AION 2 gear and upgrades
Updated 2026-10-12 · checked against Global launch (client 2.0.5.0)
AION 2 measures a character in combat power, and combat power is the gate: dungeons and raids open by item level rather than by character level alone. Gear is most of that number, and there are more systems feeding it than a new player expects. This hub takes them in the order the game hands them to you.
Every number on this hub and its guides comes from the global launch client.
Where gear comes from
Weapons, armour and accessories come mainly from Expedition dungeons, and an Expedition can be run two ways. Exploration spends the shared dungeon energy and is what you farm. Conquest spends scarce passage tokens and is where the best drops sit — roughly a 7.5% chance at a unique-grade item per run, with a counter that guarantees one eventually, so a bad streak ends rather than going on forever. The Dungeons hub covers the formats themselves.
Enchanting
Enchanting takes a piece from +1 to +15 with enchantment stones and Kina.
The line that matters: up to +10 is guaranteed. From +11 to +15 each attempt can fail, and every failure adds to a success bonus that stacks until it lands. Taking enchantments back out of an item refunds the stones but not the Kina, so moving a +10 from an old piece to a new one is cheap in stones and expensive in gold. The Enhance Stones guide has the cost of every step for every grade and item level, and the best places to farm the stones.
Past +15, Unique gear moves on to Amplified Enhance: one, three or five more levels by item level, paid in Amplify Stones, each adding Attack or Damage Tolerance on top. A Transfer Stone moves a piece’s enhancement onto a new piece of the same kind. The Amplified Enhancement guide has every table.
Engraving: manastones and spirit stones
Manastones go into weapons and armour; spirit stones go into accessories. Unlike the first game, one stone fills every slot on the piece at once and rolls its stats at random, and the stone’s grade — white and green, then blue, then yellow — sets how good those rolls can be. Both are made through Alchemy.
Every stone’s stat chances and grade odds are on the manastones page; weapon Theostones and their combine odds are on the Theostones page.
Soul binding
Gear can also carry skill levels. Soul binding rolls random skill lines onto a piece: weapons, guards and rings draw from your active skills, while earrings, necklaces and every armour slot draw from your passives. The number of lines rises with grade — one on Common, two on Rare, three on Epic, and three to five on Unique (four to five when the lines are passives). Filling the binding rate to 100% opens an extra Manastone slot, Soul Sync swaps one line, and Unique gear can take a Philosopher’s Stone and, on Abyss gear, Potential — all in the Soul Binding guide.
Arcana
Arcana are five cards worn beside your gear from level 45, each with one Empyrean Lord stat and one to four skill-level lines for your class:
- Parchment and Compass raise active skills, six each.
- Bell and Mirror raise passive skills, five each.
- Chalice can roll any of those.
The grade sets the number of lines — one on Common up to four on Unique — and two sets, Primal Vigor and Magic Armor, add a bonus at two and four cards. They drop in Transcendence dungeons, enhance on experience without ever failing, and a Unique card with chosen lines can be made by Transmute. Together with the Daevanion boards on the Classes hub, Arcana is how a skill reaches the top of its range. The Arcana guide has every card, set and skill list.
The slow systems
Three more sit underneath everything and level over weeks rather than runs:
- Daevanion — the talent boards, fed by Daevanion crystals, one from every district quest.
- Revelation Amulet — enhanced with scrolls from the Monoliths, one per Monolith level.
- Noble Belt — enhanced with scrolls from garrisons (strongholds), two per garrison.
Both start as Rare quest rewards (the belt at level 13, the amulet at 16); the Fierce Battle Amulet starts as a Rare Ascension reward. At +10, Substance Morph turns each one into the next grade, Rare to Epic and then Epic to Unique. It always succeeds and works once per character, and the new piece starts at +0, so each grade is enhanced to +10 again before the next step. Below +10 the recipe will not take the piece. See Substance Morph. The enhancing is what costs: each piece takes millions of Kina to reach Unique, so save for these before enhancing anything you will replace. The full cost is here.
Wings carry two blocks of stats: an Equipped Effect while you wear the pair and an Owned Effect that stays on once the pair is collected. Wings cannot be enhanced yet; the client has enhancement raising only the Owned Effect, and the wing enhancement guide has what it will cost.
The order to spend in
Enchant to +10 first, on everything, because it cannot fail and it is the cheapest combat power in the game. Then get a Unique Arcana into each slot, because it raises skill levels and nothing else does that as quickly. Only then push past +10, and only on pieces you expect to keep — the stones come back if you change your mind, the Kina does not.