Items

Your power comes from what you are wearing. This is how to tell whether the thing in your bag is better than the thing in your hand.

Gear is where your power comes from. Most of what you do between runs is looking at two items and deciding which one goes on. This is what the card is telling you.

Gear echoes rather than drops

Nothing falls on the ground when something dies. What an enemy is wearing is what can come to you, and each piece is decided separately. Beating something in six pieces of gear is six chances, not one.

You can see all of it during the fight. Their gear is on screen while you are hitting them.

How much they carry depends on what they are. A common monster carries a piece or two, and plenty carry nothing at all. An elite always carries something, and more of it. A boss walks in wearing a full set of six.

Focusing a piece

If you are watching the fight, tapping a piece of the enemy's gear focuses it. A ring on that piece fills to show where its chances stand.

Focusing multiplies that piece's chance by ×2. It multiplies every other piece by ×0.5. Focus moves your luck. It does not add any.

So the trade changes with how much the enemy is carrying. Against something wearing one or two pieces you give up very little. Against a boss wearing all six, you can expect fewer items from the kill overall. What you get instead is a better chance at the one piece you picked.

The focus stays where you put it. It carries from one enemy to the next until you tap the same piece again to clear it.

Some pieces cannot be focused. A faded legendary, or a copy of one, is dimmed and tapping it does nothing.

Focus only exists while you are there. A fighter left alone never focuses, and takes every piece at its normal chance.

An Echo brew works the same way. It lifts the focused piece and nothing else, so it does nothing at all on a run where no focus was ever set.

Rarity is a ceiling, not a ladder

Every item builds its stats from the same floor. What rarity changes is how many stats it carries, and how high each one is allowed to reach.

• Common

  no rolled stats

• Uncommon

  1 rolled stat

• Rare

  2 rolled stats

• Epic

  3 rolled stats

• Legendary

  4 rolled stats

That has a consequence most games train you not to expect: a superbly made rare can beat a poorly made legendary. Higher rarity is better on average and carries more lines, but it is not a promise. Read the item, not the colour.

The two numbers on the card

They answer different questions.

Item Power is the one that means "is this stronger". It folds together everything the item gives you, and it accounts for the fact that a deeper item's stats are simply bigger. If one number decides whether you swap, it is this one.

Stars mean "did this turn out well for what it is". A one-star item from deep in the world can be worth far more than a five-star item from the first zone. Stars are luck, not strength. They tell you how close this piece came to the best version of itself.

Nothing equips itself

An item you pick up goes into your bag and stays there. A fighter carrying a better sword in their bag is fighting with the worse one in their hand.

Your bag is finite. When it is full, the worst thing in it is pushed out to make room for something better. If you are watching a run you can manage that yourself. If you are not, the game keeps the better item.

Making a piece better

Four things in town do something to gear, and they do different things.

The Forge upgrades a piece, spending materials and gold to push its stats up. There is a ceiling per item, and better rarities can be pushed further.

Refining turns a heap of low-grade material into a smaller heap of the next grade up. It is the answer to a pile of dust you will never otherwise spend.

Salvage breaks gear down into materials instead of gold. They are the same materials the Forge eats.

The blacksmith sells a small rotating stock, aimed at whatever piece is weakest on you, and buys what you do not want. It restocks on its own clock rather than on yours.