Race:

Your race choice is very important in Neverwinter.  Every race can play any class, but some races do certain classes much better than others!

Significant changes have been made to races in Mod 16, and this shakes up the Tier list a little.

Dragonborn (Metallic Ancestry if you have it) are at the top because of their additional 3% power and critical strike.  This works really well for obvious reasons as a dps.  Also, you get to choose what ability score bonuses you want, which means no wasted bonuses!

Sun Elf The Extra AP isn’t great, in-fact with how slowly we generate AP in mod 16, it’s hard to notice.  The Ability Score Bonuses line up, which is awesome, so no wasted bonuses.

Tiefling are still okay.  The extra % damage buff when targets are below 50% synergies extremely well but the ability score bonuses don’t line up perfectly.  CHA isn’t useless, it contributes to recharge speed, but the amount you get from +2 CHA won’t be noticed.

Moon Elf is tied for last on the list, hard to tell if it’s better or worse than Tiefling.  Moon Elf is just a worse version of the Sun Elf for us.  The only real difference is the AP gain, as a Moon Elf you trade 1% AP gain for 1% Stamina Gain.  Honestly, when we are talking about bonuses this small, it doesn’t matter.  I would pick for aesthetics, unless you really care about that 1%.

Ability Score Bonuses should always be (if possible) DEX and INT.  INT is now your main attribute, contributing now to a +% magic damage bonus, and DEX increases Crit Severity.

All Ability Score points should be put into Intelligence and Dexterity.

Intelligence gives us bonus magic damage, and Dexterity increases our critical hit severity.

Stats:

Stats and adjusting said stats has never been as important as it is in Mod 16.  The entire system has had some major changes, and if you don’t have the right stats in the right places, your character will feel significantly under-powered.  Undermountain adds new stats (Crit Resist, Accuracy, Awareness), removes some (Lifesteal, Recovery), and implements a system of “Opposing Roles”. The idea is just like we have Critical Strike, enemies have a new stat, Critical Avoidance, and our chance to crit is calculated like so:

((Your Crit) – (Their Crit Avoidance)) / 1000 = Your Critical Hit %

Enemies have a base stat value of 15,000 Defense, Deflection, Critical Strike, Critical Resist, and Combat Advantage, and a base 66,000 Accuracy,  Armor Penetration, and Awareness.  These numbers are super important when thinking about our stat caps because in order to be maxed out in a stat we must factor in enemies rolls.

Critical Strike caps at 60k (50%)

Armor Pen caps at 65k

Accuracy caps at 65k

Combat Advantage caps at 100k (100%)

Power has no cap.

Stat priority or what you should cap first is as follows:

Armor Pen > Accuracy > Crit Chance > Power > Combat Advantage

Ac is the most noticeable if you’re below cap, and that’s why it’s first on the list.  If an enemy deflects an attack it will negate a massive amount of damage.  You want to minimize the chances of that happening ASAP.  Armor Pen does the same thing, only to Defense.  Minimizing the damage reduction from your foe’s 60k defense is super important.

An amazing resource for balancing your stats in the new mod is Rainer’s Mod 16 Pocket Wiki, and it can be found here.

Enchantments:

Enchantments should be used to push you to the stat caps listed above.  The best Warlocks use a combination of multiple types of Enchantments to minimize wasted states and maximize stats at cap.  This means that there’s no cookie cutter setup for you to run.  Enchantments and your stats are customized to fit each characters unique stats.  With that said there are a few things to note about enchantments.

Be sure to use Three Stat Enchantments like the Draconic Enchantment, or the Black Ice Enchantment if you are not capped on stats.  These give you more bulk stats total.  If you are capped on one stat, focus on stats you aren’t capped on by slotting enchantments to boost stats you’re short on. If you’re capped on all stats, slot some Radiants. Remember, Power has no cap.

Companions:

Companions can be a complex topic and the easiest way to cover them is to simply state the facts.  Right now, the best option for stats are augment companions.  VERY few non-augment companions are worth using right now (to be honest I can only think of one off the top of my head).  This is because augments give you an additional portion of their stats on top of any bonding runestones you may have.  This means you can get a massive amount of additional stats from your companion.

The companion I recommend using, and would argue is best in slot, is the Bulette Pup.  This companion is an Augment that gives additional Power, Combat Advantage, and even increases our Maximum Hit points, all on top of Bondings and it’s Augmentation Bonus.  This means we can get a massive amount of power out of this little guy, and since power is king in Mod 16, the Bulette Pup is very good.

As far as Companion Powers go, The best Offense Slots I’ve found are the Tamed Velociraptor, Deepcrow Hatchling, Assassin Drake, Razorwood, and the Cambian Magus.  You’ll notice how I mentioned more than 3, and you’ll only have 3 slots.  I would strongly advise always using the Velociraptor and the Hatchling, as these two give massive bonuses to power, and I would swap the Assassin Drake depending on needed stats.  Should you need additional Accuracy, perhaps Cambian Magus is the right choice.

For Utility slots, I currently have the Owlbear Cub selected, but I’m not sure he’s working.  He doesn’t show in the ACT logs, but I think I can see damage procs.  Hard to tell.  Not sure he would even be worth using if he was working as intended however, I’m sure there’s probably something better.  I will update this when I find out.

For Defense,  I just kinda slapped whatever I had on.  I know it’s nowhere near best.  will update this too when I do some more research.

Here are some other companions with worth-while bonuses:

Deepcrow Hatchling – +8,000 Power
Ghost – +4,000 Power, + 2,000 Critical Strike
Assassin Drake – +4,000 Armor Penetration, +2,000 Accuracy 
Cambian Magus – +4% Critical Hit Severity, +2,000 Accuracy
Red Slaad – +2,000 Armor Penetration, +4,000 Accuracy
Cantankerous Mage – +2,000 Defense, +4,000 Accuracy
Fawn of Shiallia – +2,000 Power, +4,000 Critical Strike
Flame Sprite – +2,000 Critical Strike, +4,000 Accuracy
Razorwood – +4% Critical Severity, +2,000 Accuracy

Another thing to keep in mind, there are 5 different companion types, Fighters, Creatures, Invokers, Mystical, and Beasts.  Your summoned companion is granted a bonus to attack power based on how many companions you have of a specific type, and their rarity, with a cap at 15%.

Uncommon: +1.5%

Rare: +2%

Epic: +2.5%

Legendary: +3%

This is another reason why using an Augment is very strong.  Augments give you their stats, on top of bonding runestones, meaning that this bonus goes straight to you.  Its very important that this bonus is as close to 15% as possible ASAP.

Companion Equipment:

Companion gear is found in campaign, as you level up.  There isn’t (as far as I know) anywhere else to get companion gear of the same item level or with the same amount of stats in the game currently.

As far as Runestones to enchant said gear goes, remember that it’s all completely reliant on stats that you need to hit your caps.  Some stronger and more generally used Runestones are the Empowered and the Recondite Runestones.

Hellbringer

Feats:

Feats have been hugely simplified, in an effort to cut out all the decisions that were mostly pointless.  Cryptic has tried to make each feat impactful, and for the most part they succeeded, some are just slightly better than others.

Currently, I am running:

Double Scorch, Parting Blasphemy, Risky Investment, Executioner’s Gift, and Soul Spark Recovery.

From my testing, Most of these choices can be argued either way.  Most of the new feat choices are strong, and there really isn’t a way you could go wrong here.  I’m aware that I haven’t done enough testing on the test server to know 100% for sure what is, and isn’t best to be using however I’m confident that these choices will get you to 80 no problem, and serve you pretty well afterwards.  I will update the guide if needed when more testing is done.

With all that said, let me tell you a short bit about my choices:

Double Scorch: With the removal of recovery and the nerfs to Artifacts, we don’t cast anywhere near as many dailies as we used to.  Because of this, and how easy it is to generate Soul Sparks just by using Hellish Rebuke, Increasing Soul Scorch’s damage is more effective.

Parting Blasphemy : Paired with Curse bite this feat is really strong.  If you aren’t using Curse Bite, take Warlock’s Curse.

Risky Investment:  Very strong in Boss Fights since we can stack it easily with Hadar’s Grasp.  Keep in mind though that this feat is pretty useless in AoE situations since with the rotation I am currently running there is no way to actually stack it.

Executioner’s Gift: Executioner’s Gift vs Creeping Death is a hard decision.  With the way dungeons are running now, I believe we will get more benefit from the extra damage below 50%, rather than a flat 10%.  However, I could be wrong here.  I’ve yet to test much in the new dungeon, so I’m sure things will change and be tweaked after I get a chance to run it a couple more times.

Soul Spark Recovery: Previously I listed Wrathful Souls as the best option here because in my testing I neglected the fact that we gain soul sparks from critical hits.  I am only human!

Abilities:

This is the part of the guide where I once again tell you to keep in mind that this guide isn’t 100% complete.  I have done a lot of testing here, and there have been a lot of changes, but like everyone else I am human. I suggest that you take my findings into account, and test things yourself.  With that out of the way, I recommend using 2 different rotations while leveling/dungeon-ing, depending on the amount of enemies you are fighting.

AoE/Generally:

For Encounters I suggest using Fiery Bolt, Curse Bite, and Hellfire Ring.

To start, Catch as much as you can inside Hellfire Ring to apply Lesser Curse.  Curse Bite, then cast Fiery Bolt and Curse Bite again.  Remember to always use Soul Scorch (tab) when you have 18 Soul Sparks (3 green orbs).  Anything that doesn’t die to our initial rotation will burn from SS while you spam Hellish Rebuke.

For Class Features I recommend using Dust to Dust and No Pity No Mercy.

Dust to Dust is really strong now, and seeing as we don’t need All Consuming Curse to Curse everything anymore (simply use any ability without a curse consuming effect), we are free to use it!

Encounter powers are easy.  Hellish Rebuke is a must with either Dark Spiral Aura or Eldritch Blast (purely preference).

Hellish Rebuke should be your main damage dealer.  I like using Dark Spiral Aura since it’s a very passive skill with a quick animation that I can cast whenever it’s fully stacked for some extra damage, but Eldritch Blast is an okay alternative.

Dailies are important, even if we can’t cast them as often as we used to.  I recommend using Accursed Souls and Tyrannical Curse.

If you are fighting a small group, or if there aren’t any elites in the group you’re fighting, Accursed Souls is very good.  It will do a nice chunk of damage and drop Lesser Curse on everything.  If there’s an elite in the party, drop Tyrannical Curse on it and focus the hell out of it.  All the little enemies nearby will melt.

Single Target/Boss Fights:

The Idea here is to keep Soul Investiture stacked at the maximum 5 stacks as much as possible.  This will net us an additional 25% encounter damage for as long as we can keep these stacks going.  Your rotation here should be as follows, to ensure you’re stacking efficiently:  Hellfire Ring for Lesser Curse and the Dot, Hadar’s Grasp (be sure you have Lesser Curse before using HG, if your target for some reason doesn’t have Lesser Curse, wait to use HG until the end), Killing Flames (this will also add Lesser Curse).  Remember to use Soul Scorch when you have 18 stacks for a 3 second Cooldown Reduction, and repeat.

I would also swap from Accursed Souls to Brood of Hadar, although I believe the bats are bugged and de-spawn too fast right now.

Soulweaver

Soulweaver is our new healing paragon and as far as healers go, I believe we are the weakest.  That doesn’t mean we are bad, but it does mean Warlock players will have to try significantly harder to heal everyone then a Cleric, or a Paladin.

Ability Scores:

For Healing we must change our ability score bonuses.  Wisdom gives a bonus to outgoing healing and that’s a must.  Charisma increases cooldown reduction and companion influence.  Constitution gives Maximum Health and AP Gain.  These are both good choices.  Personally, if you have under 240k Maximum HP (which should be most of us) I would recommend using Constitution for the additional Health.  Constitution will help you survive large AoE attacks in LoTMM and other various dungeons.

Feats:

Lots of Soulweaver Feats come down to preference.  I recommend using this feat setup, but you can feel free to make adjustments as you see fit.

Essence of Power, Transfusion Tactics, Lingering Sustain, From the Brink, Spark Energy

Here’s the part where I tell you a little bit about each choice and why I picked them. Feats that are this color are feats that are essentially down to personal preference.

Essence of Power: I prefer using Essence of Power over Essence of Time since I find that I waste a LOT of time holding Tab to generate Soul Sparks.  This does however, lock you into making sure that you get enough healing out of the 15 Soul Sparks since it’s cooldown is pretty long and not effected by cooldown reduction.

Transfusion Tactics: Obvious choice here, since Dark Revelry is fairly useless.

Lingering Sustain: Another Obvious choice here.  Additional healing.  The other choice here seems powerful, but very risky since we use a lot of skills that also cost health.

From the Brink: This is what I believe to be the better choice, however if you are not using Essence of Power, you might find some use from Thief of Life.

Spark Energy: If you are for some reason using Curse Bite, you can set up a really fun build with Consuming Action HOWEVER, fun doesn’t mean good.  Unfortunately from what I’ve seen Consuming Action doesn’t give enough AP to really make a difference, even when you are using it as effectively as possible and neglecting healing all together.  Because of that, Spark Energy is the better choice, giving us a sizable increase in AP generation.

Abilities:

For Encounters I recommend using Pillar of Power and Shatter Spark at all times.  These two are your bread and butter as a Soul Weaver.  Pillar of Power increases both your outgoing healing and allies’ outgoing damage.  Shatter Spark is a very large team-wide heal with little to no cool down and a short animation.  Warlock’s Bargain is another team-wide heal, although the heal itself isn’t worth the HP 20% HP it costs you to use it.  However it also cleanses debuffs, which is very important.  Harrowstorm is a relatively weak heal, but you can stack it on top of each-other and it also does damage to enemies.  You’ll want to swap between Harrowstorm and Warlock’s Bargain depending on the situation.

For Class Feats I recommend using Warding Curse and All Consuming curse.  These paired together make it easy to apply lesser curse to targets and Lower their damage output by 5% (which is 5% less damage you have to heal :D)

For at wills I recommend using Essence Defiler and Dark Spiral Aura.  Dark Spiral will generate Soul Sparks, which makes it very useful!

**You can replace Dark Spiral Aura with Soul Reconstruction if you’d like. Soul Reconstruction is a very weak heal however, and it gets canceled often, so keep that in mind.**

For dailies, Tyrannical Curse and Soul Pact are the obvious choices.  Soul Pact is a large heal and a large damage resistance buff, but at the cost of 2% of your maximum HP a second.  That’s not a lot of damage in reality, and it’s very easy to heal this damage without even trying.  Tyrannical Curse is Tyrannical Curse.  The extra damage is nice, but I almost always use Soul Pact instead.

Important!

Min/Max-ing stats is something that each player will have to do for themselves, since every individual’s stats vary on a case by case basis, and should always be kept in mind when picking gear.  As long as you keep these general guide-lines in mind, you shouldn’t have any trouble.  Newer players shouldn’t worry too much about their stats until they have most if not all of the gear recommended in this guide.  Artifacts and artifact weapons included.

Artifacts:

In Mod 16 Cryptic has introduced some new artifacts which are drastically stronger than the older ones.  This means that we are practically forced to use them.  Unfortunately, since most if not all of this gear is brand new, I can’t find the kind of images I want, so screengrabs from in-game will have to do for now.

For Artifacts I recommend using:

With the Wyvern-Venom Coated Knives as your Active Artifact.  At Mythic this Artifact gives a whopping 12% extra Damage to anything, and that alone makes it BiS.

I am still using the Orcus Set for Artifact Equipment, since the extra damage this set provides is still good.  I would argue that the Music Box set is however best in slot.

Gear:

Lair of the Mad Mage has been released and the gear that drops from it are pretty lack luster.  As far as what’s best in slot, You’ll want to have two items with Sniper’s Perk.  This is because Sniper’s Perk only stacks only stacks two times.  The best way I’ve found to stack this is by having two of the Ebonized Raid Rings, which drop from Master Expeditions.  This way, we can safely get rid of Hags Rags.

Murme’s Soup Bowl/Broken Cap of the Omnipotent  is still best in slot for Helm.

Robes of the Last Profit are best in slot for Chest.

Terrored Grips are still best in slot for Arms.

Root Stompers look like they have potential to be best in slot but I haven’t tested them.  Until then Gurtunk’s Booties and Hard Rock Kickers are both good.

For weapons, the Alabaster weapon set is best for clearing trash, but the Burnished set is better for Boss Fights and Single target.  Burnished should outperform significantly on boss fights and boss fights are a significant portion of Lair of the Mad Mage, and most other dungeons too, so I would recommend Burnished.

I am currently testing Armor Enchantments, I haven’t picked a favorite.  Soulforged seems to be bugged and Negation isn’t impactful enough.  I will update this when I pick a favorite.

Vorpal is currently the best Weapon enchantment.

Coming Soon!

Thank you for reading!

Thanks to everyone for the constructive feedback and ideas.  Without all the helpful and creative input from members in the community this guide wouldn’t be anywhere near as complete.  Special thanks to:
Zanros@ryn32233#8859 – for helping me test all my stupid ideas
RW_Raijin@velahryn#7236 – for their help with the Single Target loadout
Demathius@lordistat – for their help with brainstorming ideas and new things to test
Enyo@Yopuko – for their help with resources, and for being a friend
Rainer@rainer#8575 – for their amazing Mod 16 Wiki, which can be found here.

If this guide helped you, please rate it at the top of the page, it really helps me out

If you’re looking for more information, check out my YouTube channel by clicking here.

Thanks Again!

Reason why i choose Charisma over Dexterity is because Charisma gives you Companion influence and a little of recharge speed, which is way better than some severity and movement speed from dexterity.

Powers/feats:

Feats we are going to use are: Relentless Speed, Bloodspiller, Overpenetration, Steel Slam and Relentless Battlerage.

Reason why you’re going to use Not so fast:
Click on me

As you can see it procs like crazy, and you just need to get one reset to make it better than punishing charge + it does refresh your trample the fallen everytime you use it.

Passives are steel blitz and trample the fallen.

Encounters:
Not So Fast
Indomitable Battle Strike
Bloodletter

Atwills:
Sure Strike
Relentless Strike

Dailies:
Savage Advance
Avalanche of Steel

Consumables

Watermelon Sorbet OR Major or superior flask of potency, wild storm elixir, squash/pumpkin soup and m15 3% damage potion which you can get from swag bags from campaign(Acquisitions incorporated) store.

Also you can use one of these: Tymora coin, Chain of scales or pocket pet. I prefer to use chain of scales, you can get additional critical severity from it.

With mod 16 changes you’re going to use companions that add stats you don’t have capped yet, in any other case go with power ones.
Current best summoned companion is bulette pup due to it’s increased power stat(and some others of course). The reason why I don’t have it yet is because I’m too poor to buy one right now, so I’m sticking with my mod 8 ioun

Noncombat:

In combat with tenser:

Stats you’re going to get before you start stacking power are:
118k CA to get 100% bonus when you have combat advantage
68k Critical Strike to get 50% crit chance(max)
70,5k Armor Penetration (2,5k more due to our overpenetration feat)
68k accuracy
If you catch them all you can start stacking your power in any possible way.

Mod 16 pocket wiki

You can find some usefull things like caps for each level, most companion stats and a lot of other things.

Introduction

About me

Hi, guys. I’m Viperion (Vip for short), and I’ve been around in Neverwinter for quite some years. My first character was a wizard and then I thought of playing more so I also tried the ranger, and eventually the warlock. For some reason, rogues, fighters and barbarians (GWFs) never grabbed my interest. Then… an idea struck me: to try out the support and tanking roles. We needed clerics in the guild also, tbh. And a few years ago I also created a cleric and a paladin and I’ve been playing both ever since.

Mod 16 has been quite a twist of the game but some players do like the changes we’ve been presented. Myself included. I have adjusted my cleric’s support playstyle from a buffer bot to a heal bot.

Guide contents

In this guide we will be covering the following topics:

• Set up a cleric properly for healing
• Divinity management tips
• Habits a healer should develop

Contact me

I hope you’ll enjoy this build. If you have more questions or you’d like to discuss in the game, my cleric is Viperion Nexus@vasile1991

Race

For a healer I think that it doesn’t matter very much which race you pick, as long as you’re eyeballing WIS, DEX or CON. I am currently a dragonborn which allows adding +2 to any two ability scores and I’m OK with this choice. I also get that small damage boost that DPSes want it so much. It probably helps when I solo with my Arbiter loadout.

Again, Devout is for healing, if you want to deal any kind of damage, go Arbiter.

Ability Scores

I have picked WIS+DEX but WIS+CON is also a good choice if you want that AP gain or (small!) HP gain from CON.

The reason I went for WIS+DEX is that WIS helps with healing and DEX helps with critical healing.

Powers & Feats

The powers which are not grayed out in the image below are the ones I find useful. We will discuss them individually below.

At-wills:

• Sacred Flame – Single target At-will with good Magnitude. Nothing special about it OR Scattering Light – for AoE purposes.
• Blessing of Light – boost for the next healing spell.
• Sooth – quite a waste of time, really

Encounters

• Bastion of Health – never leaves the bar, the main healing encounter
• Intercession – never leaves the bar because always somebody messes up and needs that quick heal
• Cleansing Light – for situations where removing a debuff is needed OR Exaltation when Cleansing Light is not needed.

Some other situations could require Sunburst (e.g. the Yester Hill BHE in Barovia or demonic heroics).

