Breakdown: Enhancements and You!

Breakdown is designed to to fill that stressful void while Star Wars: The Old Republic is down for maintenance. Each Tuesday morning, we’ll look at a topic and try to break it down to the basics. In the end, we hope to educate, entertain, and prevent you from having your own Breakdown!

If you follow the official TOR forums at all, you will see more than a few threads repeating themselves trying to clarify some of the basic features of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Here in Breakdown, we’ll try to present all the currently known facts about how the game works in an easy to read format. Hopefully, we can clear up a few misconceptions, and answer a few questions; maybe we will even fill you in on something you didn’t know.

This week’s Breakdown is about Enhancements! If you’re an Artificer or a player over level 30, you know that the enhancements go from only having a few options, to having several dozen (about 56 at my last count). Enhancements come in almost every arrangement of secondary stats you could want, and they come in multiple quality grades; each one more difficult to craft than the next. This week, we’re going to break down all the different types available to you, so that you know which ones you want to slot into your favorite set of custom gear.

First, let’s start with some definitions:

Primary Stats: These are things like Strength, Endurance, Willpower, etc… They have a direct relation to how your character performs. Each class has a primary stat which increases almost everything they do.

Secondary Stats: These are derivative stats like Crit Rating, Surge, Power, etc.. and they are merely bonuses to your character’s performance. Secondary Stats, unlike Primary, are affected by diminishing returns. It has also been rumored that Power is not affected by diminishing returns.

Enhancement: This is the name of a specific modification slot in gear. Enhancements are universal, in that they are on both weapons and armor. Enhancements themselves can be purchased for commendations, or bought from an Artifice Crafter.

Enhancements can come in [Premium], [Prototype], and [Artifact] quality; they will always have Endurance on them, and then 2 other Secondary stats. The reason there are so many different combinations is due to the fact that you can get those 3 stats in different values.

Here is an example:

Acute vs. Finesse

Both of these enhancements have the same 3 stats, but each has a different value. The important thing when choosing an Enhancement is to figure out which stat is most important to you.

Now, let’s get on to the list! I am using the green version, because they are the most widely available. Higher quality versions will have higher values, but the proportions will remain the same. (Also note there are duplicates in here which I will show, but strike out. These are covered elsewhere on the list.)

As you can see, there are many duplicates, and with time maybe this will be fixed to help fill in a few of the missing combos.

Hopefully this will help you next time you decide to peruse the Galactic Trade Market (and remember that the one on Nar Shaddaa is cross faction), or the next time you hit up your local Artificer. As always, I hope I’ve helped educate you on more of the basics, and I hope you’ll join me next week when the servers are down for another Breakdown!