Grim Dawn’s endgame gear talk runs on a vocabulary its interface spreads across several windows. Reputation, quartermaster, Augment, Rune Augment, Component, Completion Bonus, Seal — each of these terms names a system, and each system gates the next. This glossary defines the endgame terms in roughly the order a player meets them, and it states its frame of reference up front: the base game plus the Ashes of Malmouth expansion, released October 11, 2017, and Forgotten Gods. Factionfaction. An in-game group or nation players can align with or fight against, with its own goals and reputation system. vendor stock is not static across that history, so the table below notes which expansion introduced each vendor.
What this covers: Grim Dawn’s endgame vocabulary — factions and reputation tiers, quartermasters, augments and rune augments, components, seals, and the crafting economy that connects them. Why it matters: Reputation opens a vendor, the vendor sells augments and component blueprints, and those decide the last resistances and damage multipliers a finished build is missing. Who should read it: Players in Elite or Ultimate who keep meeting faction names and “Seal of” components in build guides without one page tying the terms together.
Faction and Reputation
A faction is a group on Cairn with which your character holds a standing that can rise or fall. Crate’s official guide describes the faction window as the place where you track progress through the reputation states and see what each faction wants and whom it opposes.
Friendly standing runs through five tiers. The Miraheze wiki records the thresholds:
| Friendly tier | Reputation |
|---|---|
| Tolerated | 0 to 1,499 |
| Friendly | 1,500 to 4,999 |
| Respected | 5,000 to 9,999 |
| Honored | 10,000 to 24,999 |
| Revered | 25,000 |
Hostile factions use a parallel ladder — Hostile, then Despised (1,500 to 7,999), Hated (8,000 to 19,999) and Nemesis (20,000) — and climbing it makes champions and heroes of that faction spawn more often before Nemesis enemies begin to appear.
The official guide says Grim Dawn features eleven factions with which you can interact, while the wiki counts twenty in total: twelve in the base game (seven friendly and five hostile), with Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods each adding three friendly and one hostile faction. Some friendly factions can turn hostile through story choices. The wiki notes that the player must side with either Kymon’s Chosen or the Order of Death’s Vigil and must join one of the three Witch God cults, and that the two cults not joined do not become hostile.
Respected is the first gear-relevant gate. The official guide says that once you become Respected with a faction you unlock its bounty table. Its list of possible rewards is quests, dungeon access, consumables, equipment, crafting blueprints, augments, and writs or mandates.
Writ, Mandate and Warrant
Three consumables change how fast reputation or infamy accrues.
- Writ — the official guide says writs are purchasable at Honored, cut the path to Revered dramatically, and can be used only by the character that bought them. Miraheze and Fandom both state the boost is 50% reputation gain.
- Mandate — the official guide says reaching Revered lets you buy a faction’s mandate, and that unlike writs it can sit in the shared stash for other characters. The two wikis disagree on the size of the boost: Miraheze says 200%, Fandom says 150%. Treat the exact figure as open.
- Warrant — dropped by Nemesis bosses, boosts infamy gained with that hostile faction by 50%, and can be traded, according to Miraheze.
Quartermaster and Augment
A quartermaster is a faction’s vendor. The Fandom wiki describes quartermasters as merchants who sell faction-specific gear, blueprints, consumables and faction items such as writs and mandates, with reputation unlocking more of the stock. Crate’s own quartermaster announcement says reaching Revered gains access to a special quest, the most powerful augments, and Epic-quality accessories unique to that faction.
An augment is the main reason most players care about a vendor. The official guide calls augments powders, meticulously crafted enchantments, tinctures and poisons, and says there are three types, one per equipment family: weapon, accessory and armor. The Miraheze Augment page adds the mechanical rules — augments come from faction quartermasters, with the exception of one Act 3 quest reward; the accessory set fits rings and amulets; the weapon set fits one-handed weapons, shields and caster off-hands, with Potent versions restricted to two-handed weapons; the armor set fits head, shoulders, chest, belt, hands, legs and feet. Only one augment can sit on an item at a time, a new one overwrites the old, and salvaging an augmented item does not return the augment. The official guide notes that a weapon augment also adds a glow effect, except on items that already carry a special effect.
| Faction | Introduced in | Augment stock documented at its quartermaster |
|---|---|---|
| Black Legion | Base game | Weapon and armor augments, including aether, physical/fire and vitality/chaos lines |
| Rovers | Base game | Weapon, accessory and armor augments, including cold, poison and pet lines |
| Homestead | Base game | Weapon and armor augments, including pet, lightning and physical lines |
| Devil’s Crossing | Base game | Accessory and armor augments, including pierce, aether and survivability lines |
| Kymon’s Chosen | Base game | Accessory and armor augments, including fire, lightning and resistance lines |
| Order of Death’s Vigil | Base game | Accessory and armor augments, including vitality, cold and pet lines |
| The Outcast | Base game | Weapon and armor augments, including aether, chaos and elemental lines |
| Barrowholm | Ashes of Malmouth | Weapon and armor augments, including bleeding, aether and vitality lines |
| Coven of Ugdenbog | Ashes of Malmouth | Weapon, accessory and armor augments, including acid, fire/chaos and pierce/cold lines |
| Malmouth Resistance | Ashes of Malmouth | Weapon, accessory and armor augments, including aether, elemental and physical lines |
| Cult of Bysmiel | Forgotten Gods | Weapon, accessory and armor augments, including bleed and pet lines |
| Cult of Dreeg | Forgotten Gods | Weapon, accessory and armor augments, including acid/poison and elemental lines |
| Cult of Solael | Forgotten Gods | Weapon, accessory and armor augments, including fire/chaos and pierce lines |
The stock is not a footnote to the faction system — it is the reward. The Miraheze augment tables key almost every entry to a faction, which is why a build guide that names an augment is also naming the vendor you must reach Revered standing with to buy it.
