Armor Upgrades | Dark Souls Wiki

Armor Upgrades in Dark Souls
Each upgrade level will increase the Physical Defense, Magic Defense, Fire Defense and Lightning Defense values as well as any Bleed Resist, Poison Resist or Curse Resist that is present on the armor piece.

 

Armor Upgrades are a type of Upgrade in Dark Souls and Dark Souls Remastered. They enable players to increase the effectiveness of the various armors available throughout the game.

Armor upgrades can be performed at any blacksmith by using the Reinforce Armor option. Armor upgrades can also be done at a Bonfire after buying an Armor Smithbox.

Regular Armor Upgrades:

When considering how many ores it takes to upgrade an armor piece, they fall into one of two categories: Light armor and Heavy armor. Light armor is classified as any armor that has no Poise bonus, with the exception of the Hollow Warrior Set which is included in this category despite granting poise. All other armor pieces possessing poise are considered to be Heavy armor and require more ores to upgrade. When observing the Warrior Set, we see this categorization holds true. The Standard Helm, which gives +5 poise bonus, is categorized as Heavy armor and requires more ore to upgrade than the Hard Leather Armor, Hard Leather Gauntlets and Hard Leather Boots which have no poise despite being part of the same set. The breakdown of how many ores are required to upgrade items from each category is included below.

Light Armor

• Regular upgrade from 0 to +3 requires 4 Titanite Shards.
• Regular upgrade from +3 to +6 requires 4 Large Titanite Shards.
• Regular upgrade from +6 to +9 requires 4 Titanite Chunks.
• Regular upgrade from +9 to +10 requires a Titanite Slab.

Heavy Armor

• Regular upgrade from 0 to +3 requires 6 Titanite Shards.
• Regular upgrade from +3 to +6 requires 6 Large Titanite Shards.
• Regular upgrade from +6 to +9 requires 6 Titanite Chunks.
• Regular upgrade from +9 to +10 requires a Titanite Slab.

Light Armor

 Heavy Armor

Special Armor Upgrades:

Upgrading special armor follows the same process as upgrading unique weapons with  Twinkling Titanite.

Upgrading from +0 to +5 requires 10  Twinkling Titanite.

Notes

• Each upgrade level requires 200 souls in addition to the required ores.

• Upgrading armor does not effect the Poise or Weight attributes; these are fixed for each armor piece regardless of upgrade level.

• Some armors cannot be upgraded, but they either have special properties or are already at a fully upgraded level.

• It is not generally recommended to upgrade many (if any at all) armor pieces to +10 due to the extreme rarity and scarceness of Titanite Slabs. It is usually more worthwhile to use the precious few that are obtained on upgrading weapons as the slight defensive increase gained upgrading armor from +9 to +10 is not typically worth the cost.