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One of the big things about Aion is building up your gear to help make your avatar a defensive juggernaut or a ruthless killing machine. There are several ways to do this, but with each you need to understand the basics of what they are and how they work.

Gear Grades
There are four levels of gear rarity in Aion, each tier more powerful than the next. Some gear you acquire will have sockets for placing manastones or godstones. Chest, legs, shoulder, gloves, and boots will offer socket slots. The more rare the gear, the more sockets the item has.

• Normal (Gray): Normal items are the common drops and often found on vendors. Normal items have between 1-2 socket slots.
• Rare (Green): Rare items are a bit harder to find but they offer better statistics then normal items. These items drop off of creatures across Atreia and on contribution vendors for those looking rare items for a PvP boost. Rare items generally come with 2-3 socket slots.
• Legendary (Blue): Legendary items are difficult to find, but they provide some of the best statistic gear in the game. Contribution vendors also carry these items at a high cost. Legendary items come with 3-4 sockets.
• Unique (Orange): Unique items are the hardest to come by, but they also provide the best statistics gear-wise. You can find these on contribution vendors, but expect to pay greatly for them. Unique items come with 4-5 socket slots.

Enchantments
Enchantments improve specific attributes on weapons and armor and are a bit tricky, but the way this works is you will need to buy a set of extraction tools from the general goods vendor. You can then use these tools on an item to try and extract an enchantment stone from it. It is important to note that this will destroy the item. However, the higher the level of the item, the better the enchantment. Once you have your enchantment stone, you can try to use it on one of your items to boost its stats. There is also a chance that you will fail here and lose the stone. Lastly, if you try to enchant an already enchanted item and fail, your item will lose one level of enchantment. So there is always a chance you could do more harm than good through enchantments, but if you can succeed, your power will be enhanced, making it risky, but worth it. One way to reduce your chance of failure is to try and use a higher level stone than your items level.

Manastones
Manastones are used to socket your gear and provide it with a number of possible enchantments. You can usually find these stones on various creatures throughout Atreia and very commonly on the trade broker. Manastones provide a number of possible enhancements such as boosting evasion, parry, hitpoints, attack, mana points, and much more. Read the full list of manastones here.

To socket a manastone, you first need an empty socket in a piece of gear. If you have already placed something in the socket, you can pay a visit to the specific vendors in town that can remove your current manastones. Before you remove a manastone, make sure it’s the one you want to be rid of as removing it will destroy the stone.

Godstones
Godstones are the last and one of the most powerful enhancements you can add to gear. Much like manastones, you will need a free socket to use a godstone and you will need to visit a godstone vendor in your faction’s main city. Unlike manastones however, godstones can only be placed in weapons. You can begin socketing godstones at level 30. More importantly, socketing a godstone to a weapon will give you a nice new shiny effect. What good is it to have all that power if you can’t smite an enemy in style? Godstones offer a number of enhancements to your weapon to enhance your attacks, Read the full list of godstones here.

Overall, Aion provides a huge number of options to customize your character’s gear and enhance their power. Enchantments may be risky, but the payoff can sometimes be well worth the risk. The early use of manastones is an essential tool for boosting your gear statistics and the later addition of godstones can turn your weapon into a giant, glowing, instrument of death. With all these enhancements available, you can march into battle well equipped and ready to monkey stomp opposing forces. And if the strong gear enhancements don’t earn you victory, you can always pop your wings and fly away while screaming like a school girl.