Component, Completed Component and Completion Bonus
A component is a crafting item applied to equipment to add stats and bonuses. The Fandom wiki notes components can also grant active or passive skills, and that they come in common and rare tiers. The official components guide records the weapon distinction: weapon components all grant a unique active skill when completed.
The official guide documents the attachment rules. You apply a component by right-clicking it and left-clicking the item. To remove one you visit the Inventor, and — this is the part that catches new players — you recover either the item or the component, not both.
The wiki states that only one Completed Component can be used on an item. That phrase matters, because Completion Bonus is a term the game used to attach to components and no longer does. Build 29, which Crate shipped on December 23, 2015, removed completion bonuses from components. The patch notes give the reasoning: removing them lets components stack, so “Components now stack up to 1000”, and crafting no longer requires placing items in the UI because materials are pulled automatically from your inventory, personal stash and transfer stash. Many components were buffed in the same pass.
So a modern guide that talks about a component’s completion bonus is describing either an outdated build or a different item class. Relics are the exception that keeps the idea alive: the official relics guide says that whenever you craft a Relic, it generates a random bonus in addition to its base stats.
Rune Augment and Seal
Forgotten Gods added a fourth augment category. Crate’s Forgotten Gods page describes Rune Augments as enchantments applied exclusively to medals that grant mobility skills, with blueprints that drop as loot so they can be crafted for every character, and the most powerful blueprints found only in the Shattered Realm. The same page names three examples — Emblem of the Leaping Mantis, Emblem of the Charging Bull and Emblem of the Riftstalker.
A Seal is two separate things in Grim Dawn’s gear vocabulary. The Ashes of Malmouth expansion added a family of weapon components named “Seal of …” — the Fandom component list includes Seal of Blades, Seal of Blight, Seal of Corruption, Seal of Destruction, Seal of Might, Seal of the Night, Seal of Resonance, Seal of Shadows, Seal of Skies and Seal of the Void, plus the rarer Seal of Ancestry and Seal of Annihilation. Like other weapon components, they grant a skill. Separately, some faction gear uses the word in its name, such as the Legion War Seal shown in Crate’s quartermaster announcement. When a build guide tells you to farm a seal, it means the component.
The Crafting Economy
Crafting is the loop that turns faction standing into equipped stats.
- Blacksmith. The official guide says the Blacksmith unlocks through a short Act 1 quest, and two can be recruited to Devil’s Crossing: Angrim, who imbues crafted weapons, armor and accessories with martial properties, and his apprentice Duncan, whose arcane forging grants energy regeneration, elemental resistance or elemental damage.
- Blueprint. A blueprint is a forgotten template that a Blacksmith studies. The official guide says recipes are not consumed — right-clicking a blueprint permanently learns it and adds it to your collection, and any recipe you learn is unlocked across all characters, with the notable exception of separate lists stored for Normal and Hardcore characters.
- Materials. Crafting consumes iron bits and materials; the official guide points to Aether Crystals from Aetherial abominations and the iron-like fur of a Stonetusk boar as examples, and notes the rarest materials come only from heroes and bosses.
- Dismantling. The Build 20 changelog introduced dismantling at the Inventor, which destroys unwanted items with dynamite to yield scrap and components, and notes that some components drop more commonly from dismantling.
- Enchanted and rare crafting. The official guide describes enchanted blueprints as Grim Dawn’s equivalent of a gambling system — cheap, and able to produce anything from a single-affix magic item to a double-rare — while rare blueprints cost more and come with useful base attributes regardless of the affix roll.
- Faction blueprints. Build 28 moved every component blueprint onto the quartermasters: “All Component Blueprints are now sold by Faction Quartermasters at Respected status. They no longer drop from monsters/chests.”
That last change closes the circle. Component blueprints sit behind Respected; augments sit behind the reputation ladder up to Revered; and writs and mandates exist to shorten the climb. A character’s gear ceiling is therefore set partly by how far faction standing has been pushed — and the final resistance caps on a finished build usually come from augments rather than from the item rolls underneath them.
For how that gear layer sits on top of a build’s skill and devotion layers, see the site’s Grim Dawn masteries and devotion pathing guide. For the other end of the decision — which two masteries you are gearing around — see How to Choose Your Two-Mastery Combo in Grim Dawn.