Upgrade question

Hi all. I am playing GW alot and doing steady progress. A problem have shown up for me and maybe someone here can help out. When i want to upgrade lets say a sword, I have in my stash both a hilt and a pommel. The sword i want to upgrade have 3 mods, 2 good ones and one i want to exchange. Now i dont know if the bad upgrade is in the hilt or pommel, and thus i have no idea what to do. I had a hammer that gave me +7 phys def and an upgrade giving me +4, so i thought; that`ll give me +11 def, almost as good as a shield, so i put in the upgrade. But ended up replacing the +7 def with the +4 def, oh man was i satisfied by my good thinking.

Your items have a sufix (end) and a prefix (start).
I.e:
Flaming Ascalon Sword of Defense
If your sword then had the following:
Fire damage 10-20
+15% Damage if health over 50%
Defense +5

So. What can we tell?
Flaming = Fire Damage. It changed it from being physical to fire.
Defense = +5 Defense mod.
The +15% mod was built into the sword and is not a rune!

The two runes you will change are the prefix (flame) or the sufix (Defense) depending on what rune your going to replace them with.

This web site has a good rune listing that may help more.
Hope that helps?
Tony

I'm asking everywhere, but nobody answered. How and where do you upgrade your weapons/armor? Is this function available from the beginnig of the game?

Thank you.

Ingvard do a search on the site and you'll get a few dozen threads explaining this. But to go over it one more time when you receive new items dropped by mobs you identify and salvage the items. There are chances that you will unlock a rune with the identify. After the Identification of the object use a expert salvage kit (available from the merchants after you reach Lion's Arch) and salvage the item. You have a chance to unlock a rune. However, there is a chance the salvage will "fail" and instead of the rune you'll get an uncommon or rare crafting material.

Thank you!

But the question also is how and where to upgrade my weapon/armor with unlocked runes? I haven't seen any NPC doing such thing.

Just double click the rune/upgrade component
and then left click onto ur weapon(correct type) / armour

Ok thx for the good answer that clears it up some. But is the hilt of a sword a prefix or a suffix? And a Pommel? and so on...

Edit. And what if a sword seems to have both a pre- and a suffix, how do you know one of the bonuses are not an inherent property of the sword? And from there on, if the other bonus then is a prefix or a suffix?