What Equipment Leveling does
Every eligible weapon, Zem or Grimoire off-hand and shield carries its own Equipment Level, from 1 to 100, tracked independently of its Normal or Ascended upgrade stage. Awakening and Rarity change what an item rolls; Equipment Leveling rewards how much you actually use it.
Each level banks a Growth Bonus — a small permanent stat add-on that stays with the item and stacks with everything else it already has equipped.
How XP is earned
Equipment XP fills while the item is equipped in combat, with no separate menu or NPC step. Weapons, Zems and Grimoires bank XP from the damage you deal. Shields gain Equipment XP five times faster than before; ordinary weapon XP rates are unchanged.
Equipment Level 11/100, climbing live as this Ascended Nightmare weapon lands hits — the Equipment XP bar and Growth Bonus update in the same tooltip.
Growth Bonus
Each item rolls a Growth affinity: one stat, or All Stats. A single-stat affinity grows by +1 per Equipment Level; All Stats grows by half the level, rounded up.
| Item | Single stat | All Stats |
|---|---|---|
| Eligible weapons and off-hands | +100 | +50 |
| Eligible custom Bows and Yo-yos | +200 | +100 |
Eligible custom Bows and Yo-yos, including their Eclipse variants, grow at double these rates and support up to 20 weapon piercing slots. Items with more than 15 combined card slots cannot be sent by mail; trade and storage still work. Every Eclipse weapon variant supports Equipment Leveling and Ascension.
Requirements and limits
- Equipment Level and Equipment XP belong to the individual item instance, not your character.
- The higher an item's tier, the more total XP its level bracket requires — a maxed Nightmare weapon banks hundreds of millions of XP across its full climb.
- Ascended Conversion resets Equipment Level to 1 and Equipment XP to 0 on the same item. Awakening, Rarity, piercings, element, Transmutation appearance and lock state all survive conversion; Equipment Level does not.