First off, let’s walk through how Inscriptions work. Inscriptions are random modifiers that are applied to each loot item upon creation. Here is an example of some inscriptions on an Avenging Herald - a Masterwork Heavy Pistol (and a really good one at that!)

A couple things to note with inscriptions:

So in the Avenging Herald example above, the following inscriptions were rolled:

• +15% Weapon Damage - This increases the damage dealt from the Avenging Herald by an additional 15%. In this case, the inscription has a Gear icon so the damage boost ONLY applies to this weapon and wouldn’t apply to your secondary weapon.
• +4% Repair Amount - All health drops that are picked up will replenish an additional 4% health.
• +30% Ammo Drop Rate - Increases the chance of a defeated enemy dropping weapon ammo by 30%.
• +15% Heavy Pistol Damage - Since this has a Suit icon, any Heavy Pistol the player is carrying (including this Avenging Herald) will do an additional 15% damage. So if you had 2 Heavy Pistols equipped, both weapons would get the 15% increase.

One other callout here is that the Damage Number shown (in this case 1044) doesn’t include the damage bonuses that came from the Inscription rolls. This is an important consideration – Inscriptions aren’t reflected in the stat block (currently at least) so make sure you are comparing apples to apples here. As an example, check out these 2 Avenging Heralds – they both show identical Power values of 45 and Damage values of 1044. However, the one on the right will do more damage because of the 2 Damage inscriptions it has.

How are inscriptions applied? We have the following buckets of inscriptions:

• Minor Primary
• Minor Secondary
• Major Secondary
• Major Primary
• Epic Secondary
• Epic Primary

The lower the tier, the less impact the inscription will have. The higher the tier, the higher the impact. As an example, Minor Primary can modify weapon damage from +5-25%. But Major Secondary Inscription to weapon damage will modify it from +25%-175%.

Ultimately, the rarity of an item dictates which inscriptions it gets. Here is a table that visualizes how this works on Weapons and Gear:

Here is a list of all Inscriptions with descriptions of what they do: