(The intro is a bit talkative, so for the actual suggestion, skip down to the bolded "How It Works" area)

So with the whole issue with tier 3 monsters having health and damage values as if they were in tier 4 in certain danger rooms, spawn locations, and in all shadow lairs, it feels a bit unfair that several mechanics that players rely on, such as knockdown and flinch, simply do not work due to our weapons not scaling to the new areas, and our armors not protecting enough of the enemy damage.

While presumed to be a bug by the community, some folks are really enjoying the new challenge that shadow lairs are bringing, even if it is just "don't get hit, and hit the enemy way more", since it does emphasize working together to bring down even the smallest of foes. This does make fighting individual monsters take forever, however, and means that non-arena areas drag on and on, requiring meta gear to perform under-average.

So how do we fix this? Well first off, making a whole new tier of gear seems unnecessary if we're only adventuring into a single stratum, and other things like lockdown and tier 1 would suffer from having new star levels (plus that means we'd go up to 7*, which is just a strange number to stop at when 3's and 5's are usually standard stopping numbers).

So what if we could simply power up our existing gear? Well, rarities would be a perfect contender for this!

How It Works
Upon 5* gear reaching level 10, players can opt to enhance their gear. Doing so will consume eternal orbs of alchemy and sparks of life to increase the item's maximum level, with radiant fire crystals being used to level the gear up at a flat rate. Every 5 levels, the gear piece will require an ultimate evo catalyst to level up instead of fire crystals.

Gear leveled up in this way will scale properly in deeper levels, but will not increase their damage in earlier tiers of the game, or in minigames like Lockdown.

While the numbers can be crunched to ensure the process is fair, here's the numbers I would personally use:

- 1 Eternal Orb of Alchemy, plus 1 additional Eternal Orb of Alchemy per level
- 1 Spark of Life per level, plus one additional Spark of Life per every 5 levels
- 50 Radiant Fire Crystals required to level up an item after heat is acquired per level
- Every 5 levels, one Ultimate Evo Catalyst is required in place of 50 Radiant Fire Crystals

At the time of writing this, I'm not sure if we should have a "maximum" level for this form of leveling up, but we could make it increase indefinitely and simply make it so that it scales at a rate of 1 depth per level. Would be interesting if we even get an endless mode, plus would be a great way to "prestige" your gear and show off its level.

Overall this would allow players to keep their current gear, as well as give users some end-game grinding they can make definitive progress on instead of relying on RNG for UVs. With this change, I'd also make Ultimate Evo Catalysts spawn as a rare drop, with about the same frequency of sparks of life, in boxes that are considered D29 or deeper. These would be bound as to not take away from the usual method of acquisition, but also to encourage leveling up items to take on harder areas by having you play in them.