Equipping decorations is a vital part of: it provides extra skills you can slot into your armor and weapons that can offer things like stamina reduction, increased weapon sharpness, or buffs to attack at full health. Higher rarity orbs can even have two different skills attached, making them highly valuable assets.
A good chunk of your endgame will be spent farming for the best decorations for your chosen weapon's build, but you actually start collecting them quite early on in the game. Here's everything you need to know about decorations, such as how to get them and slot them into your gear to make your hunter even stronger.
How to get decorations
You'll obtain your first decorations after defeating The Black Flame in Chapter 2-4. They'll initially appear as Mystery Orbs, before being automatically appraised at the end of your hunt and turned into a random assortment of decorations.
There are two categories of orb: Sword, which slots into your weapon, and Armor, which unsurprisingly slots into your armor. Both have three rarities of orb: Mystery Orb, Glowing Orb, and Ancient Orb—level one, level two, and level three respectively.
Initially, you'll only get decorations from hunts, but eventually you can get them via three different methods:
- Quest rewards from hunts
- The melding pot in Suja
- Bonus rewards from investigations (High Rank)
The best method of decoration farming is to wait until High Rank and take advantage of the investigation system. Monsters will start appearing on the map with a variety of bonus rewards, and quite often include high rarity orbs among the list of guaranteed goodies.
You can select a monster on the map and hit "Create Quest" and then spend Guild Points in order to save it as an investigation. You can then play that hunt up to three times, claiming whatever bonus rewards are listed for each successful run.
I've ended up scoring upwards of 25 decorations from some particularly lucrative investigations, and I'd highly recommend keeping an eye on your map as well as lobby quests or SOS Flares posted by other players to see if they're offering anything with big rewards.
Sometimes, though, that one decoration you're in desperate need of just won't show up. That's where melding can come in real handy.
How to meld decorations
Melding Sword Orbs costs four points, 10 points, and 120 points respectively while Armor Orbs cost four points, 10 points, and 60 points in increasing rarity. To do this, head to Wyverian Melding, select your desired orb and get to plugging those spare decorations in.
If you're looking to meld a specific decoration, you'll initially only be able to meld the level one variation of it. Each decoration costs 20 points to meld, and you can do so by selecting Meld Decorations when speaking to Vio.
Grinding to Hunter Rank 100 will unlock the ability to meld level two decorations, which cost 80 points each. I'm not yet sure if ranking up further will unlock level three decorations, but if I find [[link]] out I'll update this guide and let you know.
You unlock melding during Chapter 3-3, when you're prompted to go and speak to Vio the Melder in Suja. You can then make use of her melding pot to either meld more orbs, or to meld specific decorations that you're after.
To use the melding pot, you'll need to consume decorations you've already collected or a selection of rare equipment materials like Sild Cotton and Great Hornfly. I recommend foregoing any rare material usage—they're much handier for trading or crafting secret armor sets—and instead use decorations [[link]] you don't need.
How to equip decorations
While farming for decorations can be a bit of a slog, thankfully the act of slotting them into your armor is very simple:
- Either head to Gemma at the Smithy or into your tent at any Base Camp or Pop-up Camp
- Tab over to the Equipment Menu, then select Change Equipment
- On a controller, hit right on the d-pad to bring up the decorations menu
- Select a slot on your weapon or armor to bring up your list of available decorations
- Choose one [[link]] and it'll slot itself into your gear
Something to pay attention to is the fact that there are actually three levels of decorations. You can tell at a glance by how many triangles are at the bottom of each jewel as well as the number listed at the end of each decoration.
That's important as not all gear will let you slot in a level three decoration, for example, but you can put a level one decoration in a level three slot. I don't recommend you do that, but you can. In High Rank, beta armor often has higher rarity decoration slots with the trade-off being fewer skills compared to alpha armor, so it's worth weighing up your options and seeing what's best for your build.
Also, don't be afraid to experiment. There's zero cost attached to throwing decorations on your armor. You can freely swap them on and off as you please, letting you play around with different builds until you find the right combination of skills for you.
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