Back in the day, all you needed was an armor set, a weapon 5 jewels and you were good to go! That was many many years ago but new content, new items are added every 6 months or so, right now the "empty slots" of a character sum up to 90, we will go over them briefly but right now we are exploring all the types of gear you can have in the game. As mentioned the empty slots of a character are 90 but in many cases after you reach a certain point you need more items than that so you can swap between certain areas, whether that is olympiad, pve content, or adena farming.
Over the years they have added character bound gear that is non-tradable and comes in various forms, that can be Forgotten skills, Homunculus, Dethrone Skills, Relics, The Historical Tome, Collections, Virtual Equipment which was added recently, and of course Augments that is added on tradable items and temporarily makes them non tradable (until you remove that augment).
The tradable items are weapons/ armors/ accessories/ artifacts, pretty much anything that is sold from players and in the auction house and can be equipped in the following photo so lets go over the items, on the bottom row you have 4 slots for Brooch, Kaliel's Bracelet, Seed Bracelet and Artifact Book. Each one of them unlocks more slots as you upgrade them and can fit different amount of items each time, I will go over the max items, so you can see where the number 90 comes from, so Brooch (6), Kaliel's Bracelet (6), Seed Bracelet (5) and Artifact Book (21), then you have 5 accesories ( rings/earrings/neck), the Shirt/ Circlet/ Mask/ Belt/ Cloak and finally Armor and Weapon, what you cannot see there is that the 6 parts of armor and then 5 accessories can now have 2x Soul Crystals on each part and 3 Soul Crystals on the Weapon, (Tersi & Pa'agrio for the Armor, Masia & Eva's for the accessories. We talked about augments so here are the items you can augment, Mask/ Circlet/ Weapon/ Armor/ Shirt/ Accessories/ Brooch/ Kaliel's Bracelet/ Seed Bracelet and Artifact Book. You can find more about Augments [here]
The character bound gear is something that gives a lot of stats, it is cheaper to get, or rather there is also the option to get it for cheap ( on some items) but it takes time to do so.
Lets start with the Relics, a feature that was added in November of 2023 with the Shinemaker update. You can buy Relic Summoning tickets from the Shop with Adena that rewards Relics from No grade to C grade or Shinning Relic Summoning tickets, that you can buy with Einhasad Gold Coins and you can obtain Relics from No grade to B grade.
Those relics are a passive stat that gives you bonus based on the weapon that you have, the higher the grade, the better the stats, the type of relic you have active, should be the same type of the weapon you currently use to get they full effect, for example, if you have a dagger/dual daggers then you need to own a dagger. Besides the stats that you get you can also Compound them for a chance to upgrade it to the next grade, No grade to D, D grade to C, C grade to B, B grade to A, with A being the highest Relic grade, additionally you can enchant them from 0 to +4 and the reason for that is for one better stats but Relics do have their own Collection System, the Relic effects apply to each character individually for both the main and the dual class.
The forgotten skills are passives that you learn and can increase your characters stats significantly, you can obtain them with a low chance from the boxes that come from "Innadril of Crisis", Events and Loot Boxes, the downside is that the effect only applies to the class that you learn them, this can be either your main or your dual class. There is a total of 7 skills that can each one go up to level 31, one of them is for fighters, one for mages, and the remaining 5 are common and give stats to all classes.
The dethrone skills is a rather new feature, it allows you to add damage on your toon through various activities inside Dethrone but the effects are permanent on your character and work everywhere. You need to be level 110 to enter Dethrone and there are ways to level up those skills even if you do not have the ability to hunt in there. The stats start at lv0 and go all the way up to lv10, the bonuses are as follows, Source of Fire 40 Weapon Patk/Matk and 40 Element Atk and Def per level, Fighting Spirit 3% Patk/Matk/Pdef/Mdef per level, Fire Totem 4% All Critical Damage/- 4% All Critical Damage received, Fire Part, 4% Damage/ -4% Damage Received and Finally Source of Life Vitality Bonus 3% and XP/SP 3%.
You can read more about Dethrone Skills [Here].
The Historical Tome is passive stat that you can level up using drops from ToI or Dethrone (Dimensional Historical Tomes), alternatively you can buy event items (Einhasad Historical Tomes) that you can get from loot boxes. This game feature starts from level 0 all the way to level 300, and gives you a permanent buff and a Greater Rune Stone every 50 levels, the first 50 are purely defensive stats but after that you get both defensive and offensive stats.
A cute little pet that you can see, but cannot summon and gives you an abundance of passive stats such as, reuse, patk, pdef, extra adena, element attack and defense depending on the type you get and its rarity, you can obtain them for free that is once a day, with adena which is 3x per day for 12m adena per or pay 400 Einhasad Gold Coin to get a guaranteed Top Homunculus but random type, once you start diving deeper in the game the Homunculus can be a real nice boost in stats or it can give you the flexibility to switch around gear for more damage output.
A new feature that allows players to "borrow" gear for a certain period of time. The way it works is rather simple, you complete a 10 minute instance and in the end, once you kill the final raid, you are awarded virtual points, which then can be used in the Virtual Gear Shop. The gear in the shop is not always the same, of course you can always select weapons/armors but the Brooch Jewels vary from season to season. You can also get items such as soul crystals and stats such as pdef/mdef, XP/SP, Weapon Patk/Matk, Increase to all stats in intervals of 1.
One of the main features of the game that players go to when they need more damage, the Collection system allows you to "sacrifice" various items to gain a permanent increase ins damage/stats, these items can be anything to a combination of weapons or armors, dyes, misc items such as insanity talismans, sayha talismans etc, or drops from ToI and byproducts of enchanting such as Blood Red Soul Beads. There are paid collections that come once a year, usually around the time of the Anniversary and give something like 5% patk/ matk/ pdef/ mdef and of course there are temporary collections that will boost your character for a set period of time. Collections is a feature that is used mostly from the higher level players once the gear upgrades start to get pricy.
Most of those features can be found on the sidebar that is usually located on the right hand side of the screen, at least this is where it is located once you install the game for the first time, of course you can always move it to the location of your choice.
Lineage II is a 20 year old game as of 2024 and has gone through a lot of changes, new items, higher levels and with each update something new is added. Some have the ability to keep up others might struggle, however Lineage II is something that requires time to make progress. To be able to stay in the game and follow the content, you will need to have patience and determination, usually those are not required to play a game but here we do things differently, the grind and the high difficulty were always part of the game or rather the core of the game!!
