Path of Exile 2: How to improve equipment Quality, and what does it do?

Like the previous game, Path of Exile 2 allows you to improve the Quality of your gear. To be clear, this is different from simply improving the rarity — there are many ways to do that across the game. But if you want to improve the actual stats on your equipment, there’s only one way to do that: find the correct items for it. In my personal experience, these have been incredibly rare compared to PoE, but your experience may vary.

The method and frequency of drops could also change throughout the game’s Early Access time. With these items potentially dropping far less, you’ll want to make them count, so consider carefully before you go and improve your equipment Quality in Path of Exile 2.

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How to improve equipment Quality in Path of Exile 2

If you want to improve equipment Quality in Path of Exile 2, you must have the right customizable items. Depending on which piece of gear you’re trying to improve, there are a series of specific items that you need to have in your inventory.

Just make sure you have the right item, and you can improve your gear Quality (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

You must farm either Blacksmith’s Whetstone, Armour Scrap, or Arcanist’s Etcher. You just have to activate them in your inventory and select the item you want to improve. Below is the list of items and what they influence:

• Blacksmith’s Whetstone: All Martial Weapons
• Armour Scrap: All armor pieces
• Arcanist’s Etcher: Wands, Staves, Sceptres

Finding these items only improves the base stats the piece of gear came with, not the Affixes. So if your gear, for example, has “+2 to all Monk skills,” that wouldn’t be improved. But if that gear had +Armor and +Energy Shield as baseline stats, those would get improved. We saw a roughly 3% upgrade by using an Armour Scrap on a piece of gear.

If there are base stats on the gear, using this will improve them a bit (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

The hard part is getting these items. They’re random drops off of enemies and from various chests, boxes, and pots scattered throughout the game. That’s the nature of games like Path of Exile 2 though — you never know where important things are going to drop. That just means you have to slaughter all evil forces that come your way.

If you’re finding that these items are particularly rare, that just means you have to make their use count. They are the only way to improve the actual Quality of your equipment in Path of Exile 2. If you want to improve their rarity, you need items like Orb of Transmutation, Regal Orb, or any of the other items that serve a similar function.

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Check out our other Path of Exile 2 guides and features:

• Path of Exile 2 Warrior class overview: Skills, Ascendancies, and playstyle
• How to preload Path of Exile 2 (PC and consoles)
• You can dual wield two-handed weapons in Path of Exile 2