You can have a glyph of a different quality than that of the item. Dropped items usually come with an equal quality glyph and the glyph also gets upgraded if you upgrade the item's quality. It doesn't work the other way around, though. Also, if you change the glyph yourself, it will no longer upgrade with the item.

However, you can apply a better quality of the same enchantment to crafted gear if you wish-- that is, if you upgrade crafted gear you'll need to upgrade the enchantment separately by applying a better quality enchantment to it.

I always enchant my crafted gear with gold enchantments, even if the gear itself isn't gold quality, so it won't be necessary to apply a better quality enchantment later on if I ever decide to upgrade the gear.

But as far as your specific question, there's no clear way to tell what quality of enchantment has been applied to gear, because you can put a lower-level enchantment on gear than the level of the gear itself. Furthermore, you can apply a new enchantment to dropped gear, so the level and quality of the enchantment on dropped gear doesn't necessarily match the level and quality of the gear itself since you can't tell whether the enchantment is the one that came on the gear or was applied later.

If you want to see whether it's possible to improve the enchantment on a piece of gear, the only thing you can do is craft or buy the desired enchantment at the desired level and quality, then go halfway through the motions of applying the enchantment to the gear-- that is, right-click on the gear, select Enchant, select the enchantment, and hover your mouse over the before and after versions of the gear to compare the numeric values for the enchantment.

As far as I know any dropped item that is enchanted, is enchanted with a legendary glyph anyway. If you update the Gear the power of the legendary glyph just updates with it.
Also if you craft yourself always enchant with the legendary glyph, otherwise you obviously won't get the full effect.

Rule of thumb, if the gear dropped is Blue, it had a Blue Glyph on it, Purple has a Purple Glyph etc.

You can always queue up a glyph to see what it will be before making it. Also, if you do crafting and have hirelings, you will be swimming in Enchanting mats so wasting a glyph is not a big thing all in all.

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

The glyph only affects the enchantment itself. So if you have a web page telling you what numbers glyphs of different colors have, you can figure out what color is on there.

One twist -- if the gear has the Infused trait, then the glyph's numbers go up.

Good point about Infused.

Also, note that enchantments may not get applied at full strength depending on the type (size) of armor they're being applied to, such as Chest armor (full strength) versus Hands armor (not full strength). If you've ever enchanted armor yourself then you probably know this already, but new players might not know it yet. Anyway, the strength of the enchantment as shown on the glyph might show up differently on the armor itself if it's a smaller piece of gear, which might look wrong if you don't know to expect it, but it's correct.