Items

As a loot-oriented game, Hellgate has a number of ways in which you can upgrade and otherwise interact with your weapons, armor, and other gear. It can take a bit of time to wrap your head around the myriad options that are available to you, so if you’re at all confused, read on.

Finding and Identifying Items

As you kill enemies, smash barrels, open chests, and so on, you’ll be finding plenty of loot. Most of what drops will be cash, which is automatically picked up when you walk over it, but there’ll be plenty of items, as well, which will need to be manually picked up with the F button. There are a bunch of different things that can drop, including usable items like health injectors, armor, weapons, and mods.

We’ll get into the types of loot that you can find in a second, but first off, keep in mind that every item that drops has a few characteristics that you should know about.

Usability

There are a few icons that can appear in the lower-right corner of an item that tell you, at a glance, information about it.

You’re going to be seeing a lot of loot of various sorts throughout the game.

Unidentified (Question Mark): If an item is unidentified, it’s unusable. Buy Analyzers at a shopkeeper and use one on an unidentified object to take a look at its hidden properties. You’re going to be using a lot of Analyzers as you proceed through the game, so you may want to drag them to one of your number keys and use that as a shortcut.

Unusable (Circle with line through it): Unusable items are intended for classes other than your own. Trade them, sell them, or break them down for components.

Unusable Due To Attributes (Minus symbol): Sometimes you’ll find armor or weapons that your class can use, but which you can’t currently equip. All items have minimum attribute requirements, so if you don’t currently meet the requirements, you’ll need to increase your attributes before you can use the item.

Rarity

Common (Grey): Common items have no special properties, and are all alike. If you find two common Tempest Rifles, for instance, they’ll have the exact same stats (in rare cases you may find common items with different mod slots). You’ll be using common items for the first few levels of a character’s existence, but eventually you’ll shed them all and not want to use them anymore. They’ll drop throughout the game, however, so you can feel free to break them down for components as they do so, or simply leave them on the ground and not bother with them.

Enhanced (Green): Enhanced items are superior versions of common items. They’ll typically have one special property and will deal more damage or have more armor by default, and will almost always give you rare components when broken down. Green items will be worn up until level 10 or so, but after that you’ll probably be replacing them with rares and legendary items.

Rare (Blue): Rare items are further enhanced from the enhanced items that came before them, and, as the name implies, they’ll be much more difficult to come across. Typically they’ll have two enhancements and will be more powerful yet than the enhanced items.

Legendary (Orange): Legendary items are the kings of the randomly-generated heap, with the capability of holding three or four special properties. They are, as you can imagine, quite rare, so be sure to examine them carefully when one drops.

Unique items aren’t guaranteed to be all that good, but they’ll often be worth trying out at the very least.

Unique (Golden): Unique items are a bit different in Hellgate London than they were in, say, Diablo II. Instead of being premade by the game’s designers, uniques in HGL are randomized, just like lower-level loot: they will have unique names, however, and will usually be quite a bit more powerful than any other item that you’re likely to find. (Sometimes the randomness of these items can result in a bunch of mods that simply aren’t that useful; don’t hesitate to deconstruct a unique if it’s just not good enough for you.) If you find a unique item for a class that’s not your own, be sure to offer it up in chat channel to other players; you’re likely to earn quite a bit of cash for it.

Breaking Down Items Into Components

There are basically two kinds of currency at use in Hellgate: Palladium (cash) and components. Palladium is found throughout the game world; many enemies will drop it, and it’ll also be found in the barrels and boxes that you’ll wind up smashing. Components, however, can only be found in one way: by breaking down items that you find.

When you find an item that you don’t need or can’t use, hold down your right mouse button while hovering over it, then move your cursor up over the screw icon there. You’ll need to confirm that you wish to break down the item, because doing so completely destroys it. You’ll lose the item itself and gain raw components. (Low-level items will break down into palladium instead, but this is a pretty rare occurance at higher levels.)

Components come in a few varieties, including Tech Components, Runic Fragments, Blessed Shards, and Scrap Materials. Each of these varieties comes in common and rare forms, as well, with rarer items giving you more rare components when you break them down. So what can you do with them?