Enchanting Past +20 in Rappelz: Ancient Cubes, Awakening and the "Change Armor Class" Myth

Enchanting up to +20 in Rappelz is a mechanic most players eventually get comfortable with: grab an item, a cube, maybe a protection powder if the stakes are high, and climb one level at a time. Everything past +20, though, belongs to a different floor of the game entirely — its own items, its own risks, and its own separate progression layer called Awakening. This is exactly where beginner crafting guides tend to go quiet, and the rules genuinely change enough to catch people off guard.

Let's go through it properly: what actually changes past +20, what Ancient Cubes are for, roughly how far you can push an item before protection stops being optional, how armor Awakening works, how weapon Awakening differs from it, and — because the question comes up constantly — whether you can actually change what class an armor piece belongs to.

What changes once you cross +20

Ordinary enchanting raises an item's level using a Strike Cube for weapons or a Defense Cube for armor, and +20 is the ceiling for that pair. Up to that point the familiar rules apply: a failed attempt breaks the item instead of destroying it outright, and an ordinary protection powder covers you against that.

Past +20, an entirely different toolkit takes over. Stronger, rarer cube variants come into play, and the item itself unlocks access to Awakening — a separate system that layers extra, partly random bonus properties on top of whatever the normal enchant level already gives. Enchanting and Awakening run side by side on the same item rather than one replacing the other.

Ancient Cubes: what they actually do differently

An Ancient Cube is a stronger version of the ordinary enchant cube, offering a noticeably better success chance. They come in the same flavours as their regular counterparts — Ancient Cube: Strike for weapons, Ancient Cube: Defense for armor, and Ancient Cube: Skill for skill cards — and on high-rank gear they're specifically labelled by rank, like a Rank 7 Ancient Cube: Strike.

One thing worth being clear on: an Ancient Cube improves your odds, it doesn't guarantee success. It's consumed either way, win or lose, so it's best thought of as a better tool for a still-genuinely-risky attempt, not as insurance.

How far you can push it before protection stops being optional

Community consensus, echoed across multiple independent player guides, puts the comfortably safe zone at roughly +8 using ordinary cubes — past that, failure becomes a real possibility rather than a rare inconvenience. A common practical path is to enchant with ordinary cubes up to +7, then attempt a single higher-value jump with a Fortune Cube to leap from around +8 straight to +12, and only switch to Ancient Cubes paired with stability powders for the stretch from there up to +20.

The logic on protection mirrors what you already know from ordinary enchanting: an E-Protect keeps an item from breaking on a failed attempt, gets consumed either way, and simply leaves the enchant level unchanged on a failure instead of costing you the item. The more valuable the gear and the higher its current level, the less sense it makes to skip that protection to save on a handful of attempts.

+21 and beyond: the item-merging ladder

Past +20, the enchant path changes shape entirely — it's no longer a single item and a cube. To push a piece from +20 to +21, you combine two identical items already at +20 along with a special catalyst material, and the same pattern repeats at every step after that: two +21 items plus catalyst for +22, two +22s for +23, and so on up the chain.

A hard rule governs what can be sacrificed here: the second item has to match the type of the one you're upgrading — a sword only merges with another sword or a spear, a belt only with a helmet of the matching class, and so on. Because of this, serious players keep a stock of ordinary, permanent combat gear set aside specifically to feed this ladder rather than relying on random drops, since temporary items and cash-shop gear don't qualify for the merge at all.

Awakening armor: what it concretely gives

Armor, helmets, gloves and boots enchanted to +20 or higher can be Awakened using an Awakening Stone, bought from a dedicated NPC merchant for a significant chunk of rupees — enough that Awakening is squarely an endgame investment rather than something you budget for early.

The concrete payoff on a +20 piece is a bonus skill level on one of your character's skills plus a modest reduction to that skill's cooldown — a small but permanent, always-on upgrade rather than a cosmetic flourish. It's exactly the kind of bonus that's easy to overlook on a spec sheet but adds up over hundreds of hours of actually playing the class.

Awakening weapons and shields: a different, fully random roll

Weapons and shields don't use the armor version of the stone — they take a plain Awakening Stone of their own, obtained by breaking down spare, unused creature cards through the inventory's disassembly option. The rarer the card you break down, the more Awakening Stones you get out of it, which gives players a genuine use for lower-value pet cards instead of just vendoring them.

The stats you get from weapon Awakening are completely random, and the game is upfront about it — it shows you a clear before-and-after comparison the moment you use the stone. If the roll disappoints you, there's no partial fix or reroll option on that specific attempt; your only move is to try again on a fresh Awakening Stone.

Busting the myth: can you change an armor piece's class?

Short answer: no. You cannot turn a Warrior-type piece of armor into a Mage-type one, or strip its race or class restriction — that's fixed into the item at creation, and no item, quest, or system removes it.

The myth almost certainly comes from the name of a completely different item: Power of Change: Armor, and its stronger counterpart, Blessed Power of Change: Armor. Combined with a Distorted World armor piece in the enchant window, it doesn't convert the item at all — it grants a +1 bonus to one specific skill belonging to a particular master-class specialization, like Necromancer, Swordsman or Summoner. The base version could originally roll a completely random specialization, meaning you might end up boosting a skill from a class you don't even play — which is almost certainly where the "it changes the armor's class" impression comes from. The Blessed version fixed that by being sold separately per class, so you pick the exact specialization you actually need and walk away with a handful of +1 skill bonuses that are actually useful to you.

So if you were hunting for a way to reclass a piece of armor, that door genuinely doesn't exist — but if what you actually ran into was this similarly-named item on Distorted World gear, now you know it's boosting a class skill, not converting the item itself.

Wrapping up

Everything past +20 is less a continuation of ordinary enchanting and more a separate stack of systems layered on top of it: Ancient Cubes instead of the regular pair, an item-merging ladder for pushing past +20 one pair at a time, and Awakening running alongside both — its own stone for armor, its own for weapons, and both tied to how far you've already pushed the base enchant. Keep the naming traps in mind too — a "Power of Change" item sounds like it should reclass your gear, and it doesn't; it just boosts a specific skill. Worth double-checking an item's actual description before assuming its name tells you the whole story.