While i had Exp lvl 1 i had the upgrade option with every Item i was proficienced with but at lvl 2 all upgrade buttons are gone.

The bonuses you get for expertise is way to general for this heavily build focused game. I know im not the only one who's saying this, but you can do so much more!

For a baseline, weapons and armor should have unique stat bonuses like the skill bonuses.
While bonus damage is pretty universal, nobody will complain about it, but it is so very boring. bonus armor on the other hand, its almost useless in DPS or Skill foused builds, nobody is going to appreciate bonus armor in builds like that.

The Expertise system could be so much more exciting if it were just a little bit more complex; imagine if Expertise gave gear sets and brand sets different bonuses?
for example; what if True Patriot Expertise made its Debuffs more powerful, similar to how the backpack talent works.Or imagine Negotiator's Dilemma letting marks last longer on enemies, Or Striker's Battlegear Stacks Decaying slower?
Brand sets could have their bonuses increased! anyone using Wyvern Wear, for example, is most likely doing a skill build, why not have the Expertise increase the Skill Damage, Effects, Duration. the bonus could alternate with each level, 0.5% damage, 0.5% Effect, etc, etc.

Simple chanages like that would be so much more rewarding and motivating to grind for rather than a generic across the board buffs.

The description of an upgrade on an individual item seems pretty clear; my level 2 upgrade on a chest piece says "+2.0% Total Armor."


I have a nearly identical piece without this upgrade done on it. In a build where the only armour sources are the six gear items' base armour and Keener's watch, that gives 726,095 armour, which is very close to the ~660k from the base armor values read off the gear descriptions multiplied by 1.1 to account for the 10% total armour buff from the watch.

Using the upgraded item gives 739,216 armour. Working this back, it seems I'm getting 660k × (1 + 10% + 2%), so that "Total Armor" description appears accurate in this case.

But let's check it by switching out one of my other items to bring in a blue core. A Gila pack I just constructed makes a good test here because it adds both 170k from an attribute and "+5.0% Total Armor" from the brand buff. I'd expect that this then gives me about (660k + 170k) × (1 + 10% + 5%) = 954.5k, and indeed, the game says I've got 954,517 armour.

So does switching to the upgraded item give me (660k + 170k) × (1 + 10% + 5% + 2%) = 971.1k armour? Yes indeed, it's 971,117. It seems clear that "Total Armor" means what it says, and it's added to the same multiplier that gets contributions from the watch, gear brand buffs, and anything else labelled "Total Armor."

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EDIT: The following is not correct; I was apparently suffering from a bug where the system was not properly updating my armour values as I changed parts. As N3mB0T points out:

dont forget the PTS is cluncky you might need to even restart the game to see the real values of what you upgrade , this happens even in the live game with some stuff , and that is why some values you encounter seem funny and dont match the expectations.

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Just for completeness, I upgraded my mask to "+1.0% Total Armor"; I would expect that I now have (660k + 170k) × (1 + 10% + 5% + 2% + 1%) = 979.4k armour. But no, it's still 971,117. That's unexpected; could it be because both the mask and pack are from the same proficiency category, Striker's?

Fortunately, I am also Proficient in Providence and have a Providence mask. Putting it in as-is leaves me at 971,117 armour. Upgrading it to "+1.0% Total Armor" still leaves me at 971,117 armour. Replacing the +2% item with its non-upgraded equivalent takes me to 954,517 armour, which is not the (660k + 170k) × (1 + 10% + 5% + 1%) = 962.8k I was expecting. But I'm remind that there's a bug related to switching, and switching the mask out and in brings me to 962,817 armour, which is the calculated value.

So it seems from all this that it doesn't matter how many Expertise upgrades you have on your gear; only the highest one is used. (And the bug makes perfect sense now, if you're a programmer.) So we need not worry about Expertise adding massive, game-breaking amounts of armour to builds; in the current game, where Expertise Level is limited to 10, no build will have more than an additional 10% added to the Total Armor value. That seems fairly reasonable.