Grey Gear Fortification and Transfer

NOTE: The following may no longer be true. Since the patch in Spring 2014, the success rate for all gear for fortifying to 12/12 is supposedly 4%. I am unsure if there is still a soul gold advantage.

Many player use level 30 grey gear to get a 12/12 fortification rather than fortify the gear that they are currently using. The two main reasons for this is that grey gear has a higher success rate - 8% vs 4%, and that it costs far less soul gold for each fortification try. Whereas a level 77 piece may cost a few soul diamonds per try, the 30 grey gear costs less than 1% of that.

You can fortify the unbound gear, which will cost trade gold. These pieces will be tradeable to other players. Some players make extra trade gold this way.

If you don't want to spend a bunch of trade gold, and intend to use the piece for your char, fortify the piece enough to open one gem slot. Place a bound gem in. The gear will now be bound and only cost soul gold to fortify. This is also how you bind a non-class piece to make it transferable.

In the example below, you can see that I am a warrior with a 12/12 grey mage chest. In order to transfer the stats, it must be bound to my char. Normally you bind gear by wearing it, but as a warrior, I can't wear mage gear. So, I bind the gear using a bound gem.

You can transfer the bound grey piece directly to your current gear. This will cost you a certain number of star frags and star diamonds depending on the level difference and the gear type. The higher the level difference and the more of a difference between gear grade, the more diamonds and frags you will need.

Star frags can be gotten from your leveling reward in Shylia Market, randomly from attendance boxes, AH, player shops/trade, and from Otis next to Ferrie the healer in Freedom Harbor at the library entrance. Otis asks for 10 Token of Faith for each star frag.

Star diamonds come from a few quests, mining the guild base mining satellite, AH, player shops/trade, and from Eyrda cash shop.

If you have a cash shop reward high enough, you can get free transfers up to a certain level of gear. The transfers must be from blue to blue gear. If you are taking advantage of this benefit, you will need to first transfer to blue of the same level. This first transfer will cost you a few star frags. You can actually transfer to a higher level for just slightly more frags if you can't find a blue 30 piece.

When doing the free transfer, you will need to transfer in steps up - first to a lv40, then to lv50, then to lv60. After your free transfers are done, I did not see any cost effectiveness in stepping any longer, so I transferred directly to my current gear. Still lots of star diamonds and frags, but definitely not as many as it would have been going directly from grey 30 to blue 77.

The grey piece in the example above cost me about 100-150 star crystals to get from 0/12-12/12. It's not too hard to get the piece to 9/12. After that, I wait until I feel really lucky, then drop everything and go fortify. For me, the luck sign does not seem to make a difference. I got all my FP gear from 6/12 to 9/12 one day when I was feeling really, really lucky. Every single fort worked. And it was not under my lucky sign or even my birth sign.