A Treatise on Items
Updated for v1.57. Contact @merpderpy in the Idle Wizard Discord for any questions - this guide is very new, and I’m making it from the perspective of a player who already has a lot of knowledge. I’ve tried my best to explain things well, but there may be things that are unclear to new players. Please let me know, so I can improve this guide!
Introduction
This guide is meant for new players to the game, who often struggle with what items to get or upgrade and how to go about it, as guides will often include legendary items. This can lead to players feeling like they need legendary items to progress, or something along those lines, when that couldn't be further from the truth. This guide will cover mostly R0 and how to utilize unique items, but also what to do in the subsequent Realms as you start actually upgrading items. Enjoy!
Crafting Dust
Crafting dust (cdust) is the most important resource in the game. It will be slow to get more of it for a while, as there’s very few things that speed it up, very little of which are accessible pre-realms. Here’s a full list:
| Source | Amount | Total boost |
|---|---|---|
| “Reclaimed Methods” Heritage | 10% Cdust per level | 100% |
| Trial milestones (20, 170, 230, 290, 340) |
5% per milestone (additive with each other) |
25% |
- Bats and Corruptions can also give dust - 6.5% per bat for 500 Cdust, 8% for Corruptions to give ~2.5k Cdust. Any increase of bat spawn is also, thus, an increase in dust gain, which comes mostly from legacies and trial milestones.
- Similarly, trials give some dust, so rune generation rate increases overall dust gain.
It’s not worth it to go out of your way to get any of these things, besides Reclaimed Methods (which is a huge part of the reason why it’s recommended to realm ASAP for the first time).
Also. DO NOT buy dust packs for relics. They aren’t worth it, not by a long shot. At most, buy a gather booster, which should only ever be done after getting all bat catcher/auto expedition purchases and all renowns.
Early-game Items
When you first craft items, they will come at a pre-set rarity for that given item - most are common, a few uncommons, and even fewer rares, plus uniques. Everything that isn't rare or higher probably doesn't have very good effects, and even rare and epic items are usually not great compared to legendary. However, this doesn't mean that you're screwed and you just have to sit and wait for Cdust to generate so you can get legendary gear.
YOU DO NOT NEED ITEMS AT LEGENDARY TO PROGRESS.
(at least until past your first realm).
You can get to e400+ mysteries with entirely base rarity gear, no upgrading required. It also doesn't really rely on RNG, since the base rarity of items is pre-set and you can target specific slots to prioritize gear you want. There are 2 ways to make the most of your base-rarity items:
- Use set bonuses. Specifically, the Conjured set has very nice set bonus effects. Set bonus effects are independent of rarity, so you'll get their full effect even with common gear. However, because these set bonuses don't scale at all, it's worth noting that they often mean very little once you have full legendary gear. Do not assume that a given class uses "a set" - item slots are generally much more individually defined, although occasionally parts of sets line up as more of a coincidence than anything.
Now, the main event, the "secret sauce" for new players: Unique items. These come at unique rarity, which is essentially equivalent to legendary. These items are often VERY powerful compared to common or uncommon gear, although they often fall behind legendaries. However, they’re not especially rare when crafting, so you should prioritize slots that have uniques you don’t have yet when crafting new gear (use the dropdown next to the hammer button to select which slot you’re crafting for). There are also a few items that will help you craft/upgrade other items faster. Here’s a list of items you should prioritize getting:
Items to Prioritize Getting
These are mostly uniques, but there are a few that aren't. Only start prioritizing items in the third column after getting all items from the second.
| Slot | MOST important items | Low(er) priority |
|---|---|---|
| Head |  The Artificer's Crown - gives crafting effiency, as well as having an Evocation enchant. |
|
| Hands |  Grasp Of The Grave - has a small Idle Bonus effect at base, although its enchant (Summon Eff) is useless for most classes.
| |
| Boots |  Legacy - gives 40 INS, as well as a VpE enchant. Used in almost every VM phase. |
|
| Shoulder |  Artificer's Shoulderpads - gives crafting efficiency, as well as an Incantation enchant for snap phases. Not unique. Should be upgraded to Legendary ASAP. |
|
| Waist |  Architectural Databelt,  Collar Of Obedience - both are incredibly useful items in their own right, but their bases are generally not so useful as an new player. Databelt isn't useful until much later in the game, and Collar requires 175 MAS, making it hard to use for most T1 classes, although it does have a useful enchant once you reach e200 mysts.
| |
| Rings |  Resonator Ring - Not unique. Gives extra Enchant levels to all other equipped items (only applies if they already have at least 1 enchant level on them). This is almost always the strongest single item in the game. Only needs to get to epic, but should be prioritized to get there (after only Artificer's Shoulderpads, imo). Even on just uniques, it'll have a large effect.  Whiplash - has a strong base effect, and a good PAP enchant. |
 The Bond - generally not useful, except for  Abolisher.
