Imbuing

Basics | Resources | Unravelling | Imbuing | Restrictions | Bonuses | Power Scrolls & Skillgain | Mysticism

Imbuing is a skill that allows player characters to add resists and/or magic properties to loot or crafted items in a controlled, though limited way and to unravel magical items into the basic resources needed for such embellishment. A character who is trained in this skill has the skill title ‘Artificer’. There is also a more random, but also more powerful, option for the skilled artificer, runic reforging.

Basics

• Imbuing requires no ‘tool’ but does require you to be close to a special kind of forge, a soulforge. There are several kinds of soulforge
  • The public forge in the center of Royal City
    
  • The Queen’s Soulforge in the Royal Palace
    
• Player Crafted Soulforges which can be placed in your house, made by a carpenter with some imbuing skill and being a copy of the queen’s forge in appearance
• A small soulforge (left), a very rare drop from Osiredon the Scalis Enforcer
• WARNING: There is also a ‘minisoulforge’ (right) from the Primeval Lich Champion Spawn. This is Decorative Only and does not function as a soulforge for imbuing.

Experienced crafters will know that the usual way to open a crafting menu is by double clicking the tool. There is no tool, so how do you open the gump? Through the skill menu. In the Classic Client make a macro using the options ‘use skill > imbuing’ and tie that to a hot key or combination of keys. In the Enhanced Client open the skills menu and pull the icon to a hotbar slot.

Resources

Imbuing a property onto an item requires up to 3 different types of ingredients. The first type the artificer obtains by unravelling items which have magic properties. The resource obtained is governed by the intensity of the magic properties on the item being unravelled.

Much like working colored ores for a smith or colored leather for a tailor, if your skill is not high enough, you will be unable to obtain the higher level resource. The item you have tried to unravel will remain intact. Unravelling is recommended as your principle training method, not only will you gain in skill, but you will also accumlate a supply of the resources you will need later.

The resources obtained from unravelling are:

• Magical Residue, obtainable by an unskilled artificer
• Enchanted Essence, obtainable from 45.1 skill
• Relic Fragments, obtainable from 95.1 skill

The second type of ingredient needed is small gemstones, these can be bought from a jeweller NPC or looted from monsters. There are a large number of different creatures which have gemstones as loot. Solen Warriors, Gargoyles and Dragons are examples. Gemstones are also found in shipwreck chests by fishermen and Exodus hidden boxes by thieves.

The third ingredient type is only needed to imbue properties at greater than 90% intensity. A full list of ingredients, together with the properties they are needed to imbue, can be found on the Imbuing Ingredients page.

Unravelling

All magic properties have ‘weight’. These weights can be seen on the Magic Item Properties page and are displayed on the imbuing menu when a property is selected to imbue. Here’s an example of how they work:
I have a ring which has the properties Hit Chance Increase 10%, Defence Chance Increase 8%

Hit chance increase has a property weight of 1.3 and a maximum of 15%. Therefore the total weight for hci on this piece is 10/15*130 = 86.6666 (rounded up to 87)
Defence chance increase has a property weight of 1.1 and a maximum of 15%. Therefore the total weight for dci on this piece is 8/15*110 = 58.666 (rounded up to 59)
Total property weight for the item is 87 + 59 = 146
Property weights for unravelling work as follows:

• below 199 Total Intensity = Magical Residue
• 200 to 449 Total Intensity = Enchanted Essence
• 450+ = Relic Fragment

The ring in question would therefore unravel to magical residue.

All items with magic properties, whether loot or crafted, can be unravelled, however a confirmation gump will appear if you choose to unravel artifact items or items made with special materials ie colored ingots or leather. Unravelling an item destroys it. You will see from the last two lines of the crafting gump pictured above that you can either unravel items individually or in bulk, simply put all the items you wish to unravel into any container and use the last option on the gump.

Imbuing

An imbued item may have up to 5 properties in total, in the case of a GM crafted weapon, the damage increase is considered a property already on the item. So an artificer can imbue 4 other item properties on the weapon.

Select ‘imbue item’ from the imbuing menu and target the item you wish to imbue. You will now have a list of property categories to choose from, selecting a category shows the properties within that category.

When you select a property a further page of the menu will give you details including the weight, the cost of the imbue in resources, a brief description of the property and your chance to succeed. Failure will cause the loss of some of your type one and type two resources. Type three resources, the special ingredients, are not lost on failure. A successful imbue will add the item property tag ‘imbued’ to the item. Logically the more properties, and higher intensities you try to squeeze into a piece the more difficult it becomes and the lower your percentage success chance.