I have excluded Healing Word because it eats a lot of Divinity and the heals are not very great. More info about the “why” in the Divinity Management Tips section.

Dailies

• Guardian of Life
• Hallowed Ground OR Guardian of Faith

When the AP is filled, most of the times it’s Guardian of Life the daily to use (but only if there’s an actual need for extra healing).

Both Hallowed Ground and Guardian of Faith are situational. I use Hallowed Ground for phases when a big blow is about to happen (e.g. Trobriand’s or Ras Nsi’s one shot). The only situation I use Guardian of Faith so far is during Arcturia’s mimics phase, if the tank didn’t manage to defeat the mimic in time.

Class Features

The only good ones I consider are worth slotting are:

• Hallowed Armor – you take 5% less damage from all sources and 10% less damage when you pray (TAB)
• Expanded Faith – your divinity meter is increased by 150 units (from 1000 to 1150)
• Hallowed Guide – heal for 5% more when you’re close to your target (15 feet). This one is a good candidate but I don’t really use it because sometimes you can’t be that close to your target. It can be good during some situations where players are packed together (e.g. During the Boreworm fight in Lair of the Mad Mage, when we need to survive the lightning phase)

Feats

• Repeated Blessings – this is because we have to choose something… This build doesn’t use Healing Word. But the other choice targets boosting Sooth, so it’s even worse.
• Battle Prayer – this helps slightly regenerate more divinity after you used an encounter which costed divinity. Not a big game changer as the values are very small but the other feat to pray until you get the effect. Sometimes you need to jump out of praying mode and assist your party.
• Blessed Armaments – when using Exaltation you also get an additional 10% reduced damage. The other feat increases your damage by 10% depending on how full your divinity meter is – this makes no sense, in my opinion for a healer who should heal not deal damage…
• Persistent Guardian – helps with more healing over from your Guardian of Life daily. Usually you use that daily when your encounters are not enough to handle the situation, so this feat which extends the healing of the daily over time, is just pure gold. The other feat based on Annointed Army can also be slighly good but on a different loadout for damage buffing.
• Light of Devotion – every 4s of praying your next healing is boosted by 5%. Stacks 3 times. Initially I thought the other feat, Angel of Life is better but those 30 stacks are way too much to achieve and over time you might just lose them all (e.g. unskippable long CoDG cutscene…). Having to use that many encounters will very likely end you up with no divinity… The goal is to avoid reaching the point of running out of divinity and to avoid that you need to pray during the fights. Remembering to pray for at least 4s, will also benefit you the boost of Light of Devotion. You have to pray anyway to refill your divinity.

Gear & Enchantments

The following image displays what I decided to use starting with mod 16. You won’t need to follow strictly these items, we will tackle them individually and provide alternatives.

Weapon set

The best weapon set in the game right now is the Watcher set which is good to have for every class. But for the moment, it’s extremely hard to obtain. If you have the free time to farm for it, then sure, go ahead. But if you don’t, the Alabaster set is just as good.

The Burnished set, is not suitable for a cleric healer either because of how its bonus works. You will need to get hit or be healed for more than 15% of your max HP. Read again. Not to hit but to get hit. And not to heal but to be healed. The part about getting hit isn’t too acceptable for a healer role, it’s what a tank is good at. You might say getting healed could work. Yes, it could however, you will develop this weird habit of heaing yourself instead of efficiently spending your divinity on your party.

In the image above, I’m using the Burnished main hand weapon only to benefit from the base damage and stats from these new mod 16 sets, which are way higher than the other existing sets in the game. Do not use the Burnished set on a cleric, I was just unlucky not to drop my Alabaster main hand already… I will get rid of it as soon as I get my Alabaster main hand weapon.

Artifact equipment set

First of all, let me clear this out – you don’t need necessarily to wear the items as a set. But since sets have some extra bonuses, it’s nice to pair the items as a set. However, I strongly recommed to use some of the new mod 16 artifact equipment set items just because they have so much better HP compared to the previous ones. That extra HP will help you with better survivability.

I am currently using the Enchanted Thumb set (more commonly known as the flower set). It’s not a cheap one, mainly because of the artifact, the Staff of Flowers which drops from Zok’s chests (the Yawning Portal pretty face goblin). The artifact is very good for a support to use as an active. Also the set belt, has WIS+CHA which are good for a support healer. For alternatives, I suggest the Constructed Demiset set (more commonly known as Trobriand set) since the ring piece should be part of your equipment. Or, if you’d like to have the Wyvern-venon coated Knives artifact as an active, go for the Wyvern set.

Enchantments

Radiants for your offense slots (more Power means better heals)

Radiants for your defense slots (more HP means better survivability). Alternatively, you can use Demonics like me to also cover some Deflect and Crit Avoidance defense stats.

Dark for your utility slots for companion influence (if you think that stat actually can make a difference). Alternatively, Quartermasters for RP bags.

Vorpal for your critical heals.

Soulforged for a 2nd chance to dodge that red better.

Armors

• Headpiece: Crown of the Lost King (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests) OR Broken cap of the Omnipotent (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests) OR a piece of the successor gear (from Lair of the Mad Mage).
• Chestpiece: Gurdunn’s Defense (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests).
• Gloves: Crash Guards (from Master Expeditions) because of the Power-based bonus.
• Feet: Gurtunk’s Booties (from Master Expeditions) because of the Power-based bonus.
• Rings: Ebonized Raid Rings (from Master Expeditions) because of the 3% ranged damage bonus which is totally useless for a healer who doesn’t deal damage but it will help you when soloing content with an Arbiter loadout.
• Shirt: Ebony Stained Assault Shirt (from Master Expeditions) because of the damage bonus which is again totally useless for a healer who doesn’t deal damage but it will help you when soloing content with an Arbiter loadout.
• Pants: Prized Restoration Trousers of the Cult (from Master Expeditions) OR some pants which are part of the Protege set (with Seals of the Deep from Lair of the Mad Mage).

Artifacts

Mainly use artifacts which have the Power stat on them. With mod 16, the Staff of Flowers and Trobriand’s Ring are especially good due to their 3k Power each.

Other good options are: Wheel of Elements (bonus damage to use on a DPS character), Sigil of the Cleric (some AP over time), Sigil of the Paladin (damage resistance buff and heals).

Armor reinforcement Kits

Power kits for armors. The +1s are slightly better.

Stamina regeneration kits for accessories. Since the stamina regen ones won’t be too much of a game changer, you can alternatively use Combat Advantage ones for the times when you run content with other people as Arbiter.

Boons

Aim for all the power boons, all the HP boons, the resistance boons vs demons/undead, companion influence, movement speed, AP gain and Outgoing Healing.

For the Stronghold boons, make sure to use the Power boon, the defense boon (if you didn’t cap defense yet) or the HP boon.

Companions

There are two important things to mention here: use an augment-type companion as your active and use companions with powers which deal with Power increase and Outgoing Healing increase.

There can be other choices, of course, but this is what I’m currently using for now:

• Deepcrow Hatchling – At legendary it grants 8k Power.
• Ioun Stone of Might (also my active augment companion) – At legendary gives 2k Power and 4k Deflect. You may use other companions instead of this one, but since it was my active, I thought to take advantage of its power as well.
• Baby Polar bear – the tooltip for this companion is quite messed up but it’s 6% Outgoing Healing for Rare quality, 8% for Epic and 10% for Legendary.
• Neverember Guard – 10% Outgoing Healing at Legendary quality.
• Ghost – 4k Power and 2k Critical Strike at Legendary quality. I had this companion from previous mods and it was a pleasant surprise to see it’s still useful this mod.

The companion gear I use is the ones you get from the Undermountain quest line (make sure during all expeditions you find all 9 relics). They all have offense slots and in every offense slot I’m using Empowered Runestones for more Power.

Bonding runestones as high as possible. This is important.

Mounts & Insignias

Mounts

Any mount with 5k Power boost is fine. Even better, one with 10k Power boost such as the Arcane Whirlwind or the Black Ice War Horse.

Insignias

Ideally, you’d like to go for Domination insignias to boost your power. However, these are so not affordable for most players at the moment. When offense improvement is too expensive, consider defensive improvement. I’m using a few Domination insignias but I am also focusing on increasing my HP through Prosperity insignias and Deflect through Evasion insignias.

Healbot Play Style

In this section we will speak about the DOs and DON’Ts a cleric healer should keep track of in a group.

I’ve heard this way too many times: Cleric divinity just sucks! The Cleric healer is an awful experience. To be honest, I have thought so too in the beginning. However, I took a step back to analyze what cause that awful feeling about this healing spec. The big truth is it’s a class that requires some brains, you can’t just throw out all your healing and then the next moment the boss sneezes, you find yourself out of divinity.

Divinity Management Tips

Here’s a list of situations or issues which cause your divinity meter to go down fast:

1. Healing when not needed.

The truth is I’ve seen far too many healers who just heal all the time. This will decrease your divinity meter fast and in the end, you’ve barely been effective with anything.

2. Healing in too many places at once.

Now this is something big, many players maybe don’t even realize. It’s that kind of thing that’s so obvious, you don’t even realize it. This happens very often.

When you run in a group, especially with ranged characters, you will notice people might be scattered all over the place. The tank aggroes the boss, some DPS who actually takes advantage of the Combat Advantage is on the other side of the boss, and some other wizards are dealign damage but from a distance. This is at least three spots to heal: one for the tank, one for the smart DPS that deals Combat Advantage from the other side of the boss and one for the far-away wizards. Oh, and you too!

Some bosses have certain mechanics that ignore the threat from the tank, and just target the DPSes or the healer. I think it’s obvious where I’m hinting. To keep your party alive, you need to heal 3-4 times for the 3-4 spots where players are located. This will cause you to run out of divinity very fast.

Since this build doesn’t use Healing Word because we have already agreed it heals very poorly based on how much divinity it eats, you will need to “educate” the players to stick together. It’s simple as that. One heal to heal them all Well, two actually, cause if they’re near the tank, they’re probably dead.

3. Dealing damage instead of praying

You might want to be useful with something, so you want to deal damage. Worse, you’re using divinity-based damaging encounters like Daunting Light… Please stop.

You’re helping the party by healing them and keeping them alive. That’s your job. Your damage can very easily be covered by a competent DPS character. So embrance your role, you’re there to heal and not dps.

Now that we’ve agreed on you having to heal instead of dealing damage, we also have to make sure you pray to recover your divinity. Between fights of clearing monsters, it’s nice to pray out of combat to regen the divinity faster. However, for longer fights like boss fights, you will need to identify small timeframes when the fight is going just fine without your intervention, and just pray to recover your divinity. This habit will extend the overall ability of spamming healing with Bastion of Healing.

Healer Habits

This section will just reiterate some of the previous points. It will also add a few new tips that should help to your overall experience as a healer:

• Heal when a player actually needs healing.
• Buff with your active artifact only for enemies worthy of your key press (bosses or tougher enemies)
• Do not deal damage with divinity-based encounters. Save your divinity for healing.
• Use Cleansing Touch for dungeons where debuffs are applicable to players (Hati fight in FBI, Ras Nsi fight in ToNG). Its main use is to remove debuffs so don’t use it instead of Bastion of Healing. Cleansing Touch costs 90 divinity and heals for 400 Magnitude. Bastion of Healing costs 80 divinity and heals for 800 Magnitude.
• Use Intercession to quickly heal the tank or a player in need. Don’t waste it on things that Bastion of Healing could’ve easily handled because Intercession has a relatively high cooldown.
• Some players don’t know or realize they’re not using the positioning correctly for gaining Combat Advantage. For instance, the tank is in the “North” side and a DPS in the “South” side. This other players deals damage from the “West” side but he doesn’t gain Combat Advantage. Help them out by positioning yourself on the opposite side of him (i.e. in the “East” side). Of course, do this only if the boss fight mechanics allow it.
• Watch people’s HP bars. I have customized my UI to drag the party HP bars closer to the center of the screen. It’s now right of where the Arbiter sparks meter should be displayed. This provides you an easier way to spot when a player’s HP suddenly goes down and needs healing. Additionally, you can even enable to show HP bars above party characters as they move. This also helps a lot!

Introduction

About me

Hi, guys. I’m Viperion (Vip for short), and I’ve been around in Neverwinter for quite some years. My first character was a wizard and then I thought of playing more so I also tried the ranger, and eventually the warlock. For some reason, rogues, fighters and barbarians (GWFs) never grabbed my interest. Then… an idea struck me: to try out the support and tanking roles. We needed clerics in the guild also, tbh. And a few years ago I also created a cleric and a paladin and I’ve been playing both ever since.

Mod 16 has been quite a twist of the game but some players do like the changes we’ve been presented. Myself included. I have adjusted my cleric’s support playstyle from a buffer bot to a heal bot.

Guide contents

In this guide we will be covering the following topics:

• Set up a cleric properly for healing
• Divinity management tips
• Habits a healer should develop

Contact me

I hope you’ll enjoy this build. If you have more questions or you’d like to discuss in the game, my cleric is Viperion Nexus@vasile1991

Race

For a healer I think that it doesn’t matter very much which race you pick, as long as you’re eyeballing WIS, DEX or CON. I am currently a dragonborn which allows adding +2 to any two ability scores and I’m OK with this choice. I also get that small damage boost that DPSes want it so much. It probably helps when I solo with my Arbiter loadout.

Again, Devout is for healing, if you want to deal any kind of damage, go Arbiter.

Ability Scores

I have picked WIS+DEX but WIS+CON is also a good choice if you want that AP gain or (small!) HP gain from CON.

The reason I went for WIS+DEX is that WIS helps with healing and DEX helps with critical healing.

Powers & Feats

The powers which are not grayed out in the image below are the ones I find useful. We will discuss them individually below.

At-wills:

• Sacred Flame – Single target At-will with good Magnitude. Nothing special about it OR Scattering Light – for AoE purposes.
• Blessing of Light – boost for the next healing spell.
• Sooth – quite a waste of time, really

Encounters

• Bastion of Health – never leaves the bar, the main healing encounter
• Intercession – never leaves the bar because always somebody messes up and needs that quick heal
• Cleansing Light – for situations where removing a debuff is needed OR Exaltation when Cleansing Light is not needed.

Some other situations could require Sunburst (e.g. the Yester Hill BHE in Barovia or demonic heroics).

I have excluded Healing Word from this build.

The problem with this encounter is that it eats way too much Divinity compared to the amount of the initial heal. Furthermore, the healing over time aspect is unreliable because it might proc when healing is not needed at all (full HP already) or it might not proc when it’s extremely needed (right before a big blow from the boss). This means that the predictability of the fight from a healing management perspective is affected, because it cannot be controlled at all by the healer, as it’s controlled by the game via the healing over time ticks. So you need to jump in with Bastion of Healing interventions anyway. Bastion of Healing is far superior to Healing Word because of almost x3 less Divinity used for a doubled amount of burst HP healed and the fact that you control when healing happens. Having to use Bastion of Healing on top of Healing Word just means that Healing Word is not enough to do the job properly. As a result, I have decided to drop using Healing Word entirely and ever since I’ve been so much happier with my divinity management. It no longer drops fast as it used to and I now rely on the healing  upon the press of a button when I know it’s really needed.  This idea is reiterated in the “Divinity Management Tips” section.

Dailies

• Guardian of Life
• Hallowed Ground OR Guardian of Faith

When the AP is filled, most of the times it’s Guardian of Life the daily to use (but only if there’s an actual need for extra healing).

Both Hallowed Ground and Guardian of Faith are situational. I use Hallowed Ground for phases when a big blow is about to happen (e.g. Trobriand’s or Ras Nsi’s one shot). The only situation I use Guardian of Faith so far is during Arcturia’s mimics phase, if the tank didn’t manage to defeat the mimic in time.

Class Features

The only good ones I consider are worth slotting are:

• Hallowed Armor – you take 5% less damage from all sources and 10% less damage when you pray (TAB)
• Expanded Faith – your divinity meter is increased by 150 units (from 1000 to 1150)
• Hallowed Guide – heal for 5% more when you’re close to your target (15 feet). This one is a good candidate but I don’t really use it because sometimes you can’t be that close to your target. It can be good during some situations where players are packed together (e.g. During the Boreworm fight in Lair of the Mad Mage, when we need to survive the lightning phase)

Feats

• Repeated Blessings – this is because we have to choose something… This build doesn’t use Healing Word. But the other choice targets boosting Sooth, so it’s even worse.
• Battle Prayer – this helps slightly regenerate more divinity after you used an encounter which costed divinity. Not a big game changer as the values are very small but the other feat to pray until you get the effect. Sometimes you need to jump out of praying mode and assist your party.
• Blessed Armaments – when using Exaltation you also get an additional 10% reduced damage. The other feat increases your damage by 10% depending on how full your divinity meter is – this makes no sense, in my opinion for a healer who should heal not deal damage…
• Persistent Guardian – helps with more healing over from your Guardian of Life daily. Usually you use that daily when your encounters are not enough to handle the situation, so this feat which extends the healing of the daily over time, is just pure gold. The other feat based on Annointed Army can also be slighly good but on a different loadout for damage buffing.
• Light of Devotion – every 4s of praying your next healing is boosted by 5%. Stacks 3 times. Initially I thought the other feat, Angel of Life is better but those 30 stacks are way too much to achieve and over time you might just lose them all (e.g. unskippable long CoDG cutscene…). Having to use that many encounters will very likely end you up with no divinity… The goal is to avoid reaching the point of running out of divinity and to avoid that you need to pray during the fights. Remembering to pray for at least 4s, will also benefit you the boost of Light of Devotion. You have to pray anyway to refill your divinity.

Gear & Enchantments

The following image displays what I decided to use starting with mod 16. You won’t need to follow strictly these items, we will tackle them individually and provide alternatives.

Weapon set

The best weapon set in the game right now is the Watcher set which is good to have for every class. But for the moment, it’s extremely hard to obtain. If you have the free time to farm for it, then sure, go ahead. But if you don’t, the Alabaster set is just as good.

The Burnished set, is not suitable for a cleric healer either because of how its bonus works. You will need to get hit or be healed for more than 15% of your max HP. Read again. Not to hit but to get hit. And not to heal but to be healed. The part about getting hit isn’t too acceptable for a healer role, it’s what a tank is good at. You might say getting healed could work. Yes, it could however, you will develop this weird habit of heaing yourself instead of efficiently spending your divinity on your party.

In the image above, I’m using the Burnished main hand weapon only to benefit from the base damage and stats from these new mod 16 sets, which are way higher than the other existing sets in the game. Do not use the Burnished set on a cleric, I was just unlucky not to drop my Alabaster main hand already… I will get rid of it as soon as I get my Alabaster main hand weapon.

Artifact equipment set

First of all, let me clear this out – you don’t need necessarily to wear the items as a set. But since sets have some extra bonuses, it’s nice to pair the items as a set. However, I strongly recommed to use some of the new mod 16 artifact equipment set items just because they have so much better HP compared to the previous ones. That extra HP will help you with better survivability.

I am currently using the Enchanted Thumb set (more commonly known as the flower set). It’s not a cheap one, mainly because of the artifact, the Staff of Flowers which drops from Zok’s chests (the Yawning Portal pretty face goblin). The artifact is very good for a support to use as an active. Also the set belt, has WIS+CHA which are good for a support healer. For alternatives, I suggest the Constructed Demiset set (more commonly known as Trobriand set) since the ring piece should be part of your equipment. Or, if you’d like to have the Wyvern-venon coated Knives artifact as an active, go for the Wyvern set.

Enchantments

Radiants for your offense slots (more Power means better heals)

Radiants for your defense slots (more HP means better survivability). Alternatively, you can use Demonics like me to also cover some Deflect and Crit Avoidance defense stats.

Dark for your utility slots for companion influence (if you think that stat actually can make a difference). Alternatively, Quartermasters for RP bags.

Vorpal for your critical heals.

Soulforged for a 2nd chance to dodge that red better.

Armors

• Headpiece: Crown of the Lost King (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests) OR Broken cap of the Omnipotent (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests) OR a piece of the successor gear (from Lair of the Mad Mage).
• Chestpiece: Gurdunn’s Defense (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests).
• Gloves: Crash Guards (from Master Expeditions) because of the Power-based bonus.
• Feet: Gurtunk’s Booties (from Master Expeditions) because of the Power-based bonus.
• Rings: Ebonized Raid Rings (from Master Expeditions) because of the 3% ranged damage bonus which is totally useless for a healer who doesn’t deal damage but it will help you when soloing content with an Arbiter loadout.
• Shirt: Ebony Stained Assault Shirt (from Master Expeditions) because of the damage bonus which is again totally useless for a healer who doesn’t deal damage but it will help you when soloing content with an Arbiter loadout.
• Pants: Prized Restoration Trousers of the Cult (from Master Expeditions) OR some pants which are part of the Protege set (with Seals of the Deep from Lair of the Mad Mage).

Artifacts

Mainly use artifacts which have the Power stat on them. With mod 16, the Staff of Flowers and Trobriand’s Ring are especially good due to their 3k Power each.

Other good options are: Wheel of Elements (bonus damage to use on a DPS character), Sigil of the Cleric (some AP over time), Sigil of the Paladin (damage resistance buff and heals).

Armor reinforcement Kits

Power kits for armors. The +1s are slightly better.

Stamina regeneration kits for accessories. Since the stamina regen ones won’t be too much of a game changer, you can alternatively use Combat Advantage ones for the times when you run content with other people as Arbiter.

