Defiance Weapon Modding Guide

Defiance Weapon Modding Guide by ThatFacelessMan

To start off, for those who don’t know. you can find Mods just about everywhere, stores and missions!

The modding process is essential to effective weapon use. With mods a decent gun can be good, a good gun can be great, and a great gun makes you an ark hunter to be reckoned with.
That being said, modding a weapon can be a confusing and troublesome process. First you’ll need a few things to get started. A weapon, a mod, and at least 100 EGO rating. Access to the Salvage Matrix is unlocked prior to 100 ER, but at 100 ER you should be able to start adding additional mod slots to weapons.
First let’s start with where the salvage matrix is:

There is no hotkey to immediately take you to it, so going through the Loadout menu is the quickest, and will also help keep you mindful of what you have equipped, as that can make a difference to your modding experience, but we’ll cover that in a minute.
Welcome to the Salvage Matrix!

In it you select a weapon, and depending on the weapon and your EGO rating you have several options. First is to break the weapon down for resources. This gives you an amount of ark salvage depending on the rarity of the item.
In order:

• White – 250
• Green – 500
• Blue – 750
• Purple – 1000
• Orange – 1250

(The colors also indicate rarity for those of you who are wondering, white begin the most common and orange being the rarest.)
You should be doing this with almost any weapon, grenade, or shield that you don’t want. Modding weapons can deplete your ark salvage quickly if you’re not careful, and an ark hunter flush with ark salvage can buy keycodes at lockboxes, and potentially get even better guns to work with!
So now you’ve got a gun, and you want to put a snazzy new mod on it. Awesome! This is what it looks like when you’ve got a un-modded gun selected, and ready to go.

But you realize that maybe you don’t really want to mod that pistol. You’re going to scrap it, and get some salvage. What you really want to do is put another mod on that awesome Infector that absolutely destroyed those pesky 99er’s. You already put a barrel on it to increase it’s damage, but it needs a better scope for accuracy.

So you can see what a gun with a mod already attached looks like. See how the icon for barrel is lit up, and has the mod stats next to it?
Well lets load that bad boy into the salvage matrix!

Whoops! That’s right, if your weapon is equipped you can’t perform any action to it. So make sure you check all your loadouts before you try to mod something.
There we go!

Notice that there are now options to remove or retrieve the mods currently equipped on the weapon. Removing the mods destroys all mods that are attached to the weapon, clearing the slots. Recovering the mods destroys the weapon, but you get the mods back.
I mentioned that cost was a factor previously. To simply attach a mod, there is no cost, however everything after that costs ark salvage and time.

Remove mod: 285 ark scrap, 2 minutes

Retrieve mod: 5,690 ark scrap, 2 minutes

Add mod slot: 11,380 ark scrap, 10 minutes

So yeah, the costs add up, so breakdown those worthless pieces of gear cluttering your inventory all the time!
So that’s how you navigate the salvage matrix. But what about the actual mods? There are four mod slots, and four mod types. Stock, barrel, magazine, and scope. They follow the same color scheme for rarity, but also have the additional marker of being named with a roman numeral, I-V to denote their rarity level as well.

There’s a breakdown of all the types and their in game names here:
http://www.ign.com/wikis/defiance/Modifications
You get mods from side quests, arkfalls, hotshots, and rampages. They are also available from some vendors on sale, but there are a few vendors that deal exclusively in mods, such as Headlands Transport and Cronkhite Station, and the faction vendors of Toolworks, VBI, Soleptor, and Echelon have a random mod from a synergy set for sale.

A synergy set? Yep, there are even more bonuses to be had with some mods and weapons, and this is where it gets really fun.
Synergy sets are a set of bonuses that all have something in common, they can be on weapons and mods, and the more of synergies you have of the set on a weapon, the more bonuses from the set appear.

Let’s take a look!
Here’s my Baby!

She’s a faction Frontier SAW from Toolworks, and she’s got it where it counts. Look at all those stat bonuses in the top box! That’s from the synergy set on just the weapon. If I had four mods on there from the Preparation Synergy Set, they’d be even bigger!
It’s level is also maxed out, so it has a bonus x1.04 dmg, and a magazine mod that adds x1.4 magazine size. So what do those two rather small stats do overall? Well like any modifier for your gun, they actually can do a lot.
So what? x1.04 dmg, and x1.4 magazine size? Big whoop! But that’s the beauty of mods! They stack with everything else you’re doing as well. So what about with all the perks I’ve got normally equipped?
This is my LMG versus the exact same weapon on the vendor. Notice how different the stats are with just a few modifiers from leveling, and one magazine mod! Now imagine if there were three more mods!

Modded vs Stock

That’s an almost 50% jump in damage capability from just a magazine mod! Add in everything else like it being fully leveled and perks, and suddenly you’ve got an exceptional weapon!
As you can see Prepared deals with ammo regeneration, and increased melee damage on a kill, so Prepared would be good for weapons that need ammo, or for builds looking for increased melee damage, like Blur!
So what are the other synergies, and where are they available? Well right now you can get synergy weapons at faction vendors. The three main, Toolworks, VBI, and Soleptor all have two types available, and Paradise and Echelon each have one. They’re on purple or higher weapons, and it’s also possible to find them, very rarely out in the world or through lock boxes. I’ve only found one that way
So what are the synergies?

Toolworks:

• Hard Boiled
• Prepared
• Random Prepared Mod

Von Bach Industries:

• EGO Precision
• Nano Mastery
• Random Precision Mod

Soleptor:

• Nano Executioner
• Scavenger
• Random Scavenger Mod

Paradise Territory:

• Sawbones

Echelon:

• Wrecker

Secret Vendor 1:

• Machinest
• Outlaw

Secret Vendor 2:

• Veteran
• Survivalist

Secret Vendor 3:

• Rolling Thunder
• Brutal
• Secret vendor locations (Video, Map)

There are also many more synergies, here’s a list of them!
So that’s about it for mods, modding, synergies, and the salvage matrix. If you’ve got any questions regarding mods, fire away!