Upgrading past +8 was a treadmill, and the maths proves it
If you have ever hammered an item at +8 for an evening and finished the night at +6, you were not unlucky. You were playing a table that was designed to take more than it gave, and it has been replaced.
The problem was not the success rate
Everyone looks at the 36% and calls it low. The 36% was never the problem.
The problem was what happened when you failed. From +6 upward, a failure took two levels, between 27% and 50% of the time. Put the two together and work out what an average attempt does to your item:
| level | success | −1 | −2 | average result of one attempt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| +5 | 60% | 40% | — | +0.20 levels |
| +6 | 52% | 21% | 27% | −0.23 levels |
| +8 | 36% | 19% | 45% | −0.73 levels |
| +12 | 36% | 14% | 50% | −0.78 levels |
Above +5, every attempt lost ground on average. That is not a hard climb, it is a slope you slide back down. You only ever went up during a lucky streak, and between streaks the table quietly took the streak back.
The price of that, from +0 to +15 on one item: 24,121 Upgrade Cores.
We checked what it had done to this server. Across all 28 characters there are 195 equipped items. 131 of them are +0. Eleven are +5 or better. The highest upgrade anybody has ever reached is +9.
Cores were never what was stopping you. The median monster drops one every four kills. The table was the wall.
What changed
Two rules.
A failure can no longer cost you two levels below +12. This is the big one. Up to +11, the worst an attempt can do is knock you back one, and 8% of the time it just eats the core and leaves your item alone.
No success rate went down. Not one. Every number below is the same or better than what you were playing yesterday.
| level | success | was | fail, core only | −1 | −2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| +2 | 95% | 90% | 5% | — | — |
| +3 | 88% | 80% | 6% | 6% | — |
| +4 | 82% | 70% | 8% | 10% | — |
| +5 | 75% | 60% | 8% | 17% | — |
| +6 | 66% | 52% | 8% | 26% | — |
| +7 | 59% | 44% | 8% | 33% | — |
| +8 | 52% | 36% | 8% | 40% | — |
| +9 | 46% | 36% | 8% | 46% | — |
| +10 | 42% | 36% | 8% | 50% | — |
| +11 | 39% | 36% | 8% | 53% | — |
| +12 | 37% | 36% | 8% | 45% | 10% |
| +13 | 36% | 36% | 8% | 41% | 15% |
| +14 | 36% | 36% | 8% | 36% | 20% |
At +9 the treadmill stops: an average attempt now leaves you exactly where you were instead of dragging you down. Below that you climb. Above it you drift back slowly, which is deliberate — +15 is meant to be a story, not a Tuesday.
What that costs now, on one item:
| from +0 to | +7 | +9 | +11 | +13 | +15 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| before | 29 | 135 | 763 | 4,296 | 24,121 |
| now | 17 | 38 | 93 | 258 | 855 |
+13 went from a fantasy to a project. +15 went from 24,000 cores to 855 — still the hardest thing in the game, and now something a person can actually finish.
Core Enhancer and Core Superior exist now
You may never have seen these. There are eight of them, two families of four:
- Core Enhancer (Low / Medium / High / Highest)
- Core Superior (Low / Medium / High / Highest)
They are the items the original publisher sold for real money to make upgrading survivable. On this server they were impossible to get — no shop sells them, they are not in the eCoin shop, and only two of the eight dropped anywhere at all. So the safety net the game was balanced around simply did not exist here.
They do now, and they come out of the game rather than out of a wallet.
| you kill | Core Enhancer | Core Superior |
|---|---|---|
| Treasure Chest | 2% | — |
| Relic Chest | 3% | — |
| Legacy Chest | 4% | 0.5% |
| Legendary Chest | 5% | 1.5% |
| dungeon boss | 6% | 2% |
The grade you get matches the content — the areas that drop Upgrade Core (Highest) drop Core Enhancer (Highest), and so on down. A dungeon run that opens a few of each chest should hand you an Enhancer about every other run, and a Superior every sixteenth or so.
They were also nearly useless before, worth a tenth of one percent of extra success at high level. Rebuilt:
| level | on its own | with a Core Enhancer | with a Core Superior |
|---|---|---|---|
| +0 / +1 | 100%, +1 level | 100%, +2 levels | 100%, +2 levels |
| +8 | 52% | 60% and it cannot eat the core | 75%, 10% chance of double |
| +11 | 39% | 47% and it cannot eat the core | 65%, 10% chance of double |
| +12 | 37%, can drop 2 | 45%, cannot drop 2 | 60%, cannot drop 2 |
A Superior on a +11 attempt is the difference between a coin flip you keep losing and a bet you expect to win. Save them for the attempt that matters.
They will never be sold for eCoin. An item that buys better upgrade odds is the textbook definition of pay-to-win. You get these by killing things.
Nothing you own changed
No item was touched, no upgrade was reset, nothing was taken away. Only the odds of your next attempt.
Every number here is browsable in the Codex, and the full working —
including why the success rate was the wrong thing to blame — is in the repository
under docs/UPGRADES.md.