Masterwork Armor RS3 Guide

When you reach the highest combat levels of Runescape 3, you’ll have to start jumping through numerous hoops to get gear appropriate for the challenges that you’ll be facing.

One of the strongest is Masterwork Armor, a craftable power armor that can only be used once you have Defense Level 90. So, if you’re looking for how to equip yourself with some of the best tier 90 armor in the game, here is everything you’ll need to know.

Key Info Up Front

• Required Defense Level: 90
• Required Smithing Level: 99
• Alternates: Trimmed Masterwork Armor
• Set Price: 69,042,917

Masterwork Armor Overview

Like most high-tier armor in Runescape 3, Masterwork Armor is considered degradable power armor. This means that when you use it, the armor only has a certain amount of charges it comes with, and once they are expended it has to be repaired before it can be worn again.

However, it is one of the most robust armor sets in all of RS3, and its stats see it being the second-best melee armor available outside of the realm of Daemonheim.

It is also important to note that Masterwork Armor can be traded with other players when it is first created but is untradeable once a player has equipped it. When you first equip the armor, a window will warn you that donning it will render it untradeable, but it is still good to be aware of it beforehand.

If you get better armor and then want to trade your Masterwork Armor, you still can, but only after it has either had its durability completely drained or has been fully repaired afterward.

However, the stats of Masterwork Armor make chasing a set down more than worthwhile. The stats for the individual pieces are in the table below.

How to Make Masterwork Armor

Before you can craft your Masterwork Armor you have first to unlock the “It Should Have Been Called Aetherium” achievement. This achievement is unlocked by preparing a full Elder Rune +5 armor set.

Members only achievable this and is a required element to earn the completionist cape. To be able to make the armor, you’ll need to reach Smithing Level 90, get 384 Elder Rune Bars, and reach Mining Level 90 if you want to gather the ore yourself.

To smelt Elder Rune Bars, you must mine Light Animica and Dark Animica in equal parts. Light Animica can be found in either Tumeken’s Remnant, Lletya Mine, or Anachronia Southwest Mine.

For Dark Animica, you’ll have to travel to either Anachronia Swamp Mine or the Empty Throne Room Mine. Once you’ve gathered enough Elder Rune Bars, you’ll have to craft each piece of the set before upgrading it multiple times to reach the +5 upgrade level.

Once you’ve gotten the achievement out of the way, you’ll be ready to work on your own set of Masterwork Armor. To complete the stage, you will need to gather 12 of the following three ingredients: Steel Bars, Leather, and Glorious Bars.

At this point in the game, you should know how to get Steel Bars and Leather, or you can just buy them from the Grand Exchange. However, Glorious Bars take significantly more involvement on your part.

You can purchase Glorious Bars if you want or make your own to save some coins. Each Glorious Bar is made with one Partially Folded Alloy Bar by using it at an anvil to complete the folding process. To make a Partially Folded Alloy Bar, however, you must first make an Immaculate Alloy Bar and use that at the forge.

Creating an Immaculate Alloy Bar requires ten Enriched Alloy Bars, which in turn each take five Concentrated Alloy Bars.

A Concentrated Alloy Bar requires you to combine one of the various types of metal bars, including Bronze, Iron, Steel, Mithril, Adamant, Rune, orichalcum, Necronium, Bane, and Elder Rune. So, to make a single Glorious Bar, you have to do the following:

• Combine one Bronze Bar, Iron Bar, Steel Bar, Mithril Bar, Adamant Bar, Rune Bar, Orikalkum Bar, Necronium Bar, Bane Bar, and Elder Rune Bar into a Concentrated Alloy Bar.
• Combine five Concentrated Alloy Bars into one Enriched Alloy Bar.
• Combine ten Enriched Alloy Bars into one Immaculate Alloy Bar.
• Turn one Immaculate Alloy Bar into one Partially Folded Alloy Bar at a forge.
• Turn one Partially Folded Alloy Bar into one Glorious Bar at a forge.

Each of these steps takes thousands of progress to complete, so you’ll have to be okay spending a lot of time at the forge reheating the bar and taking it back to the anvil to continue working it.

