Disassemble, promote, or leave it: four things, four answers

✍️ Alice・愛麗沙

Update 9/14: Two things checked against Taiwan’s 9/9 update log (thread 3541097). First, the “what you lose” list gains an official line: “已套用附魔的裝備即使分解，也無法取回附魔卷軸” — with the enchant system live since 9/9, disassembling an enchanted piece burns the scroll. Second, this article’s last falsifiable claim (“a second supply route for emblem runes”) moved halfway: the new Package Points shop (9/9–11/25) sells an “史詩徽章符文選擇箱” (Epic emblem-rune selection box), but Package Points only come from buying packs — for non-spenders, “emblem runes come only from hunting grounds, never disassemble” stands; for pack buyers there is now a plannable supply.

What disassembly gives back, and what it takes

The mechanics first, because every decision below rests on them.

Disassemble a piece of equipment and you get back the runes engraved on it and the gems in its sockets. The item itself is destroyed and becomes disassembled equipment parts.

Two things are lost, and both are easy to forget:

• Engraving enhancement levels reset to zero. Every enhancement you pushed on that item stays with the item, not with the rune.
• The rune shards you spent on enhancement come back only in part. Not in full.

One more rule is worth committing to memory: there is no way to pull a rune out and keep the equipment. If you want a rune moved onto a different piece, the route is either “disassemble the old one” or the performance-improvement transfer. There is no third door.

This table is generated from the site database at build time.Upgrades

That table lists the irreversible steps across this game’s upgrade lines. Disassembly sits inside its logic: the act itself is reversible in the sense that nothing vanishes, only changes form — but several of the squares it passes through are not.

23,814: the reason low tiers get broken down

Rune promotion succeeds at 90/85/80/50/40/10%. Only the last two rungs look hard. Multiply the whole chain and the result is brutal.

A player did the arithmetic: by promotion alone, taking an advanced rune to legendary has an expectation of 23,814 advanced runes. (Player-computed, medium confidence.)

Twenty-three thousand. The meaning of that number is not “difficult.” It is that route is not a route at all. And the control case is this: that same advanced rune, disassembled, reliably produces rune shards.

Yields by grade (Korean data, season 0 star notation):

So “break down the low tiers, promote the high ones” is not a matter of taste. It is forced by 23,814. Where you draw the line depends on your goal. The Korean consensus is disassemble advanced and rare weapons and armour, promote epic and above — because every rung above epic is too expensive, and because legendary runes can be traded for on a recurring basis through the abyss line.

Flag on the table itself: those yields come from a single player post dated April 2025, and season 1 shifted the whole star notation up by two stars. Trust the order of magnitude; do not transcribe it cell for cell.

Emblem runes: the mechanism runs backwards

Apply the same logic to emblem runes and the conclusion flips. The reason is worth walking through once.

The rule above carries a hidden premise: low-tier runes are cheap, available, and farmable. Breaking one is painless because tomorrow drops another.

Emblem runes have no such premise. Their supply comes only from hunting grounds — no shop, no exchange, no cheap substitute channel. Their replacement cost therefore trends towards infinity. The one you disassemble might take a very long time to replace.

So the rule inverts: promote at every grade, disassemble never. The community’s own phrasing is that grade is irrelevant and promotion is unconditionally recommended.

This is the easiest mistake in the whole article to make, because an emblem rune looks identical to every other rune in the interface, the disassemble button sits in the same place, and nothing in the game tells you that this one item has a different supply structure from its neighbours.

Transcendence-engraved gear: break it without worrying

This case is counter-intuitive enough to deserve its own section.

When transcendence-engraved gear is disassembled, the runes and the transcendence materials come back intact. Not at a discount. In full.

Two rules ride along:

• Re-engrave with a rune of the same star level and same rarity and the transcendence state is preserved.
• Switch to a different star level or rarity and transcendence is released, the materials are refunded — but the gold is not.

And the gold square is not small: transcending one armour piece costs 500,000 gold. So the real cost structure is: materials are recoverable, gold is burned.

That changes the arithmetic of re-gearing. Most people hesitate in front of a transcended item, afraid the investment is locked in. Only the gold portion is locked in; the materials all travel with you. If your new item can take a rune of the same star level and rarity, the release never even happens.

Parts are a currency

Finish with the output, because it is the real downstream of the whole decision.

At the Tir Chonaill blacksmith, disassembled parts have three fixed outlets:

• iron ore ← 1 part, 10 per day
• 3 coal ← 1 part, 10 per day
• alloy steel ingot ← 2 parts, 4 per day

Together that consumes 28 parts per character per day, every day. On the Taiwan service a reverse route was added in August 2026 — 100 ore for 10 parts, once daily — so on that service parts and ore now flow in both directions.

A part has three prices, and all three are real:

• Sell to a shop: 1 gold.
• Feed a standard auto-potion: a marginal value of 22.5 gold.
• Trade at the blacksmith: 20 free-material conversions per day.

Never sell parts to a shop. That 1 gold is the worst of the three prices by a factor of more than twenty.

Related: the +20% disassembly yield stated for adventurer membership in the Taiwan service’s official guide attaches at the very top of this chain. It is not a loose percentage floating on its own — it multiplies the supply side of the 28 parts you are certain to consume daily.

Two things we could not confirm

Listed rather than guessed, per house rule:

1. How many parts a green or blue item yields when disassembled. Nobody has published it, in either live service.
2. Whether the shop buy price for a part varies by item grade. We confirmed the value “1 gold” and could not confirm whether it is tiered.

There is also a widely circulated rule — “disassemble advanced accessories, promote rare ones” — for which we could find no source at all. The neighbouring rule that is sourced says something different: an elite accessory rune that matches your class beats an epic accessory rune that does not, because accessory runes carry class-specific skill effects. That one has a provenance. The other does not.

The conclusion

Disassembly is not “throwing away junk.” It is four completely different decisions sharing one button. The test is a single question: is this thing’s supply abundant or scarce? Abundant (low-tier gear and runes) means break it down for shards. Scarce (emblem runes) means promote it and never touch the button. Recoverable (transcendence-engraved gear) means break it freely, as long as you accept that the gold does not come back.

Do: exclude emblem runes from your disassembly routine wholesale; stop hoarding low-tier runes for promotion; route every part into the blacksmith’s three lines and sell none to a shop. Ignore: the unsourced accessory rule, and any advice to stockpile low-tier runes for a promotion climb — that path expects twenty-three thousand of them.

Two things would overturn this page. The 23,814 figure is a player’s own computation from published promotion rates; if the rates differ, or if a great-success mechanic or catalysts change the expectation, it needs recomputing — but it would have to shrink by two orders of magnitude to change the conclusion, which is not plausible. And if a second supply channel for emblem runes ever opens — an event, an exchange, a shop — then “never disassemble” softens into an ordinary rule. That square is worth rechecking after every patch.