The gear guides on this site cover acquiring pieces, upgrading them, and choosing which ones suit your mode. Rerolling is the operation none of them explain properly, and it is the one that behaves differently from everything else.
Here is the difference in one line. Every other way you spend resources on gear moves in one direction — shards get you the piece, upgrades improve it, levels raise it. Rerolling is the only gear operation that can leave you worse off than before you spent.
That single property should govern how you approach it, and almost nobody treats it that way.
What a reroll is, and what it is not
Rerolling changes the properties on a piece you already own, in exchange for premium currency.
What it does not do is worth listing, because each of these is a mistake somebody makes:
- It does not upgrade the piece. A rerolled piece is at the same upgrade level it was before.
- It does not move you toward a breakpoint. Thresholds are about upgrades, not properties.
- It does not turn a weak piece into a strong one. The ceiling is set by the piece; a reroll only redistributes within it.
- It does not fix mode mismatch. A piece built around sustain is still a sustain piece after a reroll, and if you are playing multiplayer rather than Survivor, that was always the actual problem.
Rerolling is a refinement tool. It is the last five percent, applied to a piece that is already correct in every other respect.
It is a chest with an extra risk
Mechanically, a reroll is a draw from a distribution, which puts it in the same category as chests and Phantom Zone pulls. Everything in the drop rates guide applies: the odds are not published, a handful of attempts tells you nothing, and "I am due" is false.
But rerolls carry a risk chests do not, and it is the crux of this whole page.
A chest is additive. You open it and receive something, which may be useless, but nothing you already owned got worse.
A reroll is a swap. Whatever was on the piece is gone, replaced by whatever comes up. Which means you can spend premium currency and end up holding a piece you liked more before you started.
If you take nothing else from this guide: decide, before the first reroll, what you will accept and what you will spend. Not a rough sense. A number and a stopping rule, set while nothing is at stake, exactly as the pull discipline section argues.
Three questions before you spend anything
1. Is this piece on a character I actually field?
If no, stop. Rerolling bench gear is flagged as a mistake in the gear shards guide and it deserves the emphasis, because the visible change makes it feel productive. A better roll on equipment nobody equips changes nothing about any fight you will have. It spends premium currency to improve a plan rather than a team.
2. Can I name the property I want?
Not "something better" — the specific thing. If your Flashpoint Batman build lives on crit damage, you are rerolling for crit and everything else is noise. If you cannot complete the sentence "I am rerolling this to get X", you are not refining, you are sightseeing with premium currency.
3. What is my ceiling?
Set it now. The stopping rule is the entire discipline, because the in-session version of you will always find one more attempt reasonable.
Reroll after upgrading, never before
A sequencing rule that saves a surprising amount.
Settle the properties first, then pour upgrades into the piece. Do it the other way around and you are investing upgrades into properties you are about to throw away, spending twice on the same piece for one outcome.
The related mistake is rerolling a piece that has not yet crossed a threshold. A piece below a breakpoint is not paying out at all yet, so improving its properties is polishing something that is not currently doing its job. Cross the threshold first, see whether the piece is actually good enough in practice, and only then consider whether the roll is what is holding it back.
Most of the time it is not.
Who should be rerolling
| Your situation | Reroll? |
|---|---|
| Gear on your working team, thresholds crossed, one property away from the build you want | Yes — this is the case it exists for |
| Gear on your working team, below a breakpoint | No — finish the upgrades first |
| Good piece, wrong mode | No — that is an acquisition problem, not a roll problem |
| Anything on a benched character | No |
| You are in the early or middle phases | Almost never — your Nth Metal has better uses |
| You cannot name the property you want | No |
The pattern: rerolling is a late-account activity. In the earlier phases, the same Nth Metal spent on promotions moves your account considerably further, because promotion is the wall and gear properties are a refinement on the other side of it.
What to do instead, usually
When the urge to reroll appears, one of these is normally the better spend:
Finish a threshold. Reliable, permanent, and it produces a visible change in performance rather than a change in a tooltip.
Fix the mode mismatch. If a piece is not performing, check whether it was ever built for the mode you play. A perfectly rolled Survivor piece is still the wrong piece in multiplayer, and no number of rerolls addresses that — the Tantu Totem and Astro Harness comparison is the clearest illustration.
Promote something. Almost always the higher-value use of premium currency until you are genuinely late-account.
Where money fits
We sell currency and gear resources, so the honest note is a narrow one.
Rerolling is close to the worst thing to buy currency for, because you would be purchasing a deterministic amount of resource in order to feed it into a non-deterministic system with no published odds. Whatever certainty you paid for is discarded at the point of use.
If gear is genuinely your bottleneck, the thing to buy is shards to cross a threshold — a known quantity producing a known effect. That is the diagnosis argument applied to the most specific case on this site, and are Injustice mods safe? covers the risk before you order anything at all.
The short version
- Rerolling changes properties. It does not upgrade, does not reach breakpoints, and does not fix mode mismatch.
- It is the only gear operation that can leave you worse off, because it swaps rather than adds.
- Set a ceiling and a stopping rule before the first attempt, not during.
- Three gates: on your working team, a named target property, a spending limit.
- Settle the roll first, then upgrade. Never the reverse.
- Never reroll below a breakpoint — the piece is not paying out yet anyway.
- It is a late-account refinement. Earlier on, the same currency belongs in promotions.
Where to go next
- Injustice gear shards — acquisition, upgrades, and breakpoints
- Injustice drop rates and RNG — how to think about any distribution in this game
- Injustice Nth Metal — what else that currency could be doing
- Tantu Totem vs Astro Harness — when the problem is the piece, not the roll
- Injustice gear setup guide — builds worth rerolling toward