Gear, Obsidian (Ruby, etc) Shards and Identifying Items

As soon as you get to level 15 and open your Reward Box you'll get 12 Obsidian Shards. Well, you might wonder what they are for and it took me a while to find out. They are used to BUY gear. If you play World of Warcraft, they work almost like Badges/Emblems. To buy the gear you need to go to Freedom Quay, the Pier in the south-east side of Freedom Harbor, just before Charlie's boat.



Shards

Beware, you will also spend Soul Coins to purchase the gear. For Obsidian gear you will need 4 shards for each piece of gear and you can get: Chest, Hands, Legs, Waist and Boots. There's 3 vendors: Beginner, Standard and Advanced. The beginner, which is the one you will first talk to, sells gear for Obsidian, Ruby and Sapphire Shards, you can select the type of shard from the Tabs on the left side of the vendor window. I recommend getting the gear as soon as you can. These are excellent gear pieces and will give you a serious boost to your damage and defenses. One catch though, to take full advantage you will need to use Scroll of Sages to unveil the hidden attributes. You can still wear unidentified gear but you will not gain any of the hidden attributes. You will notice an item has hidden attributes because it will say "Unidentified".

Gear Identification

One thing you need to know about Gear identification. The stats discovered by your identification scroll are random. This means that you can re-identify gear. I haven't done it yet, but you get an interface to do so at your Blacksmiths and Armor smiths in Freedom Harbor. To use a scroll you simply right-click it and then use the mouse pointer to click the item you need to identify.

As far as I know there's only 3 ways to obtain a Scroll of Sages:

• The Fishing Event, which requires you to visit Nousen the Big-Eye in Fossicker's Plain. I believe this is the only way to farm the scrolls.
• Quests. You get them as reward for some quests but this is far from a decent place to get these scrolls when you need them.
• Buy them from other players, which includes using the Auction House.

Armor sets and Gear Choices

You will notice that the items from the Shard vendor have special attributes when you equip more than one item of each set. Use this to plan your gear choices. You will get Chest at level 10, Pants at level 12, Waist and Gloves at level 14, Boots at level 15. This repeats at level 20 for Ruby shards. Meaning you will get the Ruby Shards Chest at level 20, Legs and Shoulders (the new item!) at 22, Gloves and Waist at 24 and Boots at level 25. So if you are getting close to level 20, you might want to skip buying the Chest (since you'll get it as soon as you hit 20) and buy the rest of the Obsidian set. In order to maximize your set bonuses you should only switch to the next set if you have at least 2 pieces of it, so you don't lose any set bonuses for nothing. This is only valid, of course, if you have the full set and just want to upgrade to the next tier one.

The most important stat for Protectors, as far as I understand them so far, is Defense. This is equivalent to Armor in World of Warcraft and judging by some very basic tests I did it has a huge effect on how much damage you get hit for. For example, losing 20% of my armor resulted in getting hit for something around 30 instead of 3. So when upgrading sets you should also make sure you get that 3-set bonus as far as possible without losing the 3-set bonus from your previous gear set.

That's all about Gear and Shards. Check out my next post coming very soon!