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Exos and Forgemagie

Last updated: August 18, 2026

Forgemagie is how a finished build stops looking like the sum of the items you found and starts looking like the build you designed. It is also where the most expensive single line in the game lives — the exo — and where a well-meaning change to a weapon can quietly cost you 15% of its damage.

What forgemagie does

Forgemagie uses runes to modify the stat lines on an item. In broad terms you can do three things:

• Raise a line the item already has, up to and beyond its normal maximum (overmaging), at the cost of pushing other lines down.
• Add a line the item did not have, which is how exos happen.
• Change the element of a weapon's damage, which is a special case with its own rules.

What matters for planning a build is not the crafting procedure but the result: an item in your build is rarely the item in the database. Any calculator that cannot represent a maged item is computing someone else's character.

Exos: the +1 that costs a fortune

An "exo" is an exotic line — a stat added to an item that could never roll it naturally. In practice the term almost always means one of exactly three lines:

They are so sought after because AP and MP are the two resources every action in the game spends. One extra AP can mean an additional spell cast every turn for the rest of the character's life, which is worth more than almost any amount of raw stats — and the market prices it accordingly.

The caps are on the total, not on the exo

12 AP, 6 MP and 6 Range are ceilings on your final value. If gear and set bonuses already carry you to 12 AP, the exo adds nothing — and the builder disables the checkbox to tell you so. Before hunting an exo AP, check where your build actually lands without it; that is a considerably cheaper experiment than buying the item.

Changing a weapon's element

Weapons carry active damage lines rather than stats, and those lines can be converted from neutral to another element. The conversion is not free:

You lose 15% of the printed numbers. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on the damage formula: neutral damage scales on Strength, so on an Intelligence build a neutral weapon is being multiplied by a characteristic you did not invest in. Converting it to fire at 85% and then multiplying by 300 Intelligence beats keeping 100% of a line multiplied by 0 Strength, by a wide margin.

On a Strength build the same conversion is a straight 15% loss. The rule of thumb is simple: convert when the weapon's element does not match your build, never when it already does.

Only neutral lines convert

The conversion applies to a weapon's active neutral damage — including neutral HP steal and generic damage lines. A weapon that already deals fire damage is not converted to air; the builder lists such lines read-only in the forgemagie panel so you can see them without being offered an operation the game does not support.

Overmaging and the trade-off

Raising a line past its natural maximum is possible, but the item pushes back: gains on one stat come out of the others, and the further you push, the harsher the exchange rate becomes. There is no single formula a build planner can promise you here, because the outcome depends on the runes, the item's remaining lines and a good deal of luck.

What a planner can do is answer the question that comes first: is the resulting item actually worth chasing? Enter the values you are aiming for, look at what happens to your damage and resistance totals, and decide before you spend anything.

Modelling all of this in the builder

Every equipped slot has a 🔨 hammer button that opens the forgemagie editor for that item. From there you can:

• Override any numeric line with the value your real item has.
• Add new lines, including the AP, MP and Range exos.
• Convert a weapon's neutral damage to another element at the 85% rate, applied automatically.

Edited lines are shown in green in the item tooltip so you never lose track of what is real and what is planned. The data is stored per item instance — equip a different item in that slot and the forgemagie edits are cleared rather than silently applied to the new one.

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