons to the new House of Wolves damage and light benchmarks. It can be done to almost any legendary/ exotic weapon or armor so long as it is not already at the max.

Re-forging can only be done on legendary weapons and will change the guns selection of perks when completed. The restrictions on what weapons you can re-forge are a little stricter than ascending an item, but we will go into the details later on.

Ascending

As mentioned before, Ascending is the process of upgrading a weapon or gear to the new damage/ light level numbers of House of Wolves.  The great part about Ascending is that whatever you ascend will keep its progress and perk unlocks. If you ascend a fully upgraded piece of Crota armor, it will receive the stats of a fully upgraded HoW armor.

It should also be noted that any piece of legendary or exotic gear/ weapon can be ascended. If you really love the look of your legendary vendor armor, you can upgrade it to House of Wolves stats.

Weapons function the same way. If you have all the damage unlocks on a weapon and re-forge it, those damage perks will take you to the max available in House of Wolves.

House of Wolves Max Stats

Light: 42

Damage: 365

Required Materials

Ascend a Legendary Item: 1 Etheric Light // 20 resources // 750 Glimmer

Ascend an Exotic Item: 1 Exotic Shard // 25 Dismantle Materials // 1500 Glimmer

Re-Forging

Re-forging in Destiny was added in the House of Wolves and can only be done to legendary weapons added in House of Wolves or later. You can tell if a weapon is re-forgeable or not by checking to see if it has the crossed hammers symbol on it’s upgrade screen.

When you’re ready to re-forge a weapon, you’ve got to take it to your local gunsmith in the tower. Before you do though you’ll need to have the following materials on hand each time you want to re-forge something.

Re-Forging Cost

1 Mote of Light

3 Weapons Parts

250 Glimmer

Note: Unlike Ascending, Re-Forging a weapon will reset all of its progress so you’ll have to level it back up again. Make sure you are certain about re-forging before you purchase it.

 After purchasing the re-forge, your weapon will receive an all-new set of random perks. You can re-roll these perks as many times as you want on a weapon, but it will cost you the materials listed above each time you do.