Honor items were given back in 2012 for the Homecoming event and were given as four separate tiers depending on your rank. These items having no alchemy paths, give players no way to upgrade them to higher tiers if you were given anything that wasn't the 5-star version of them. Since honors items were given over 14 years ago, I believe that players that logged in during the Homecoming event and didn't receive the 5-star version of items should be able to upgrade them fully. This wouldn't be a free upgrade and we would still have to use orbs and materials to upgrade them.

It just sucks to be stuck with the low tier version of a items after so many years and can't be used effectively in higher tier content. Maybe you can craft them using the Mysterious Alchemy machine so you don't have to learn a recipe? In the end, I believe if people have been playing for that long we should at least be able to upgrade the honor items even though they are just reskins of the leviathan blade and Aegis.