|
| Neck |  Miniaturized Accelerator - has a base effect, and a good CAP enchant. |
 Light Of Eighth Star - useful if you go offline for long-ish (more than 1 day) periods of time; otherwise, not so useful.
|
| Back |  The Amplifier - very useful for Snap phases with its enchant, although its base is kinda meh. |
 The Magnifier - useful for doubling Persistent casts, but low effect for Burst phases.
|
| Weapon |  Head Of The All-Eater - incredibly strong burst option before you get a class's specific burst option to Legendary.  Shadow-Scryer's Crystal Ball - incredibly useful for the majority of classes that need to stack accumulateds, besides Archon/Oni. Also helps with the IS unlock, if you haven't done it already. |
|
| Offhand |  Scales of Appraisal - gives Crafting Efficiency. Not unique. |
|
| Pants |  Temporal Scabbard - the enchant is incredibly useful for Tempo, Oni, Shaman, and Deso. The base effect is less so, but is useful whenever you use  Batstick.
|
Image version - an image with the items you should fish for, although with slightly less prioritization and missing a few that are in the same slots.
The other reason uniques are so powerful, as you may have gleaned from some of the descriptions, is because they are immediately enchantable. Enchantments are also the reason why singular items should be upgraded to legendary immediately, rather than spreading upgrades out and getting several items to rare or epic. Read more about enchantment below.
The Importance of Enchants
Enchantment is one of the most important features in the game, unlocked at e200 mysteries. You can only enchant legendary and unique items, with the first level of enchantment costing 100 enchanting dust (Edust), and each successive level costing 1.5x as much (150, 225, etc). Each enchanting level’s bonus is multiplicative with each previous level, meaning that if an item has a 20% evocation efficiency enchant, the total evocation efficiency bonus from enchant will be 1.2^(enchant level). As a brief aside as to what that means, and how big a difference a larger enchant makes, see this table:
| Enchant level | Bonus for a 20% Evo enchant | Bonus for a 30% Evo enchant | Extra profit from 30% over 20% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1.2x | 1.3x | 1.08x |
| 2 | 1.44x | 1.69x | 1.17x |
| 3 | 1.73x | 2.20x | 1.27x |
| 4 | 2.07x | 2.86x | 1.38x |
| 5 | 2.49x | 3.71x | 1.49x |
| 6 | 2.99x | 4.83x | 1.61x |
| 10 | 6.19x | 13.79x | 2.23x |
| 15 | 15.41x | 51.19x | 3.32x |
| 20 | 38.34x | 190.05x | 4.96x |
| 40 | 1,469.8x | 36,118.9x | 24.57x |
If you look at the second column, you'll see the total enchant bonus for an item with a 20% Evocation Efficiency enchant with a given enchant level. These bonuses are very large - an with the exception of very early enchant levels, WAY stronger than the base effect of the item. You can also see how changing the enchant bonus makes a HUGE difference, due to it being exponential scaling, and why item sets are primarily based around enchants. It's also worth noting that The Legion's reward gives all items a free +1 enchant level, and Resonator Ring gives +4 (these effects require there to be at least 1 enchant level on the item already). We often denote this by saying "Enchant Level X+5", where X is how much you actually upgraded the enchant. This means that the lowest enchant anyone ever really sees outside of R0 is 6, or maybe 2 in some phases were Resonator Ring isn't worn (although that's a precious few).
When you can spread enchants out among all item slots, simply gaining 1.5x more Edust will give you anywhere from 2000-500000x profit, depending on the class. This is why enchants are one of the most important and powerful features. When you first reach Realms, some of the most important Heritages to upgrade are the ones that boost Edust. Gaining more memories is primarily useful because of the extra Edust you can gain - the raw profit memories are not nearly as useful. This isn't quite as true earlygame when you don't have many slots you can enchant, but Edust is still incredibly profitable even then.
It’s worth noting here, although not useful for new players, that later in the game, the primary source of Edust is not passive gain, but experiments. After you’ve maxed all the relevant gear for your class of choice, you can start doing “Edust Phases”, where you respec all of your memories into Edust gain, do a bunch of experiments to burn dust, and then respec back to everything else, leaving no Edust gain heritages because they’re no longer a relevant amount of Edust gain. You can learn more about those in the Early Realms Progression Guide (WIP).
