Mastery 101

Following the Arena post, Mastery (and its accompanying transmutation) is a new game feature to be introduced to DH5. The general gist of it is to allow you to use duplicates and spare items to improve your gear with enhanced stats and a unique trait.

For this post’s structure, I’ll be doing a different approach by adding FAQs along the way since putting everything at the end might seem too confusing. Another reason is that Mastery might not be as straightforward on first glance, so probing around and asking questions was the best way to learn about it. 🙂

*Minor Update (16/6): Strike Chance damage rough percentage added.

Honestly, I was initially quite lost since a lot of things aren’t immediately made available to you at the start. If you’ve read the changelog and the forum teaser post, Mastery is actually much easier to understand than it seems. It does, however, have a lot of variations to the transmutation and mastery recipes which I’ll go into some detail here.

A shout out to Max for providing the full list of Mastery materials and Abh, Aqve, Book and Josh for some much-needed screenshots and discussions for this post. 🙂

---

About Mastery

Mastery is intended as a feature to make full use of your heaps of duplicates instead of letting them gather dust – something which has been much debated since the reduction of loot from the legendary chest. For this update, only Weapons and Armors can undergo Mastery, but do be warned, it is an extremely arduous process.

The fundamentals of this feature involves two steps: First, Transmutation – to get your mastery materials; and second, Mastery – to take your gear to the next ‘level’ (so to speak).

Upon Mastering an item, this will change the tier star on the item card from White to Gold. You can only Master up to the tier that it currently is at (eg. you need a T5 gear to get to M5).

*For this instance, let’s term Mastery levels as M1-M6 (corresponding to T1-T6) for the convenience of this post.

---

Transmutation

As seen at the inventory tab, transmutation is a function which breaks single or multiple gear(s) down into respective Mastery Materials and Celestial spheres (for every SF within the item), and this process destroys it completely. At this point, you can break down all equip-able gears, but excluding minions in the inventory list.

Transmuting a gear will give you the first type of material necessary for the Mastery process.  The tier of this material is based on the tier of the gear which has been transmuted (ie. T2 items give you M2 mastery material).

Mastery materials galore!

While I was doing research on the transmutation outcomes, I realised that the actual list of transmuted gear to materials has a lot of minor variations. The amount of material we get from transmutation is dependent on:

• Type – Weapons and armors give more materials than skill gear
• Level – Higher level produces more materials
• Tier – Gives different tiers of mastery material (see below)
• Origin – Legendary items give highest amount of material than WC or regular

This means that transmuting Legendary T6 gear at Max level provides the highest amount of M6 Mastery materials. Of course, this will only give you the M6 materials (Galoxite) so you’ll only be able to Master T6 -> M6 gear.

Simply put, a general overview of transmuting gear gives you approximately:

• T1 gear – 1 x Dalomite (M1 material)
• T2 gear – 1-2 x Rhundite (M2 material)
• T3 gear – 2-4 x Questarite (M3 material)
• T4 gear – 2-9 x Ekenite (M4 material)
• T5 gear – 2-7 x Ydamite (M5 material)
• T6 gear – 2-6 x Galoxite (M6 material)

Also, you can also break down mastered items but these do not provide you the previously consumed material need for the Mastery process. You will get the same amount of materials as listed above, making it a highly un-worthwhile endeavor.

TL;DR: Transmutation breaks down gear into its Mastery Materials and celestial spheres. Amount of material is dependent on type, level, tier, origin and existing SF pts.

---

What and why should you transmute?

Spare gear(s) lying around would definitely be your initial target(s). Thus, this makes it a great inventory space maker and would help you clear out unnecessary equipment quickly.

Moreover, since the tier of the item determines the Mastery level of the material, it’s best to do a couple of mission on Normal-Hard difficulties to get T1-2 gear in order to kick start your mastery attempts. My personal favourite being Mission 58 Normal where you can farm not only Crafting materials (orbs) but also get a bunch of T1-2 armors/shields/weapons as well.

The other neat trick would be converting your embedded Super fusion points (SF) into celestial spheres. This potentially enables you to transfer your SF points to another type of equipment or even minions alike, and not be limited to the type of gear for those set amount of SF points.

This is especially so now that minions/champions have SF points that add to attack and armor in addition to HP as well. Getting a bunch of champions to max +150 SF, coupled with >40% minion bonuses, would indeed serve as a challenge to incoming raiders.

Of course, do be cautious when transmuting gear as this destroys it entirely!

As there is a visual notification of which gears you are transmuting, do remember to check through if you are transmuting a large number of gears at a time to avoid unfortunately mishaps. Thankfully, you cannot transmute gear which you have equipped, so that might be a saving grace to help avoid accidental breaking down of good gears.

