I did not write any of the material contained within this document. The following information has been gathered from several sources (with appropriate credits where possible). If an enchanting mage discovers any flaws in this please, please, PLEASE! let me know. Thanks.

*** A basic treatise on enchanting by Lord Mithadris ***

Sooner or later you are going to want to improve your armor and increase your protection. When that time comes one of your options will be to have a wizard enchant your armor. You will probaby have numerous questions about this and I will attempt to explain enchanting and hopefully answer most of these.

In order to enchant a wizard must first have armor. So choose your armor in advance and save the wizard a lot of additional needless headaches by working this out ahead of time. There are some excellent resources available in the file library that can be downloaded to help you make your selection. You can also take your questions on armor to the specific folder for your profession and get excellent advice. Deciding which armor is the first step. Finding a wizard the second one.

Once you find a wizard you can ask him if you need to provide the armor for him to enchant. Often the wizard will not need you to buy the armor unless you have a unique set you want enchanted.

Before a wizard can enchant armor he must first temper it to accept the enchantment. This is done using one of the numerous potions purchased from Bin, the local alchemist. The armor takes a minimum of 2 hours to cure after being treated with the appropriate potion. Two hours is a minimum, but that time can easily take days depending on the potion used to cure the armor and the level of the enchantment. Until the armor is tempered the armor cannot be enchanted.

After the armor has finished curing and is ready to accept the spell, the wizard can cast the enchantment. Each enchantment will add +5 to the bonus of the armor to your DS. So it is very common to hear armor referred to as 1x, 2x, 3x, etc... If someone has armor that is 3x, or enchanted three times, it has a bonus of +15 to your DS when worn.

When enchanting there is always a chance of failure. A failure can result in merely losing the temper or more catastrophic, which might kill the wizard and others present. There is also a chance the item may lose a level of enchantment or even become cursed. For example, if a wizard was working on 2x armor and trying to get it to 3x and failed...if it lost a level of enchantment it would then be 1x...if it was cursed it would end up being -1x, or you would have a -5 to your DS when wearing the cursed armor.

There are a number of things that will increase the chances of failure when enchanting, but there are also a few things a wizard can do to improve the chance of success. He can avoid attempting to enchant any armor he has not worked on. Attempting to enchant over another wizard's enchantment will increase the chance of failure. The higher the enchantment the higher the chance of failure. Enchanting at a node, or better yet, in a workshop, the age of the wizard and the potion used to cure the armor all increase the chances of success.

If tempering the armor and avoiding failure was all there was to enchanting armor we wouldn't have a problem and everyone would have enchanted armor, but there is another very important point to cover. When a wizard attempts to enchant armor it must be tempered and there has to be enough mana in the local pool before it will succeeed.

There are only a handfull of mana pools for all the lands of Elanthia. These generate mana on their own over time. The mana level of the pool that the wizard is enchanting at is important. If there is not enough mana in the pool it is not possible to enchant the armor. For those who must know exactly what and where these pools are, please find a local philosopher for his thoughts on this subject as I will not attempt to address it...or better yet...find a ranger to help you find them; your chances are about as good. The pools have no physical manifestation in the game, but are an inherent part of the lands. When enchanting the wizard taps these pools and the mana levels are reduced based on the level of enchantment being added to the armor. The first enchantment only reduces the pool by a minor amount whereas the greatest enchantment you can get, 10x, would reduce the pool of a large amount of mana. The mana level of a pool is unknown and a wizard generally has no idea what level the pool is at until he has a successful enchantment.

If a pool does not have enough mana for an enchantment anyone is able to infuse their own mana into the pool to raise it in an attempt to bring the mana level of the pool up to a level high enough to successfully enchant the armor. This done by simply typing: Infuse (number). Where number is equal to or less than the amount of mana you have personally.

So if you have 26 mana, you could INFUSE 26 and place all 26 of your mana into the local pool. However, I must point out that if your mana sharing is less than 100% you will not be infusing all your mana into the pool. You have to have 100% mana sharing to infuse the pool with 100% of your mana. If you do not have 100% mana sharing you can send your mana to someone who is overtrained in mana sharing and they can infuse it for you.

The more mana that is in the pool the more you will have to infuse to increase the level of enchantments the pool will be able to handle. It is fairly easy to infuse enough mana into the pool to raise it high enough for 1x enchantments...but increasing the pool from the 3x level to the 4x level is much harder and this gets increasingly more difficult the higher the level.

As the number of enchanting wizards have increased so have the amount of 1x or 2x armor being created. Each time those enchantments are placed on armor it reduces the pool so that higher enchantments cannot be attempted. Rarely do the pools have enough mana in them to attempt 3x no less 4x. As a result it is rather common for the wizard to infuse the node before attempting the higher enchantments. This can be a very long and trying effort fraught with a number of potential problems.

