The Basics
The Augment System adds another layer to the character personalisation and progression in The Secret World. You can use augments to attach special effects to specific abilities, such as an increase in penetration chance for a damage ability or an increase the healing done by a healing ability. You will need a lot of Ability Points and Skill Points to gain access to augments and upgrade them.
Please note that the Augment Wheel is not really considered a mandatory part of the character progression. The Augment System is really meant to be a long-term progression path for those players that have finished everything else in the game. You will not need to grind hours upon hours to get augments in order to ensure survival in future content as the content will not be balanced around that. Don’t stress trying to get 100% completion.
Augment Skills
The first thing you will need to do is to upgrade one of your augment skills. To be able to gain access to level 1 augments, you need skill level 1 in that particular augment type (damage, healing, support or survivability). For level 2 augments, you need skill level 2, for level 3 augments, you need skill level 3, and so forth.
Each skill upgrade will cost you 30 Skill Points. You will raise your maximum Ability Points limit every time you upgrade an augment skill. When all the augments skills are at level 5, you will be able to gather as much as 515 Ability Points as opposed to the standard cap of 175.
The Augment Wheel
To gain access to the Augment Wheel, press N to open the Ability Wheel and switch wheel type by using the navigation above the Ability Wheel.
There are in total 40 different augments and all of them can be upgraded 5 times, which is why the Augment wheel says there is a total of 200 abilities. 40 x 5 = 200.
Augment Types
There are four different augment types:
Damage Augments
Increases damage output (penetration, critical chance, hit chance and so on)
Healing Augments
Increases healing output (critical healing chance, heal over time boosts and so on)
Survivability Augments
Increases defence stats (health, block rating, hate generation and so on)
Support Augments
Induces utility effects (cooldown reduction, additional targets and so on)
Acquiring Augments
In order to gain access to the augments and be able to use them, you will need to harmonise augment resonators for each respective augment. This may sound a bit confusing, but Augment Resonators are items that drop inside scenarios. They are loot.
There are two ways to get them. You can get augment resonators from playing scenarios or from buying them at the Auction House. If you want to do scenarios, it is recommended that you do group scenarios as they will offer the greatest amount of augments and a higher chance to get better augments too.
All augment resonators, except the basic green ones, need to be attuned, which is done through a crafting process. More details about this can be found below.
Attuning Augments
To attune an unattuned augment resonator, mouseover it to view the tooltip. The tooltip will tell you exactly what you will need to put in the crafting window along with that augment in order to attune it.
For example, an unattuned restoring augment resonator requires 60 pure dust and 2 attuned mending augment resonators. An augment attuning kit is also needed. Take a look at the crafting window below:
Harmonising Augments
Attuned augment resonators can be harmonised by clicking on them. This will consume the resonator and activate the augment in the Augment Wheel. You will require a certain amount of Ability Points in order to harmonise an augment. Augments of higher rarity require even more Ability Points.
Upgrading Augments
All augments can be upgraded 5 times. In order to upgrade an augment, you will need to two, three, four or five of the same augment resonator, depending on which level you’re upgrading it to, in order to upgrade it. For instance, to upgrade a restoring augment resontator to level 2, you will need two of them.
Augments must be upgraded sequentially. You cannot skip from level 1 to level 5. You will have to upgrade it to level 2, then level 3, then level 4 and finally level 5.
You will also need to buy an augment amplifier toolkit from the vendor in the Sunken Library.
Take a look at the image below to see the crafting process of upgrading the attuned mending augment resonator to its second level:
Equiping Augments
Augments must be attached to an ability, which means you can have up to 7 augments equipped at a time. In order to slot an augment, open the Augment Wheel, find the augment you want and drag it to an available augment slot.
Note that abilities can only take specific types of augments. You cannot attach a healing augment to a pure damage ability, nor can you attach a damage augment to a pure healing ability. Some abilities can take multiple types of augments. You can identify which type of augments an ability can take by looking at the empty augment slot icon above the ability.
It will take a long time to achieve 100 % completion for the Augment Wheel, however, that is also the point. You are not supposed to endlessly grind this as there will probably be more ways to obtain augment resonators at a later point other than scenarios.