Since you’ll have had to have ground to level up your Mining and Smithing Levels to reach this point, you should already have preferred methods to get the raw materials required to make each lesser metal bar to begin the process.

Of course, if you have the funds, you could always purchase the materials from the Grand Exchange, which will come with the following average cost:

Suppose you’d instead gather all the materials yourself or play an Ironman character who cannot purchase items from the Grand Exchange or trade with others. In that case, you will need to gather the following quantities of each material:

Once you have the Glorious Bars, you’ll have to refine them through five more stages before you can assemble pieces of the armor. You must turn it into a Masterwork Plate, which requires 10,000 progress at an anvil.

This can then be turned into a Curve Masterwork Plate with another 10,000 progress, followed by an Untempered Masterwork Armor Piece with a further 10,000 progress. That can then be tempered into a Masterwork Armor Piece with 1,000 progress, after which you can combine it with one leather to create a Lined Masterwork Armor Piece.

With RS3’s heat mechanic, each swing of your hammer on a piece with heat from 66-100% adds 20 progress. Hammer strikes happen 1.2 seconds after one another, meaning that with a fully optimized smithing process, making a single Lined Masterwork Armor Piece from a Glorious Bar will take around 31 minutes.

You can then use those to create the unfinished variants of each piece of equipment for the armor set. To finish them, you must combine them with Masterwork Rivets, which are made with a single Steel Bar and only require 300 progress. Then, you’ll finally have your first piece of Masterwork Armor.

Masterwork Armor Improvements

However, the fun doesn’t stop there if you want to improve your Masterwork Armor further. You have two options to do this: making Trimmed Masterwork Armor or Augmenting your Masterwork Platebody and Masterwork Platelegs. Each method has different requirements and benefits, so I’ll go into both details below.

Trimmed Masterwork Armor

Trimmed Masterwork Armor is the direct upgrade to standard Masterwork Armor. It requires Defense Level 92 to wear and makes your set the strongest melee armor outside of Daemonheim.

It has the same durability as standard Masterwork Armor, which you can read about below, or you can ultimately double it if you upgrade further to Custom-Gitting Trimmed Masterwork Armor.

To create Trimmed Masterwork Armor, you’ll need to craft 12 Masterwork Trim. These can be purchased at the Grand Exchange if you don’t want to spend the time making them, but I recommend making them because the price for all 12 is an absurd average of 493,231,356 coins.

So, to make a Masterwork Trim, you need to combine an Elder Rune Bar, Malevolent Essence, and Melee Praesulic Essence at an anvil.

To get Malevolent Essence, you’ll need to break down a piece of Malevolent Armor at the Dragonkin Anvil found in the Dragon Forge. It is important to note, however, that since Malevolent Armor degrades similarly to Masterwork Armor, the amount of Malevolent Essence you receive from each piece depends on its remaining charge.

Getting Melee Praesulic Essence is a similar process. To get it, you’ll have to break down pieces of Torva armor on the Dragonkin Anvil in the Dragon Forge.

Make sure to break the armor down, however, as disassembling it is a different process that will not net you any Melee Praesulic Essence. Torva armor is also powered armor, so how many essences you get from each piece will depend on the remaining charge.

Creating Trimmed Masterwork Armor

Once you have the Masterwork Trim, you can take it to an anvil with the individual pieces of Masterwork Armor to combine the two and create your set of Trimmed Masterwork Armor. The recipe for doing each work is below:

Custom-Fitting Your Trimmed Masterwork Armor

To continue improving your Trimmed Masterwork Armor, you can have it custom-fitted. This prevents you from ever trading the armor but does increase its durability so that it doesn’t have to be repaired as frequently.

You can even complete this process for free by taking your Trimmed Masterwork Armor pieces to Elof, found in the Artisans’ Workshop. However, you can only do so once you have a complete set of Trimmed Masterwork Armor.

Speaking Your Custom-Fitted Trimmed Masterwork Armor

If you still aren’t satisfied with your armor set, you can customize it further by producing spiked variants. This again requires you to go to Elof in the Artisans’ Guild and can be done by bringing each piece with an additional Glorious Bar.

