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 six 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 feed mods onto gear, in very different ways:
| Material | What it does |
|---|---|
| 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. Only works on gear that already carries ratings. |
| Tiger Eye | Not an equipment-mod material in its own right - it is the armor counterpart of the Prismatic Drift Stone. Used once on a never-tinkered piece of armor (or clothing covering the head, hands or feet), it works 1 to 5 steel armor tinkers into the piece and settles one random mod into it besides, at ordinary roll strength, the same as any other mod roll. See below for the details. |
Obsidian is the route in for gear that already carries ratings. Tiger Eye is the route in for gear that has none - it never touches ratings at all, so an unrated item is no longer permanently unmoddable the way it once was.
The Obsidian actions ask you to confirm first, since converting or rerolling cannot be undone.
Tiger Eye: armor tinkers plus one mod
A full bag of Tiger Eye used on a clean piece of armor grants between 1 and 5 steel armor tinkers at once, always succeeds, and consumes the whole bag. Each tinker adds 20 armor level, so the total gain is anywhere from 20 to 100 armor level depending on the roll. Alongside those tinkers, on any target eligible for a mod (this excludes shields), it settles one random equipment mod into the piece at the same ordinary potency roll every mod uses.
The piece is then treated as fully tinkered and can never be tinkered again by anything, obsidian included - any gear ratings it carried are sealed in with it for good. Applying Tiger Eye to an item is a one-way commitment for exactly this reason: Obsidian refuses a Tiger Eye piece outright, on both the convert and the reroll path, because the two systems both spend the same one-time upgrade slot.
Steel salvage, sold alongside Tiger Eye by the same broker, raises armor level by the same flat 20 per application, but incrementally and without any of this - you choose when to stop, up to the normal retail ten-tinker cap, and it never mints a mod or forecloses anything. Tiger Eye is the gamble: one bag for a 1-to-5 roll that can pay less than five hand-applied Steel bags, in exchange for a shot at a Class Ability mod on a piece that would otherwise never carry one.
Capacity
How many mods a piece of gear can ever carry is fixed the moment you first apply one to it. For an Obsidian conversion, capacity is set by how many gear ratings that piece was born with - a well-rolled rated item can hold several. For a Tiger Eye grant, capacity is always exactly one, independent of ratings, because Tiger Eye's rule is one mod per application rather than one mod per rating point. Capacity never grows afterward - it is locked in at that first application either way.
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: a shield is excluded even from Tiger Eye's mod grant, and 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.
Checking your mods
Type /mods to list every mod on your equipped gear: how many mod types you carry and across how many items, then one line per mod type showing its combined value, how many items contribute to it, and what percentage of one perfect roll that represents. A mod linked to an ability you have not trained is marked inactive.
Type /mods items instead to see it broken down by item: each equipped piece that carries a mod, how many of its capacity slots are filled, and every mod on it individually.
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. Both are additionally sold as a Sealed Hammer at ten Trade Notes, which holds ten applications in one reusable tool - a Tiger Eye Hammer for the armor-tinker grant, an Obsidian Hammer for the reroll. 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, and Salvage Forge for a way to turn your own stacked bags into a Hammer without spending notes.
See also
- Custom Crafting - all six 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.
- Prismatic Drift Stone - the weapon-side one-way tinker Tiger Eye mirrors.
- Salvage Forge - forges a Hammer from your own stacked bags.
- Class Abilities - the abilities equipment mods amplify.
- Salvage-Broker Bevan Tolliver - sells both salvage materials as sealed bags.