Boons

Aim for all the power boons, all the HP boons, the resistance boons vs demons/undead, companion influence, movement speed, AP gain and Outgoing Healing.

For the Stronghold boons, make sure to use the Power boon, the defense boon (if you didn’t cap defense yet) or the HP boon.

Companions

There are two important things to mention here:

• use an augment-type companion as your active
• use companions with powers which deal with Power increase and Outgoing Healing increase.

Bonding runestones must be as high as possible.

There can be other choices of companions, of course, but this is what I’m currently using for now:

• Deepcrow Hatchling – At legendary it grants 8k Power.
• Ioun Stone of Might (also my active augment companion) – At legendary gives 2k Power and 4k Deflect. You may use other companions instead of this one, but since it was my active, I thought to take advantage of its power as well. The Deflect is good to have because it boosts your defensive capabilities. Nobody would like a squishy cleric in their group. A dead cleric means most of the times a dead group. If you plan to increase your Deflect via insignias, you can use a Minstrel here which grants 4k Power at legendary quality.
• Baby Polar Bear – the tooltip for this companion is quite messed up but it’s 6% Outgoing Healing for Rare quality, 8% for Epic and 10% for Legendary.
• Neverember Guard – 10% Outgoing Healing at Legendary quality.
• Ghost – 4k Power and 2k Critical Strike at Legendary quality. I had this companion from previous mods and it was a pleasant surprise to see it’s still useful this mod.

The companion gear I use is the ones you get from the Undermountain quest line (make sure during all expeditions you find all 9 relics). They all have offense slots and in every offense slot I’m using Empowered Runestones for more Power.

Mounts & Insignias

Mounts

Any mount with 5k Power boost is fine. Even better, one with 10k Power boost such as the Arcane Whirlwind or the Black Ice War Horse.

Insignias

Ideally, you’d like to go for Domination insignias to boost your power. However, these are so not affordable for most players at the moment. When offense improvement is too expensive, consider defensive improvement. I’m using a few Domination insignias but I am also focusing on increasing my HP through Prosperity insignias and Deflect through Evasion insignias.

Healbot Play Style

In this section we will speak about the DOs and DON’Ts a cleric healer should keep track of in a group.

I’ve heard this way too many times: Cleric divinity just sucks! The Cleric healer is an awful experience. To be honest, I have thought so too in the beginning. However, I took a step back to analyze what cause that awful feeling about this healing spec. The big truth is it’s a class that requires some brains, you can’t just throw out all your healing and then the next moment the boss sneezes, you find yourself out of divinity.

Divinity Management Tips

Here’s a list of situations or issues which cause your divinity meter to go down fast:

1. Healing when not needed.

The truth is I’ve seen far too many healers who just heal all the time. This will decrease your divinity meter fast and in the end, you’ve barely been effective with anything.

2. Healing in too many places at once.

Now this is something big, many players maybe don’t even realize. It’s that kind of thing that’s so obvious, you don’t even realize it. This happens very often.

When you run in a group, especially with ranged characters, you will notice people might be scattered all over the place. The tank aggroes the boss, some DPS who actually takes advantage of the Combat Advantage is on the other side of the boss, and some other wizards are dealign damage but from a distance. This is at least three spots to heal: one for the tank, one for the smart DPS that deals Combat Advantage from the other side of the boss and one for the far-away wizards. Oh, and you too!

Some bosses have certain mechanics that ignore the threat from the tank, and just target the DPSes or the healer. I think it’s obvious where I’m hinting. To keep your party alive, you need to heal 3-4 times for the 3-4 spots where players are located. This will cause you to run out of divinity very fast.

Since this build doesn’t use Healing Word because we have already agreed it heals very poorly based on how much divinity it eats, you will need to “educate” the players to stick together. It’s simple as that. One heal to heal them all Well, two actually, cause if they’re near the tank, they’re probably dead.

3. Dealing damage instead of praying

You might want to be useful with something, so you want to deal damage. Worse, you’re using divinity-based damaging encounters like Daunting Light… Please stop.

You’re helping the party by healing them and keeping them alive. That’s your job. Your damage can very easily be covered by a competent DPS character. So embrance your role, you’re there to heal and not dps.

Now that we’ve agreed on you having to heal instead of dealing damage, we also have to make sure you pray to recover your divinity. Between fights of clearing monsters, it’s nice to pray out of combat to regen the divinity faster. However, for longer fights like boss fights, you will need to identify small timeframes when the fight is going just fine without your intervention, and just pray to recover your divinity. This habit will extend the overall ability of spamming healing with Bastion of Healing.

Healer Habits

This section will just reiterate some of the previous points. It will also add a few new tips that should help to your overall experience as a healer:

• Heal when a player actually needs healing.
• Buff with your active artifact only for enemies worthy of your key press (bosses or tougher enemies)
• Do not deal damage with divinity-based encounters. Save your divinity for healing.
• Use Cleansing Touch for dungeons where debuffs are applicable to players (Hati fight in FBI, Ras Nsi fight in ToNG). Its main use is to remove debuffs so don’t use it instead of Bastion of Healing. Cleansing Touch costs 90 divinity and heals for 400 Magnitude. Bastion of Healing costs 80 divinity and heals for 800 Magnitude.
• Use Intercession to quickly heal the tank or a player in need. Don’t waste it on things that Bastion of Healing could’ve easily handled because Intercession has a relatively high cooldown.
• Some players don’t know or realize they’re not using the positioning correctly for gaining Combat Advantage. For instance, the tank is in the “North” side and a DPS in the “South” side. This other players deals damage from the “West” side but he doesn’t gain Combat Advantage. Help them out by positioning yourself on the opposite side of him (i.e. in the “East” side). Of course, do this only if the boss fight mechanics allow it.
• Watch people’s HP bars. I have customized my UI to drag the party HP bars closer to the center of the screen. It’s now right of where the Arbiter sparks meter should be displayed. This provides you an easier way to spot when a player’s HP suddenly goes down and needs healing. Additionally, you can even enable to show HP bars above party characters as they move. This also helps a lot!

Race choice and ability score

Pick whichever race gives you CON or/and STR. Any other race bonus is not gonna be important in long run, but if you have extra money you can buy Dragonborn for more damage. For ability score you also want to choose STR and CON for obvious reasons. Most of your attacks deal physical damage, more HP = better, and stamina generation is very important now. I’ll be testing Gith race soon because it gives nice stamina regeneration boost.

Stat distribution and priorities

The key is to balance your offensive and defensive stats. If you go full defensive, it’s going to be difficult to cap offensives and hold aggro. If you go full offensive, you’re gonna die a lot and be useless as tank.

Your offensive priorities are armor penetration, accuracy and crit. Armor penetration is definitely your first priority then the rest. Defensive priorities are similar: defense to counteract enemies arm pen, deflect and crit avoidance. I would cap defense first, then deflect and get as much of crit avoidance as you can get through gear. Crit avoidance has pretty high cap so just get it as much as you can without sacrificing other stats.

The easiest way to cap those stats is to put it on your companion. New companion gear has a lot of numbers so you can mix and match until you get what you need, and don’t be afraid to even use lesser IL or green equipment for that, stats are what’s important, not IL. After you cap on those, you want to aim for more power and HP. CA is also good if you can get it, but it’s damned hard to cap if you want to cap all the above stats. Awareness does not seem useful to me if you’re doing your job right. Enemies shouldn’t have CA over you. However, it can be useful, but don’t choose it until you’ve have maxed your priorities.

Only two utility stats are important: stamina regeneration and movement speed. While recharge time is nice to have, it is not something to invest in, and this build is based on other ways to reduce your cooldowns. As for AP gain, we really don’t have good dailies, but by dealing damage and using your encounters you generate AP fast enough so we’re gonna focus more on that.

Pick whatever stat you’re lacking and if you’re not lacking any choose power, HP, damage and damage reduction on demons, cultist and undead (not on dinos). Speed boon, stamina regen and companion influence boons are a must have.

Master boon

I really don’t like that healing boons proc when you have 25% or less HP, I rather avoid getting myself in that kind of situations.

First two boons are good for mobs so you can run them on AOE loadout.

But I would like to take a minute to tell you about the real killer – Focused retaliation. First of all, it procs on encounter use, and fairly often. I find that is much better chance for tanks to take boon that procs on encounter use rather than on kill, especially on bosses. And second of all, did you notice that you get hit a lot? Have you ever reflected 100k hit back? Feels great. I run this boon on both loadouts and it makes a big chunk of my damage.

Gear

% damage buff pieces are always better than raw power. It is much easier and better to have flat damage buff than compensate for that with power. Keep in my that only two of same equip bonuses stack so use only two of % melee damage. Ideally, you would have Heels with Kiuno (it has CA), grips and Shadowstalker +5 and +4. But if you’re having difficulty capping arm pen or accuracy, you can wear new rings and opt out for another armor and feet.

Terrored Grips > 3% on encounter powers

Heels of Fury > 3% on melee

Fured Kiuno of the Bear > 3% on melee

New rings from ME’s that give 3% on melee

Shadowstalker rings (+5 ih you’re lucky and +4) > 2.5 % + 2%

Choosing other gear because of higher IL or little bit better stats will result in loosing damage and problems in holding aggro over high DPS players. You don’t want new successor gear. You want your defense to be constantly capped since there is no evidence that % of defense goes over the 50% cap. Bonus that reduces % of damage is different, it works, but there are better ways to mitigate damage. Also remember, 3k power doesn’t mean 3% more damage, there is relative increase when it comes to power, so it is always better to have flat damage bonus.

The rest of the gear you can choose based on your missing stats. Take any helmet that have 5% damage in Undermountain if you’re running ME’s and LOMM. For shirt you want either the one giving you 3% damage when you have full stamina (isn’t that rarely?), or the one reducing your encounter powers. I have opted out for latter. For pants choose between AP gain and % damage reduction.

BIS weapon set for tanks is Burnished set because it procs basically all the time. However, any other mod 16 set is good if you got it first.

Neck and belt are discussable. If you want to dish out more damage, go for demon lord set, or if you want more damage reduction go valhala. IMO Best would be any of new sets because you gain 50k-ish HP from them + AP gain. Constructed demise set is cheap, and +2 DEX and CHA are somewhat good. Reflective set is IMO BIS, it has damage debuff and STR and CON (all great). However, I also like Wyvern set for buff but dislike useless INT bonus. So, pick what you like.

Enchantments

Considering enchantments, it’s simple: radiants, radiants and more radiants. But if you’re poor like me, you want radiants in offense (if everything else is capped), and some dual or triple stat ench in defense that has HP. I found savages great for capping that crit avoidance. A lot of people have recommended having one high rank tenebrous enchantment, and it seems really good, after some testing I see it procs relatively often.

In utility slots you want either darks or tactical enchantments. Dark will give you extra stats from your companion and tactical will give you incoming healing so you get more heals. I’m running darks but will try tactical especially with new trial coming.

Armour: elven battle on rank that has stamina regen bonus.

Weapon: lightning is great for AOE aggro, bronzewood or holy avenger for the party, vorpal for more ST damage

Artifacts

Active: BIS is Wyvern-venom Coated Knives after Lantern and Heart of x dragons nerf. It is a must have for buff, debuff and encounter cooldown reduction.

Other: whatever completes your set, and new (better, more stats) or old (less stats) artifacts with power or stats you need

Augments are, and I can’t stressed this enough, absolutely a must for tanks. You have to cap a lot of offensive and defensive stats so every little bit will help. Also, that extra HP you will get means a lot. Choose Bulette pup for extra power if you can afford it, but any other augment will do. As for companion equipment, take whatever it suits you stats-wise. You want it to have stats that are a priority – arm pen, accuracy, crit, defense and deflection so they are easy to cap.

Offensive slot is occupied by Deepcrow hatchling for 8k of power. Since you already have Bulette pup on legendary take its healing power to one of defense slots. In other defense slots you can put incoming healing bonus, HP, or any stats you need. In utility I find Energon’s HP to be best.

Mount powers and insignia bonuses

I’ve wanted to buy Armored Griffon so I can abuse Wyverin for more damage, but after announcement of new trial I’ve changed my mind and am saving for War Triceratops for more HP. Epic version that gives 25k of HP is also good or you can put some of the missing stats here, however I would rather put here uncapped stats like HP or power.

Insignia bonuses have been severely nerfed in mod 16. I use same as most of folks healing bonuses in lack of better ones: Champion’s return and Barbarian revelry. Gladiator’s guile is probably the best bonus there is – it grants movement and stamina. Artificer’s persuasion is great in combo with Wyveryn artifact as you can shave of 2 seconds from your encounters every 15 seconds. In fact it so great that I have two of them. I know, I know, but it shaves off 2.8 seconds or something like that and every second counts in fast paced fights. You can use another healing bonus instead, there are plenty of options you can check here (credit to SkullElf).

ST powers, feats and rotation

I basically use this build for AOE as well, I just change one class feature and one encounter.

Feats

Shieldthrower over Staying power. It is excellent aggro tool with very short cooldown.  10\10

Second feat doesn’t matter, most of the time I don’t use Cleaving bull on bosses and never Tide of Iron.

Combat balance – simply, it goes over defense cap. With stamina regeneration boon and Elven you won’t have problem with stamina regeneration.

On this screenshot I have chosen Determination because I was testing it in sticky situations. Anyways, I don’t find the effect very useful and I don’t know what does most attacks means according to Cryptic so I’m not using it. I will be switching to Bladed Rampart that I use more often but it doesn’t really matter.

Focused retaliation – you use Dig in on bosses when you know there are big hits coming in or when you know you need every bit of protection you have. It boosts your incoming healing which you will find very nice in this situations and also damage. 10\10

At wills

I only use cleave and threatening rush. I’ve tried Brazen slash and Tide of iron, but they just don’t feel right. Cleave is excellent for AOE, it’s fast and works in a big arc, think of it as pre-16 WMS. I sometimes even use it on bosses as well when I have no fear anyone will steal my aggro as I can dish out more damage with it considering how fast I can swing it.

Threatening rush is your main single target at will. I can’t explain how awesome this power is. It works as gap closer, it generates more aggro, has decent (well, better than tide of iron) casting time and magnitude.

Encounters and class features

There are two encounters that will never leave your slot, either on AOE or ST. Shield throw because it is hands down the best encounter we have and linerbreaker because it is the best AOE encounter we have. Why do I use AOE encounter on bosses? In most boss fights there are mobs, and in some there are pretty mean mobs so you want to have a power that can aggro them so rest of the party can do their own things. Also, it generates more threat. Enough said.

Shield throw combined with Shieldthrower feat is probably the coolest thing about vanguard fighter. You can spam it every 6 seconds or so, it is a great threat multiplier and has decent magnitude. Not to mention how cool you look while you throw your shield. Also it is ranged, so really great for aggroing a group of mobs from a far and breaking those rocks on Boreworm.

Third power I use on most bosses is Anvil of doom coupled with Anvil of challenge passive. It will put you on top of the threat list and because how much damage you will deal it will keep you there. Use it with Anvil of challenge if you know there is possibility that you will die so you can gain aggro instantly, or you think any dps might take it. If that’s not the case, take the Ferocious reaction class feature instead for a little bit of more dps.

So choose between Anvil of challenge and Ferocious reaction depending on the situation, however in any given situation you want to have Combat superiority. What you get is practically non-stop 10% increase in at-will damage thanks to shieldthrower feat. It may not sound a lot, but you don’t really have a better choice. You may be tempted to use Shield talent for stamina regeneration, but it only works when you are not using you shield and there are better ways to manage your stamina.

Dailies

Nr. 1 daily that I use is Earthsaker. Being only vanguard’s damaging daily it isn’t great, but I use it because we lack better ones. This is actually for AOE as it is great for aggroing large crowd when you are caught off guard, but it is decent for bosses when you want to do extra damage.

Determination is also decent as it gives you 10% more damage but if you use it never take Perfect block feat because it will put 3 min ban on its use.

Second daily slot I like to call “Oh shit, I’m gonna die button”. Second wind isn’t what it used to be. Since you have to attack to gain HP I don’t slot it in new mod. Attacking means letting you shield down and probably insta death if you have 20% of health and you healer is out of divinity or sparks. Once I’ve gotten used to tanking without life steal I’ve learned to withdraw strategically (that’s a fancy name for running away). I raise my shield and backpedal in circle so I’m not always in range of an attack. That’s way I use Bladed rampart as it passively reduces incoming damage.

Rotation

Smash buttons and spam Threatening rush. If you know there will be mobs spawning, save Linebreaker for them. If you think you are going to die, save Anvil for instant aggro. Don’t forget to dig in for big hits and use Wyverin if you can turn around real quick. Try to use Wyverin on beginning or right before fight because most Dps’s are using alabaster bonus.

As I’ve said, feats are the same because I’m lazy and only change one power and class feature so read ST page first. There is a second version to this build that is based on using Enforced threat with Staying power feat and Tide of Iron with Rising Tide but I honestly don’t see much difference regarding aggro. Whenever I use ET it puts me on top of threat list but I end up in orange in one sec. So, it does what it says but it’s not great. And I really dislike using power that feels empty, when I press button I want to see some damage numbers.

At wills are the same, but you will be using Cleave a lot. Fast Cleave in combination with Lightning is excellent for our lack of good AOE encounters.

Instead of Anvil, I use Bull charge. It is great for gap closing and getting ahead of Dps’s and you also get bonus damage when you hit multiple enemies. And instead of Anvil of challenge, I use Greater endurance.

Rotation

Now, let’s face it, we lack really good AOE aggro grabbing encounter. That’s why getting to mobs first is the best thing we can do. You just have to be mobile. Take that movement boon, slot Greater endurance and drink Lightwine, it will boost you to be a little bit faster than most DPS classes. For that reason we use Threatening rush and Shieldthrow on mobs so we can quickly grab attention of a strayed mob.

What I mostly do is hit group of mobs with Shieldthrow from a far to aggro them, then use Bull charge to get there first. Next step depends on the damage of your party. If my party isn’t high on DPS I use Dig in real quick for Retaliate effect to deal more damage, then I circle around mobs for CA, use Linebreaker (because I can hit all of them), and then spam Cleave. If they are not dead, hit Shieldthrow again to biggest mob or the one that isn’t hitting you, use Bull, retaliate etc. until they are dead. If your group is HDPS, use Linebreaker instead of retaliate because while you kneel, DPS may take aggro from mobs and you are left waiting for a hit that isn’t coming. I generally refrain from using retaliate in this kind of parties because it is too slow, but it can come handy as 4th encounter.

Don’t forget to activate Wyverin in between fights to help your party and reduce your cooldowns because if you go in without Linebreaker or Bull charge you’re gonna have a hard time getting that aggro. I like to save Earthshaker for that kind of situations or when I know that we will merge two or more groups of mobs as it has decent radius.

Plus tip: Doohickey works on multiple targets.

Plus plus tip: you can leave while mobs have a little bit of health. Mobs don’t turn to Dps’s right away and as they will finish them in a 2 seconds, you have a head start to next group.

A lot of people asked for LOMM tanking tips and guide. On Arcturia I use Bull charge, Linebreaker and Anvil with Anvil of challenge passive. At the start of the combat I use all three encounters and then spam Threatening rush since I save encounters for mimics. You want to block that attack with black thing under you, it always comes 3 in a row so you have time put down your shield in between to regenerate stamina a little bit. Before hitting a mimic use Wyverin, Doohickey and then all three encounters, should be enough. Now, I don’t use Anvil and Bull charge on her except at beginning and the end of the fight since using Linebreaker and Threatening rush is enough to keep aggro during the fight. Remember that priority is to kill mimics, a lot of parties don’t even have tank for this fight. I ditch Shieldthrow for Bull for more damage. If there is a party member with red arrows above their heads run to them so you take part of theirs damage.

Boreworm is straightforward fight, except for the golem phase. I use standard encounter setup here. When fighting golems, after 2nd rock phase, try to be right next to wall because otherwise those bastards will push you away from party and you will die for sure. I save daily for them, which one – depends on the healer. After the phase ends, run to the boss so you pull golems to him; when he does his swing attack they will die.

Trobriand can be really messy fight if your party have to much of dps. Always wake up scaladars one by one with Trobriands red cone attack, so you don’t end up with 4 at the same time. His cone attack will stun you, so avoid it if you can, if you can’t use Dig in. If you end up with more scaladars than you can handle, cuss loudly at dps’s, aggro them all with Linebreaker, hit Bladed Rampart, and start backpedaling with your shield up. Scaladars are meanest up close, they only have one range attack you can see so it is easy to block. If your stamina falls under 25% use Dig in and pray. Save Anvil in case you die, no one wants Trobriand chasing him. After portal phase, use Phalanx daily if you don’t trust your healer or for extra protection. Use Dig in on his palm attack in last phase of the fight, it hits like a truck and completely drains my stamina.

Big thanks to my partner in life and game that hooked me to this game @pablos#6151

Thanks to all the good people that provided player base with all the information about the game.

And thanks to all my guildies who dragged me along in all the big dungeons while I was just a small tank, especially to @valmadoran84.

So on the first tab of the character sheet we’ll cover Race, Attributes, and Equipment.  Some of these require more focus than others.

Race

With Mod16 this has become less important than ever; at most any particular race is going to net you 2 extra attribute points or a minor effect.  Pick the race that you want to look at for the duration of the character’s life. Any advantage that one race may or may not have over another race is so small that the standard deviation of random number generation is going to be larger than the difference.  I like human paladins; I come from old-school D&D where paladins were always human. That was the extent of my choice.

