Throne and Liberty's New Item Level System Is a Slot Machine You Can Feed With Real Money

How the new system works

Forget enchanting. Under the Nix system, your gear doesn't get upgraded — it gets replaced, one item level at a time, through drops.

Here's the loop. Say your weapon, armor, and accessories are all sitting at item level 50. The next items you acquire in those categories have a chance to roll at 51. Not a guarantee — a chance. So you farm until you land a 51.

But here's the catch: getting one 51 doesn't move you forward. To unlock the chance at 52s, you need item level 51 in every category — weapon, armor, and accessory. Your progression is gated by your weakest slot. One stubborn category refusing to cooperate, and your entire character is parked.

Then you do it again for 52. And 53. And every single level, in lockstep across every category, all the way to 80.

A different kind of grind

This is a fundamentally different kind of grind than the old Growthstone treadmill. Back then, progress was incremental and legible: farm stones, feed stones, watch the bar fill. Bad luck slowed you down, but every session moved you forward.

The new system replaces that with a pure RNG gate at every step. There's no bar filling up. The item either rolled +1 or it didn't, and until all your categories get theirs, you're running in place. Thirty times per character. The floor on how long this takes is entirely controlled by roll rates NCSoft can tune whenever they want — and the ceiling doesn't exist.

And here's the pay-to-win part

You knew this was coming, but the shape of it is worse than the usual "whales buy finished gear off the market" arrangement.

Items on the Auction House don't list at a fixed item level. They show a range — 50 to 80 — because the level isn't determined until you get it, and it rolls relative to your current gate. If you're wearing all 50s and buy a ring, that ring has a chance to be a 50 or a 51. If you're all 51s and buy the exact same listing, now it's a 51 or a 52.

Sit with that for a second. The marketplace isn't selling gear. It's selling dice rolls.

The house doesn't even stock the machine

That's not a shortcut bolted onto a progression system. That is the progression system, with two payment methods. Bad drop luck isn't a bug in this design; it's the sales funnel. Every dry farming session makes the swipe more tempting, and every listing on the market is a loot box with the box removed.

The genius — and I mean that in the most cynical way possible — is that NCSoft never has to sell power directly. The players supply the market, the RNG supplies the frustration, and Lucent supplies the escape valve. The house doesn't even stock the machine. It just takes a cut of every pull.

Is it all bad?

Some of the design intent here is legitimate. The pre-Nix announcement talked about bringing back the fun of field farming and gear acquisition, and the system genuinely delivers on that half: drops matter again, open-world farming has a purpose, and there's a real old-school dopamine hit when the +1 finally lands. That loop — kill mobs, gear drops, character grows — is the oldest and most honest one in the genre.

But the lockstep gating strips out all the agency. You can't prioritize your weapon and catch armor up later. You can't focus-farm the slot you care about and coast on the rest. Every category advances together or nobody advances at all, which means the system is only ever as fun as your unluckiest slot. And when the pressure release for that frustration is a marketplace selling literal randomized upgrade attempts for a real-money currency, the whole thing stops looking like progression design and starts looking like monetization design wearing progression as a costume.