Modding: Quality, Farming Efficiency & the Cull

This topic keeps coming up -- primarily with folks who struggle with an overflowing mod inventory, but others as well. I am just ... not a video creator. Not my bag. So I'm going to post this here and link back to it as necessary when someone on the forums looks like they need some advice with mod basics. 

What are mods? How do we talk about them? 

Mods are equipment for your character that affects the final stats of that character. Unlike gear or relic mats, however, mods can be unequipped from one character and moved to another - or simply sold for credits (never as much as you invested). This allows you to upgrade the mods on your best toons as you gain a new best mod of a particular type. Then you can hand down your old best mods to characters that are good, but maybe not your best. Let's look at the mod screen for my account's version of The Stranger: 

The dots indicate a quality known as "rarity" and currently run from 1 dot to 6 dots. Mods from 1 to 4 dots in rarity are worthless. Do not save these mods. Mods from 1 dot to 5 dot all have the same border, a kind of grey. 6-dot mods gain a gold border instead. Since you won't be saving 1-dot to 4-dot mods, you can generally use that border color to tell you at a glance whether a mod is 5-dot or 6-dot. 

Each mod gives 5 bonuses, and contributes to what might be another. 

I say "might be" because the last bonus is a "set bonus". When you collect enough mods of the same type on a character (the required number is always either 2 or 4), you gain the set bonus. But each mod individually gives you its primary bonus and 4 secondary bonuses. 

Each primary gives a fixed bonus. The amount of your bonus is NEVER random. 

Each secondary gives a random bonus, and also it can gain multiple increments of that bonus. Once a mod is sufficiently upgraded to have 4 secondaries exposed, with each future improvement that grants a secondary roll, you "roll" an additional hit of some secondary you've already acquired. No matter how much you improve your mod, you can never have more than 5 rolls on a single characteristic. Nor can you have more than 8 total rolls on a 5-dot mod or 12 total rolls on a 6-dot mod.

This produces wide variations in how large a bonus a given secondary provides. Each bonus is random, and you can have 1 to 5 doses, further separating the meagre bonuses from the fat ones.

There are 12 possible secondaries. Apart from a rule that a mod cannot have a secondary bonus of the same type as its primary bonus, any of the 12 possible secondaries can appear on any given mod. But since one is typically ruled out by the "no matching the primary rule" and since there are only 4 slots for possible secondaries, you generally have a 4-in-11 chance of any given secondary appearing on any given mod. Decent odds, but by no means great. 

Finally, notice that each mod has a shape to it, and each character has 1 slot available for each of the 6 possible shapes. Two mods with the same shape can never be placed on the same character. There are always the same 6 slots on every character, one of each shape, and you must match your mod shapes to the slot shapes. 

Ultimately this will force you to acquire mods that effectively duplicate each other but fit different slots, so that when it is important you can put 6 different mods on a character that all boost the same stats. 

That focussed improvement is how randomly selected mods provide reasonable bonuses, but carefully selected mods grant amazing performance boosts. 

The next posts will focus on other aspects of mods -- most importantly, how do you know when when a mod is great or good? When to hold on and when to sell a mod? That's going to be the single most important skill in developing your mod inventory, and there don't seem to be many good places to learn it. So let's tackle that, shall we?