Attributes

So your attributes is really an extension of the Race question, isn’t it?  Whatever race you choose, you’re going to have to select an attribute(s) to increase.  Let’s look at how your attributes impact your paladin:

• Strength:  Stamina Regeneration & Physical Damage Boost
• Constitution:  Maximum Hit Points & Action Points
• Dexterity:  Critical Severity & Movement Speed
• Intelligence:  Control Bonus & Magical Damage Boost
• Wisdom:  Control Resist & Outgoing Healing Boost
• Charisma:  Companion Influence & Recharge Speed

For a Justicar, the two attributes you’re going to want to raise are Constitution & Intelligence.  Block stops up to 50% of your maximum hit points, so you want to layer on as much health as you can, and all paladin damage is radiant (magical) so Intelligence will boost your overall damage.

For the Oathkeeper, I would instead recommend going with Intelligence & Wisdom.  Wisdom is going to boost your Outgoing Healing, which you want to pick up every scrap of that you can.  Again you pick up Intelligence because every class should boost the attribute that increases your damage.

But let’s review what the other attributes offer; when evaluating artifact equipment you might be looking at gaining some of these, so let’s understand which is better.  Strength is the weak attribute for paladins; it does not boost our damage, and Justicars have many ways to recover stamina already.  Dexterity is a good pickup for any class; Critical Severity is always welcome, and no one complains about running a little faster.  Charisma is another solid choice; because Recharge Speed is always good, though Companion Influence is lackluster (more on that in Companions).  However a paladin’s core powers are tied to Divinity, not cooldowns, reducing the usefulness of Charisma.  

Equipment

So this is the big question–what is the best gear to wear!?  I won’t focus on that, because that changes all the time. With Mod 17 here, the best gear from Tower of the Mad Mage has equip bonuses that replace all of the level 70 Chult/Barovia items that were clung to in Mod 16.  Basically anything that gives flat percentage boosts to damage is probably the absolute best. However if you have full Successor and Protege gear? You’ll be just fine. All that really matters are your caps, so let’s talk about those, instead.

For Lair of the Mad Mage, the end-game content as of Mod17, 60K points for level 80 content, 68K for Lair of the Mad Mage, and 80K for Tower of the Mad Mage.  A few stats like Accuracy start hitting a soft-cap around 8-10K before the hard-cap, when adding more Accuracy has the same impact to your overall damage as just adding more Power.  The same goes for Deflect, when you reach a point where your life expectancy against incoming damage increases the same if you just add more Hit Points.

So what stats do you focus on hard capping?  For both paragons:

• Defense: To overcome enemy Armor Penetration so you always take 50% damage.
• Armor Penetration:  To overcome enemy Defense so you always hit for 100% damage.
• Critical Strike:  To overcome enemy Critical Avoidance, so you will critically hit 50% of the time.

And that’s it.  Now before veterans freak out–I’m not saying to ignore the other stats.  I’m just saying it’s not essential to cap them, when Power & Hit Points are the other option:

• Accuracy:  Capping that you will never be Deflected.  But before the hard cap you will get the same overall damage increase from just stacking on more Power.
• Deflect:  Capping means you will hit the max Deflect chance of 50%, which would be a mitigation of 25%.  There comes a point (8-10K before cap) where adding more Deflect doesn’t extend your life expectancy more than just adding more Hit Points.
• Awareness:  You take Awareness to counter enemy Combat Advantage.  This happens very rarely though, so I won’t devote resources to raising it.
• Critical Avoidance:  This is another one that’s just not very important (for now).  The only hits that you’re worried about critting you should be blocking anyway.

I’ll say again, I’m not suggesting that these stats aren’t important, just that you should get enough from your gear and companion that you don’t need to allocate slots to them.

So Where Do the Stats Come From?

The most obvious is your gear you wear.  As I mentioned before there are some older pieces of gear with great Equip bonuses, but you’ll be fine if you’re newer and just go with Spy Guild/Protege/Successor/etc.  For your main/offhand you will want to get Alabaster (Mountaineer if RNG hates you), and you should get a good neck/waist (most important is to have the extra enchant slots).  I like the Wyvern set because I get DEX/INT from it. Any of the new sets are fine though; the Electric Collar/Charged Restraints are really cheap after all, and there’s nothing wrong with DEX/CHA.

The next source of stats (and probably the most important) is your companion.  As of this writing, your best gain is from an augment. There are lots of augments to choose from, and the main driver for your choice should be the 3 bonus stats that augment has.  I’ll get into the choices I like in the Companion section, but for right now I like any augment companion with a boost to Hit Points, Power, or Deflect. Along with that augment companion, you need Bonding Runestones.  The better they are, the more stats your augment is transferring to you. Additionally, Bonding Runestones have no cost to unslot, so they are very simple to swap between characters through the shared bank–so it’s a really solid, safe investment.  Runestones are a good way to tweak any stats you are coming up short on, or just stack on more power with them if you are capped where you want to be.

Then you have your mount insignias.  One of your first goals should be to get 5 mounts with 3 insignia slots each, and fill them with rare insignias.  As far as insignia powers go, I always want Gladiator’s Guile (at least once) on my characters, Wanderer’s Forturne (because I still need RP) and after that I pick up any “when X happens, heal for Y” powers that I can manage.  Epic insignias cost a fortune and are one of the worst returns for investment you can buy. Get rares, fill out any stat gaps you have, and then stack on power.

The last spot you can work on is your enchantments and armor/jewel kits.  Again, look at your stats, and if you have any holes left (you really shouldn’t) then plug them, and after that stack on the power and hit points.  You can pick up some power and stamina with armor/jewel kits, and that’s usually my pick there.

So this is the meat and potatoes of any class guide.  I’m going to focus on giving my take on every power, feature, and feat, as well as the best use-cases for them.  I will conclude this section with what my preferred choices are as well.

At-Wills

• Valorous Strike – Fast-hitting radiant damage, this is the primary single-target attack for the Oathkeeper.  It’s the fastest way to proc Critical Touch, which is why I spend most of my time in melee wailing away when healing.  This is your single target on Justicar until you unlock Shielding Strike.
• Radiant Slam – This is the paladin gap-closer.  The damage is very weak, but it’s a dash, so it’s useful at times.  On a Justicar I only use this in niche fights like Bore Worm, to dash between boulders quickly.  On Oathkeeper, this is my second at-will most of the time, as it’s the only multi-target at-will available to them, and dashing into melee so I can Valorous Strike is desirable.

Justicar

• Oath Strike – This is the best multi-target at-will for tanking, with increased threat added.  It does good damage and keeps targets attacking you instead of allies. I will swap it out for Radiant Slam if I’m going to need to dash constantly, but that’s rare.
• Shielding Strike – This is the best single-target at-will for tanking, with built-in stamina regen, plus it’s the most damage output available.  Anytime you are not doing something else, you should be using Shielding Strike to recover your shield meter.

Oathkeeper

• Cure Wounds – So this is a free, very weak heal for paladins.  It’s capable of proccing Critical Touch but for the most part it’s too weak to reliably use.  We have so much better heals, I’d rather have the dash most of the time.
• Divine Fulmination – This is a slow-casting decent-damage ranged attack.  It’s not amazing, but it’s a ranged attack. Sometimes (like when standing in your Circle of Power at range) you want to keep hitting the boss without moving, and this at-will works then.

Encounters

• Burning Light – This is a 25’ radius point-blank AOE that does 150-300 magnitude, based on how long you charge it (0-2 seconds).  It also stuns everything hit for 3 seconds, regardless of the charge time. The cooldown is 14 seconds. The feat Burning Vengeance affects this power, primarily removing the need to charge it.  Solo it’s a good opener to damage and stun a group of enemies, and when tanking through trash just opening with it to stun the pack (even without charging it) is a great way to start fights.
• Sacred Weapon – 10 second buff you can cast every 28 seconds that adds 40 magnitude to most damage you deal.  It’s not terrible, but it’s not outstanding either. With Sacred Shield this becomes a double-duty power giving you increased threat and stamina regen (the same amount as Shielding Strike), which is nice when you want diversity from the power.  With Enduring Spirit an Oathkeeper gets 10% damage reduction and increased Divinity regeneration for those 10 seconds.  The total regen will be 120 over 10 seconds which is roughly how much you would gain from using Channel Divinity in combat for that long.
• Divine Touch – This is our primary heal; it’s placeable up to 80’ away with a 20’ radius.  It’s our most versatile heal at 350 magnitude (500 magnitude for Justicar), and also provides the same amount of temporary hit points (when Oathkeeper).  Casting it on someone will replace any existing temp HP even if it’s lower.  It’s 100 Divinity for an Oathkeeper, while it jumps to 220 for a Justicar.  With the feat Critical Touch your at-wills have a chance to make the next cast automatically critical, which is huge.  When tanking I will use this power in order to assist the healer on a fight like Bore Worm.
• Smite – The most damaging single-target encounter we have, weighing in at 900 magnitude for 220 divinity, and 80’ range.  The damage is reduced as your divinity bar drops, down to about 600 magnitude if you only have enough divinity to barely cast it.  Combined with the feature Divine Challenger, a Justicar can bump to the top of the threat list on their target with this power.  If using as Oathkeeper, the feat Spirit of Austerity drops the magnitude down to 450, but reduces the cost to 80, making it more efficient with divinity cost, and allowing you to do some damage while healing without draining your Divinity badly.
• Bane – Casts a placeable 15’ radius AOE at up to 80’, doing 480 magnitude for 300 divinity.  If you hit 3 or more targets it’s more efficient than Smiting three times. On a Justicar the feat Baneful Strikes makes your at-wills have a chance to proc a free Bane that will cost 0 divinity, which will also trigger the feat Divine Pursuit.  On Oathkeeper, the feat Spirit of Austerity drops the magnitude to 240 and the cost to 100, making it much more efficient on Divinity, allowing you to help damage trash without plummeting your Divinity bar.

Justicar

• Templar’s Wrath – This power is a blend between Burning Light and Bane.  It’s a very large point-blank AOE (30’ radius) that does 300 magnitude damage, and increased threat, for 300 Divinity.  It generates more aggro than Burning Light, doesn’t require a feat to instant cast, and has no cooldown (till you run out of Divinity).  It does less damage than Bane, but covers twice the area (while not placeable). This makes this power… useful for trash clearing if your group is moving so fast that Burning Light isn’t ready in time, and you feel the Bane is too small of a radius.  I don’t really feel this way, I’d rather just use Bane.
• Vow of Enmity – Sometimes you just need to aggro everything, and this is the power to do it with.  80’ range, and 20’ radius effect centered on your target. Does 100 magnitude to everything and places you at the top of the threat list.  It’s on a 19 second cooldown, and for some fights, it’s perfect. I use this a lot on trash clearing, when I don’t have a lot of use for a single target power, but occasionally need to grab a lot of aggro.
• Absolution – For the next 8 seconds, you take 20% less damage.  If you know you’re about to get smashed (or your healer is struggling) this is a reliable means of mitigation with a 22 second cooldown.  I think this is a rare situation, and would mean not using a power that’s giving me either aggro, stamina, or damage.
• Binding Oath – This power makes you reflect a 50 magnitude hit back at anything attacking you for 12 seconds, and also boosts your Stamina Regen for the duration.  The latter portion is the effect we are interested in. Over those 12 seconds it will restore ⅔ of your shield bar, which can be critical in a fight like Trobriand where you have to constantly block is heavy strikes.
• Relentless Avenger – This is effectively a mini-Smite that includes a Dash.  It has a 60’ range, 460 magnitude, and a 12 second cooldown.  In fights where I need occasional bursts of mobility, I will swap this in over Smite or Sacred Weapon when I don’t need them.

Oathkeeper

• Divine Shelter – This is similar to Divine Touch; it heals a similar radius centered on you, for 400 magnitude, at a 180 divinity cost.  That’s 80% more divinity for %14 more healing. While it’s our strongest heal, not being placeable, and not boosted by Critical Touch does not justify the increased divinity cost for me.  That makes this power is a complete pass for me.
• Banishment – This is another power that falls a little short.  It’s a 60’ range, 15’ radius spell that stuns targets for 6 seconds and reduces their damage by 5% for the duration.  It’s on a 20 second cooldown as well. This isn’t a bad power, but other powers are much better. Burning Light has a 25’ radius and stuns for 3 seconds on a faster cooldown.  The 5% reduction would only matter on control immune targets, and on a boss that might reduce one attack.
• Cleansing Touch – This is the paladin debuff remover.  It’s a very cheap single target heal (200 mag, 50 div) but it’s real purpose is to remove negative effects.  You have to aim it which is annoying, but it’s all we’ve got. It’s useful in Master Expeditions to remove curse effects, and on Trobriand for removing the attraction debuff from when two players collide (you may have to cast more than once).  When I run this I typically replace Smite/Bane.
• Circle of Power – Places an area on the ground that increases outgoing healing by 15% and boosts divinity regen while standing on it.  Over 16 seconds it recovers 300 divinity, which is 50% more than you would gain with Channel Divinity in that time. In fights where your Divinity pool is going to be strained, it’s a great power to drop when you can be stationary for the duration.  A prime time I use this power is during the AOE phase of Bore Worm, or for the cocoon phase of Arcturia. Note that 300 Divinity is also basically 4 free Smites with Spirit of Austerity so you can use it as a damage boost as well.
• Bond of Virtue – You can place this buff on an ally for 18 seconds every 30 seconds, up to 60’ away.  Any heal that you cast will also land on this ally, even if the first heal was cast on them as well.  With the reduction to paladin healing in Mod 17, this has become the key to healing a cocooned player in the Arcturia fight.  It has an instant activation time, so it does not change how many times you can heal before the cocoon explodes. Healing a cocoon to full is very difficult without using this power.  I’ve also used this power on the tank during Trobriand while healing the party fighting scorpions.

Dailies

• Divine Judgement – Really simple daily.  You push the button, and a target within 40’ takes a 1500 magnitude hit.  Doesn’t get much simpler than that. Good option for turning your AP into damage on one target.

• Shield of Faith – Core defensive daily.  Upon activation you and allies take 5% less damage and receive 10% more healing for 10 seconds.  When combined with Justicar Sheltering Light, allies will receive half of all heals you receive during the duration, which can help boost the heals to the party during a critical moment.  Only 5% damage reduction isn’t great, but it’s also the best we get. Oathkeeper has a feat called Convalescence that makes all barriers convert to healing during the duration of the daily.

• Radiant Charge – If you can hit 3 targets, this is better than Judgement.  Delivers 600 magnitude to a 20’ wide pathway in front of you.  If you need to dump your AP into multiple targets, this is the daily to use.

Justicar

• Divine Protector – So using this redirects damage to you from the nearest ally for 12 seconds, but doesn’t do anything to help you tank that damage, so it’s… okay.  With the feat Shield of the Gods it no longer redirects but instead makes you immune to most damage for 6 seconds.  There are some niche uses for that, but this probably won’t be on your tray much.

• Heroism – This is just a big old self-heal and buff.  You gain 20% max HP, receive a heal for that much, and do 10% increased damage for 12 seconds.  It’s an okay daily, though I feel like our direct damage options are better.

Oathkeeper

• Lay on Hands – This daily is a guaranteed “restore target” effect that will fill their health to full and cleanse all negative effects.  If combined with Divine Intervention it will even add a large temporary hitpoint shield as well.  It’s a reactionary daily, that I usually have slotted.
• Sanctuary – Creates a 15’ radius shell around you that gives 10% damage reduction and applies a 600 magnitude heal over time for 12 seconds.  The downside is that you can’t do anything but channel during the effect; casting another encounter or using an at-will will interrupt it.  After killing the tesla coils on Trobriand is a prime time to use this ability though.

Mechanics

• Block – While holding Shift, you raise your shield, blocking attacks from the front, as well as making you immune to most control effects.  You stamina bar represents how much shield you have left, and is 50% of your max health. Consider them temp hit points you can use instead of your health.  Regaining stamina on Justicar is a key component of tanking heavy-hitters, and is really the core of a fight like Trobriand.

Justicar

• Divine Champion – Toggled on or off with Tab, this will double your aura effects, automatically block all attacks from any direction, and drain your Divinity quickly (60 per second).  This is actually very useful sometimes, such as during Trobriand who has many attacks that need to be blocked. During his heaviest hits, turn on Divine Champion and keep swinging, then after the big hit turn it back off, without ever stopping your swinging (which regains stamina).  With the feat Unyielding Champion, you can block 75% of your hit points, and drain 50 divinity per second.

• Oath of Protection – This is what makes you a tank.  You get 40% more hit points, increased threat (5x multiplier), and your base damage is reduced by 10%.

• Justicar’s Charge – This is your main form of divinity regeneration.  Every time you block, you will regain 25 Divinity. However you can only regain about ~500 divinity this way (you have 1000 divinity total).  After regaining that much you only gain ~3.5 divinity per block. The “hidden” 500 limit from blocking returns over time (about 2 minutes). With the feat Justicar’s Bulwark you that hidden limit is ~1000 so you could block from empty to full (it then needs about 4 minutes to refill).

• Divine Palisade – This is your “super-block”.  If you block while Divine Champion is active, then you will hunker down and create a cone of radiant shielding behind you.  First you can block 75% of your maximum hit points like this, you reduce damage to self and allies behind you by 10%, and apply a 200 magnitude heal over time.  Because you have to have Divine Champion turned on, you can only do this for a limited time. A perfect use is during the blast wave on Trobriand.

Oathkeeper

• Channel Divinity – When you hold Tab you will slowly regain Divinity, 13 per second in combat (40/s out of combat).  With the feat Guarded Prayer you will also block while using Channel Divinity.

• Oath of Devotion – This is what makes you a healer.  You threat from healing is reduced, and all of your heals add a Divine Barrier (temp HP) based on the amount of the heal used.  The feat Emissary of Warding doubles the effect of Divine Barrier when you critically heal.

Class Features

Every class can have two class features active at any time; for paladins, only one of them can be an Aura power, and it must be placed in the top slot.

• Aura of Protection – Self and allies gain +2% Deflect.  This is a plausible option for Justicar, as Deflect is hard to cap.
• Blessed Wanderer – Deal 5% more damage when solo.  Having your companion summoned still counts as solo.
• Composure – Regen Divinity 10% faster (2 divinity every 3 seconds).  You gain 20 divinity every 3 seconds in combat, so this is a pretty insignificant increase.
• Aura of Wrath – Self and allies gain +2% Critical Strike.  Because it’s a priority to cap Critical Strike (and easy) this feature is typically wasted.

Justicar

• Aura of Valor – Allies generate 5% less threat.  Plausible option even though it’s not a huge effect, simply because the auras are all kind of lackluster.
• Divine Retribution – Deal up to 5% more damage as Stamina decreases.  The idea is flawed, as you are trying to keep your stamina full when tanking, not empty.
• Divine Challenger – Smite places you at the top of the threat list.  As Smite is already an amazing strike, having it place you at the top of the threat list gives you a great 80’ range hard taunt.
• Aura of Vengeance – Self and allies reflect 10 magnitude hit when struck.  Compared to boosting deflect or lowering ally threat, an occasional 10 mag hit is pretty disappointing.

Oathkeeper

• Aura of Restoration – Self and allies receive +5% incoming healing.  This means Divine Touch becomes a 367.5 magnitude heal.  This is a decent pick, as Incoming Healing% is hard to pick up, but it’s in heavy competition with Guarded Prayers for me.
• Guarded Prayers – While using Channel Divinity you block.  This is a very handy feature, allowing you to block and channel at the same time.  Combos well with Prayer of Opportunity, and this choice really depends on if I feel like I need the Restoration boost or not.
• Timely Intervention – Divine Barrier on <25% health targets converts to healing.  This is the feature I recommend most for healing–it gives you a built in emergency heal on anyone below 25% health.
• Aura of Life – Self and allies receive 25 mag heal on encounter heal.  While Restoration will boost Divine Touch directly, this feature applies a separate heal to anyone in the aura.  Restoration is better for a group that’s packed together, while this is better for scattered groups, applying some minor healing to people not hit by your Divine Touch.

