You’ve likely heard whispers of just how powerful Refined and Experimented items can be, but until you’ve seen the final “as delivered” stats on the best examples of said items, either in a screenshot, or by examining another player in-game, it’s hard to know just how awesome these processes are.
A Refining/Experimentation Primer
If you grasped everything in Niami‘s EQ2Traders primer on the subject back when the Chains of Eternity expansion was new, then you already know the how-to and formulas at work here, but if not…
- A Refined item is a Mastercrafted weapon, armor, or piece of jewelry which has been created using a Purified rare. Instead of just crafting an item with an [eq2u]osmium cluster[/eq2u], if you first refine that rare into a [eq2u]purified osmium cluster[/eq2u]. When you then craft the item with this improved rare, nearly all of the item’s stats will be increased by 10%. A few stats are only improved by 5%, and others aren’t impacted at all. View a complete list of Refined stats.
- Meanwhile, Experimentation allows a skilled crafter to “boost” or increase a chosen stat on a crafted item. Experimented items gain a name “prefix” which changes with each experiment, with 5 successful experiments granting a prefix of “Visionary”. Boosting a single stat once increases it by 10%, but if you boost the same stat multiple times, you receive diminishing returns. Boosting the same stat sees an increase of 10%, 15%, 17.5%, 18.5%, and, at the max, 19% (10+5+2.5+1+0.5). Suffice it to say, most people spread their boosts around rather than stacking them all into a single stat.
To know just how powerful Refining, Reforging, and Experimentation can be, one need look no further than top tier raid guilds who, until they acquire their Plane of War mythical cloaks, often wear these Experimented/Refined/Reforged crafted cloaks to the exclusion of most other dropped cloaks.