Equipment

Every piece of gear in Second Calamity carries a rarity, and the rarity tells you what to expect before you even open the tooltip. Common items roll no modifiers at all; Magic (blue) items carry one or two; Rare (yellow) items carry up to six — three prefixes and three suffixes — pulled from a pool tied to what kind of item it is. Unique (orange) and Notorious (purple) items break the pattern on purpose: their modifiers are fixed rather than rolled, and they exist to hand you a new way to play rather than a bigger number. This chapter walks the gear system from the ground up: weapon classes, how gear scales as you level, armor and accessories, support slots, and the affix system that turns a plain base item into a build.

Weapons

There are fourteen weapon types, and no job owns any of them. Your abilities don't change when you change weapons, and nothing in your kit is locked behind holding the right thing. What a weapon actually decides is your damage floor, your swing speed, and which modifiers are allowed to roll on it. Weapon choice is itemization, not class.

Two gates stand between you and any given weapon. The first is attributes: heavy weapons want Strength, finesse and ranged weapons want Dexterity, casting weapons want Intelligence. The second is skill. Every weapon base carries a required skill value, and it's checked against your ceiling in that weapon class rather than your current skill, so you can equip something the moment your job and level permit it and grow into it by using it. Jobs with a poor grade in a weapon class hit a lower ceiling, and stop a tier or two short of that weapon's best bases. The grades are in the Jobs chapter.

Because the requirement reads your ceiling and not your current skill, there is no chicken-and-egg problem where you need skill to hold the weapon that gives you skill. Requirements are re-checked whenever your gear changes, and anything you no longer qualify for unequips itself to your bags.

Modifiers aren't a single pool that every weapon draws from. Each weapon type belongs to one or more mod categories, and it can only roll modifiers from the categories it belongs to. This is the main lever separating weapons that would otherwise be a damage number and a delay number.

Attack modifiers are the physical and elemental damage lines, attack speed, accuracy, and critical rolls. Spell modifiers are spell power, spell damage, and cast speed. A sword can roll both, which is why Spellblades and Paladins live on one. A greatsword rolls attack only and hits harder for it.

Tank modifiers on a weapon are a deliberate reversal: defensive lines have always been an armor and shield concern, and putting them on Fist, Katana, and Great Katana is the thing that lets a tank build out of a weapon slot instead of only out of armor.

Sword

Greatsword

Axe

Hammer

Dagger

Fist Weapons

Polearm

Scythe

Mace

Wand

A one-handed main with unusually long basic-attack reach, which is what lets a caster hold an off-hand and still attack from where a caster should be standing.

Staff

Bow

Marksman Offhands

TODO: the marksman offhands occupy the offhand slot rather than a main weapon type — one line explaining what that means for pairing them.

Thrown (Boomerangs & Chakrams)

TODO: thrown weapons are universal pulling tools, not tied to a job — one line explaining pulling and any secondary use.

Katana

Great Katana

How Gear Scales

Most of your power comes from your gear, not your level. The design target is roughly a 70/30 split — about 70% of your strength at any given cap comes from what you have equipped, and about 30% comes from your level and job growth. That split is deliberate: it's what makes loot worth chasing instead of level count.

Leveling speed and gear churn are tied together on purpose. Early levels come fast, so early gear upgrades are small and frequent — you won't need to re-gear every level. Later, leveling slows down, and each level band becomes a real gear era: the best possible item from the old band gets beaten by a solidly-average item from the new one, but never before you reach it. A perfect item from an old cap is a trophy, not a way to skip the next one.

Level caps rise in bands of five. When a new band opens, new base items are authored for it — your gear doesn't get worse, the ceiling above it just moves. If you sync down to play with a friend at a lower level (or revisit old content), any gear above the synced level goes inert rather than being stripped — it's still equipped, it just isn't doing anything until you sync back up. Old gear never stops being real gear: a character built around true low-level best-in-slot items is genuinely strong at that level.

Rarity maps to power in a simple way. Magic (blue) gear is fully functional from day one. Rare gear is where your real power comes from — a well-rolled rare is your character's backbone. Unique and Notorious items are not a power tier at all: they exist to change how you play, sometimes even at a cost to your raw stats, and no fight is ever built to require one.

Quivers & Reagents

TODO: gear-rolled elemental mod layer.

Armor & Shields

Armor is sorted by what it does rather than by what it's made of. Every piece belongs to one of three defensive lanes, or to one of the three hybrids that split the difference between two of them.

Ward is the one that behaves differently from what you'd expect. It sits in front of your health and soaks damage one for one, and unlike health and mana regeneration it ticks while you're still fighting. That makes it the sustain lane for anyone who can't afford to stand still, and it's the main reason a cloth wearer isn't simply a health bar with fewer numbers in it. Filling the pool and raising its ceiling are separate things: gear that raises your maximum Ward does not hand you the difference.

There is no armor weight class beyond this. A piece is gated by the attributes its lane demands and nothing else, so the question is never "can my job wear plate" but "do I have the Strength for this piece."

TODO: notable sets by lane, and how a set reads on the character sheet.

[Armor Set]

TODO: one line on this set's identity — who wears it and why.

[Armor Set]

TODO: one line on this set's identity — who wears it and why.

[Armor Set]

TODO: one line on this set's identity — who wears it and why.

TODO: shields as an offhand option — what they trade off against a second weapon or caster offhand.

Support Slots

Every job carries three weapon-ish slots: MainHand, OffHand, and Support. MainHand is where your basic attacks and primary damage come from. OffHand is your contested style choice — a shield to block, a talisman to ward, a second melee weapon to dual-wield, or a pistol or light crossbow to weave ranged shots into your swings. Support is universal: every job fills one, no matter what's in the other two hands.

A support item is never just a stat stick. The rule behind the slot is that no support item may be pure stats — every one of them changes how your autos or abilities actually behave, and stats ride along second. Support items are typed, so the slot won't accept anything that doesn't belong there; you acquire and upgrade them the same way you do the rest of your gear.

Accessories

Five accessory slots sit outside the armor set: neck, earring, ring, back, and waist. They carry no armor value of their own, which makes them the cleanest place in your kit to solve a specific problem — a resistance you're short on, an attribute you need two more points of to clear a gate, a resource pool that keeps running dry.

Accessories are also the only place your job's natural attribute lane can be pushed past where it would otherwise sit. Your job assigns your attributes as you level and there is nothing to allocate, so an accessory roll is the one lever you have.

TODO: per-slot mod affinities and notable bases, once the accessory tables are seeded.

Affixes & Rares

An item's modifiers live in up to six slots — three prefixes and three suffixes — and each one can be a hybrid affecting two stats at once, rolled independently, so a hybrid mod can land high on one side and low on the other. Rarity decides how many of those slots are filled: Common has none, Magic fills one or two, and Rare fills anywhere from four to six.

Which mods can roll on an item depends on what kind of item it is. In practice, that lean tracks the same attribute that gates the item in the first place: heavy Strength-gated armor leans toward defensive mods, Dexterity-gated evasion armor leans toward accuracy and evasion, Intelligence-gated cloth leans toward magic and ward, and the hybrid bases healers wear lean toward healing power. On the tooltip, mods are always grouped by prefix and suffix regardless of the order they rolled in, so a rare's mod lines read the same way every time.

TODO: uniques are job-lockable and gameplay-altering — call out a small starting list once itemization is further along.