Big changes to announce! A huge addition has been made. Players may now forge and make higher level equipment.
For nearly all the information, refer to this revamped enhancement guide. http://www.sao-rpg.com/topic/6691-enhancement-guide/
The Profession guide has also been amended to reflect the changes in terms of required ranks for crafts.
Two huge changes not documented easy to be seen are in an enhancement and in mitigation. Recovery as an enhancement has been completely revamped, refer to the enhancement guide, to function similar to battle healing but for energy.
Note also that the armor skill has been nerfed to max 30 mitigation and the Block skill to max 50 (the new numbers can be seen in the main guide), however the defence enhancements (Damage MIT/Regen/Thorns) have been buffed in power they give to reflect. This avoids the lop sided scaling there was where tanking was OP early game and poor late game, now looking a lot more balanced.
Tailors can now also craft whips to make them more relevant.
As stated in the enhancement guide, 4 slot unique quality equipment dropped from bosses and the like scale up in power to the highest available tier you can equip. To ensure players understand this new system, I ask all players to submit their unique equipment to the re-evaluation thread stickied in evaluations to be made Tier 2 if they can equip Tier 2 equipment.
All currently Perfect and below level equipment, including those with unique enhancements, remain as Tier 1 equipment.