User:Immortalbob/Guides/Covenant Tinkering Guide

Overview
Covenant and Olthoi armor are unique among the other armor classes for their wield requirements, Unenchantable property, and higher starting base armor level. Due to the higher base armor level, Steel Salvage is unusable on these types of armor. Instead of tinkering the armor level, the individual protection properties must be raised. This guide will teach you how to tinker these types of armor effectively.

Glossary
Listed here are a few terms I will be using in this guide.

Armor Level - Armor Level or "AL" is exactly what it sounds like, this is the base or buffed Armor Level on your piece of armor.

Protection Level - These are the modified armor levels for each element, listed in the stat panel of your armor.

Protection Modifier - The invisible modifier given to each protection on your armor that is then multiplied by the Armor Level to get your Protection Level.

Situational vs All Purpose
When you decide to start tinkering your armor, you have a couple choices on how you would like to do it.

Situational
Situational armor is tinkered for a specific purpose. The most common use for armor tinked in this fashion is to defend against hollow attacks. Hollow attacks ignore all life and item spells, and will cut right through your protections and banes like they are not even there. For example, Aerbax's Shadow attacks using hollow lightning. If you are relying on Lightning Bane/Protection he will cut you down quickly. However, if you tinker your suit to be unparalleled to lightning attacks it will greatly reduce the amount of damage he can do.

If you are fighting creatures that regularly use the same attacks, or may have the odd hollow attack thrown in(such as the Mucky Moarsman's hollow fire attack), you can tinker up a suit for your specific needs.

All Purpose
All Purpose armor is tinkered for multiple purposes. This style of tinkering will focus on rounding out the protections on your armor. The primary goal will be to not have any weak spots that can be exploited by the creatures(or players) you are fighting.

The Importance of Base Protections and Banes
It may go without saying, but the most important part of selecting Covenant or Olthoi armor to tinker are the base protections and spells.

Base Protections
The number you see listed next to each individual element is the Protection Level value. Depending on the Protection Modifier, it can range anywhere from 0.1(Poor) to 2.0(Unparalleled) times the amount of the base Armor Level.

The higher the base Protection Modifier of the damage type you are looking to increase, the less tinkers required to hit the unparalleled cap. No matter how many times a specific element is tinkered, it will always have a maximum value of two times the armor level of that item.

Spells
The other important factor of tinkering Covenant armor are the spells. To tinker a piece to fully Unparalleled for each element requires 3-4 banes. Physical banes are preferred as the salvage for these only adds 0.2 each tinker, while the elemental damage types are raised by 0.4 each tinker. Although physical protections normally generate with higher base stats, it is possible this will cause you to use up to double the amount of tinks to make them reach the same cap.

Example A:

A piece of Covenant armor without an Impenetrability (Spell) and a base armor level of 450 cannot surpass a protection level of 900.

Example B:

A piece of Covenant armor with Impenetrability VI (+200) and a base armor level of 450 cannot surpass a protection level of 1300. (AL450 + Imp6 x2) = 1300

Example C:

A piece of Covenant armor that has Slashing, Piercing, Bludgeoning, and Fire banes, and average(1.0) protections for Acid, Cold, and Lightning. The four protections that have banes associated with them should be at unparalleled when the item is activated. It leaves 3 protections at 1.0, or equal to the Armor Level. These protections are elemental, so each tinker adds .4 to the protection modifier.

Even though you will have to add three tinkers to each remaining element (adding up to +1.2, or 2.2 total) your armor will never surpass a 2.0 protection modifier.

Types of Salvage Used
Listed below are the types of salvage that will be used when tinkering your armor.

Armor Augmentations
Armor augmentations are one time use items that can be applied to any piece of armor to increase a base protection level. These do not count against your tinker total, and can be applied before your first tink, or even after your tenth. They can be purchased using Alternate Currency from various vendors. Note: You may only apply one of these to your piece of armor.

Finding the Base Protection Multiplier
 Formula: Protection Multiplier = Protection Level / Armor level (PM=PL/AL)  Since you are actually tinkering the Protection Multiplier, you must first figure out what the base amount is. Find this by dividing your base protection level by your base armor level. Once you have this number you can figure out how many tinks it will take to get to your desired result. Repeat this for each element you are tinkering to figure out how many of each type of salvage you will need, and don't forget to add in the use of one of the armor augmentations for an "eleventh tink."

Example A:
Base Stats: AL 200 Slashing: Average (183)

Using the formula above, you can see the protection modifier for this example is 0.915. (183/200 = 0.915).

Since 2.0 is unparalleled (and the maximum allowed), and Salvaged Bronze gives .2 per tink, you would need to add 6 tinkers to push it to the 2.0 cap.

If you only put on 5 bags it would be 1.915, and would still show up as Excellent even though very little difference is in that last .085.

This is what the tinks would look like along the way:

Tinkering Wisely
Remember to pay attention to what banes are on your armor. Tinkering any of the elements that already have a bane covering them will only help versus hollow attacks. You cannot increase a protection past the 2.0 limit, even with banes.

If you are tinkering all purpose armor, try to even out your protections. You will not always be able to have a fully unparalleled piece, this is highly dependent on the banes and or base protections that it comes with.

When tinkering armor for use against hollow attacks, armor level is king. The higher the armor level an item has, the higher the possible protection level it can achieve.