Swordfighting bug or helluva bonus?

[MTYL]

I just noticed my characters on Dwi drop by like 12 swordfighting fame points over the last several days. Someone just got a fancy artifact or is it a bug of some sort? I don't report it as bug because I'm 80% certain it's the first option, thought I'd check though. And honestly - envious.  (that's an envy tongue)

[Zakky]

That means someone who is sitting at 100% fame has gotten his fancy swordfighting item back and pushed the upper bound even higher. It is not that you lost your skill level. It is just that someone gained more. So relatively speaking the gap between you and the best has widened.

[Ketchum]

Oh, that could be my character. Finally the artifact is back fully repaired. Been waiting for the "timeout no you cannot exchange because just recently traded" to expire.

What Lappallanch says

[Gordy77]

Funny,my advy is looking to divest a +15% swordfightinf helm to the right bidder..it's no use to her! Plenty of prestige too. It wasn't expensive to upgrade, for a change.

[Zakky]

Get any item with prestige 6. Find a sage, get it upgraded. If you get lucky, you can get swordfighting bonus and sell it for quite a bit.

Items have something like an exp bar. Battles, repairs, and upgrades all grant exp. Once you get enough exp, your item gains a prestige point.

It starts like this.

At prestige 6 you get your first upgrade. +2 later at prestige 8, you get to upgrade again. I think at 11 you can do it again. Then at 15 and 19 and so on.

Upgrading an item will give you the most exp but like you can see you don't get to upgrade that often. Also it becomes extremely difficult to gain enough exp unless you are in Westgard fighting monsters all the time.

[Gordy77]

So if you happened across an item with +19 prestige, you could convince a sage to increase it four times before needing to earn more exp? And what sort of things earn you exp? Can only nobles increase it? Adventurers? Does it accrue over time regardless? What about prestige rust- will an item wear away back to nothing as it lies on the ground (presumably losing its special skill bonuses when it drops below +6 prestige?)

I guess from experience each upgrade is a random percentage to a given skill (decided on the first attempt) and gives about 7-9% increase at most but usually less. I've upgraded three items in the last week which was a good run. Most expensive was 100 gold, cheapest about 13.

[Zakky]

Prestige decay? Since when did items lose prestige? Once durability goes down to 0 I am pretty sure the item will just disintegrate.

When I upgraded and repaired items, I charged people a lot. at minimum 300 for upgrades. Sold 3 items for 1k each. Had too much gold on advy too be honest. Kept spamming 40 kegs.