Feats

Justicar

• Sacred Shield vs Divine Reciprocation – Sacred Shield adds an effect to Sacred Weapon that makes your hits deliver increased threat and restore stamina (1.5 per hit).  Divine Reciprocation increases the threat of Divine Touch, and if you aren’t healed by it, you get the heal anyway. There’s really no choice to make here go with Sacred Shield.  It’s extremely rare that you will even use Divine Touch, and even if you do, you’ll most likely be healing yourself with it.  Activating Sacred Weapon will make all of your attacks high threat and restore stamina.
• Burning Vengeance vs Baneful Strikes – Burning Vengeance alters Burning Light; it now does 300 magnitude without charging, and up to 600 as your Stamina decreases.  You can still charge it (you don’t need to) and will Block while charging. Because the stun from Burning Light isn’t tied to the charge time, all you’re really gaining is saving 2 seconds of charge time for 150 mag.  It’s not great. Baneful Strikes will give your at-wills a chance to make your next Bane cost no Divinity. The cooldown on Burning Light is 14 seconds; you are more likely to proc Baneful Strikes in 7 seconds than not, so on average you will get 2 free Banes for every 1 Burning Light.  Plus, even when cast for free, Bane still triggers Divine Pursuit.  Both of these feats mainly help kill trash or play solo; Baneful Strikes is overall going to offer you more.
• Justicar’s Bulwark vs Divine Pursuit – Justicar’s Bulwark modifies Justicar’s Charge; you have a “hidden” pool of divinity that you can regain from blocking, increasing it to ~1000 Divinity, allowing you to refill your Divinity from empty to full with blocking.  However it will take about 4 minutes for the “hidden” pool to refill. Divine Pursuit is triggered by using any encounter that costs divinity (including a free Bane from Baneful Strikes), which makes your At-Wills restore 5 divinity per hit, for 10 seconds.  That means that if you use Smite/Bane at least every 10 seconds, you will always be recovering Divinity with your At-Wills.  Every 5 at-will strikes is the equivalent of blocking once, and makes Divine Pursuit clearly better.
• Shield of the Gods vs Sheltering Light – Shield of the Gods changes Divine Protector so that it no longer redirects damage to you but instead makes you immune to most damage for 6 seconds, with a 180 second cooldown.  Sheltering Light adds an effect to Shield of Faith that makes any healing you receive while shielded cascade 50% of that healing to allies. There are a few niche cases where Shield of the Gods could be useful, but 99% of the time Sheltering Light is going to be a superior choice.
• Intimidating Presence vs Unyielding Champion – Intimidating Presence changes your Divine Champion (Tab) ability to generate greatly increased threat, but no longer automatically block.  Unyielding Champion changes Divine Champion to cost 50 divinity/second instead of 60, and also makes the auto-block stop 75% of your hit points instead of 50%.  This means you can now “super-block” without stopping your attacks. Intimidating Presence is a solution for a problem you just shouldn’t have, as we have many tools for grabbing aggro, especially not when it means passing up on being able to “super-block” longer, while continuing to attack.  This is why Unyielding Champion is the best feat here.

Oathkeeper

• Critical Touch vs Sheltered Healing – Critical Touch gives your at-will attacks a 10% chance to proc this effect, which guarantees the next Divine Touch you cast will critically heal.  Sheltered Healing boosts Cure Wounds to a 100 magnitude heal if your target has a Divine Barrier. While this actually makes Cure Wounds decent, it’s not good enough to be better than guaranteeing our most versatile heal will crit, especially when just attacking with our at-will is all you need to proc it.  This can even be triggered by swinging at the air, before starting a boss fight. Critical Touch is hands down the best feat the Oathkeeper has.
• Prayer of Opportunity vs Divine Focus – Prayer of Opportunity gives you a 5% chance with any power to gain a stack of this buff (up to 3 times) that lasts 60 seconds.  Any time you activate Channel Divinity with the buff, one stack is consumed and you regain 75 divinity. Divine Focus builds stacks of its buff while you Channel Divinity, and at 10 stacks, causes your at-wills to regen divinity for 12 seconds.  Just activating Channel Divinity 3 times with Prayer of Opportunity will get you 225 divinity back, and with the feature Guarded Prayers you can just Channel Divinity instead of blocking.  Divine Focus will regain 18 divinity per second from at-wills, for a maximum of 216 regained.  While you gain a similar amount of Divinity with them, Prayer of Opportunity doesn’t require you to Channel Divinity to build charges, so it’s my preferred option.
• Spirit of Austerity vs Enduring Spirit – Spirit of Austerity cuts the cost of Smite to 80 and the magnitude to 450, and drops the cost of Bane to 100 and the magnitude to 240.  Enduring Spirit makes Sacred Weapon reduce damage taken by 10% and restores 120 divinity over 10 seconds. Both of these feats are good, but Spirit of Austerity is really good, making soloing on Oathkeeper enjoyable, and allowing you to throw in Smite/Bane freely during fights without wiping out your Divinity pool.  If you plan to ever use Smite or Bane, then Spirit of Austerity is the best choice.
• Divine Intervention vs Convalescence – Divine Intervention simply makes your Lay on Hands also apply a Divine Barrier for 50% of the healing amount.  Convalenscence causes heals under the effect of Shield of Faith to convert all Divine Barriers to healing. Both of these feats are useful, so the choice depends on which daily you use the most.  I use Lay on Hands and Sanctuary as my primary dailies, so Divine Intervention was an easy pick for me.
• Emissary of Warding vs Divine Vessel – Emissary of Warding causes Divine Barriers applied with critical heals to be doubled.  Divine Vessel kicks in if you drop below 100 Divinity; for the next 12 seconds all of your healing spells are free, and your outgoing healing is boosted 20%.  The downside is that it then has a 3 minute cooldown before you can use it again. It’s still a great emergency feat–but because we can use Critical Touch to guarantee that Divine Touch is a critical heal, Emissary of Warding is just a much better feat in comparison.

Boons accomplish a couple of things for your paladin.  First (and most obvious), they give you increases to your stats.  Second, they increase your item level, 25 points at a time. Lastly, at the Master Tier, they give you access to some pretty strong bonuses.  So how do you earn boons? Two ways:

Campaigns

So the primary way you earn boons is by completing campaigns from previous modules.  There are a lot of them, and one can quickly get overwhelmed with the idea of doing all of them.  The first thing to do is relax–you don’t have to do them all at once. My advice is to just pick a campaign, and do the quests for it.  If you have more play time, do another one. If you get bored, stop and run a dungeon or hang out with guildmates. Some of the campaigns (Maze Engine, Sharandar, Dread Ring) are very small time commitments each day, while other campaigns (Tyranny of Dragons, Storm King’s Thunder) are massive, long treks that require significant amounts of time daily that drain your soul, and finally the latest campaigns (Chult, Ravenloft, etc) are progressed with weekly quests instead of dailies.

My advice is to just work on them when you feel like it.  If you really don’t feel like it, you have another option: campaign buyout tokens.  You can find these both in the ZEN store and in the Auction House. If you are earning 100K AD a day from doing dungeons and other stuff, you can buyout most of the early campaigns within a week.  Even the newer campaign buyouts can be earned within 2 weeks. Getting to 60 total boons is a big deal though, as that’s both 1500 item level, as well as unlocks all 3 of your Master Boons.

So what boons should you take?  Remember that I value Defense, Armor Penetration, and Critical Strike heavily; they are your priority to cap.  The other stats I see value in, but don’t believe you should go out of your way to cap them; your companion and bondings will mostly take care of them.  Because of that, I don’t like taking those stats in boons, either. My focus is on Power > Other Stuff > Hit Points.

In the first four tiers there is a 5-point boon that grants 1250 Power at 5/5.  You should take all of these as your priority. Also in the first four tiers, there is a 5-point point that grants 5% increased damage & damage resistance to a specific enemy type at 5/5; I also like taking these.  Finally, in each tier there is a special effect, for Gold Gain, Movement Speed, Companion Influence, or Control Resist. I like to take all of these as well. Grand total that’s 60 points of boons. If you like a different set of Boons in Tier 1-4, go for it.  I think these are the best bang for your buck, but they aren’t super critical.

Tier 5 is important though.  You can put 4 points in two boons (8 total) at this tier.  For both paragons I prefer to choose Critical Severity, and Recharge Speed.  Critical Severity and Recharge Speed are both rare stats to pick up, so they are great to get here.  Incoming/Outgoing Healing, and Stamina Regen are all good for paladins, but there are sources for all of them on enchants, companions, and armor kits already.

At Master Tier you get 3 more points to spend, 1 for every 20 boons you have spent.  For Justicar you should take Focused Retaliation, which gives you a chance to mirror all damage back to the attacker for 15 seconds when you use an encounter power.  On Oathkeeper you should select Blessed Resilience, which gives you a chance to restore 12% stamina to anyone you heal, which is huge for tanks.

Stronghold

The second set of boons you receive is from joining a guild.  The Stronghold gives you access to three boons, Offense, Defense, and Miscellaneous, and which ones you can select depends on the structures in your guild.  You can get quite a few extra stat points from these. I’m not going to get into how to build the structures and maintain them, that’s well beyond this guide–we’re just going to look at which boons to take:

• Offense – Power.  As always, Power = Damage.  Get more power.
• Defense – Hit Points.  Again, Hit Points don’t cap, and make you live longer.  Get Hit Points.
• Miscellaneous – Mount Speed.  Really take what you like here, but Mount Speed is the most useful.

That’s everything I have to offer on your boons; they are quite worth getting, whether you do that by grinding the campaigns out, buying them in the auction house with AD, or just breaking out the wallet and buying some campaign completions using ZEN.

Companions changed a lot in Mod 16, so I’ll start with the basics in case the reader is new to the game or at least new to this mod.

How do they work?

Your companion tab has a couple different sections.  First, you have your summoned companion. This is the companion that will follow you around and battle your enemies beside you.  They can level up to 40 when legendary, and they higher level they are, the higher their stats. When your companions hit their max level (35 at epic for example) you can use Companion Upgrade Tokens (from Lockboxes or ZEN Store) or Astral Diamonds to upgrade them to the next color.  (White > Green > Blue > Purple > Orange) You can have lots of companions. The base stats of your companion are determined by their level, the amount of Bolster they have, and your Companion Influence. I just introduced two new terms there, so let me explain them.

Bolster is a percentage multiplied by the base stats of your summoned companion, that is determined by the five best quality pets you have in that category (Fighters, Creatures, Invokers, Mystical, Beasts).  For example, I have an Ioun Stone of Might on my paladin, which is a Mystical companion. My best five companions in that category are 1 legendary, and 4 epic. You get 3% bolster for a legendary, and 2.5% for epic, so that’s 13% bolster to any Mystical companion I summon.  Companion Influence is gained from various sources, including Charisma, Dark enchantments, and Boons. It also boosts the base stats of your summoned companion, regardless of category.

The downside of these two stats is that they boost the base stats of the companion, not their stats after you include their gear and runestones, so the end result is these two stats have a much smaller impact on your companion than you might hope.  Let’s move on to the gear.

On the right side of the Companion window, you have 3 slots for Bonding Runestones, and 3 slots for Companion Gear.  The Bonding Runestones each transfer a portion of your pet’s stats to your character. The Companion Gear slots can only equip gear specifically for companions; you will get a Pearl Ring of the Companion, Choke Chain of the Companion, and Plated Belt of the Companion during the Undermountain campaign–these are the best gear you can get for them right now.  Each piece of companion gear has 1-2 slots that you can put runestones, which work like enchantments for companion gear. With Mod 17 there has been new companion gear introduced which you can opt for to improve your stats even further.

The catch here is that your Bonding Runestones transfer the stats of your companion including the gear and runestones.  At max rank, 3 rank 15 Bonding Runestones will transfer 210% of your pet’s stats to your character.  Additionally, if you use an “augment” companion, rather than fight beside you they have a bonus of 1000 stat points to three of their stats, and transfer 100% of their stats to you.  That means that you get 310% of your augments stats transferred to you, and an extra 3100 in three stats, depending on the companion you use.

For this reason, augment pets are the optimal companion for reaching your stat caps.  As far as which companion you should use? You want an epic augment at least, and getting it to Legendary (1 million AD to upgrade) should be a priority.  This also is why getting up to rank 15 Bonding Runestones is also critical. Plus, because Bonding Runestones don’t cost gold to take out of their socket, you can freely swap them between your characters, making them an incredibly good investment.

The last section of the Companion tab is the enhancement section.  Along the bottom you have 6 slots; the top left is your companion power.  Each companion you own has a different power that you can slot here. My preferred one is either Power, or Critical Severity if you have a companion that offers it.  The remaining slots are for enhancement powers, which again are offered by each companion. It’s important to note if a companions enhancement can be put into Offense, Defense, or Utility slots, which vary by class.  A paladin has 1 Offense, 3 Defense, and 1 Utility slot.

There are hundreds of pets and different options for these enhancement powers, and each player will have ones they prefer.  I like Outgoing Healing% when Healing, because there are not a lot of sources for it. I like Deflect when tanking. Because I haven’t felt like running two different sets of enhancement companions, I currently use Neverember Guard, Polar Bear Cub, and Rebel Mercenary (all give 10% Outgoing Healing Bonus at legendary), as well as Ioun Stone of Might and Goat (+4000 Deflect each) in my last two slots.  This leaves me with over 50% Incoming & Outgoing healing on both specs, which I’ve been happy with.

You might want to focus on Power or Combat Advantage, or whatever else.  This is really a personal customization here. I will acknowledge that a huge source of Combat Advantage is from these enhancement slots–you can pick up 24K Combat Advantage with the right enhancement companions.

Ah… mounts.  There are tons of mounts in the game, and we love them for getting us from point A to point B quickly.  They also offer us another avenue to increase out stats however! This is done with Insignia Slots. You can have up to five mounts in your “Stable”, and each one will have up to 3 insignia slots (rare and better have 3 slots, while white/green have 2).  Your first goal with mounts should be to get 5 mounts that are rare or better, unlocking 15 insignia slots.

The combination of insignia types you use will unlock various Insignia powers, but none of them are going to be earth shattering changes to your character.  I like Gladiator’s Guile (movement speed when stamina full) and Wanderer’s Fortune (refinement stones drop from kills) a lot, as well as anything the heals when I kill, crit, deflect, get controlled etc.  If you use the same insignia power twice, the second one will be half effect, the third will be a quarter (the max you can have). What’s more important is that you have 15 insignias. Green insignias are better than nothing (and very cheap) while Rare ones are the best bang for your astral diamonds.

You can get most stat combinations on insignias, you just need to look through them.  My preferred insignia is of course Dominance, which has Power as the primary boost. Some insignia types don’t have Dominance available, and I use Brutality with them.  Free free to tweak your insignias to fit your stat needs, though ultimately most people are going to end up with Dominance/Brutality in the end as they hit their stat caps.

You also get access to an Equip Power gained from your available mounts (I use +5000 power from Guard Drake) as well as a combat power if you have a legendary mount (which I do not).

As I said in the beginning, my goal was to explain how all of the abilities of a paladin work, in both paragons, so you can make an informed decision as to how you will run your own character.  At the same time, I’d like to give a summary of what I run myself, now that I’ve explained all of these powers and mechanics.

I hope I’ve made it clear that your powers (and sometimes features) should be changing throughout a dungeon, based on the content.  I’m going to give an example of what I would run during a Lair of the Mad Mage dungeon, from both paragons:

Justicar

Dailies:  Divine Judgement, Shield of Faith

Features:  Aura of Valor & Divine Challenger

Feats:  Sacred Shield, Baneful Strikes, Divine Pursuit, Sheltering Light, Unyielding Champion

• Trash Clear:  I’m using Burning Light primarily for the 3s stun, and using Oath Strike plus Bane to do damage.  I’ve got Vow of Enmity as a backup to round up loose piles of adds or to just establish aggro on a pack.
• Arcturia: I’m loading out for single target DPS with Smite, Sacred Weapon doubling for stamina regen and single target damage, and Relentless Assault giving me a periodic dash and solid single target damage.  I keep Oath Strike in case I have to round up any golems.
• Bore Worm:  I swap in Radiant Slam because it’s optimal for killing boulders.  I go back to Bane and Vow as they are my best tools for keeping the golems aggro on the second half of the fight (plus the worm attacks people randomly regardless of aggro).  Divine Touch is loaded in to help with healing the AOE phase if needed.
• Trobriand:  Still using Radiant Slam so I can quickly get back in position if I get knocked back, as well as letting me charge to the next tesla coil in that phase.  Running Smite (in case I lose aggro), Sacred Weapon (threat/damage/stamina) and Binding Oath (pure stamina). Activate Divine Champion to block the Palm Blast while swinging (and 75% block with Unyielding Champion) and after the towers fall I activate Divine Palisade plus Sigil of the Paladin (20% total damage reduction) to help with the blast.

Oathkeeper

Dailies:  Lay on Hands, Sanctuary

Features:  Aura of Restoration, Timely Intervention

Feats:  Critical Touch, Prayer of Opportunity, Spirit of Austerity, Divine Intervention, Emissary of Warding

• Trash Clear: I use Slam to get into the middle of the fight and then Valorous.  Use Divine Touch to refresh shields whenever Critical Touch procs, use Burning Light more for the stun, and Bane to taste as long as Divinity holds.  Remember to use up Prayer of Opportunity stacks.
• Arcturia:  Swap in Fulmination so I can damage her without moving as needed.  Bond of Virtue is used on cocooned players to double our healing output, and Circle of Power is used after mimic phase both to regain divinity, and boost my healing for the cocoon (which procs Timely Intervention).  Always be using Valorous or Fulmination to proc Critical Touch.
• Bore Worm: Back to Slam for the boulder phase.  During the AOE phase I drop Circle of Power and use Prayer of Opportunity stacks.  Guarded Prayers is handy here but if you need more healing go with Aura of Restoration.
• Trobriand:  Running Fulmination again as I really need to use Circle of Power to regen divinity so I don’t like to move a lot.  Divine Touch and Circle of Power are used normally, and I keep Bond of Virtue ready in case the tank needs some emergency healing.  I will swap in Cleansing Touch here if someone gets the attraction debuff (lowers damage and damage resistance) which can mean death in the tower phase.  After the towers fall I pop Sigil of the Paladin then Sanctuary (25% total damage reduction) for the big hit.

Conclusion

This should give you a solid understanding of what powers I’m using and why, as well as adapt it for any specific content.  The only thing I would add is that when I’m soloing, I run in Oathkeeper.  When soloing for an extended period (Legacy Campaigns for example) I run:

• At-Wills:  Valorous Strike, Radiant Slam
• Encounters:  Smite, Burning Light, Bane
• Dailies:  Divine Judgement, Radiant Charge
• Features:  Blessed Wanderer, Guarded Prayers

Playstyle is really simple; run up to a pack, pop off a full Burning Light.  If there are three or more targets still alive, use Bane, otherwise use Smite.  If you need to block, use Channel Divinity instead.

So on the first tab of the character sheet we’ll cover Race, Attributes, and Equipment.  Some of these require more focus than others.

Race

With Mod16 this has become less important than ever; at most any particular race is going to net you 2 extra attribute points or a minor effect.  Pick the race that you want to look at for the duration of the character’s life. Any advantage that one race may or may not have over another race is so small that the standard deviation of random number generation is going to be larger than the difference.  I like human paladins; I come from old-school D&D where paladins were always human. That was the extent of my choice.

Attributes

So your attributes is really an extension of the Race question, isn’t it?  Whatever race you choose, you’re going to have to select an attribute(s) to increase.  Let’s look at how your attributes impact your paladin:

• Strength:  Stamina Regeneration & Physical Damage Boost
• Constitution:  Maximum Hit Points & Action Points
• Dexterity:  Critical Severity & Movement Speed
• Intelligence:  Control Bonus & Magical Damage Boost
• Wisdom:  Control Resist & Outgoing Healing Boost
• Charisma:  Companion Influence & Recharge Speed

For both paragons, you want to increase your Intelligence, as all of your damage is magical.  For the second attribute I recommend Dexterity to improve you Critical Severity.  You want to hit hard and crit harder, and I believe this is the best combination to do so.

But let’s review what the other attributes offer; when evaluating artifact equipment you might be looking at gaining some of these, so let’s understand which is better.  Strength offers almost nothing to wizards; Stamina Regeneration is not a significant gain for us.  Constitution is a mediocre attribute for DPS roles; more HP is always good, and AP gain never hurt anyone, but I would never strive to get it.  Wisdom is the healer’s attritube, and something a wizard should pass on given the choice.  Charisma is a solid choice and my third pick after INT & DEX because Recharge Speed is always good, though Companion Influence is lackluster (more on that in Companions).  However the Thaumaturge has significant cooldown reduction already, and the Arcanist uses a lot of fast cooldown encounters already, so the impact of Charisma is mitigated a bit.

Equipment

So this is the big question–what is the best gear to wear!?  I won’t focus on that, because that changes all the time. With Mod 17 here, the best gear from Tower of the Mad Mage has equip bonuses that replace all of the level 70 Chult/Barovia items that were clung to in Mod 16.  Basically anything that gives flat percentage boosts to damage is probably the absolute best. Sharpedge’s mechanics guide (link in Summary) has a nice breakdown of all the decent equip powers if you want to go for those.  However if you have full Successor and Protege gear? You’ll be just fine. All that really matters are your caps, so let’s talk about those, instead.

For Lair of the Mad Mage, the end-game content as of Mod17, 60K points for level 80 content, 68K for Lair of the Mad Mage, and 80K for Tower of the Mad Mage.  A few stats like Accuracy start hitting a soft-cap around 8-10K before the hard-cap, when adding more Accuracy has the same impact to your overall damage as just adding more Power.  The same goes for Deflect, when you reach a point where your life expectancy against incoming damage increases the same if you just add more Hit Points.

So what stats do you focus on hard capping?  For both paragons:

• Defense: To overcome enemy Armor Penetration so you always take 50% damage.
• Armor Penetration:  To overcome enemy Defense so you always hit for 100% damage.
• Critical Strike:  To overcome enemy Critical Avoidance, so you will critically hit 50% of the time.
• Combat Advantage:  To overcome enemy Awareness, so you will do 100% combat advantage damage.

And that’s it.  Now before veterans freak out–I’m not saying to ignore the other stats.  I’m just saying it’s not essential to cap them, when Power & Hit Points are the other option:

• Accuracy:  Capping that you will never be Deflected.  But before the hard cap you will get the same overall damage increase from just stacking on more Power.  Still, this is the fourth stat you should try to reach the cap on as a DPS.
• Awareness:  You take Awareness to counter enemy Combat Advantage.  As a DPS this is not an important stat.
• Critical Avoidance:  In Mod17, enemies received critical severity, which means you take more damage when you are hit with a crit.  This makes Critical Avoidance an important stat for tanks, but of limited use to DPS.
• Deflect:  Capping means you will hit the max Deflect chance of 50%, which would be a mitigation of 25%.  There comes a point (8-10K before cap) where adding more Deflect doesn’t extend your life expectancy more than just adding more Hit Points, but again as a DPS, you don’t need raise this stat intentionally.

