If you want to survive the Living Lands, you’ll need to upgrade weapons and armor in Avowed early and often. While the game constantly throws new gear your way via chests and scattered backpacks, you can’t blindly switch to whatever has slightly better stats. Obsidian’s tiered system incentivises you to stick with weapons and armor you like and upgrade them over time. Since gear doesn’t scale automatically as you level up, even good early-game weaponry can fall behind fast as tougher enemies tank damage and quickly overwhelm your weak defences. To get you started, here’s how to upgrade weapons and armor in Avowed.
Avowed: How To Upgrade Weapons and Armor
As previously mentioned, gear in Avowed does not scale with your level, so that Common dagger you found at the start will quickly stop dealing meaningful damage. To upgrade weapons and armor in Avowed, you will need to visit a Party Camp. You’ll find these camps throughout the Living Lands, each with its own huge Adra Waystone.
The first Party Camp in Avowed becomes available at Ivona’s Threshold in Dawnshore. Simply walk inside the camp, interact with the workbench to open the upgrade menu. From there, select the weapon or body armor you want to upgrade and spend the required materials and gold. If you notice a shiny anvil icon next to an item in your inventory, that means you already have what you need to upgrade it.
Each item in Avowed has a progression tier that shows its current quality level. Standard gear can be upgraded across Common, Fine, Exceptional, and Superb tiers, while Unique items can also reach Legendary. Every tier is split into sub-levels such as Common, Common +1, Common +2, and Common +3 and advancing through each sub-tier will also increase the stats.
Some Unique items also let you enchant them, adding one permanent bonus on top of their base perk. As you might have guessed, enchanting will cost rare materials and gold, and once you select a bonus perk, you can’t change it later. Every time you upgrade a weapon in Avowed, you’ll need a universal herb that matches the item’s tier, along with another material depending on what kind of gear you’re working on.
Armor, on the other hand, will require pelts and hides. As you move up through the tiers, you’ll need rarer versions of those same materials, and upgrades will also cost more gold, so improving your gear will start to feel more expensive the stronger it gets. Thankfully, you can pick up most upgrade materials just by playing normally and exploring, looting chests and discovering new regions.
Moreover, if you ever run low on materials, you can buy what you need from merchants, salvage gear you’re not using into crafting components, or use a workbench to turn lower-tier materials into stronger ones. Tough bosses and bounty targets are also a great way to get Adra if you’re looking to upgrade your Unique gear.
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