TL;DR: Transmute spare gear and transfer loose SF points to more desirable items

---

Mastery

As of this update, only weapons and armors are able to be Mastered with a maximum of M6 for a T6 equipment.

To initiate the Mastery, you need the following items:

• Mastery Material type 1 – from transmuting gear
• Mastery Material type 2 – from Arena rewards
• Duplicate of current gear – regardless of tier
• Existing Gear – at the right tier

Akin to transmutation, all gears require different amounts of material for mastery and this is dependent on your gear origin (ie. Leg, WC, Regular). Legendary gear requires the most amounts of materials while regular gear requires the least.

You would also require a duplicate of your current gear and you can select which duplicate you want to use by clicking on the center item card. The duplicate gear DOES NOT need to be of the same tier/mastery as the gear which you are planning to Master.

M1 mastery items to get to Master the first star

For a more detailed overview, here is the amount of material required to Master a legendary item from M1-M6 (credit to Max):

M1 – 12 x Dalomite (M1 material); 1 x Hexaanium (T3 Arena); 1 x Duplicate
M2 – 12 x Rhundite (M2 material); 2 x Hexaanium (T3 Arena); 1 x Duplicate
M3 – 12 x Questarite (M3 material); 4 x Hexaanium (T3 Arena); 1 x Duplicate
M4 – 12 x Ekenite (M4 material); 9 x Hexaanium (T3 Arena); 1 x Duplicate
M5 – 12 x Ydamite (M5 material); 3 x Decanium (T6 Arena); 1 x Duplicate
M6 – 12 x Galoxite (M6 material); 5 x Decanium (T6 Arena); 1 x Duplicate

For other gears (ie. WC and regular), you can substitute the 12 materials with 8 (for regular gear) and 10 (for WC gear). Do note that due to lack of information, I’m not too sure of the Arena materials at upper Mastery levels for non-Legendary gear and it might require less at higher tiers.

Putting this into perspective, to Master a legendary gear from M1-6 requires a massive truckload of mastery materials both transmuted from gear and won from arena league rankings. It also requires a total of 6 additional duplicate items to complete the Mastery.

In the near future, I plan to do a proper list of all of the other gears once I get more information and analyse the amount of items needed for transmutation.

*Tip from VastGenome (Updated!):
Mastery of M5 to M6 equipment is the most expensive hurdle since they require transmuted materials from T6 gear. The most economical suggestion would be to transmute a regular T6 gear at level 75 as they yield 4 x Galoxite and the next jump is level 125 for 5 x Galoxite. Considerations of transmutating T6 WC or Legendary gear, however, is out of the picture for obvious reasons. 

TL;DR: Mastery requires materials from transmuting, Arena rewards, duplicate gears and your existing gear. The main limiter would be the Arena rewards and the duplicate gears.

---

Where can I find Hexaaniums?

If you’ve just started on your journey for Mastery, you won’t be immediately able to Master anything yet as certain materials can only be procured from Arena seasonal quests or leaderboard rankings.

Hexaaniums can be procured from this week’s Arena quest

For this week specifically, Hexaanium can be attained by completing the quest of using 10 Coliseum weapons in Arena (covered here). They can also be gotten once the Arena season (week) ends and finishing at Bronze league (and above) already entitles you to Mastery materials.

Fun fact: Technically, for a M6 Legendary gear, the fastest plausible way to get it would be to get rank 1 constantly, which rewards you 6 Hexaaniums and 3 Decanium.

Even so, this would take a total of 3 weeks to get enough Arena mastery material for the M6 item. This is discounting Mastery items from seasonal quests and under the assumption that you have all the 6 duplicates and other Mastery material already at your disposal.

A costly endeavor but definitely much faster than waiting for 5 extra weeks

For the rest of the non-competitive community out there, it takes a total of 8 weeks to collect the same amount of mastery material for M6. But getting those 6 duplicates would indeed be more of an issue.

TL;DR: Certain Mastery materials can only be gotten from Arena and boy, it’s definitely a long wait!

---

What do I gain?

Mastery boosts the base stats of your gear by a percentage of approximately 6% per every mastered star. This also raises the amount of stats provided by the SF points meaning that you get more than just +2 per every SF added.

The overall stats increases by 6%, and this includes any SF points factored in as well

For those more mathematically inclined,  a simple formula, referenced from Aqve’s, of the stats can be:

Atk/Armor stat = [Base stat + (SF pts* 2)] * [100 + 6 * (Mastery tier)]%

This applies to both weapons and armor but there are no changes in the numerical values for the traits.

Another feature would be that Mastery adds a unique trait of Strike chance for weapons and Strike resist for armor. Strike chance allows you to deal additional elemental damage to your opponents during attacking; while Strike resist protects your character from this additional damage.

*Update: The strike damage reported is an estimated additional 90% of your normal damage.

