So you finally hit the end of your weapon tree and upgraded your favorite armor to max in Monster Hunter World. Well, get ready for more grinding. You can further improve weapons in Monster Hunter World by unlocking the Augmentation System. Once it’s available, you can use it to augment weapons and armor using Streamstones, which are scarce items that make the grinding you had to do before look like child’s play.
However, with the Augmentation System, you can take your weapons and armor past their max level and make them twice as powerful or more. Below we’ll tell you how to unlock Augmentation and how to get your hands on the Streamstones you need to upgrade your equipment past the max level in Monster Hunter World.
How to Hunt Tempered Monsters to Find Streamstones in Monster Hunter World
Before you can use the Augmentation System to upgrade your equipment past its original specs, you’ll need to get your hands on some Streamstones. There’s a good chance that you may be done with the story and have done a lot of endgame grinding and not have run into a Streamstone yet. They’re extremely rare, and you’ll need to go on a specific kind of quest to get them.
Once you hit Hunter Rank 13, you’ll start getting Investigations involving Tempered Monsters. Tempered Monsters are large monsters that have had their attack rating bumped up quite a bit. They’re not any harder to take down than their regular versions are health-wise, but you do not want to let them hit you because they do massive damage.
To find Tempered Monsters you need to be on the lookout for tracks out in the world that your scoutflies turn blue around. You’ll run into these for the first time during the story, but the game doesn’t explain them to you much until later on.
How to Use the Augmentation System to Augment Weapons and Armor in Monster Hunter World
It might take you anywhere from ten to twenty Tempered Monster kills before you get your first Streamstone and if it’s an armor Streamstone, you’re still out of luck. To unlock the ability to Augment Equipment, you’ll need to get a Warrior’s Streamstone which is used to upgrade weapons. (This may be a glitch that could be corrected to where getting an armor Streamstone activates the Augment ability at the Armory in the future.)
Each weapon has up to three augmentation slots that are generated at random. You can kit these slots with augments that you make using the Streamstones and a Gem from a powerful monster. Using augments, you can increase a weapon’s attack, affinity, defense, upgrade a slot, or enable health regen when you do damage.
For armor the augment process is a bit simpler. By using armor Streamstones, you can lift the upgrade limit for your armor. It seems like using the augment usually doubles the number of upgrades you can use, so if you previously were able to upgrade an armor 7 times, you’ll get a new limit of 14 with the augmentation.
Given how rare Streamstones are, only the most dedicated players will likely grind for them. However, this is set to be a big part of the endgame and is the only way to push your gear stats further if you’ve crafted the best equipment for your character.