Repairing Your Armor

As you are adventuring in Tamriel your gear will eventually break.

In this article we will look at a few different ways you can maintain your gear in ESO including some pro tips on how to repair your equipment for a fraction of the usual cost.

Common confusions:

Your gear will never break beyond repair in ESO, even if your equipment durability reaches 0%, you can still restore in . it back to its original state.

You technically don’t need to repair your gear until it’s fully broken. Your equipment will maintain its full strength all the way down to 0%. Once you hit 0% your item will become completely useless, losing all stats until you repair it again.

Your weapons do not break in ESO, only your armor will need to be repaired. Weapons lose their enchanment charge instead, you can use soul gems to power them back up again.

How to repair your equipment

The most straightforward way is to simply talk to any merchant in the game. They will have an option to repair your gear.

This is fine for your early days in eso, it will be fairly cheap and a quick solution.

However as you acquire some more advanced gear in the higher levels you will notice that the price tag for repairing your gear quickly ramps up.

At higher levels it can cost you several thousand gold to repair your broken armor through a merchant!

Another drawback to this method is that you have to find a merchant before you can repair. Not optimal if you are in the middle of a dungeon.

So, let’s look at some alternative methods which will save you a ton of gold.

Repair Kits – A cheaper and better solution to repairing your gear

Repair Kits are items you can carry in your inventory. They will allow you to repair your gear anywhere at any time.

To use a repair kit, simply right click on your broken piece of armor, hit repair, and select your repair kit in the menu that pops up. The repair kit is consumed in this process.

There are different levels of repair kits, the higher the level, the more it will repair your item. 

A grand repair kit is the highest level and will repair your item 100%.

A Crown repair kit will repair ALL your currently equipped armor.

There are different ways to acquire repair kits, the easiest is to buy them from a vendor, however I would not recommend doing that as it will cost you more than if you just repair at a merchant. There are better ways.

Ways to acquire repair kits:

• Merchants: 420 Gold per kit
• Buying from guild traders: 50 – 60 Gold per kit.
• Crafting writs will usually reward you with repair kits.
• Through the Crown Store for Crowns (Real money, not recommended).

As you can see, buying them from guild traders is by far the cheapest option, they should cost around 50 – 60 gold, sometimes you can find them even cheaper. But do not pay more than 60, just keep looking around until you find a good deal, there are tons of them out there.

Automatically repair your equipment

It’s quite a tedious process to have to repair manually, and most of the time you will use your repair kit too soon.

IE your armor is down to 6%, but you have a boss fight coming up so you repair just to be safe. Now you wasted 6% of that grand repair kit. This quickly adds up.

If you are on console, you are out of luck here 🙁 But if you are playing on PC, there are some excellent addons that will automatically repair your gear for you.

I personally use Kyoma’s Repair ‘n Recharge addon and I love it! You can adjust at what percentage to automatically repair your armor. I have set mine to 2% just to be safe, but you can probably go down to 1% without any concern.

Whenever your piece of armor goes down to that percentage the addon will automatically use a repair kit to replenish your armor. Super handy.

Kyoma’s Repair ‘n Recharge addon will also automatically recharge your weapons as they lose their enchantment charge.

How does your gear break?

Your equipment will deteriorate at a slow pace when you are engaging in combat.

Dying is the biggest culprit for gear braking down.

If you are in a dungeon wiping out a lot you will notice your gear wearing down much much quicker than usual.

PVP combat will not cause your gear to break, neither will duelling.