Enchanting, Enhancing and Socketing

I remember one of the first things that grumpy old Claude shared with me over dinner was that the strongest and mightiest weapons are never found in the marketplace but in your own cupboard. What that means, is that you really have to get down to crafting and enchanting your own dream weaponry and armors. It can be really expensive, but the ancient magicks will never fail to surprise you.

However, the costs can be brought down quite a fair bit if one abides by the following guides,
A) Always try to enchant the desired options onto the weapon before attempting to enhance the weapon to a godly glow or to open sockets on the weapon. But if the weapon is easily available, you may want to +5 or +6 it without boosters first before starting to enchant it.

B) It can be really cost effective if your raid weapon happens to be the same as your pvp weapon as in the course of chipping, the first good options that come along is usually atk/race instead of atk/human or atk/ar. Its a real horror if you had to wash off a godly 40atk/100daemon option simply because you only need pvp opts on this weapon type.

C) Choose your base weapon with care before investing in enchanting it. However godly the options, the weapon isn't going to be worth much if the base AR, or base attack score is low.

D) Gather a few hundred chips and if possible, a few of the same weapon before starting to chip them so that if you come across a good option, you can put that weapon aside and use another to continue. If you only have one of the weapon, you can also try to find a trusted friend who has the same weapon (clean) and borrow it while you are chipping so that you can hang on to a nice set of opts that came up along the way on the spare weapon while continuing to try.

E) Many pioneers have their lucky charms and rules but no matter what rules you follow, chipping, enhancing and socketing are going to be extremely expensive and if you aren't willing to pay the cost, it will be better to just settle for 2nd rate items off the marketplace.

F) This is just my personal opinion but what are the options to aim for? For raid weapons, 40atk/100race bonus would be great. As for the other options like critical, accuracy, atkspd, magical attack, you really need to see what stance and char is using that weapon. Dont forget that the three rumins you can put into the sockets can help to make up for some options. +5 is great, +6 looks magnificent and +7 .. only for the very rich and die-die-must1HkO types. Some people are duellists while others are raiders. But there are really other ways to down an opponent; use stackable skills and you can get it done with simple weapons. And here, I remember what Adelina the feisty pirate told me,

"With the mightiest of weapons, even a noob can kill but it takes a true master to kill with simple tools"