The problem with infusing a pool is that you may not gain the fruits of your labors. You may lose the mana you infuse into a public pool if another wizard taps that pool while you are infusing. For example, if I wanted to enchant some 2x armor to 3x I might spend an hour or two infusing in TS only to have another wizard at the manor enchant some 1x and reduce the pool of all the mana I infused. Remember there are only a handfull of pools for all the lands and most regions only have a single pool from which to draw mana when enchanting. So a wizard can sit at one location infusing a pool while another wizard someplace else can tap it. You can see how this would be a big problem for the higher enchantments that take hours, if not days, to infuse the pool before an attempt can be made.

Workshops are an exception. A workshop has its own pool that cannot be tapped from any other location. You have to be in the workshop to tap its pool. Once the pool in the workshop is depleted the mana from the regional pool is tapped. In addition, workshops improve the chances of success when enchanting. So there are a number of benefits to using a workshop.

Finally, I must point out that if you have enough mana in the pool to attempt a 7x enchantment you would not want to enchant some armor to 1x before attempting the 7x. If you enchanted the 1x first you would no longer be able to enchant the 7x, since the 1x would have reduced the mana level of the pool below the level needed to attempt the 7x. However, if you did the 7x first you could then do the 1x. So the best use of the mana available in the pool is to start with the highest enchantments first and work your way down to the 1x.

I hope you find this brief overview of enchanting useful. If you have any further questions feel free to post them. I doubt this is a comprehensive look at enchanting, but it should cover most of the basics. Keep in mind though that there are no official details covering enchanting and most information is based on the knowledge and experience the older wizards have had with enchanting over the years and even they do not agree on all the details. This was not intended to explain or justify everything covering enchanting, but merely an attempt to cover the basics for those who know nothing of enchanting so that they will have the information they need to decide how best to go about acquiring enchanted armor.

An enchanting mage, Mithadris

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*** A few well thought out questions posted in the enchanting topic on the message boards ***

Q: What if there is insufficient mana in the pool at the time of attempted enchantment? Will it empty the pool?
A: If there is insufficient mana, you'll get a message specifically saying so. There are no adverse effects. Generally you'll just continue infusing until the pool is large enough. Then you'll go ahead an enchant the item.

Q: What happens if you can't infuse enough? Can the armor be ruined if it is in a tempered state too long without being enchanted in a certain amount of time?
A: You have at least 3 weeks to increase the mana pool without anything happening to the temper/armor from what I gather. I'm not sure if the potion use you influences this time-frame. In short, it's basically a non-issue.

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*** A monolog by Lord Marc on enchanting ***

Marc says, "OK...going to start this monolog and will end up meditating (AFK)...will wake in a couple..."

Marc asks, "ready to catch and record this stuff?"

You nod.

Marc says, "This information came primarily from Kodos and others...."

Marc says, "To ET, you have to treat something with an ET potion, wait the correct amount of time, and then cast enchant on it."

Marc says, "If there is not enough ET mana in the area, you will not be able to cast."

Marc says, "The formula figured out for ETing by mages (this formula is not from the gods) with a lot of experience is:"

Marc says, "Success if D100 roll > 126-(your level*4)+(ET plus*4)-(potion bonus)-(workshop bonus)+(previous ET factor)"

Marc says, "There are 4 ET potions, 3 in the front room and 1 in the back. The merchant presents them in the order of increasing price and bonus."

Marc says, "The four potions have bonuses of 0/10/20/30."

Marc says, "The four potions have waiting times between pouring and casting of 2-4 hours/4-12 hours/4-24 hours/4-14 days."

Marc says, "Workshop bonuses are 0-no workshop, 10-any workshop that is not your private workshop, 20-your own private workshop."

Marc says, "Previous ET factor: 0-if never ETed or previously ETed by you, 10-if previously ETed by another mage."

Marc says, "There are five known ET failure modes:"

Marc says, "Fizzle-no bad effect, repour and try again."

Marc says, "Backfire-same as fizzle, but you take a fire crit. You can die."

Marc says, "Drawdown-same as backfire for personal risk, but you lose an ET. If you had a +15 item and trying for +20, you end up with a +10 item."

Marc says, "Curse-same as backfire for personal risk, item goes to -5 or -10 and is cursed and blackened."

Marc says, "Poof-same as backfire for personal risk, item is history."

Marc says, "Each workshop has a mana pool and there are regional, non-workshop pools."

Marc says, "Workshops appear to recharge a bit over 1K of mana an hour and the regional pools a bit more."

Marc says, "A mana pool requires 5k mana to do a +5 ET. Each higher ET requires 3 times the mana of the previous ET."

Marc says, "So for enchants to plus 5/10/15/20/25/30/35/40/45/50 requires:"

Marc says, "Mana levels of 5/15/45/135/405/1215/3645/10935/32805/98415 K mana."

Marc says, "These are the amounts to go between levels. To go from +15 to +20 takes 135K mana in the pool."

Marc says, "As you can see, trying to do higher level ETs in workshops shared by many mages requires a lot of cooperation to let the pool build up mana."

Marc exclaims, "OK, thats all I know!"

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*** Hope this info is useful! ***

Lord Gulcar Greumalkin

- from Zanteal's personal library.
Documents and manuscripts gathered since 1996.