Defiance doesn’t have ‘gear’ in the traditional MMO sense, you can’t go farm dungeons hoping to get that epic purple chestpiece to drop after run 1,234. Gear progression is weapon based with your weapon skill (individual weapon, and weapon family) and the weapon’s bonuses both coming into play.
For weapon skills, IGN’s Defiance Wiki has a good breakdown of the families. Each weapon that you pick up, you gain skill in by using it… which also raises the skill in the family. Maxing out weapon/family skills grant small bonuses (quicker reload, more damage, etc…).
The other ‘half’ of weapon progression, is in the mods you place on the weapon. There are 4 families of mods:
- Barrel
- Magazine
- Scope
- Stock
Barrel mods typically increase damage, Magazine mods improve reload time OR provide additional ammo capacity, Score mods improve accuracy, Stock mods improve melee damage or reduce recoil. The IGN Wiki has a very nice list of available mods here. As you get to higher ego levels (and higher ego rated weapons), you get synergy mods as well. I’ve got no experience with them, and I haven’t been able to find much detail so far. My assumption is that ‘synergy’ mods are similar to ‘class sets’ in functionality.. if you have 2 synergy mods, you get a bonus, 3 synergy mods gets you a bit bigger bonus.. etc. Once I have more information on Synergy mods, I’ll update, or do a separate post on them.
What IGN’s wiki is missing, is a ‘how-to’ for mods, the system isn’t very intuitive, so some explanation is necessary. Because this next part is picture heavy, I’m putting it after the break.
To mod a weapon, you start by going into the salvage matrix, I access via my inventory (i hotkey), and then clicking on the salvage matrix icon:
Once in the Salvage Matrix, you’re offered a few choices:
Obviously, from here, you need to select the weapon you want to ‘modify’ (or, breakdown into parts). Double clicking on the “Select an Item to Modify” box, will bring up an inventory view, and you scroll through to find the weapon you want, then double click it.
After selecting, you get some additional choices to make:
Breakdown to resources will destroy the weapon, and give you a variable amount of Ark Salvage (which, you need to ‘spend’ to equip some mods). Add mod slots will add a random mod slot to an eligible weapon (not all weapons can have mod slots added). Remove mods will, remove mods (destroying the mods in the process), Retrieve mods will remove the mods (destroying the weapon in the process), and add mods will allow you to add a mod to an existing mod slot.
- To Scrap, or not to Scrap, that is the question!
The rifle I’ve chosen has two existing mod slots, magazine and barrel (You can also see I have no skill with this particular rifle yet). Double click on the mod type you want to add (I’m going to do the Magazine, as I don’t have a barrel mod for the assault rifle family). After you double click, you’ll get an inventory view of the available mods for that slot:
If I had more than one mod, I could click the compare button down in the bottom right, to compare the different ones, and see which one was better. Once you know what mod you want to use, double click it. That will take you back to the detailed ‘add mod’ screen, and show you the effect of the mod you’ve chosen with the rest of the weapon’s stats:
If you wanted to also add a barrel mod, you could double click on that and repeat the previous steps.
Once you’ve got all the mods you want to add listed, click the “Start Action” button at the bottom of the detail view. You’ll receive a ‘Are you sure’ dialog, click yes if you’re sure…
That’s it! You’ve successfully modded your first weapon. That wasn’t so bad was it?
I’m now carrying around every mod I’ve looted or received as a quest reward…just because I’m not sure if it might come in handy at some point. I also don’t sell weapons for scrip at the vendors, I break them down for Ark Salvage to ensure I’ve got plenty to pay for weapon modifications (and, whatever else Ark Salvage might be needed for further down the line).