Items

Nothing Arno wears is paid for once. Ownership and readiness are billed separately in this game: something has to hand the piece over, and then a second charge in Creed Points has to be cleared before the piece reaches its upgraded numbers. Sort our outfits and equipment list by that second charge and the whole wardrobe falls into a very tidy shape, because the charge ignores almost everything you would expect it to care about.

The upgrade bill is set by tier and by nothing else

Counting the gear list gives 195 pieces, split perfectly evenly: 39 for the head, 39 for the chest, 39 for the forearms, 39 for the waist and 39 for the legs. Each slot then breaks into the same six grades in the same proportions, three Standard or DLC items, five Handmade, nine Tailored, seven Improved, seven Master and eight Legendary. No slot is richer than another and no grade is thin in one place and fat in another.

Lay the upgrade column over that grid and it never varies within a grade. A Handmade belt and a Handmade hood are both 500 Creed Points. A Legendary coat and a Legendary pair of breeches are both 10,000. The livres price does move around inside a grade, but only within a narrow band, and 74 of the 195 entries list no livres figure at all.

Read the last two columns together and the useful lesson appears. Thirty-three pieces arrive as co-op payouts and cost no livres whatsoever, yet they sit on exactly the same upgrade ladder as the pieces you saved for. A Master coat handed over by a squad still wants its 5,000 Creed Points. Free entry is not the same as free gear, which is why the missions that hand out those 33 pieces are worth running early rather than late.

One stat pays the bill back, and it only lives on hoods

Across all 195 entries there is a single modifier that returns the currency it was bought with, a ten percent boost to Creed Points earned. It appears on seven of the eight Legendary hoods, the exception being the Legendary Brigand Hood, and on no chest, forearm, waist or leg piece anywhere in the catalogue. It is also flagged upgrade only, meaning the 10,000 has to be paid in full before a single point comes back.

That makes headgear the one slot where the second bill is an investment instead of a tax, and it makes the cheapest Legendary hood the interesting one. Our gear list prices the Legendary Brigand Hood at 125,000 livres, the cheapest of the seven priced hoods in that grade, and it is precisely the one without the bonus. The next cheapest, the Legendary Prowler Hood at 130,000, has it.

Blades are billed once, then quietly billed again

The armoury works differently. Our weapons unlock list runs to 110 entries across one-handed, long, heavy, pistols and rifles, and where a price is quoted it is one figure and one only, climbing from 250 up to the 200,000 attached to the Club Competition pieces. There is no upgrade column at all, which reads like a bargain until you notice what our fast money advice says about the subject: rather than buying replacements, pick a weapon you like and keep raising its damage with Creed Points.

So the same currency is quietly funding three separate habits at once, gear upgrades, weapon damage and the Lockpicking ranks that open the Templar-protected chests. Fifteen blades skip the shop entirely and drop out of the murder cases instead, which is covered in detail alongside the rest of the optional Paris work.

Two riddle sets that arrive finished

Both of the collectible chains in this section behave the opposite way. They demand a great deal of legwork and then hand over something with nothing left to pay. Our Nostradamus Enigma solutions walk eighteen puzzle chains named for star signs and Roman gods, from Saturnus and Leo through to Sagittarius, and each completed chain yields one Fragment. Those Fragments unlock the sealed room beneath the Cafe Theatre mansion in stages, ten of them for the Cella Astri switch puzzle and eighteen for the Cella Vaporis climb, with the Cella Constellatio symbol-matching puzzle stripping the first cage off the Thomas de Carneillon armour.

The Dead Kings expansion repeats the idea in miniature. Our Suger Legacy symbol guide covers five optional chains of three riddles apiece in and around Franciade, and notes that the Diabolus and Crux sets come to you through the story and cannot be missed. Finish the optional ones and you get the Eagle of Suger sword plus the Defender of Franciade award, with no Creed Points attached.

Where to spend first

If you are early and short of everything, the Handmade grade is the honest answer. Five hundred points a piece is a twentieth of a Legendary upgrade, the livres asked never passes 275, and our gear list already names a Handmade five-piece set as its beginner loadout. Save the four-figure and five-figure upgrades for the pieces you have decided you actually want, and remember that the purse and the upgrade column are separate columns: no quantity of livres settles a Creed Points charge, which is why the systems running alongside the campaign matter more than they look. Everything else Paris is hiding is gathered on our Assassin's Creed Unity hub.