Hello! I main an Etolie, and I'm unsure how to proceed with my Novel Soaring Blades.

I'm working on upgrading the novel to a Liberate, and I do want that S5 that comes with it, I do not really care about the available S4's since lifesteal won't work anyway and that's all that interested me there. I thought I might throw the mesesta in for a Grand Melee capsule. I managed to get an amazing 8 slot drop with base affixes giving me something like 160 m-atk and a bunch of other things that would be great, so I thought I'd work at getting augment transfer passes.

I'm unclear how I should proceed. Would I need aug transfer passes for 6 slots? Since I'd be using a capsule and keeping the S5? Would I need it for 7 or 8? I know I need to upslot it, but do I upslot to 7 or 8 slots? I'm not sure how the S5 ability works. Finally for now, with the boost week ending today, should I do this with my Novel for the greater chance or wait until I have my Liberate anyway? I've seen it said that SA's transfer at 100% anyway, as do capsules so I would just have to worry about 6 slots, but I've been away since episode 4 and I've probably forgotten a lot about how this works.

Any advice would be really appreciated.

It is better to wait until you upgrade it to a Rivalate before doing an affix transfer since the S5 can only be added via normal affixing, meaning you risk losing any of those augments if they aren't 100% or that can't be re-added via normal affixing (like Mark or Grand augments), but it is a good idea to try and upslot it to 8 right now with high success junk augments to prepare.

If I recall correctly, the number of Augment Transfer Passes needed depends on the final number of slots on the item you are transferring to, including any S-Grade Augments, so if your final slot amount is 8, then you need 100 transfer passes.

@Ravrohan-0 Just to echo what AndrlCh said, if you want your final weapon to have 8-slots, then you'll need to upslot your base weapon to 8-slots before using your transfer passes and it'll cost 100 passes to transfer.

And if you were like me and thought boost week ended at the end of today and not the start of today, then you may still have to upslot your Novel/Liberate base weapon. If that's the case, then I'd wait until you upgrade to Liberate to upslot as this will give you access to S5 augments.

S-grade augs do not face the upslotting penalty so you'll want to place both an S4 and S5 on your Liberate even if you don't want the S4 in your final recipe. Any S4 will work as a placeholder, but you may find S4: Photon V Adaptation from the Atlas Victo SAF actually useful depending on your max PP. This aug increases natural and active PP regen + reduces PP costs by a set percentage given by (Your Max PP - 120) * 0.10. So if you have say 220 max PP you're looking at 10% faster PP regen and 10% lower cost (maxes out at 30% with 420 PP).

So the steps I'd take:

1. Buy 6 copies of Novel Soaring Blades from Rising Weapon Badge Shop
2. Enhance one Novel with the other 5 copies to increase grind cap to 35 (from base of 30)
3. Enhance Novel to +35 using EXP mini weapons or ones from Collection Folder
4. Transfer any S4 aug to your Novel weapon
5. Upgrade Novel to Liberate
6. Affix Liberate with 100% success junk augs to attach S5 via SAF (keep S4 in this step)
7. Upslot to 8 slots using S4 + S5 + 100% success junk augs + augmentation aid item
8. Use 100 augment transfer passes to take those good augs you got to drop; can replace the S4 with one of those augs in this step and should use your Grand capsule now as well
9. Can always replace one non-S aug with an S4 later (e.g. Raising Pursuit (JP name))

Wow, thanks a ton to you both, this is some great help. And laying it out step by step saves me a lot of headaches. Thankyou very much
Now to get those ultimate boosters to finally drop lol.

Thanks a lot for this thread! I've been wanting to affix my novel weapon before upgrading to rivalate and this information has been really helpful!