Understanding Mods and Mod Culture

It's not just a 1950's-era English subculture, you know!

A long time ago, in a social media platform far, far away, I wrote

[Near as I Can Tell...] A Quick and Dirty Guide to Mods

And this is a fine guide to modding. How to acquire them, which ones to upgrade, and so on and so forth. But I realize now, in my old age, that it lacks one small, yet important bit of information: why mods matter.

That guide assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that anyone reading it already understands that mods are important.

Oops.

Turns out, not everyone is born from the head of mod-Zeus, with a fully-formed understanding of mods. It also turns out that not every metaphor is apt, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that this guide is intended to bring you into the circle of knowledge, where you will become one of the players who has Knowledge and Game Smarts and also maybe Sex Appeal (I cannot actually claim that last one, but it remains… p o s s i b l e).

So what the fuck are mods, anyway?

Mods are these little do-dads that you shove up your characters’ butts plug into your character’s, uh, mod… board (?) and they give you higher stats. Like… a LOT higher. Mods have several characteristics: Shape, Dots, Color (which is NOT indicative of how good or bad a mod is in any way), Set, primary stat, and secondary stats. All of this adds up to: They make your characters better and the game easier. It’s a joke on the reddit sub that anyone who is struggling with anything is actually having a mod issue. And that joke is often correct.

Why mods though?

It is safe to say that, for any given character, roughly half of their power is due to the stats gained from mods. An R7 modless character is no better than a fully modded G12 character, and sometimes worse. Mod. Your. Characters.

And Where do I get such wonderful toys?

Calm down, Joker. Mods are acquired in a number of ways. Some special events reward them (Smuggler’s run, for example). They can be purchased from the mod shop (along with some very cool vinyl records of beat poetry). And they can be directly farmed via mod energy.

Everyone always asks, “So what the fuck are mods, anyway,” but no one ever asks, “How are mods?”

Mods that have 1-4 dots are like injured horses. You need to sell them before anyone finds out you have them. And you thought I was going to say the other thing.

5-dot mods are the baseline of “usable” in this game. I mean, very, very early on you may have some lower dot mods, but - again - you want to replace those as soon as possible. A 5-dot mod with garbage substats is less embarrassing than a 4 dot mod with perfect stats, capiche? Once you have all 5-dot mods, you want to start referring to my above guide on how to “speculate” with your investment in them. But the rough version of that is: When deciding which mods to keep, More speed = better. I keep every single mod I have with higher than 5 speed, until I have at least 8 spare mods in each slot and set combo, at which point I sell the slowest ones. Generally, you want to evaluate mods like:

Mod slot > Mod Set > speed secondary value > Mod primary stat > other mod substats

There’s an argument to be made for evaluating mods in a different order, and that argument is “once you actually understand how mods work, and you have a lot of very good mods, the below order makes more sense:”

Mod slot > Mod Set > Mod primary stat > speed secondary value > other mod substats

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Now that we’ve established the basics, I want to explain a bit more about why mods are so important to this game:

Mods provide a nearly limitless credit-sink by which the developers can keep you chasing “perfection” on a nearly infinite timeline. What this means is, when you have nothing else to invest in, mods are what you should be investing in. That makes mods important to the devs.

The stat boosts from mods are one of the only ways to differentiate your characters from another player’s characters. Having better mods than your opponent can quite literally mean the difference between a win and a loss in GAC. This makes mods important to you.

Mods are one of the only means by which a player can affect defensive team results in GAC. If you always put Geos on defense, and the enemy always kills them with a solo Darth Vader, switching GBA (and/or poggle) to a high tenacity set can prevent Vader from getting the easy counter. Thus, you can surprise your opponent with a result they were not expecting (and likely didn’t even look for), or at least force them into using a lower banner counter. You can’t do anything about the terrible AI, but you can use mods to affect turn order and other stats.

Mods can be moved around (outside of GAC). If you have one set of “god mods,” then you effectively have a set of god mods for every event squad in the game. Just be sure to put everything back when you’re done!

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All of which brings me to the point of this post: Mods matter. They matter a LOT. If you want to succeed in SWGoH, you should take the time to master them.

Now, I don’t want to tell you to just ask someone else. I want to teach you how to figure out what mods are good for which characters all on your own. Remember: Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a night, but set him on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life.

Hold still. I’m going to set you on fire!

head on over to https://swgoh.gg/stats/mod-meta-report/ From there, you can see every character in the game, what mod sets they prefer, and what the primary stats of those mods should be. For secondary stats, assume that you want as much speed as possible. There are only a few edge cases where you don’t want speed:

• JKL. As a leader, JKL works best with zero speed on his mods. This is how I use him all the time, because I hate remodding. It works great.

• Merrin. Merrin’s speed value only matters when she’s the last one left alive, which is rare. Outside of that, she gains speed when your allies die or gain debuffs. Her speed substat is irrelevant. So some speed is fine, but it genuinely doesn’t matter for her.

• Paploo. While he is potentially one of the fastest characters in the game, a low/no speed paploo (with zeta) is very useful in the occasional ewok galactic challenge. In the later game, you don’t use ewoks for anything else, so keeping him at no speed is fine. Earlier, you probably have to use your murderbears for GAC or whatever, in which case you’ll want speed on him most of the time.

• Cere’s entire team doesn’t want to be faster than about 240 speed. They can be, but more speed means the enemy team takes fewer turns before you go, and you don’t get those massive stat boosts in GAC. So you kind of need to mod them for low-ish speed.

Let’s get back to figuring out who gets what mods. swgoh.gg is awesome for learning what the ideal sets are for each character, but the way it’s organized isn’t the best for situations where you get a new, awesome mod, and don’t know who to put it on. Like, this offense cross with potency primary stat rolled 22 speed. Who should I put that on?!

If you followed the modding of swgoh.gg when you unlocked your characters, this step is easy, because they all already have ideal mod sets and primary stats, just not ideal speed, right? So go in game to Collection> Characters > check the “mods” option > click “manage mods” > and click “filter.” From there, filter by the type of the new mod you just got (in our example, cross, offense set, potency primary). Then sort by speed. Look for your new mod (probably near the top), and then look at the characters below that mod in the list. Whichever one seems most important to you, give them the new mod. Sometimes this means you’ll be shuffling mods all the way down. C’est la vie.

Okay, but what if you didn’t follow the swgoh.gg suggestions? That means the filter method above won’t work, right? Right. But don’t panic, I said I’d set you on fire and I goddamn meant it.

Go back to the above linked swgoh.gg page and do a search for the primary stat of the mod in question (potency, in the case of my example). Then click through the list and take note of anyone with an offense set shown. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’ll get you there fast enough. Eventually, you’ll have mods with proper sets and primary stats on all of your characters, so that first filter method will work every time.

Is this ideal? No. CG could really use some more improvements to their mod interface. So could swgoh.gg, for that matter. But it’s functional, and that’s all you really need out of a person covered in gasoline.

Flame on, you bright, beautiful, human torch!