Item mods are a core aspect of gearing in Path of Exile 2 and understanding them is essential for building a powerful character. Mods are affixes that appear on magic rare and crafted items and they directly influence your character’s stats and performance. These mods come in two types prefixes and suffixes and each item has a limit on how many it can have. Choosing the right combination of mods is critical when selecting or crafting gear and can significantly impact your survivability and damage output in all stages of the game.

Prefix and Suffix Mechanics

Every item that can be modified has space for up to three prefixes and three suffixes. Prefix mods usually affect core stats like life energy shield armor or base damage while suffix mods commonly enhance utility stats like resistances accuracy attack speed or critical strike chance. Understanding which affixes are prefixes and which are suffixes is important when crafting because you can use certain currency items or crafting bench options to manipulate individual mod groups. For example if your item already has strong prefixes you might want to use a modifier like cannot roll attack modifiers to ensure new rolls only affect suffixes.

Must Know Defensive Mods

Some of the most important mods in Path of Exile 2 are defensive. Life is one of the most sought after prefixes on any rare armor piece and stacking high life across multiple items is essential for nearly all builds. Resistances such as fire cold and lightning resistance are vital as they help you meet the elemental resistance cap which is required to survive endgame content. Chaos resistance is less common but becomes more important in specific areas like Delirium maps or against bosses that deal chaos damage. Energy shield and evasion mods are useful for characters that rely on alternative defensive layers and hybrid builds often look for combinations of these stats.

Essential Offensive Mods

For increasing damage output certain mods are especially valuable depending on your build type. For melee and ranged weapon users mods like increased physical damage added elemental damage and attack speed are key prefixes and suffixes that boost overall damage. Spellcasters will focus on mods such as increased spell damage cast speed and elemental penetration. Critical strike chance and multiplier mods are highly sought after on both weapons and accessories for crit-based builds. Additionally mods that scale with a specific damage type such as increased fire damage or chaos damage are crucial for elemental or DoT builds.

Specialty and Utility Mods

There are also a number of utility and specialty mods that provide strategic value. Increased movement speed on boots is one of the most universally desirable mods and is nearly mandatory for smooth mapping. Increased flask effect duration mana regeneration chance to avoid ailments and cooldown recovery are also valuable depending on the character setup. On weapons and accessories mods like gain extra damage as elemental or increased damage per endurance charge can greatly scale a build’s potential. Crafting bench exclusive mods like cannot roll attack modifiers or multicraft allow players to fine tune their items and are considered essential for advanced item customization.

Influence and Eldritch Mods

Influenced items and eldritch gear introduce unique mod pools that cannot be found on regular items. These mods are tied to special content such as Shaper Elder or Eater of Worlds and can include powerful bonuses like elevated modifiers extra projectiles or conditional damage scaling. Understanding the interaction between base mods and influenced mods is a major part of high end crafting and can elevate a good item into a build defining piece. Investing time to learn what influence mods are available for your gear type can give you an edge in both trading and character development.

Mastering item mods in Path of Exile 2 opens the door to powerful gear customization better trade decisions and deeper build optimization. Knowing which mods to look for and how to apply them will help you create a character capable of handling the game's most challenging encounters.