Equipment Mods
Equipment Mods let a piece of eligible gear carry a small number of rolled bonuses, each tied to a single Class Ability. A modded piece amplifies (or, for a player who never trained that ability, quietly stands in for) the ability its mod is linked to. It is one of the five mechanisms on the Custom Crafting page.
Overview
A mod is applied by using a salvage-bag material on an item sitting in your pack - never while the item is worn. Every application rolls a random strength for the mod, so a perfect roll is intentionally rare, and trading modded gear or spare material is the normal way to close the gap.
Each mod is linked to one Class Ability, spanning all eight classes: Archer, Rogue, Vanguard, Berserker, Archmage, Void and Summoning, Blood Mage and Spellsword. Some mods stand alone, useful even to a player who never trained the linked ability; others are pure machinery, amplifying an ability's own effect and doing nothing without it. Either way, a mod is only worth applying to a player actually built around its ability - which is exactly what keeps modded gear worth trading.
Applying a mod
You need the item in your pack (not equipped) and a full bag of the material. Using the bag on the item consumes it and settles the mod in - the roll always succeeds, there is no wasted material on a bad outcome, only a weak one.
Materials
Two salvage materials do the work, in different ways:
| Material | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tiger Eye | Adds one random mod, at a guaranteed baseline strength, to a plain item that has no gear ratings and no mod yet. This is what sets an item's mod capacity for good. |
| Obsidian | Convert: destroys every gear rating an item was born with and mints that many mods instead, each rolled independently. Reroll: replaces every mod already on a converted item with fresh rolls. |
Tiger Eye is common early but grows scarce at high tiers, which keeps it the everyday commodity material. Obsidian stays available at every tier instead, which is what makes it the one worth chasing once you are converting rated endgame gear.
Both destructive Obsidian actions ask you to confirm first, since converting or rerolling cannot be undone.
Capacity
How many mods a piece of gear can ever carry is fixed the moment you first apply one to it, and is set by how many gear ratings that piece was born with. An item with no ratings at all caps at one mod (via Tiger Eye); a well-rolled rated item can hold several. Capacity never grows afterward - it is locked in at that first application.
Workmanship matters
An item's workmanship scales the strength of every mod on it, the same way it does for Weapon Mods. A workmanship 10 piece gets the full value of whatever it rolls; a workmanship 5 piece gets half of it. Two items that roll identically will not end up equal unless their workmanship matches, so a high-workmanship base is worth holding out for before you spend material on it.
An item with no workmanship at all cannot be modded and is refused before anything is spent.
Roll intensity
Each mod on the appraisal panel carries a bracketed percentage showing how good that particular roll was, against the best that mod can reach:
- Deadeye [100%]: +2.8% missile damage
- Venom [20%]: +0.82 poison damage per hit
100% is a perfect roll. The percentage is pure roll luck - workmanship is already accounted for in the value beside it, so a low-workmanship item can still show 100%.
Eligible gear
Only armor and clothing (crowns included), cloaks, and jewelry can carry a mod. Jewelry here means neck, wrist and finger pieces and the trinket slot - a tier 8 trinket rolls vitality or healing-boost ratings exactly as a ring or bracelet does, so Obsidian converts one the same way. Weapons, shields and sigils never can: Aetheria carries no gear ratings at all, so a conversion would have nothing to work with. Trying to apply a mod to an equipped item, or to an ineligible slot, is refused outright and nothing is spent.
Stacking
An item never rolls a mod type it already carries. Across separate pieces of equipped gear, though, matching mod types simply add together - putting the same mod on several equipped pieces makes it stronger.
For most mods that addition has no ceiling of its own; the only real limit is how much of the right material you can gather and how the dice land. A smaller group of mods - the ones that change how often something triggers, such as a proc chance or a re-fire chance - stop adding value once your equipped total reaches the equivalent of three perfect rolls of that mod. Piling on a fourth or fifth copy of one of these past that point does nothing further. The affected mods are: Double Volley, Acid Proc, Echo Cast, Elemental Rend, Nether Bloom, Spellblade, Runeblade, Sundermark, Surge, Spellstorm, Cascade, Dispelling Edge, and Shield Wall.
Available modifiers
There are 49 mods. The tables below list every one, grouped by the class whose ability it amplifies.
Reading the tables. The strength shown is the effect at a perfect 100% roll on a workmanship 10 item - the ceiling, not what a typical roll gives you. Your item's appraisal panel always shows the value it actually rolled. A mod marked Standalone works whether or not you have trained its linked ability; a mod marked Machinery amplifies the ability's own effect and does nothing without it. A Capped mod is one of the stacking-limited mods described above.
