Item tier

A ladder that adds damage and hit to a piece of equipment.

A tier is separate from a variant. Each step of the ladder is worth +20 damage and +10 hit, and the steps stack: tier 3 is +60 damage and +30 hit.

Every item has its own cap, the highest tier it can reach, and the ladder is the same on every item that can reach a given step.

No item in the game currently carries a tier cap. Every piece of equipment reads zero, so nothing can be tiered at the moment and no item page lists one. The same goes for sockets and energy.

From the update notes

What the developer wrote when this was added or changed, newest first.

Hall Of Pain , 0.4.51

Idea/Todo: Another future idea is to expand the bounty board by increasing experience rewards per bounty, introducing a wider variety of targets and objectives, and adding progression-based features such as unlocking higher-tier contracts over time. Since bounties rotate and are reshuffled daily, this system would further encourage and reward consistent manual gameplay. Expanding the overall diversity of available bounties would also give players more meaningful choices in what to do each day, focused on rewarding and encouraging manual/grouped teamplay.

Introducing Item Charging + Tiers , 0.4.45

Energy and tiers enhance the effective output of items (which are power,hitrate,evade,armor and crit)

The idea here is when the player worked their items all the way up to 100 energy, the item can be tiered up (if the max Tier of the item and server allow it). If the current maximum tier is reached, players can continue to overcharge the item above 100 energy, still gaining additional benefits. Overcharging is likely to be more expensive (has to be reviewed later)

Energy + Tiers , 0.4.45

This item tiers should make a nice endgame progression system that can scale as the world continues to grows with more content, enabling items to become really powerful.

Explaining the difference between Variation and Tiers:: Variation , 0.4.45

This are the element, variant, class, and bound status of the instanced item. Defining the identity of the item once it is created (by drop or craft). The system may allow limited per-item rerolls later.

Tiers , 0.4.45

This are the energy, tier, and sockets of the instanced item. Unlike variations, these can be improved through effort, giving players a chance to raise them to greater heights (not releasing in this patch)

Revived , 0.4.37

These changes aim to make the first tier of jewelry more accessible and a bit more enjoyable to farm. Drop rates have been doubled, and requirements have been reduced, except for the bracer which was slightly increased to 7 ponytailes each. This adjustment removes the shortcut that made crafting jewelry bases and gear frames out of bracers only easier than the others.

1 more in the update notes.