Weapon Enchantment

Weapon Enchantment is the process of giving weapons elemental Archmagick enchantments; enchantments can be either permanently embued on a weapon as part of its attributes, or temporarily bestowed by a Mage, Sorcerer or Mystic Knight.

Overview

 * See also : List of Enchanted Weapons and Category:Elemental Weapons

In Dragon's Dogma a weapon will perform either physical or magical damage, or sometimes a weapon can perform both types of damage depending on its nature and/or the nature of the skill or spell selected by the character. A weapon may then be enchanted with one of the five Archmagicks, giving it additional magical damage specifically targeted at an enemy's weakness; enemies can be resistant to specific elements which can cause an elemental buff to work against the attacker.

An enchanted weapon will also be able to inflict element-specific damage or status effects; for example, a Fire enchanted sword or staff gains the ability to inflict the Burning debilitation.

In the case of physical weapons, adding enchantment allows the weapon to perform an additional magical damage attack, making the weapon scale greater in power due to factoring the holder's magic attack stat. This can make the weapon attacks of a character that has leveled up mostly in magic-using classes very potent.

For magic-based weapons such as archistaves and staffs, the addition of an elemental component allows elemental debilitations, effects, and benefits, but does not give an increase in power to specific spells. As an example, a Bolide is a Fire-based spell; enchanting the archistave with Fire does not increase Bolide's elemental damage component; instead, the enchantment boosts the amount calculated off the magick user's base Magic Attack (MATT) stat, making the spell's MATT component more powerful. Additionally enchanting with an element different from that of a spell cast does not affect the nature of the spell, but will still give an overall magic power boost, even if the elemental characters are different.

Enchantment spells



 * For lists see Category:Enchantment skills

In addition to permanently enchanted physical and magical weapons which may be found or bought, any weapon may be temporarily enchanted with an archmagick, giving the benefits of an enchanted weapon for a short period of time.

In general, an elemental spell will temporarily overwrite any permanent or previous temporary elemental enchantment; with one exception these spells do not stack. Casting a weaker variant of any element on an already temporarily-enchanted weapon will overwrite the first enchantment's effects with that of the lesser secondary enchantment.

Mage, Sorcerer, and Mystic Knight all have enchantment spells or varying power and effect; most spells are available in variants matching all five archmagicks:

Boons and Trances
Mage and Sorcerer boon and affinity spells enchant an individual target's primary and secondary weapons with an elemental Archmagick.

Mystic Knight has Enchanter and Trance spells which are respectively parallel to Boon and Affinity spells. The Enchanter and Trance spells are shorter in duration, and affect the entire party with a single cast.

Whilst boon type spells enchant the main and secondary weapon of the recipient, enchanter type spells enchant only the primary weapons of the group.

The magic boost from one rank of spell to another (eg boon to affinity) is generally small - the increase in power is noticeable in term of secondary effects - for example a dark affinity enchanted weapon is more likely to give a critical hit than a dark boon enchant.

Addtionally the durations of the spells increases:

In addition to giving an elemental boost, these spells give a magic power boost weapons - the effect varies but can typically give a 10-30% boost in magick damage against non-magick resistant enemies. The power is related to the casters innate magick ability, but not the quality of their staff, or its enchantments.

Although more than two Boons may be cast sequentially by a pawn when requested, a Mage or Sorcerer pawn will stop after casting two Affinities or Pacts when requested and must be asked a second time to complete the elemental buff of the entire party. This specific command is the left d-pad button.

Self enchantment
The Boons, Affinities, and Pact spells can be cast on the caster, and the Trance based spells always enchanted the invoker's weapon. Certain enchantmetns can only be cast on the caster's own weapon - these are primarily Mystic Knight spells.

Extending enchantments

 * The augment Perpetuation extends the duration of temporary enchantments when this augment is equipped by the caster by approximately 30%. Exceptions include some Mystic Knight shield spells, Dark Anguish, Abyssal Anguish, duration of these spells are not lengthened by Perpetuation. The Mystic Knight's shield spells are, instead, directly affected by the Gauntlet attribute " Boosts the power of normal and magick shields. " which affects damage output rather than duration.
 * Perpetuation stacks with Dark Arisen equipment that "Extends duration of attribute boosts applied to you." For example, a Pact cast by a pawn with Perpetuation on an individual with Gauntlets or Claws bearing this attribute lasts for six-and-a-half minutes.
 * Dark Arisen armor with the permanent attribute "Extends duration of attribute boosts applied to you." extends the duration of all applied elemental enchantments.