Archer
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deadeye | Deadeye | +2.8% missile damage | Standalone |
| Eagle Eye | Eagle Eye | +2% effective missile attack skill | Standalone |
| Long Draw | Long Draw | +3% missile damage at maximum range | Standalone |
| Heavy Draw | Heavy Draw | +2.4% missile damage while Heavy Draw is active | Machinery |
| Splitshot | Multishot | +2.5% extra-arrow damage multiplier | Machinery |
| Double Volley | Double Volley | +2.5% volley re-fire chance | Machinery, Capped |
Rogue
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venom | Poison Weapon | +4.1 poison damage per hit | Standalone |
| Acid Proc | Acid Proc | +10.3% acid proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Caustic | Acid Proc | +25.6% acid damage per tick | Machinery |
| Riposte | Riposte | +10% counter-strike weapon damage | Machinery |
| Attack Speed | Attack Speed | +2.5% attack speed | Standalone |
Vanguard
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thorns | Thorns | +1% of shield armor reflected | Standalone |
| Shield Check | Shield Check | +10% thorns-on-parry strength | Machinery |
| Bulwark | Battle Hardened | +1.57% damage reduction | Standalone |
| Provoke | Taunt | +2s Taunt hold duration | Machinery |
| Bellow | Taunt | +1m Taunt radius | Machinery |
| Shield Wall | Shield Block | +1.41% shield block chance | Machinery, Capped |
Berserker
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frenzied Pace | Frenzy | +0.3% attack speed per Frenzy stack | Machinery |
| Lingering Fury | Frenzy | +3s Frenzy stack window | Machinery |
| Savage Blows | Savage Blows | +2.7% melee damage | Standalone |
| Blood Fury | Blood Fury | +3% melee damage at lowest health | Standalone |
| Executioner | Executioner | +3% melee damage against badly wounded targets | Standalone |
| Bloodlust | Bloodlust | +0.5% of melee damage returned as health | Standalone |
Archmage
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overchannel | Overchannel | +2.8% war magic damage | Standalone |
| Echo Cast | Echo Cast | +2.5% recast chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Elemental Rend | Elemental Rend | +2% vulnerability proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Resonance | Spell AoE | +2% radiated blast damage | Machinery |
| Mana Barrier | Mana Barrier | +3% damage diverted from Health to Mana | Standalone |
Void and Summoning
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Void Damage | Void Damage | +2.5% void magic damage | Standalone |
| Withering | Withering | +2.8% void damage per tick | Standalone |
| Empowered Summons | Empowered Summons | +8.7% summoned pet health, damage and defenses | Standalone |
| Soul Tether | Soul Tether | +3% combat pet damage reduction | Standalone |
| Nether Bloom | Nether Bloom | +25% chance of an additional bloom jump | Machinery, Capped |
Blood Mage
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blood Charge | Sanguine Reserve | +0.54% life magic damage per Blood Charge | Machinery |
| Transfusion | Transfusion | +10% of Drain surplus redistributed | Machinery |
| Hemorrhage | Weakened Blood | +0.05 life vulnerability on marked targets | Machinery |
| Deepen | Malediction | +2% debuff intensity | Machinery |
| Bloodletting | Crimson Harvest | +1m Crimson Harvest radius | Machinery |
| Sanguinate | Exsanguinate | +0.117x Exsanguinate burst multiplier | Machinery |
| Blood Price | Blood Price | +2.5% spell damage while paying the Blood Price | Machinery |
| Clotting | Sanguine Ward | +10% of the Sanguine Ward absorb | Machinery |
Spellsword
| Mod | Linked ability | At a perfect roll | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spellblade | Spellblade | +3.6% Spellblade proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Harmonics | Resonance | +0.48% magic damage per Resonance stack | Machinery |
| Runeblade | Runeblade | +3.6% Runeblade proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Sundermark | Sundermark | +1.5% Sundermark proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Surge | Spellsurge | +0.51% war proc chance per Spellsurge stack | Machinery, Capped |
| Spellstorm | Spellstorm | +3.3% Spellstorm proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Cascade | Cascade | +2.5% Cascade chain chance | Machinery, Capped |
| Dispelling Edge | Dispelling Edge | +2% Dispelling Edge proc chance | Machinery, Capped |
Weak rolls
A few mods produce an effect the game has to round to a whole number - poison damage, an acid tick, reflected damage. Those carry a minimum roll so a bad one is never literally worthless: Venom and Caustic never roll below a quarter strength, and Thorns never below a tenth.
Bloodlust is the deliberate exception. Its healing would round away to nothing on most single hits, so instead of a minimum roll the leftover fraction accumulates across hits until it pays out. Every Bloodlust roll is worth something eventually, however low it landed.
Getting the salvage
Both materials drop as ordinary salvage, and both are also sold by Salvage-Broker Bevan Tolliver in the Marketplace as sealed bags, one Trade Note each. Obsidian is additionally sold as a Sealed Obsidian Hammer at ten Trade Notes, which holds ten rerolls in one reusable tool. Use a sealed bag or hammer in your pack to break the seal and what is inside is ready to apply. See Custom Crafting for his full shelf.
See also
- Custom Crafting - all five custom crafting mechanisms and where to buy for them.
- Weapon Mods - the weapon-side sibling system.
- Serpentine Salvage - rerolls an item's enchantments rather than its mods.
- Class Abilities - the abilities equipment mods amplify.
- Salvage-Broker Bevan Tolliver - sells both salvage materials as sealed bags.