You can:

• Imbue any property which can be obtained through runic crafting
• Overwrite an existing property to either increase or reduce it.
• Increase or reduce resists on armor pieces.
• Enhance an imbued item (or imbue an enhanced item).
• Imbue Dragon Scale armor
• Imbue Cloth hats
• Imbue crafted artifacts such as Ecru Citrine Ring, Night Reaper and Overseer Sundered Blade.

You can not:

• Imbue mods to spellbooks.
• Imbue the Self Repair property onto items; if the property already exists on the item imbuing will remove it.
• Change the damage type on a weapon.

Restrictions

• The maximum imbuing weight for a non-exceptional, or looted item (excluding jewelry, bows and 2 handed weapons) is 450
• The maximum imbuing weight for an item of exceptional armor, a one handed weapon or a jewelry item is 500
• The maximum imbuing weight for a non-exceptional bow is 500 and for an exceptional bow is 550
• The maximum imbuing weight for a non-exceptional 2 handed melee weapon is 550 and for an exceptional 2 handed weapon is 600
• The maximum intensity of hit-leech properties is related to weapon speed. Imbuing swingspeed increase after imbuing a hit-leech property will cause the leech intensity to drop. Always imbue swingspeed increase first.
• Attempting to add a second of any of these types of property on a weapon will overwrite and replace the first.
  • a ‘slayer’ property.
  • a ‘hit spell’ effect
  • a ‘hit area’ effect

  This is shown in the top left corner of the imbuing gump
  

• Jewelry is a special case, in that skills are in groups. Trying to add two skills from the same group will result in the second skill overwriting the first. This can be useful in the case of looted jewelry, example a ring or bracelet having hci, dci and di may be somewhat spoiled if it also has music – but you could replace the music with swords, macing or fencing because they are in the same group. A full table of the jewelry groups is below:

Bonuses

Certain bonuses exist from race or location, Gargoyles have a racial bonus increasing their chance of a successful imbue.

The public forge in Royal City grants a bonus, the Queen’s forge – which requires that you have 10,000 loyalty points to the queen to enable you to use it, also grants a bonus.

To demonstrate these bonuses I took the ring we examined earlier, that had 2 properties, and undertook the following test.

Skill Gain & Power Scrolls

Power scrolls for the skill are obtained by 3 simple ‘exchange’ quests from the Gargoyle artificer NPCs stationed around the Royal City soulforge.

• Beninort gives the quest Secrets of the Soulforge, the quest item is 50 magic residue, the reward a 105 or 110 power scroll (random).
• Aurvidlem gives the quest Knowledge of the Soulforge, the quest item is 50 enchanted essence, the reward a 115 power scroll, or (rarely) a runic hammer and chisel.
• Ansikart gives the quest Mastery of the Soulforge, the quest item is 50 relic fragments, the reward a 120 power scroll

In reality the difficulty of obtaining relic fragments means very few people undertake Ansikart’s quest, preferring to repeat Aurvidlem’s quest until they have 10 x 115 scrolls which they can bind using a scroll binder to create a 120 scroll.

Unravelling is by far the easiest, and least costly method of gaining skill, provided you are able to obtain items to unravel. Mibs, treasure chests and paragon chests as well as regular monster loot are excellent sources, high level treasure chests will give multiple relic fragments when the contents are unravelled.

At some point you will need to start imbuing properties. Keep in mind that there are some items that can be crafted with a property already existant, leather caps made in spined leather will have ‘luck’; weapons made in gold will have both damage increase and luck; weapons made in dull copper will have damage increase and lower requirements for example (see Material Bonuses). Each item may be imbued up to 20 times before you will need to discard it. Many imbuing skill guides recommend the use of platemail jingasa because of the mage armor property, these were made out of date by publish 81 which removed mage armor from the imbuing menu and reduced its property weight from 1.4 to zero.

The most popular properties imbued for training purposes, because of the cost of the gemstones involved, are ‘hit dispel’, ‘reflect physical damage’, ‘luck’ and ‘lower reagent cost’.

A further visit to Royal City to undertake Ortlem the Mystic’s quest will be worth the effort. The Crystal Ball of Knowledge thus obtained will help you know whether the imbue you are attempting is of the right level to allow you to gain.

Mysticism

Imbuing works as a ‘support’ skill for a mystic, interchangeable with focus, however there is no bonus to an artificer in having mysticism unless you plan use it for combat.