I’ll say again, I’m not suggesting that these stats aren’t important, just that you should get enough from your gear and companion that you don’t need to allocate slots to them.

So Where Do the Stats Come From?

The most obvious is your gear you wear.  As I mentioned before there are some older pieces of gear with great Equip bonuses, but you’ll be fine if you’re newer and just go with Spy Guild/Protege/Successor/etc.  For your main/offhand you will want to get Alabaster (Mountaineer if RNG hates you), and you should get a good neck/waist (most important is to have the extra enchant slots).  I like the Wyvern set because I get DEX/INT from it. Any of the new sets are fine though; the Electric Collar/Charged Restraints are really cheap after all, and there’s nothing wrong with DEX/CHA.

The next source of stats (and probably the most important) is your companion.  As of this writing, your best gain is from an augment. There are lots of augments to choose from, and the main driver for your choice should be the 3 bonus stats that augment has.  I’ll get into the choices I like in the Companion section, but for right now I like any augment companion with a boost to Power or Combat Advantage. Along with that augment companion, you need Bonding Runestones.  The better they are, the more stats your augment is transferring to you. Additionally, Bonding Runestones have no cost to unslot, so they are very simple to swap between characters through the shared bank–so it’s a really solid, safe investment.  Runestones are a good way to tweak any stats you are coming up short on, or just stack on more power with them if you are capped where you want to be.  In addition to your active companion, you also have five enhancement slots (3 offense, 1 defense, 1 utility) which allow you to slot powers from all of the companions you have.

Then you have your mount insignias.  One of your first goals should be to get 5 mounts with 3 insignia slots each, and fill them with rare insignias.  As far as insignia powers go, I always want Gladiator’s Guile (at least once) on my characters, Wanderer’s Forturne (because I still need RP) and after that I pick up any “when X happens, heal for Y” powers that I can manage (Barbarian’s Revelry, Oppressor’s Reprieve, and Survivor’s Blessing).  Epic insignias cost a fortune and are one of the worst returns for investment you can buy. Get rares, fill out any stat gaps you have, and then stack on power.

The last spot you can work on is your enchantments and armor/jewel kits.  Again, look at your stats, and if you have any holes left (you really shouldn’t) then plug them, and after that stack on the power and hit points.  You can pick up some power and Combat Advantage with armor/jewel kits, and that’s usually my pick there.

So this is the meat and potatoes of any class guide.  I’m going to focus on giving my take on every power, feature, and feat, as well as the best use-cases for them.  I will conclude this section with what my preferred choices are as well.  Before getting into the powers though, let’s discuss what makes the paragon paths different.

The Arcanist specializes in single target damage, with a handful of hard-hitting, fast cooldown arcane encounter powers, all boosted by arcane mastery stacks which build up quickly.  They are capable of a barrage of rapid fire encounter powers with the right daily use.  Their AOE damage output is lackluster, because of limited AOE powers which tend to be awkward or lack synergy.

The Thaumaturge on the other hand specializes in AOE damage, with full suite of hard-hitting, variable cooldown fire & cold encounter powers, all boosted by arcane mastery and chill stacks, but more importantly, constantly proccing Smolder, which will represent the majority of this path’s damage output.  When it comes to single-target, this path is quite capable of dealing solid damage especially in combination with the feat Shatter Strike, but will generally still fall short of what the Arcanist can do to a boss.

At-Wills

• Magic Missile – Fast casting single-target 25 magnitude single-target at-will with a 3 animation cycle.  The last strike hits 3 times and adds an Arcane stack.  This is the highest damage arcane at-will the wizard has available, and builds action points fastest.
• Ray of Frost – Channeled 40 magnitude at-will that hits every 0.5 seconds for 4 seconds, applying Chill every time it does damage.  Builds action points slower than other at-wills.  On Arcanist this benefits from the feat Snap Freeze to add a 40 magnitude hit with each Chill stack.  On Thaumaturge whenever it applies Chill to a target with Smolder, it procs Rimefire Smolder.  If the first tick of damage crits, the entire channel will crit.  In Mod17 this power was nerfed so that the feature Critical Conflagration only procs on the first crit of a channel, instead every tick in the channel.  Additionally, Rimefire Smolder will only proc a max of once per second.

Arcanist

• Storm Pillar – This is an 8′ radius, 25-60 magnitude AOE, depending on how long you charge it (up to 1.6s), if you charge it at least 50% it will refresh Arcane/Chill stacks, and if you fully charge it, it will continue to hit the area for 30 mag/sec for 3 seconds.  Storm Pillar is not what I would consider a good AOE at-will.  However it’s the only one that Arcanist gets, so you take what you can get.  It can also be activated instantly, which is handy for killing boulders in the Bore Worm fight.
• Arcane Bolt –  This is a slower casting 45 magnitude version of Magic Missile, that on paper looks like it should do more DPS, but actually ends up doing a little less because Magic Missile hits 3 times on the last cast of the combo.  The end result leaves Arcane Bolt falling short of Magic Missile in just about every aspect.

Thaumaturge

• Scorching Burst – Up to 8′ radius, 25-60 magnitude AOE, depending on how long you charge it (up to 1.7s).  The radius starts at 1′ and expands as it charges up till you release it.  Unlike Storm Pillar, this is actually a decent AOE at-will.  The reason is that it procs Smolder, and Smolder on a Chill target becomes Rimefire Smolder, which actually hits pretty hard.  As long as you’re hitting chilled targets with Scorching Burst, it’s quite good.  On non-chilled targets, it’s about the same as Storm Pillar.  All powers that proc Smolder are boosted by the feats Glowing Flames, Critical Burn, and Directed Flames.  Also because it’s charged, you can insta-cast this to kill boulders in the Bore Worm fight.
• Chilling Cloud – Medium casting 50 magnitude, 3-combo at-will that does AOE damage on the final hit, as well as add Chill to all targets.  On targets that are already chilled, Scorching Burst is going to be better, especially when only used for one or two cycles.  When used for a longer duration, Chilling Cloud will keep the targets chilled, meaning it procs Rimefire every third hit.  I flop back and forth on which one I use–Chilling Cloud is just fire and forget, while you have to pay attention more with Scorching Burst.

Encounters

Wizards have a fourth spell mastery slot for their encounter powers.  I will detail the effects of putting a power in the mastery slot [M] with each description.

• Repel – This is an 80′ single target 375 magnitude, nearly instant cast, with a 10s cooldown.  It also pushes the target, which does not make friends.  In Mastery it becomes a 140 magnitude AOE that pushes everything.  When used on control-immune targets, Repel is a fantastic encounter, when used on things you can push, it can be great for pushing things off ledges, but is also a very fast way to upset group members.  For the Arcanist it’s a staple in boss rotations for the quick cast, nice damage, and arcane stack.  It’s also one of the limited AOE options available, but scattering enemies has no synergy.  The Thaumaturge relies on Repel in a boss-rotation in combination with Shatter Strike to boost the damage to control-immune targets.  The only reason to slot it into Mastery for this path is for pushing groups of enemies off of ledges to their doom; they have plenty of AOE alternatives.
• Entangling Force – An 80′ single target 375 magnitude Hold+DOT on a 15s cooldown.  Every arcane stack extends the duration 0.1s, and every 0.5s of extension adds an additional tick of damage (increasing to 500/625 magnitude at 5/10 stacks).  The Arcanist leans heavily on this power for boss-rotations with their ability to stack arcane mastery 10 times.  The Thaumaturge gets a boost to the magnitude of this power from the feat Shatter Strike.  Putting this power into mastery increases the magnitude by 10%.
• Icy Terrain – This is a 15′ radius, 200 magnitude point-blank AOE with a 0.8s cast and 17s cooldown.  In addition to pulsing the damage ten times, it roots targets in the initial cast for 1.5s, and applies Chill with each tick of damage.  On an Arcanist this can apply Snap Freeze up to 10 times per target, and on Thaumaturge this should proc Rimefire Smolder 10 times (from Chill and Critical Conflagration) at once per second.  This is a mainstay of the AOE rotation for both paragon paths.  When placed on Mastery, in addition to doing 10% more damage, it becomes a placed AOE up to 80′ away.  Icy Terrain isn’t really a high damage ability–it’s a carrier for lots of procs, which do heavy damage in aggregate.  Because it’s a stationary AOE, it’s often sub-optimal on boss-fights, where the boss can move out of the effect easily.  Icy Terrain sometimes fails to hit “floating” enemies reliably as well, so be mindful of this.
• Ray of Enfeeblement – This is an 80′ range, 350 magnitude DOT, single target 0.34s cast with a 16s cooldown.  For 10 seconds the target deals 10% less damage.  On Mastery, the magnitude increases to 385 magnitude and the target takes 10% increased damage from magic & projectile damage.  For both paragons, this power is typically the best power to run on Mastery for boss fights, as it boosts all damage the wizard does by 10% for 10 out of every 16 seconds.
• Shield – This is a 1.6 second cast on yourself, and provides an ablative shield that refills after 6 seconds of not being hit.  If activated a second time, it will pulse outward for 175 magnitude and push all target hit, then cool down for 18.5 seconds.  Arcane Mastery stacks will increase the severity of the push, and shorten the cooldown.  On Mastery the shield is increased by 10%, the push is intensified, and the magnitude of the pulse increases to 193.  Shield is kind of a niche use–if you do need the shield, then you probably want it on Mastery, and essentially you’re trading one of your encounter powers for a powerful defensive buff.

Arcanist

• Lightning Bolt – This is a 30′ range, 5′ wide, 150 magnitude column, that casts in 0.72s with a 12.4s cooldown.  It will refresh Arcane & Chill stacks on any targets hit.  On Mastery the magnitude is increased to 165.  Lighting Bolt is one of the few AOE spells the Arcanist has, but it’s not great.  The range is very short, the width is very narrow, and the damage is low.  Still, with few options for AOE it’s still worth slotting if you must AOE on Arcanist.
• Disintegrate – This is an 80′ range, 300 magnitude single target with 0.35s cast time and a fast 7.1s cooldown.  If the target is 20% or less health, it does 50% extra damage (450 magnitude).  On Mastery the magnitude increases to 330 (495).  Disintegrate is one of the staples of the single target rotation for Arcanist, putting out very respectable DPS.
• Steal Time – This is a 30′ radius 200 magnitude AOE that slows up to 4 times for 2s, and stuns for up to 1.5s depending on how long the cast time charged (it can be interrupted by moving).  The duration of both increases by 0.2s/arcane stack, up to 2 additional seconds at 10 stacks.  The cast time is up to 1.5 seconds, and takes 15.9 seconds to cool down.  In Mastery the magnitude increases to 220.  On paper this looks decent, but the reality is that it’s a large AOE on a middle duration cooldown that is easily interrupted.  It’s not a great AOE, but it’s not terrible either.
• Shard of the Endless Avalanche – This power summons an icy boulder before you on the first activation (0.74s cast time), and hurls that boulder the way you are facing on the second activation (triggering a 17.7s cooldown).  Anything struck will take 125 magnitude and be knocked down; after sitting for awhile, or colliding with at least two targets, it will explode in a 5′ radius for 125 magnitude damage.  Also standing near the boulder gives an arcane stack each second.  In Mastery the magnitude increases to 138.  This is a fun power, but not necessarily a good power.  If used on a tightly packed group you might get the full 250 magnitude delivered to 2 or 3 targets at most; in reality it will probably to 250 to two targets and 125 to the rest.  But again, there are only 5 AOE encounters for the Arcanist, and one of them is an AE Repel, so this makes the cut if you must AOE.
• Imprisonment – This is an 80′ control power that casts in 0.4s with a 14.2s cooldown.  The target is held for 3s and takes 15% extra arcane damage for 6 seconds, and you gain an arcane stack.  On mastery the bonus increases to 25% to arcane powers.  This power is in direct competition with Ray of Enfeeblement on mastery; ultimately RoF does damage, and boosts all damage by 10%, not just arcane, with higher uptime (10 out of 16 seconds).

Thaumaturge

• Fanning the Flame – This is an 80′ single target 75 magnitude fire spell that applies smolder, with a 0.6s cast time and enormous 20.4s cooldown.  Any enemies within 15′ of the target that have smolder take 25 magnitude fire damage and also inflict 25 magnitude fire damage back to the target.  On Mastery the magnitude of the initial hit becomes 83.  The idea for this power sounds cool–but in reality it’s terrible.  It’s probably the worst power the wizard gets, period.  The feedback effect sounds cool, but in reality even if you applied Smolder to everything first (with Fireball or Scorching Burst) hitting a pack of 5 targets would bounce back 125 magnitude to the main target, and only 25 to each of the other four.  Even with an enormous pack around the target this power still only works as an okay single target power that has a weak AOE splash, on a really long cooldown.
• Icy Rays – This is an 80′ range spell with an 18.6s cooldown.  On the first activation it places a rune over a target, on the second activation it applies 275 magnitude cold to your target plus the target you runed.  If those are the same target, it does 400 magnitude.  All targets are stunned 1s and gain a stack of Chill.  On mastery the magnitude is 302, 440 if both rays hit the same target.  This is a good, solid power.  If going single target with Thaumaturge it’s a viable power that hits hard, but it suffers from a longer cooldown, and is usually overshadowed by other AOE powers, which is what the Thaumaturge excels at.
• Chill Strike – This is an 80′ range, 400 magnitude cold power that casts in 0.4s, with a 13.9s cooldown.  It stuns for 0.5s and applies Chill to the target.  On Mastery it becomes a 150 magnitude AOE, applying the stun and chill to all targets.  This is a staple power for the Thaumaturge, especially used in Mastery for a 4th strong AOE which can apply chill to everything at range, before powers that apply smolder land, giving you Rimefire Smolder.
• Conduit of Ice – This is an 80′ range DOT that deals 175 magnitude cold to the target and surrounding enemies, as well as applying Chill to all enemies affected.  It casts in 0.8s and has a short 12s cooldown.  On mastery the damage increases to 192 magnitude.  This is a staple power for the Thaumaturge, as it hits over and over, and on a critical will continually apply Rimefire Smolder to the target in combination with Critical Conflagration.  Valuable power both for single target and AOE.
• Fireball – This classic spell from tabletop is an 80′ range, 15′ radius, 250 magnitude fire AOE that applies Smolder to all targets hit.  It has a long cast time of 1.1s, and a long cooldown of 18.6s.  On Mastery the radius is increased to 20′ and the magnitude increases to 275.  This is a mainstay for the AOE thaumaturge; the long cast and cooldown are a hassle, but it’s the hardest hitting AOE they have, and if Chill is applied to targets first, it’s landing Rimefire Smolder on everything when it hits.  For sustained use the DPS suffers from the long cast and cooldown, but for a power used once on each trash pack, Fireball performs well.

Dailies

• Arcane Singularity – This is a huge AOE daily, with an 80′ range and giant 42′ radius of effect.  It casts slowly over 1.8s and deals 500 magnitude arcane to everything hit.  It also grants 1 arcane stack.  This is a solid AOE power for both paragons.
• Ice Knife – An 80′ range single target, 1400 magnitude cold power with a 1s cast time.  The target is knocked down and has 3 stacks of Chill applied.  Great single target daily for the Thaumaturge.
• Oppressive Force – This is a daily with a 25′ radius around the wizard, which casts in 0.9s, Dazes 1s, grants an arcane stack, and then explodes for 275 magnitude, repelling the targets away.  This is an okay power, applying some control, but in most cases Arcane Singularity works better.

Arcanist

• Maelstrom of Chaos – This is an 80′ range, 8′ radius daily that delivers 450 magnitude arcane damage, knocks down the target for 1s, and refreshes arcane and chill stacks.  Arcane Singularity delivers a bigger hit over a bigger radius.
• Arcane Empowerment – This shows an 80′ range, but it’s actually a self buff.  After a 1.3s cast time, all your arcane encounters are boosted by 10% damage, and recharge extremely fast (2-3 seconds) for 10 seconds.  Also the wizard gains 5 arcane mastery stacks.  This is the daily that should be used on Arcanist for your boss-killing rotation.

Thaumaturge

• Furious Immolation – This is a 80′ range, 35′ radius AOE pull with a 2s cast that does 475 magnitude fire, and applies Smolder.  Because of the pull and Smolder this is the ideal AOE daily for the Thaumaturge.
• Ice Storm – This is a 40′ radius cold AOE that casts in 1.9s and does 450 magnitude cold.  Targets hit are slowed for 5s and knockdown, plus receive Chill.  With the huge radius this is another great pick for the Thaumaturge in combination with the feature Frost Wave, otherwise Furious Immolation is usually more useful.

Mechanics

• Control Mastery – All wizards benefit from their Stun, Root, Hold, and Daze lasting 2.5x longer on NPCs than on players in PVP.
• Arcane Mastery – Most arcane powers grant the wizard a stacking Arcane Mastery buff.  All arcane damage dealt by the wizard is increased by 0.5% per stack for 8 seconds.  The maximum stack is 5, or 10 with the feat A Step Above Mastery.
• Teleport – This is the wizard’s dodge power.  It shifts a good distance and uses about 25% of your stamina.  You are immune for roughly 1 second after the Teleport.
• Chill – Most cold powers apply stacks of Chill to their targets, which applies a Slow up to 6 times (max stacks).  Some powers will Freeze/Stun a target that is at maximum stacks (Ray of Frost, Icy Terrain, Conduit of Ice).  The feature Chilling Presence and the Thaumaturge feat Frigid Winds causes targets afflicted with Chill to take increased damage per stack on them.  With the Arcanist feat Snap Freeze, Chill inflicts 40 cold magnitude to the target with each application.
• Spell Mastery – Your Tab power gives you a fourth encounter slot, which will boost the damage of any encounter slotted there by 10%, plus provide some additional effects for some powers.

Thaumaturge

• Smolder – The Thaumaturge has many powers which apply the Smolder effect to the target.  This effects is a DOT that inflicts 20 magnitude fire every second for 4 seconds.  If applied to a target with Chill, the effect changes to Rimefire Smolder, which causes the effect to be refreshed by Chill.  The feature Critical Conflagration causes your critical hits to proc smolder, and the feat Directed Flames causes Smolder to hit once for 75% damage (60 magnitude) instead of a DOT.  The effect stays in place though, and anything refreshing it (including Chill on Rimefire Smolder) will cause it to do the damage again.  Note that Rimefire Smolder can’t be refreshed more often than every second (this was a nerf applied in Mod17).

Class Features

Every class can have two class features active at any time, these powers are passive.

• Evocation – This will increase the damage of all your AOE powers by 5%.  It’s an okay option for AOE heavy loadouts.
• Arcane Presence – This causes your Cold, Fire, and Lightning damage to be increased by Arcane Mastery stacks, and gives you 5% recharge speed.  Useful on Arcanist builds using Ray of Frost at their single target at-will.
• Chilling Presence – Causes all targets affected by Chill to take 1% increased damage per stack (6% max) and double on frozen targets (12%).  Very strong feature for the Thaumaturge, which applies tons of Chill and Freeze.
• Orb of Imposition – Increases control duration by 20%.  This feat falls a bit flat versus so many better options.

Arcanist

• Eye of the Storm – On casting an encounter or daily power, you gain 10,000 critical strike for 5 seconds, with a 20 second cooldown.  As crit is very easy to cap, it’s pretty worthless.
• Storm Spell – Every time you critical, there is a 30% chance you will deliver a 100 magnitude hit (that will crit).  So it’s basically a 15% chance to do a critical 100 magnitude hit–extremely good feature.
• Storm Fury – When struck you inflict a 50 magnitude hit on the attacker, with a 3 second cooldown.  It’s not that this is a bad effect, but as a wizard you should not be getting hit enough for this to be good.
• Arcane Power Field – After activating a Daily (which should be Arcane Empowerment) your damage bonus from Arcane Mastery is doubled for 8 seconds, and you inflict a 50 magnitude hit to all enemies within 30′ every 2 seconds.  If you aren’t using Ray of Frost as your primary at-will on Arcanist, this is better than Arcane Presence.

Thaumaturge

• Critical Conflagration – Critical severity increased by 10%.  Whenever you crit you apply Smolder to the target.  Combined with the feat Directed Flames this is a staple of Thaumaturge damage.  On chilled targets this will apply Rimefire Smolder.
• Swath of Destruction – Smolder damage is increased by 5%, and targets affected by Smolder take 2% increased damage.  Sounds good, but that’s only 4 extra magnitude, 3 extra magnitude with Directed Flames, and Chilling Presence will apply about 6% increased damage on average.
• Combustive Action – When a target affected by Smolder is killed by another power, regain 1% of your Action Points, with a 1 second cooldown.  It’s not a bad power, but doesn’t compare to the damage increasing options you have.
• Frost Wave – On Daily use, apply 3 stacks of Chill (capable of Freezing) in a 30′ radius around you, and refresh the Freeze on already frozen targets.  While this is a very good power, starting with Mod 16 using dailies more than once per minute or so is very rare, so it doesn’t apply often enough to give up a stronger feature for it.