This can only be done with Custom-Fitted Trimmed Masterwork Armor and doesn’t come with any mechanical benefits. If you complete the process and don’t like how it looks, you can also have Elof remove the spikes for free, but you won’t get the Glorious Bar used to complete the original process back.

Trimmed Masterwork Armor Set Bonuses

Wearing multiple pieces of Trimmed Masterwork Armor also has numerous effects in PvP activities. The effect centers around reducing the incoming base damage dealt to the wearer by 30%, 40%, or 50%, depending on if you have three, four, or five pieces of the set equipped. The reduced damage is then applied to you as Bleed damage instead.

While this may not seem very beneficial, it spreads out how long it takes for the damage to be used, allowing you to react or heal accordingly so that you don’t get killed in a single big hit.

The bleeding effect can also be dampened or completely mitigated with various products. Developments such as Defender, Crystal Shield, Intercept, Blood Essence, and Twin Furies fire all reduce the toll of the bleeding damage afflicted, allowing you to negate even more of the damage and further increase your survivability.

However, note that the bleed effect is not affected by Animate Dead, Lucky, Revenge, Preparation, Devoted, Gielinor’s Bombs, or Numbing Root.

Augmented Masterwork Armor

Augmenting it is the second route you can take for upgrading your Masterwork Armor. This can be done to either base Masterwork Armor or Trimmed Masterwork Armor, and doing so on either one has different benefits.

How to Augment

Augmenting is completed by creating an Augmentor device with Invention Level 2. These can then be made at the Inventor’s Workbench and combined with certain pieces of gear to increase their stats. Since Invention is an Elite Skill, they are still costly to create despite being a low-level invention. They require the following materials:

• 2,000 Energy of some type
• 45 Base Parts
• 45 Flexible Parts
• 45 Tensile Parts
• 8 Enhancing Components
• 7 Powerful Components

This comes with a total price of 968,497 coins, but they only sell for an average of 276,875 coins on the Grand Exchange, so don’t make them find a profit.

You can purchase the different elements since getting them yourself is a lengthy process, but if you don’t want to spend the coin, you can also get them by disassembling various items. The items that can be dismantled for each component are below.

• Base Parts
  • White Knight Master Armoury Equipment
  • Varrock Sword Shop Items
  • Warriors’ Guild Armoury weapons except for battleaxes, spears, and claws
  • Anachronic Sword Shop Steel Swords and Longswords
  • Adamant two-handed swords and swords
  • Mithril two-handed swords and swords
  • Black Dragonhide Shields
• Tensile Parts
  • Maple Bows, strung or unstrung
• Flexible Parts
  • Maple bows, strung or unstrung
  • Spirit Terrorbird Pouches
• Enhancing Components
  • Ring of Slaying
  • Empty Light Orb
  • Crystal Flask
  • Lantern Lens
  • Herbs
• Powerful Components
  • Insulated Boots
  • White Magic Staves
  • Spirit Terrorbird OPuches
  • Barker Toad Pouches
  • Magic Staves
  • Amulets of Defence

Augmenting Masterwork Armor

Both your Masterwork Platebody and Masterwork Platelegs can be augmented with one augmentor a piece. The primary benefit of increasing Masterwork Armor instead of using it to craft Trimmed Masterwork Armor and then expanding it is that Augmented Masterwork Armor doesn’t degrade.

This makes it the only high-tier melee armor that doesn’t suffer from durability. So, if you didn’t enjoy the process of making Masterwork Armor, this is a decent option to use so that you don’t have to worry about repairing it further down the line.

Augmenting Trimmed Masterwork Armor

Augmenting Trimmed Masterwork Armor works similarly to standard Masterwork Armor in that you can only apply it to your Trimmed Masterwork Platebody and Trimmed Masterwork Platelegs. However, the process does also cost 36 Divine Charges for each piece. Divine Charges are devices created with Invention Level 4 and Divination Level 80.

You must combine Divine Energy with an Empty Divine Charge to make it. It is important to note that this process can also be completed with the Custom-Fit and Spiked variants of Trimmed Masterwork Armor, or you can combine them. However, Augmenting the gear does add the requirement of more Divine Charges whenever you need to repair it.