The dark glowing spirius from Dark Mastered duals

While there is no strike resist animation that I’ve seen available yet, Strike chance produces an animation that varies with respect to the colour of the element. This animation is manifested in the form of existing skill effects (eg. Light – Lightning bolt; Water – Ice Spike; Dark – Lingering orb glow etc.).

(Many thanks to VastGenome for the observations and correction!)

The amount of % raised per level is dependent on gear origin and can be categorised as such:

Strike resist (armor)
Leg – 5.5%/ level
WC – 5.0%/ level
Regular – 4.5%/ level

Strike chance (weapon)
Leg – 6.5%/ level
WC – 6.0%/ level
Regular – 5.5%/ level

Like the growth of stats upon every mastered star, this is a linear multiplier meaning that at M3, you get 5.0% x 3 = 15.0% strike resist for a M3 WC Armor.

For a M2 WC weapon, you get 6 * 2 = 12% strike chance

 

Last but not least, this also raises the maximum amount of SF that you can add into the gear itself. Every level raises by +15 allowable SF points and you can get a maximum of +240 SF points for a M6 gear. Factoring in the stats bonus multiplier, this potentially adds an estimate total of 653 additional stats for the mastered gear!

TL;DR: Mastery adds a small boost to stats, Strike chance (weapons)/Strike resist (armors), and increases the maximum amount of SF per item.

---

What should I Master first?

Weapons benefit most from the Mastery feature at the moment as strike chance do give you an opportunity to deal this additional elemental damage in areas outside of Arena. This is inclusive of all other game modes and this extra elemental damage is especially useful in ToE and Raiding.

One less armor for the next mastery level?

On the other hand, Strike resist does not have more useful applications besides within Arena matches, unless this will be added to all minions (a scary thought indeed).

A possible suggestion, as mentioned by the friendly folk credited in this post, would be to broaden the parameters of Strike resist and allow it to protect the user against critical hits or even dodge-piercing DOT. Thus, extending its usefulness outside of just the arena.

Another recommendation would be to allow the Mastery feature to reduce the percentage of degradation per battle for every tier of Mastery. Since potentially useful duplicate gears are sacrificed in the Mastery process, this encourages players to perform Mastery over just retaining your good gears for more Arena battles…which leads us to the next question.

Important notice: There is a glitch that results in a crash if you equip a mastered item into ToE waypoints. This has been acknowledged by the devs and is to be resolved hopefully very soon!

TL;DR: Weapons benefit most since Strike chance is applicable outside Arena.

---

Should I do Mastery or keep my duplicates?

Now that the Arena is in play, good duplicates serve a different role besides being used as fodder for Mastery. However, this really depends on the number of gears you possess and the extent of which you wish to play competitively.

Strategically, it makes sense to keep your WC or Legendary gear duplicates since even at T4, they provide much more worthy stat boost over regular gear. Mastering these gear, although would provide a slight boost to your stats and a fancy new trait, would result in a loss of opportunity that is worth 2-3 additional attempts at the Arena…or 200-300 points in equivalent.

However, if you’re a collector and have tons of duplicates, I’d say about 4 of the same item or more, you can safely consider performing Mastery. This, of course, is up to personal preference and if you’re going hardcore for Rank 1, then those 4 gears might very well be necessary to get you within that range.

TL;DR: For competitive players, keep duplicates mainly for more chances for Arena battles.

---

Oh no! I fused all of my Duplicates before!

This is a tough call and honestly I don’t think you can get refunded for the fused duplicates. I myself have, regrettably, fused some duplicate gears but I guess that was way before the announcement dropped.

Optimistically, the consolation is that the drop rates of chests are now boosted with the chance of getting certain items, this applies to all chests including Legendary chests. Since there is a higher chance of getting legendary chests (eg. Arena leaderboard rankings, ToE WP 75 and end-of-the-month daily reward), I guess it is about collecting and waiting till the desired item has its drop rate boosted.

Another long period of effort, I know, but thankfully much less than what it was before.

TL;DR: Uh oh….try your luck again in chests I guess 😦

---

Will skills and minions get Mastery in the future?

Not that I know of at this moment, since there hasn’t been news about it.

Don’t fret! If they’re not out yet, it simply could mean that the devs are considering this possibility and this itself would require quite a bit of testing to ensure the workability of this feature for these two types.

Not to mention, Minions have recently received a good stat boost and there have been 18k average minion stat users already in the Legendary league. Providing an additional bonus to minions needs to be balanced out well in order to prevent a skewed difference in power between those who pay and those who don’t.

TL;DR: Not sure yet!

---

That wraps this post up!

I wanted to discuss about on P2W in DH5 since the introduction of these two features might be seemingly so. However, I’ll leave that to a separate post. 🙂