Feats

Arcanist

• Alacrity vs Spell Twisting – Alacrity causes your encounter powers to cool down 2 seconds when you use a Daily power.  Spell Twisting grants you a stack of the same name when you use an encounter power (up to 4 max).  When you use an at-will power one stack is consumed, giving you 1% of your Action Points.  Using a daily more than once per minute is rare, and you will constantly use your at-wills between encounters.  Spell Twisting is the clear pick for me.
• Assailing Force vs Snap Freeze – Assailing Force causes your encounter powers to have a 10% chance of granting this buff.  The next encounter power used will do double damage, consuming the buff.  Shard of the Endless Avalanche will only do double damage on the explosion.  Snap Freeze will cause the application of a Chill stack to inflict a 40 magnitude hit.  If the hit that applies the Chill crits, so does the Snap Freeze.  Both of these feats are solid picks.  If you are going with Magic Missile as your primary at-will, then Assailing Force is the way to go; if you prefer to use Ray of Frost as your primary, then Snap Freeze will be better for you.
• Chaos Magic vs Iced Lightning – Chaos Magic gives your encounter powers are 10% chance to grant one of three effects: +100% at-will damage, +100% recharge speed, or 20% AP returned, all over 5 seconds.  Iced Lightning causes the powers Storm Pillar, Lightning Bolt, Storm Spell, and Storm Fury to inflict 10% increased damage on targets with Chill.  Chaos Magic is a good boost no matter which ability you gain, while Storm Spell is the only power you will reliably be using on a Chill target, and even then it’s only adding 10 magnitude.  Chaos Magic is my pick on this one.
• Nightmare Wizardry vs Striking Advantage – Nightmare Wizardry causes critical strikes to have a 10% chance to grant combat advantage for 10 seconds.  Striking Advantage causes combat advantage damage to have a 20% chance of dealing 80 magnitude lightning to your target.  While Nightmare Wizardry is handy when soloing, in a group Striking Advantage is the optimal pick, when you should have combat advantage the majority of the time.
• A Step Above Mastery vs Elemental Reinforcement – A Step Above Mastery allows Arcane Mastery to stack 10 times (instead of 5) and grant 1.5% damage per stack (instead of 0.5%), plus the stacks last 10 seconds (instead of 8).  Elemental Reinforcement causes Arcane, Cold, or Lightning powers to grant 5% damage for 10 seconds.  If you don’t cast the same damage type in a row, the bonus is doubled to 10%.  The ideal powers for a single target rotation are all Arcane though.  Plus, with A Step Above Mastery gives you 15% increased arcane damage at 10 stacks, making it my preferred feat.

Thaumaturge

• Relative Haste vs Smoldering Recovery – Relative Haste speeds up the cooldown of your powers by 1% per Chill applied to all targets, max of 10%.  Smoldering Recovery causes Smolder damage to return 0.25% of your Action Points.  Even with a hefty amount of Smolder happening (remember Rimefire Smolder is limited to 1/second now), the AP gain isn’t massive from Smoldering Recovery.  However you will constantly be applying Chill to everything, and benefit from all your powers 10% recharge boost with Relative Haste, which is my preferred.  Either of these feats are decent though.
• Glowing Flames vs Icy Veins – Glowing Flames causes Smolder procs to radiate 20% of their damage to enemies within 15′ of the target.  Icy Veins causes encounter powers to apply a stack of Chill to all foes within 15′.  With a multitude of ways to apply Chill to targets, and Rimefire Smolder restricted to 1/seconds, I find Glowing Flames to be much more desirable in an AOE environment, where a huge feedback loop of Glowing Flames bounces among all the Smoldering targets.
• Frigid Winds vs Shatter Strike – Frigid Winds causes you to do 1% more damage per stack of Chill on your target.  Shatter Strike gives you a 20% chance to stun frozen targets for 5 seconds and deal 250 magnitude every time you damage them.  Plus, all of your control powers gain 100 magnitude on control immune targets (bosses).  Frigid Winds is nice, though it does not affect Smolder/Rimefire/Glowing Flames damage.  It’s not quite as good as Chilling Presence, but decent.  However Shatter Strike is very powerful on control immune targets, greatly boosting the single target output of a Thaumaturge, making it my pick.  However both of these feats are solid choices.
• Chilling Advantage vs Critical Burn – Chilling Advantage grants you 4% Critical Severity for each stack of chill on the target (24% max).  Critical Burn gives you a flat 10% Critical Severity plus 25% more critical damage from Smolder.  Chilling Advantage will be great for boss fights, where the Chill has time to stack up.  With targets that die quickly like trash, Critical Burn is my pick for being better in burst-damage fights like trash clearing.  Both are solid feats though.
• Directed Flames vs Rimefire Weaving – Directed Flames changes Smolder from a DOT to do 60 magnitude damage instantly when applied (as well as whenever it is refreshed).  Rimefire Weaving causes cold powers to grant 10% extra damage to the next fire power, and vice versa.  Rimefire Weaving is a nice feat, but I find myself running 3 cold encounters and 1 fire, so alternating requires Scorching Burst.  On the other hand Directed Flames is the core of my Thaumaturge strategy, making Smolder procs a significant portion of my damage when applied by critical hits and chill.

General

These are passive skills for all wizards.

• Arcana – This is the wizard gathering skill.  You don’t need kits to loot Arcana nodes.
• Brisk Transport – After using Teleport, your movement rate is increased 10% for 2 seconds.
• Improved Technique – All of your control effects are improved by 5%.
• Controlled Momentum – After using any control power, all allies within 30′ receive a 2% damage increase for 6 seconds.

Boons accomplish a couple of things for your paladin.  First (and most obvious), they give you increases to your stats.  Second, they increase your item level, 25 points at a time. Lastly, at the Master Tier, they give you access to some pretty strong bonuses.  So how do you earn boons? Two ways:

Campaigns

So the primary way you earn boons is by completing campaigns from previous modules.  There are a lot of them, and one can quickly get overwhelmed with the idea of doing all of them.  The first thing to do is relax–you don’t have to do them all at once. My advice is to just pick a campaign, and do the quests for it.  If you have more play time, do another one. If you get bored, stop and run a dungeon or hang out with guildmates. Some of the campaigns (Maze Engine, Sharandar, Dread Ring) are very small time commitments each day, while other campaigns (Tyranny of Dragons, Storm King’s Thunder) are massive, long treks that require significant amounts of time daily that drain your soul, and finally the latest campaigns (Chult, Ravenloft, etc) are progressed with weekly quests instead of dailies.

My advice is to just work on them when you feel like it.  If you really don’t feel like it, you have another option: campaign buyout tokens.  You can find these both in the ZEN store and in the Auction House. If you are earning 100K AD a day from doing dungeons and other stuff, you can buyout most of the early campaigns within a week.  Even the newer campaign buyouts can be earned within 2 weeks. Getting to 60 total boons is a big deal though, as that’s both 1500 item level, as well as unlocks all 3 of your Master Boons.

So what boons should you take?  Remember that I value Defense, Armor Penetration, Critical Strike, and Combat Advantage heavily; they are your priority to cap.  The other stats I see value in, but don’t believe you should go out of your way to cap them; your companion and bondings will mostly take care of them.  Because of that, I don’t like taking those stats in boons, either. My focus is on Power > Other Stuff > Hit Points.

In the first four tiers there is a 5-point boon that grants 1250 Power at 5/5.  You should take all of these as your priority. Also in the first four tiers, there is a 5-point point that grants 5% increased damage & damage resistance to a specific enemy type at 5/5; I also like taking these.  Finally, in each tier there is a special effect, for Gold Gain, Movement Speed, Companion Influence, or Control Resist. I like to take all of these as well. Grand total that’s 60 points of boons. If you like a different set of Boons in Tier 1-4, go for it.  I think these are the best bang for your buck, but they aren’t super critical.

Tier 5 is important though.  You can put 4 points in two boons (8 total) at this tier.  For both paragons I prefer to choose Critical Severity, and Recharge Speed.  Critical Severity and Recharge Speed are both rare stats to pick up, so they are great to get here.  The AP gain boon isn’t a terrible pickup, either if you prefer.

At Master Tier you get 3 more points to spend, 1 for every 20 boons you have spent.  For both paragons I like Deathly Rage, it’s a significant damage bump, particularly on a character that tends to do lots of rapid hits instead of one big hit.

Stronghold

The second set of boons you receive is from joining a guild.  The Stronghold gives you access to three boons, Offense, Defense, and Miscellaneous, and which ones you can select depends on the structures in your guild.  You can get quite a few extra stat points from these. I’m not going to get into how to build the structures and maintain them, that’s well beyond this guide–we’re just going to look at which boons to take:

• Offense – Power.  As always, Power = Damage.  Get more power.
• Defense – Hit Points.  Again, Hit Points don’t cap, and make you live longer.  Get Hit Points.
• Miscellaneous – Mount Speed.  Really take what you like here, but Mount Speed is the most useful.

That’s everything I have to offer on your boons; they are quite worth getting, whether you do that by grinding the campaigns out, buying them in the auction house with AD, or just breaking out the wallet and buying some campaign completions using ZEN.

Companions changed a lot in Mod 16, so I’ll start with the basics in case the reader is new to the game or at least new to this mod.

How do they work?

Your companion tab has a couple different sections.  First, you have your summoned companion. This is the companion that will follow you around and battle your enemies beside you.  They can level up to 40 when legendary, and they higher level they are, the higher their stats. When your companions hit their max level (35 at epic for example) you can use Companion Upgrade Tokens (from Lockboxes or ZEN Store) or Astral Diamonds to upgrade them to the next color.  (White > Green > Blue > Purple > Orange) You can have lots of companions. The base stats of your companion are determined by their level, the amount of Bolster they have, and your Companion Influence. I just introduced two new terms there, so let me explain them.

Bolster is a percentage multiplied by the base stats of your summoned companion, that is determined by the five best quality pets you have in that category (Fighters, Creatures, Invokers, Mystical, Beasts).  For example, I have a Bullete Pup on my wizard, which is a Creature companion. My best five companions in that category are 1 legendary, and 4 epic. You get 3% bolster for a legendary, and 2.5% for epic, so that’s 13% bolster to any Mystical companion I summon.  Companion Influence is gained from various sources, including Charisma, Dark enchantments, Insignias, and Boons. It also boosts the base stats of your summoned companion, regardless of category.

The downside of these two stats is that they boost the base stats of the companion, not their stats after you include their gear and runestones, so the end result is these two stats have a much smaller impact on your companion than you might hope.  Let’s move on to the gear.

On the right side of the Companion window, you have 3 slots for Bonding Runestones, and 3 slots for Companion Gear.  The Bonding Runestones each transfer a portion of your pet’s stats to your character. The Companion Gear slots can only equip gear specifically for companions; you will get a Pearl Ring of the Companion, Choke Chain of the Companion, and Plated Belt of the Companion during the Undermountain campaign–these are the best gear you can get for them right now.  Each piece of companion gear has 1-2 slots that you can put runestones, which work like enchantments for companion gear. With Mod 17 there has been new companion gear introduced which you can opt for to improve your stats even further.

The catch here is that your Bonding Runestones transfer the stats of your companion including the gear and runestones.  At max rank, 3 rank 15 Bonding Runestones will transfer 210% of your pet’s stats to your character.  Additionally, if you use an “augment” companion, rather than fight beside you they have a bonus of 1000 stat points to three of their stats, and transfer 100% of their stats to you.  That means that you get 310% of your augments stats transferred to you, and an extra 3100 in three stats, depending on the companion you use.

For this reason, augment pets are the optimal companion for reaching your stat caps.  As far as which companion you should use? You want an epic augment at least, and getting it to Legendary (1 million AD to upgrade) should be a priority.  This also is why getting up to rank 15 Bonding Runestones is also critical. Plus, because Bonding Runestones don’t cost gold to take out of their socket, you can freely swap them between your characters, making them an incredibly good investment.

The last section of the Companion tab is the enhancement section.  Along the bottom you have 6 slots; the top left is your companion power.  Each companion you own has a different power that you can slot here. My preferred one is either Power, or Critical Severity if you have a companion that offers it.  The remaining slots are for enhancement powers, which again are offered by each companion. It’s important to note if a companions enhancement can be put into Offense, Defense, or Utility slots, which vary by class.  A wizard has 3 Offense, 1 Defense, and 1 Utility slot.

There are hundreds of pets and different options for these enhancement powers, and each player will have ones they prefer.  With both paragons I aim for all the Power & Combat Advantage I can manage.  In my defense slot I use Laughing Skull (4K power), in my offense I use Tamed Velociraptor (10K power), Deepcrow Hatchling (8K power), and Staldorf (8K advantage), and in my utility I use Barbarian Shaman (4k power/2k advantage).

You might want to focus on other stats, maybe to reach caps.  This is really a personal customization here. I will acknowledge that a huge source of Combat Advantage is from these enhancement slots–you can pick up 24K Combat Advantage with the right enhancement companions, but in Mod 17 when you unlock the trial you can pick up a piece of companion gear with 12K advantage on it, which is then tripled by your bondings!

Ah… mounts.  There are tons of mounts in the game, and we love them for getting us from point A to point B quickly.  They also offer us another avenue to increase out stats however! This is done with Insignia Slots. You can have up to five mounts in your “Stable”, and each one will have up to 3 insignia slots (rare and better have 3 slots, while white/green have 2).  Your first goal with mounts should be to get 5 mounts that are rare or better, unlocking 15 insignia slots.

The combination of insignia types you use will unlock various Insignia powers, but none of them are going to be earth shattering changes to your character.  I like Gladiator’s Guile (movement speed when stamina full) and Wanderer’s Fortune (refinement stones drop from kills) a lot, as well as anything the heals when I kill, crit, deflect, get controlled etc.  If you use the same insignia power twice, the second one will be half effect, the third will be a quarter (the max you can have). What’s more important is that you have 15 insignias. Green insignias are better than nothing (and very cheap) while Rare ones are the best bang for your astral diamonds.

You can get most stat combinations on insignias, you just need to look through them.  My preferred insignia is of course Dominance, which has Power as the primary boost. Some insignia types don’t have Dominance available, and I use Brutality with them.  Free free to tweak your insignias to fit your stat needs, though ultimately most people are going to end up with Dominance/Brutality in the end as they hit their stat caps.

You also get access to an Equip Power gained from your available mounts (I use +5000 power from Guard Drake) as well as a combat power if you have a legendary mount (which I do not).

As I said in the beginning, my goal was to explain how all of the abilities of a wizard work, in both paragons, so you can make an informed decision as to how you will run your own character.  At the same time, I’d like to give a summary of what I run myself, now that I’ve explained all of these powers and mechanics.

When I’m on my wizard, instead of swapping powers back and forth I tend to swap between loadouts instead; I use Thaumaturge for trash clearing and soloing (where AOE is most useful) and I switch to Arcanist for boss fights.  However listed below I will include what I would change my powers to for boss fights in each paragon path:

Arcanist

Dailies:  Arcane Empowerment, Arcane Singularity

Features:  Arcane Presence, Storm Spell

Feats:  Spell Twisting, Snap Freeze, Chaos Magic, Striking Advantage, A Step Above Mastery

• Trash Clear:  I avoid using Arcanist for AOE at all costs; but after Bore Worm, there is a large 3-wave AOE fight that you’ll be in Arcanist for unless you double back to a campfire, which I never do.  Even then I usually just use the single target loadout and lean heavily on Storm Pillar.  But if you are going to do AOE, Steal Time on Mastery is good for applying lots of control on the packs, then toss in your other three AOEs just to help kill them.
• Boss Fight: This is where Arcanist shines.  Rotation is simple–Ray of Frost except when you’re casting encounters. Priority for the powers is left to right, but don’t wait on a power if it’s not up in time.  Ray of Enfeeblement [M] will boost Ray of Frost just as well as an encounter power.  When it’s time to use your daily, pop your Artifact (I use Wyvern), then your daily, and continue the left to right priority, except Ray of Enfeeblement is lowest priority as long as you cast it within the last 10 seconds.  You want to land as many encounters in a row before the daily expires.

Thaumaturge

Dailies:  Ray of Frost, Scorching Burst

Features:  Chilling Presence, Critical Conflagration

Feats:  Relative Haste, Glowing Flames, Shatter Strike, Critical Burn, Directed Flames

• Trash Clear: This is what I feel like Thaumaturge was born to do.  Depending on how far I am from the pack when damage starts I lead with one of the cold powers to apply Chill, then toss in Fireball to get a nice Rimefire Smolder hit.  After that I dump my remaining AOE and use Scorching Burst if anything is still alive, or Ray of Frost if down to one target.  At certain points in LOMM there are some nice ledges to push golems and dinosaurs off of, so I’ll swap in Repel on Mastery in those spots.  Sometimes I just leave Repel [M] loaded to annoy my guildmates, but we’re good friends so don’t do that if you want people to like you.
• Boss Fight:  Thaumaturge is capable of decent single target damage, much more so than Arcanist is capable of AOE damage.  Ray of Enfeeblement [M] has priority, and should be ready right before each Entangling Force and Conduit of Ice, and every other Repel.  Just cycle through them while keeping Ray of Frost pouring into the target, and toss in Ice Knife to taste.

Soloing

When leveling, soloing, I stick with Thaumaturge; it’s got great AOE damage, which is the majority of what soloing is about, and when needed can swap in single target powers for a nasty boss mob.  Nothing complex about the rotation; I lead off with Icy Terrain or Conduit of Ice depending on the range, and then dump encounter powers.  If there are multiple targets left and my AOEs are cooling down then I use Scorching Burst, otherwise it’s Ray of Frost till everything dies or an encounter power comes up.

Useful Links

• Janne’s Neverwinter Info & Guides – Janne’s site covers everything you could want to know about game mechanics, has many useful guides, and some great calculators and a character builder!
• Rainer’s Neverwinter Pocket Wiki – This is a direct link Rainer’s Mod16 Pocket Wiki which has a list of just about everything in the game.  I use it a lot so search for specific companions for enhancement slots!
• Rainer’s Offline Character Planner – Rainer does tons of testing for all things Neverwinter, and has a great YouTube channel worth subscribing to.  This link is to his offline Character Builder, which is free, updated regularly, and a great way to tinker with character build options.
• Sharpedge’s Wizard Mechanics Guide – Sharpedge did amazing work in determining the ins and outs of all things wizard, including gear options much more detail into the powers than I’ve gone into here.  It’s an invaluable resource for any wizard and I treat it as my almanac when thinking about how I prefer to play my wizard.

Changes and Updates:

8.8.2019- Updated the Title of the guide to be Mod 16 compliant. Also, the content in the Title Page, Introduction, and What This Guide Will Accomplish tabs have been updated. Also, Changes and Updates was wiped of all irrelevant postings so as to start fresh with Mod 16.

8.14.2019- Updated the Ability Scores tab to be Mod 17 compliant- Screenshots are to be added at a later date.

8.15.2019- Updated the Race tab to be Mod 17 compliant- Screenshots are to be added at a later date.

9.17.2019- Updated the Race tab to prepare for Mod 17 changes incoming. Began overhauling the Stats and Ratings tab-work still in progress.

9.20.19- Updated the Stats and Ratings tab to be Mod 17 compliant.

9.22.19- Updated the Powers tab to be Mod 17 compliant. The Rotation tab is in progress. The Boons tab is in progress. The Feats tab is in progress.

9.24.19- Updated the Rotations tab to be Mod 17 compliant.

9.25.19- Updated the Equipment tab to be Mod 17 compliant; formatting is still in progress.

9.26.19- Updated the Enchantment tab to be Mod 17 compliant. Updated the Companion tab to be Mod 17 compliant.

9.27.19- Added on to the Companion tab.

9.28.19- Updated the Mounts tab to be Mod 17 compliant. Made some edits to the the Stats/Ratings tab.

9.29.19- Updated the Consumable tab. Updated the Feats tab. Edited the Useful Links tab to remove links that were no longer relevant to the current state of the game.

9.30.19- Updated the Title page to official announce the completion of the Mod 17 content updates. Further updating will still occur over the next few weeks to improve format, layout, and visual aids within the guide. A new publishing date has been requested to mark the official update to Mod 17 compliance.

What This Guide Will Accomplish:

In writing this guide, it was always my goal from the beginning to improve the quality of information on the internet available to “Guardian” Fighters of all skill levels. This guide is intended to be a full guide to the class, in addition to providing the builds that I use. I’ll admit, as a class guide, the depth one could take into such a topic doesn’t quite resemble a compendium anymore as the new direction of the game has taken a lot of the customization and personalization out of building, but I will still attempt to write as much as possible on the current topics. I do not claim to be the very best or that my way is the only way to go with the class, but I strive to make the information in here as accurate as can be, and everything is backed with experience/trial and error. Even though I have my own play style, I think it is important to present all of the information available in a non-biased way so that you the may develop your own informed decision. I’m not going to cover every way to build imaginable, but rather you’re getting a snapshot of my builds/playstyles, why I play the way that I do, and as much factual information to back it up as I can. Unfortunately, builds are more “cookie cutter” now since the devs took most of our choices and ways to individualize away, so I don’t claim to be totally unique in my build. I show my builds hoping that everyone can learn from them and use the information as a stepping stone to figuring out how they would like to play and build.