The Items to Upgrade First
Now that we've gone over how to utilize uniques, let's discuss what we should upgrade first. As stated in the table in the Priority Items section, you should first get Artificer's Shoulderpads to legendary, as they will help you upgrade items further. Once you unlock offhands, Scales of Appraisal is also a good priority, although without you doing many experiments they will have limited effectiveness to start - maybe hold off until R1, depending on how it goes in general for you. Whenever upgrading or crafting, you should be wearing Artificer's Shoulderpads, The Artificer's Crown, and Scales of Appraisal, as they will save you dust. After these items, it depends a lot where you should go next, because each class tends to use such different gear. The class guides will often point out the most important items, as they may be make-or-break effects that help significantly.
Weapons often fall into this category, and that is because they are the most class-specific. They have special effects that either help a class in their buildup, or significantly enhances their burst, or sometimes both. For weapons that fall into the second category, they can often be pushed a little to the side, because you can use Head Of The All-Eater to substitute, but items like 
Berzerker, 
Spellstealer, and other such buildup-related items are incredibly valuable to upgrade. Again, these are very class-specific, but they're often worth doing before MANY other slots.
Here's a list of some other items that are found across many different classes, as they are incredibly generically powerful:
- Resonator Ring - this should be upgraded to legendary ASAP after the crafting efficiency items. The enchant itself isn't useful, but every extra enchant level is a huge amount of profit, far exceeding entire other items with just one, even if you're still only utilizing uniques.
Bite Sleeves - super generically powerful item, giving tons of PAP, and also gives large amounts of EMP, allowing for the loosening of AP requirements on a lot of classes.
Netherfist - these are used in every single VM set in the game, meaning only Desolator (of T2s) doesn't use them.
Chronoboost Ring - generically powerful burst item.
Check if these are used for the classes you use, and if they are, upgrade them first, as guides often don't give a prioritization of upgrading beyond the most critical pieces of gear.
Generally speaking, you want to upgrade Burst gear first, then VM gear, the Snap set if there is one, and then Buildup.
Moving Beyond Uniques
This section will not be applicable to players in R0. You may not even unlock all items in R0, if you're playing especially actively and well, but once you get to R1, Cdust will be far more available. It will still be very slow, and it will take a while to get a lot of items to legendary, but it will be far faster.
Once you are in a place where you can start upgrading items, you may be asking which ones. Due to the scarcity of Cdust, the most recommended option is to pick a T2 class you like the most, and upgrade all of the items found in its guide to legendary without doing any other items. This is still usually a huge quantity of items, but it helps you narrow it down a bit so you know which items are irrelevant to your progression.
The reason we pick a T2, and not a T1, is twofold - firstly, and most importantly, we don't spend very much time on T1s. Beyond R0, the vast majority of our time is spent on T2 classes, and by the time you're in R5+ you shouldn't need more than an hour to get to e300 mysts from a fresh realm, outside of Triumphs. Secondly, most T1 guides on the wiki aren't updated, and haven't been for a while, so their item recommendations are usually wildly off from the actual best, either due to miscalculations at the time or just because the class and the items have changed.
Anyways, now that you've selected a T2 you like and want to upgrade its items, what should you prioritize? After all, there are many, many items, and not all of them are created equal. Generally speaking, you want to upgrade Burst > VM > Snap, if applicable > Buildup, but that can slightly vary per class. The reason for this is because Burst items are chosen due to their strong effects on profit (and usually their enchants), and after that, VM items have the biggest enchants, followed by Snap items, and Buildup items often don't have anything to do with their enchants, and only their base effects matter.
What exactly you upgrade first depends on class, but often the biggest and most important burst item is the weapon. For most classes, this will have one of your largest enchants, as well as a huge base effect. However, it's worth noting that there is a unique weapon (Head Of The All-Eater) that works for every class, with a decent enchant and a decent base effect. The upgrade from HotAE to the class's signature weapon is still usually more than any other item, and often greater than even two items, but it is worth noting that you do have a useful item in the slot already.
After the weapon, prioritize the biggest enchants. This doesn't necessarily mean the biggest %, because not all stats are created equal; you can refer to the guide's Enchant Priority for which ones are the strongest in a list. This is generally a pretty good way to prioritize items, although there are a few high-base items that should be prioritized above where their enchant is - Resonator Ring in particular, but also Bite Sleeves, as well as other items that boost AP in some way.
Also make sure to not be upgrading the lowest-enchant version of the class's burst gear. You'd be surprised at how fast you get more enchants in the early realms, so I would usually recommend starting with the 10-15+5 gear, rather than anything below that. It's simply not worth upgrading items that will be only a tiny bit better than the higher-enchant versions right now, when you'll be at the point where they're worse even, potentially, by the time you finish upgrading them.
It's also worth keeping in mind what slots already have useful uniques; for example, on Archon, The Amplifier beats 
Flaming Cape at relatively high enchants. However, I wouldn't recommend upgrading Flaming Cape for Archon basically ever, because The Amplifier is good enough even when it technically loses to Flaming Cape, and it saves you the Cdust.