Masterwork Armor Degradation and Repair

The base set of Masterwork Armor has 100,000 charges, meaning that it can take 100,000 hits before it has to be repaired. This is estimated to last around 55 hours of regular combat, so even the base set of Masterwork Armor will last you quite a while.

Its charges stay at 100,000 when turned into Trimmed Masterwork Armor but are doubled to 200,000 when custom-fitted.

Regardless of the type of Masterwork Armor, you are equipped with, dying and retrieving the gear from a gravestone will reduce its durability charge by 20%. Repairing Masterwork Armor, however, does change depending on which variation you use.

Regular Masterwork Armor can be fixed either at specific NPCs or at armor stands in player houses for a reduced cost. The NPCs that can repair the armor for you include Bob in Lumbridge, Tindel Marchant in Port Khazard, Dunstan in Burthorpe, and the Squire in the Void Knights’ Outpost. Getting your entire set repaired by any of them will cost you 4,800,000 coins.

If you want to repair the gear yourself at the armor stand, you still have to pay a hefty sum, but it is a reduced cost that is further reduced based on your Smithing Level.

This means that if you just bought your set of Masterwork Armor, your upkeep costs will be higher than if you made it yourself. With Smithing Level 1, repairing an entire set costs 4,776,000 coins, while at Smithing Level 99, it costs 2,424,000 coins.

If you need to repair any Trimmed Masterwork Armor, you will not be able to take it to an NPC. Instead, you need to get a regular piece of Masterwork Armor for the amount of Trimmed Masterwork Armor you need to repair.

This means that fixing a complete set of Trimmed Masterwork Armor effectively costs 69,577,570 coins. This price goes up further if you have Augmented Trimmed Masterwork Armor, as you’ll also need a total of 64 Divine Charges for the Platebody and Platelegs.

Due to the high cost of repairing the Trimmed Masterwork Armor, I highly recommend custom-fitting it. While it does restrict you from selling the set, moving on to a different armor set will double the armor’s durability.

This will give you 110 hours of average combat before you go through the lengthy and expensive process of repairing it, which is a massive boost. It is also important to note that regular Augmented Masterwork Armor only needs the Divine Charges and does not need to be repaired the traditional way.

Best Alternatives to Masterwork Armor

With how expensive and time-consuming it is to make Masterwork Armor, you may want to find a reasonable alternative. However, all of the melee armors that are around the Masterwork Armor’s stats do come with charges that you’ll need to worry about.

One slightly cheaper is the Malevolent Armor set. This set is earned through the minigame Barrows – Rise of the Six. Or, you can buy it for 36,459,855 coins on the Grand Exchange, which is less than half the cost of Masterwork Armor.

If you prefer to use ranged or magic options instead of melee there are also equivalent armor sets that will serve you better. For ranged players, there’s Sirenic armor. This armor is made with Crafting Level 92 and a total of 84 Sirenic Scales, which are dropped by high-level monsters.

If you prefer to use magic you’ll instead want to get your hands on some Tectonic Armor. This armor is crafted with Runecrafting Level 93 and Tectonic Energy. Tectonic energy is only dropped by Vorago, but the armor set increases your Defense and Magic when you wear it, so it is well worth picking up.

FAQs

Conclusion

Getting a complete set of Masterwork Armor is one of the most extensive and challenging things a player can do in Runescape 3. However, it is also gratifying and worthy of showing off.

Getting a set will help you complete the most challenging and high-tier combat activities in the game and is well worth the time and resource investment if you can manage it.

So, once ready, use this guide to tackle getting your own Masterwork Armor set and continue upgrading it to get as robust as possible.

Looking for more interesting readings? Check out:

• Violet Is Blue RS3 Guide
• A Crowning Achievement: Curse Of The Black Stone RS3 Guide
• RS3 Senntisten Quest Review: All You Need To Know!

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Arron Kluz

Arron is a featured team writer and lifelong gamer. Ever since he started playing games on his old SNES, he has been hooked ever since. He has a particular love for games like Pillars of Eternity, Skyrim, a variety of beloved indie titles, and also a few online shooters to serve as a means of avoiding open-world fatigue. Outside of gaming, he enjoys watching arthouse movies, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and writing fiction.

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