This guide is written with the understanding that many players will utilize the load out system, and that you can have more than one play style or build on one character, and switch load outs in the blink of an eye (if you’re at a campfire). Since Mod 16 launched, the game has promoted the utilization of loadouts even more to extend to playing your class completely differently by offering newly designed class roles. In an attempt to reach all readers, this guide will cover both roles for the Fighter: Vanguard (Tanking path) and Dreadnought (DPS path).

As a Fighter, it’s important to understand that due to the queue system, in Mod 16 we are no longer strictly confined to be being a tank class. We can publicly queue both as a Tank and as DPS. Which role you queue as is determined by the paragon path your loadout is currently in- either Vanguard or Dreadnought. With private queues, we can play as Tank or DPS without regards for the standard content role rules (1 Tank, 1 Healer, 3 DPS or 2-3 Tanks, 2-3 Healers, 4-6 DPS). This means that if you want, you can have 1 Healer and 4 DPS in private queue, which is an example of a popular non-tradition group compilation in private queue. If you’re public queueing, you can play as your favorite path or have a loadout for both, but just know that once you’ve started your public queue, you cannot change roles until the queue has completed. Both Tanking and DPS are viable, and which one you may use will depend on your playstyle, as well as the types of groups that your run with. My initial recommendation is to use one load out for Vanguard Tank and the other free loadout for Dreadnought DPS. If you want to buy more loadouts, then I suggest having two of each path, with one being for level 80 content and the other loadout being tailored specifically to the high stat demands of scales content.

In this guide, you’ll see Vanguard and Dreadnought builds for PVE, covering both scaled content as well as level 80 content. At this time, I am not working on PVP builds for this guide.

LOADOUTS:

On my Fighter, all of my load outs that I use are self-sufficient, meaning I don’t swap enchantments around or share gear (unless the enchantments are the same, sorry i’m a gold pincher). I also use different mounts, insignias, companions, consumables, etc. Here is a little more information about what load outs can or can’t do, so you may decide if you want to build fully self-sufficient load outs, or perhaps you’ll grow your Vanguard load out and switch to Dreadnought when you do your dailies.

Loadouts can:

• Swap gear, mounts, and companions, and companion bonuses. This includes gear on companions, as well as  insignias on mounts and mount combat powers.
• Swap between Vanguard-Tank and Dreadnought-DPS.
• Let you reassign points into your Ability Scores between loadouts.
• Let you have different boon selections.
• Swap consumables in your potion tray, ONLY if your current loadout doesn’t have a consumable on cooldown.

Loadouts can’t:

• Let you reroll your initial Ability Scores distribution (no longer a feature in Neverwinter as of Mod 16).
• Move anything that requires gold (insignias CAN be moved as it is free).
• Be swapped in combat or in danger zones (only in safe zones such as cities, the stronghold, and campfires).
• Be swapped in public queue, IF you’re attempting to change roles. For example, you can’t queue as a Vanguard Tank and then swap to Dreadnought DPS at the first campfire. You can do this with a private group but not in a public queue as the game blocks you from changing your roll once the queue has started. You should be able to swap between loadouts in the same role, however.

Ability Scores:

For the Fighter, the Primary and Secondary Attributes or Ability Scores are Constitution, Strength, and Dexterity. Previous to Module 16, it was possible to reroll all 6 attributes to acquire the best possible set-up to max your gains from Ability Scores. In Mod 16, players can no longer change the initial roll of their Ability Scores. Additionally, it seems that which stats are Primary and which are Secondary has change with Mod 16. In Mod 16, a Fighter’s base Constitution and Strength are both 16 and Dexterity has a base of 14. One could assume in this case that Constitution and Strength are Primary, and Dexterity is Secondary. Below I will show a screenshot demonstrating the base Ability Score rolls on the Fighter. There is a bonus to X and X in the image that you can subtract to confirm the true base rolls of all attributes on Fighter.

(Imagine coming soon)

Fighter Ability Score Base Rolls:

Strength- 16

Constitution- 16

Dexterity- 14

Intelligence- 8

Wisdom- 10

Charisma- 10

Before I explain which ability scores you want to boost and why, I will explain what each attribute offers. This is different from previous modules, as many stats have been removed from the game, and the stats and bonuses ability scores offer has been revamped.

Constitution: This stat increase your BASE Maximum Hit Points by .5%, and your Action Point Gain by .25% per point.

Strength: This stat increases your Stamina Regeneration by .5%, and your Physical Damage by .25% per point.

Dexterity: This stat increases your Critical Severity by .5%, and your Movement Speed by .25% per point.

Intelligence: This stat increases your Control Bonus by .5%, and your Magic Damage by .25% per point.

Wisdom: This stat increases your Control Resist by .5%, and your Outgoing Healing by .25% per point.

Charisma: This stat increases your Companion Influence by .5%, and your Recharge Speed by .25% per point.

In the past, it was possible that you could have a different distribution of your attribute points depending on your build style. If you were a tank you’d invest in certain attributes, and if you were a dps you may invest in a separate set of attributes. Via load outs, you can change the distribution of your points if you wish. The only thing you may not change in regards to ability score via load out, is the distribution of your RACE bonus, which is a bonus distribution of points determined by the race you chose to play and the selections you make during your race reroll. In order to change these again, you must race reroll so choose these distributions with care. In my opinion and play style, my distribution of points into my Ability Scores is exactly the same on Vanguard-Tank as it is on Dreadnought-DPS. This is not because I’m lazy, but because I truly feel that’s the best roll for both play styles.

When I rank up my ability scores, I am ranking up both Strength and Dexterity. This is for a few reasons. Strength gives stamina which is very important this mod, and the extra damage buff will help us to hold and maintain aggro. If you’re DPS, stamina is still important and the damage buff is even more relevant as your job is to deal damage. This is our number one feat that I feel every Fighter should invest in. I level up Dexterity because the extra movement speed helps to speed up the dungeon and is a noticeable quality of life upgrade. I also take it because Critical Severity will increase our damage, which again, is good for aggro on the tank side, and is mandatory for a DPS style build.

Why I like Strength and Dexterity is not my only reasoning for choosing them; I also have reasons for NOT liking the other choices which in tandem with the positive written above, determines why I ultimately chose Strength and Dexterity for both Vanguard-Tank and Dreadnought- DPS over other options.

Constitution– The reason I hated it pre-mod 16 is the same reason now: the buff to HP from Constitution only applies to BASE HP. What this means is, you get .5% more HP based off of what you have when you have literally no gear equipped. This ends up being a very underwhelming investment. If you were roll Strength and Dexterity, and then change Dexterity to Constitution on a separate load out with identical gear and set-up, you notice almost no increase in HP. Also, the AP gain is not super noticeable, not is it particularly valuable. No longer are the days of spamming dailies, so at the rate we regenerate AP (even with increases to AP), you’re still not spamming and are therefore going to need to hold onto your daily for “just the right moment.” This conservative way of using dailies in tandem with the meager buff to BASE HP puts Constitution pretty low on the list of useful attributes. This is my main reason for picking Dexterity or Strength over Constitution. However, those wanting to be super tanky will still insist Constitution is useful. Even though I’ve said it’s basically useless, if you decide you must have Constitution, then I recommend picking Strength as your second option and missing out on the Dexterity increase.

Intelligence– Intelligence boosts magic damage and control bonus. We don’t do magic and we don’t do control. Enough said- don’t use Intelligence.

Wisdom– Wisdom boosts outgoing healing. We aren’t healers so scrap using Wisdom on Fighter. The control resist is ok, but one good aspect out of two on Wisdom isn’t enough for us to invest in it.

Charisma– Charisma gives us Companion Influence. and Recharge Speed. Honestly, Companion Influence is the “best of the bad” attributes. Companion influence may seem useful to some people, especially as we strive to reach a plethora of stat caps, but the return on investment for Companion Influence is very small. Companion Influence is better on summoned companions versus augments, but even if you run a summoned companion, you’ll only gain a couple hundred rating per stat. As you’re aiming to cap your stats from gear, we will decidedly invest in damage % buffs instead. We no longer have high recovery builds in the game and the cool downs of our powers are quite long. Investing in al the possible cool down education options available will not even provide a noticeable quality of life improvement to the amount of powers you can cast in a dungeon, so in my opinion its not a good return on investment.

In summary, if you’re following by guide to match my builds you invest in Strength and Dexterity for both my Vanguard-Tank builds as well as my Dreadnought-DPS builds. Strength is more important than Dexterity, so if you’re insistent on being an HP HO then swap Constitution for Dexterity (but I really think it’s a waste of your investment to Constitution).

Earlier we discussed that you get bonus ability score distribution points. In the next section, I will discuss race that I feel are a good fit for the Fighter class, and at the same time I will let you know which choice to make on your bonus distributions depending on the class that you choose.

Race:

Remember, as I said in the previous section, the choice you make regarding your selection of bonus attribute points will be permanent on your character and effect all load outs until you decided to pay for a race reroll to change the selection. If you are intending to play Tank and DPS and are NOT taking my suggestion to use Strength and Dexterity on both builds (I really recommend that you do), then you should pick the bonus attribute pair that best matches the load out you’ll spend the most time in (either Tank or DPS).

Which race you decide to play can be a very personal decision. Some of you reading this will want the best race to do your job, and some of you will pick the race you like regardless of it’s utility for the sake of appearance. In older versions of this guide, I listed a variety of races that could be viable because they supported the Primary and Secondary ability scores of the Fighter or they provided another desirable gain. I have redesigned this section to include less traits, as feedback from the community stated they want to see the top few choices for race. The bonuses that each race provides has been adjusted for Mod 16, and so I will be going over what I think is the best possible race, as well as suitable substitutes that work well with Fighter attributes and play styles. I will not be listing all races, just the ones that I feel are a good fit for the Fighter. Races that aren’t listed either don’t have worthwhile bonuses, or more importantly, have bonus attribute options that are completely irrelevant to the Fighter.

Class suggestions will be separated based on whether you’d like to tank or DPS. Suggestions will be listed from best to worst.

Races for Vanguard-Tank:

Top Choices:

Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn/Dragonborn: Premium Race (Best Premium Race)

Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn and Dragonborn (in that order) are the best races available for a Vanguard-Tank. However, the race is only available as a premium purchase, or in the case of Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn, it’s only available as a legendary lockbox reward. Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn is best because it offers incoming healing bonus AND an HP bonus. The extra 3% damage is great for helping to hold aggro too. Dragonborn is only slightly behind Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn in quality because instead of offering an HP buff, it just offers a higher incoming healing bonus of 5%. Both are great if you can get them, but Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn is the best option available in Mod 16. In Mod 17, one could debate between the following options.

Gith (coming in Mod 17) (Best “Free” Race):

Gith is probably the second best race after Dragonborn for Vanguard-Tank in Mod 17. Gith offers Dexterity and Strength as your preferred bonus attributes, a bonus of 1500 Combat Advantage, and 2% increase to stamina regeneration. Gith in Mod 17 is easily the second best Vanguard-Tank race, and if you’re diligent about getting the race for free upon launch of Mod 17, then you can avoid the premium price tag on this race. The ability score offerings are perfect for the tanking build, the extra combat advantage is helpful since it’s the highest stat cap to reach, and the increase to stamina regeneration is always appreciated on a tank.

Tiefling:

Tiefling offers Charisma and Constitution as your preferred bonus attributes, a 5% damage buff to targets that are below half health, and a 10% chance on damage taken to apply Infernal Wrath to your attacker, which is a 2.5% debuff to the enemy’s damage for 5 seconds.The Bloodhunt damage buff is an appreciated boost to our aggro tool kit, and the debuff to enemy damage is a good support utility to consider. This group orientated debuff lasts longer and has a better proc rate than the Drow debuts which is why this race is better than the two Drow races (which is backwards from pre-mod 16). I don’t care for the ability score set on the Tiefling and the other following races much, but we’re getting to the point where we are running out of good options for races with good ability score combinations. The damage decreasing debuff places onto enemies will be even more important in Mod 17 so this debuff is something to consider for Tower of the Mad Mage.

Sub-Par/Pseudo-Relevant Options:

Menzoberranzan Renegade: Premium Race

Menzoberranzan Renegade, or Menzo Drow, has Dexterity and Charisma as your preferred bonus attributes, a 5% chance to apply a debuff for 4 second, which reduces target’s Defense by 1500 and their damage by 2.5%. This isn’t even worth mentioning really, but it also offers increased HP regeneration out of combat. As with Tiefling, the ability score offering here isn’t great. The debuff is decent, but the proc chance is way worse than it is on the Tiefling, and the Tiefling debuff lasts longer. Basically, you’d only pick Menzo Drow or Drow if you liked the looks better than the stats. If you’re going for looks though, you’re probably not even paying attention to what I’m writing regarding what races are good anyways. This is premium race, and is pretty low on the list of useful races to run for Fighter, so I wouldn’t run this race unless you already had it from pre-mod 16 and you’re running it for looks. The bonuses it provides in Mod 16 are not worth Zen or AD.

Drow:

Drow has Dexterity and Charisma as your preferred bonus attributes, a 5% chance to apply a debuff for 4 second, which reduces target’s Defense by 2000. This isn’t even worth mentioning really, but it also offers increased HP regeneration out of combat. As with Tiefling, the ability score offering here isn’t great. This debuff is pretty bad compared to Menzo Drow, and the proc chance is way worse than it is on the Tiefling, and the Tiefling debuff lasts longer. The only reason I’ve even included Drow in this list of choices is because even though the debuff sucks, it’s still a debuff which is “something” to offer the group, and it’s the free (but worse) version of Menzo Drow.

Halfling:

Halfling offers Dexterity and Constitution as your preferred bonus attributes, a bonus of 1500 Deflect which isn’t our best defensive stat but it’s one of the harder ones to cap, and 10% increased resistance to Control effects. Mod 16 is really heavy on control so a 10% resistance to all types of control is pretty helpful. Deflect isn’t our best defensive stat but considering it’s harder to cap, we will take it.

Dwarf: 

Dwarf offers Constitution and Strength as your preferred bonus attributes, a bonus 2000 Defense which is our second most important defensive stat, and a 20% increased resistance to knock and push mechanics. Mod 16 is really heavy on control mechanics so any help with resisting control is appreciated, and the extra defense will help especially if you’re a newer Fighter. Eventually, you’ll cap Defense without this bonus, so choosing Dwarf just becomes about the ability score choice and the increased control resistance to Knock and Push.

Summary:

Dragonborn is hands down, unarguably the best race for Vanguard in Mod 16. If you can get Metallic Ancestry, then that’s better still, but just regular Dragonborn would suffice. Gith will be second best in Mod 17 so be sure to capitalize on your opportunity to claim the race for free at the beginning of the Mod! The race will be free for only a few weeks to VIP holders, and then it will be a premium purchase so definitely don’t miss it. If you can’t afford Dragonborn now or can’t stand the shiny/scaly Dorito-Backed Lizard, then you start with the Halfling suggestion and work your way down the list until you find something you’re happy with, just follow the suggestions for each race I listed to stay in line with this build. I only listed races here that lined up with our ideal ability scores or that provided a useable bonus for tanking or supporting the group. Races that didn’t get mentioned here offered neither of those things.

Races for Dreadnought-DPS: 

Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn/Dragonborn: Premium Race (Best Race)

Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn and Dragonborn (in that order) are the best races available for a Dreadnought-DPS. However, the race is only available as a premium purchase, or in the case of Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn, it’s only available as a legendary lockbox reward. Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn is best because it offers a 3% damage bonus and there’s no other race bonus that compares to that for damage dealing classes. The extra 3% incoming healing and 5% HP is helpful too. Dragonborn is only slightly behind Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn in quality because instead of offering an HP buff, it just offers a higher incoming healing bonus of 5%. Both are great if you can get them, but Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn is the best option available. Dragonborn has an unmatched bonus for DPS, so the next two options are free, but significantly weaker substitutes for the Dragonborn.

Half-Orc:

Half-Orc has Dexterity and Strength as your preferred bonus attributes, a 5% increase to Critical Severity, and a 10% bonus to movement speed for 3 second upon entering combat (20 second cool down). 5% Critical Severity is not nearly as good as the 3% increase to damage that Dragonborn gets, but it’s still an increase in damage. The Critical Severity combined with the Physical Damage buff and Critical Severity buff from Half-Orc’s good attribute offerings puts Half-Orc slightly ahead of our next race option.

Tiefling:

Tiefling has Charisma and Constitution as your preferred bonus attributes (preferred for this race but still bad), a 5% buff to damage against targets below half health, and a 10% chance to a apply a debuff when receiving damage, that applies a reduction to your enemy’s outgoing damage by 2.5% for 5 seconds. The poor attribute offerings of the Tiefling put this race as 3rd best DPS race.

Summary: 

Dragonborn is hands down, unarguably the best race for Dreadnought in Mod 16. If you can get Metallic Ancestry, it’s a nice bonus to survivability, but just regular Dragonborn would suffice for DPS since both version have the same damage buff. If you can’t afford Dragonborn now or can’t stand the shiny/scaly Dorito-Backed Lizard, then you can choose between Half-Orc and Tiefling as free race options, with Half-Orc having a slight edge on DPS.

Running Vanguard AND Dreadnought?

If you know that you want to be able to play both Vanguard and Dreadnought, there are a few considerations to make for races that will optimize you best for both load outs. If you’re just using Dreadnought to clear campaign content then your race likely won’t matter much, but if you’re serious about running Vanguard and Dreadnought in dungeons then here are a few suggestions.

Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn/Dragonborn: Premium Race (Best Race-Premium)

This race comes in 1st place for most versatile between Vanguard and Dreadnought in Mod 17. If you read the above paragraphs in this tab, then this comes as no surprise. The Dragonborn races are best for survivability which suits a Vanguard well, and best for damage which suits a Dreadnought well. On Dragonborn, you can place your extra attributes into two categories of your choice (Strength and Dexterity) so this is a clear winner, but at a premium cost.

Half-Orc:

This race comes in 2nd place for most versatile between Vanguard and Dreadnought in Mod 17. The attributes are all correct for this build both as Tank and DPS, the Crit Severity will help damage/aggro, and the run speed bonus is mildly helpful for Tanks to help get to mobs faster and get their aggro before the DPS does.

Tiefling: 

This race comes in 3rd place for most versatile between Vanguard and Dreadnought in Mod 17. The attributes are mediocre for Tank and completely incorrect for DPS, but the Bloodhunt 5% damage buff to enemies below half health is at least a damage buff still for DPS, and the Infernal Wrath debuff offers nice utility for the Tank side.

Gith:

This race comes in 4th place for most versatile between Vanguard and Dreadnought in Mod 17. The stat attributes are correct for both Tank and DPS, but as far as utility goes, it’s mostly personal with the extra stamina regeneration, and the combat advantage is helpful. This is more useful for tank than it is for DPS, but not the worst choice for someone who is planning on playing both DPS and Tank equally. If you want to do more DPS, you would probably pick on of the other choices with a Damage buff.

Why didn’t the Elves and Humans get any love?

Human is horrible this mod because you only get 3 ability score points instead of 4 like every other race. Sure, you get to pick where they go, but only getting to boost one attribute plus the meager increase to stats Human offers makes it a very poor choice unless you’re just wanting to dress your character up nice, in which case Human does well with that. The Elves: Wood Elf, Sun Elf, Moon Elf, and Half Elf don’t really line up with Fighter on good attributes, and the bonuses aren’t really helpful for tanking, and certainly useless for DPS, which is why Humans and Elves didn’t get any mention above. Of course as I’ve said before, you can run them if you want to look a certain way as the difference between all races outside of Dragonborn, especially if you’re building a tank, is small and not super significant. You can still tank or DPS on any race you want, you’re just not optimizing and maxing your potential by choosing a race that doesn’t synergies well with the play style and build.

Stats/Ratings:

An important part of any character build and their level of performance has to do with stat allocation. Stats can be broken up into three categories: Defensive, Offensive, and Tertiary. Tanks typically stack Defensive stats first and Offensive stats second. If you want to DPS, you would stack Offensively first and then Defensive stats second. I will break down what each main stat does for us, why we may or may not need it, and for which builds you’ll want to focus certain stats on.

Stats got a HUGE overhaul in Mod 16, and so before I go on describing all the stats, I need to explain how the new Stats/Rating system works. First:

The following stats have been permanently removed from the game with the launch of Mod 16:

Life Steal

Damage over Time Resistance

Recovery

Area of Effect Resistance

Regeneration

Armor Class

The following stats have been added to the game with the launch of Mod 16:

Critical Avoidance

Awareness

Combat Advantage (as a main offensive stat now as opposed to a tertiary stat)

Accuracy

Ratings are now working in a system of Stats versus Counterstats. Both players and enemies have both kinds of stats, and understanding how they work is important to knowing why you want certain stats at a certain rating level. With the exceptions of Power and HP, each Offensive and Defensive stat has a counter to it in the rating system.

Armor Penetration: Defense

Accuracy: Deflection

Critical Strike: Critical Resist

Combat Advantage: Awareness

You may notice that we no longer have a tooltip indicating a % of effectiveness for Offensive and Defensive stats. In this system, you could divide your total stat by 1000 to determine your % effectiveness, or you could just associate 1% effectiveness for every 1000 stat you have. For example, if I have 50,000 Critical Strike, that is 50% Critical Strike Chance.

HOWEVER, it is not as simple as just determining your % effectiveness based on your stats. Since enemies have counterstats to protect themselves from your stats (and vice versa), we need to factor in how much counter stat they have. Let’s stick to our Critical Strike example. If I have 50,000 Critical Strike, and the enemy has 18,000 Critical Avoidance, that basically means the same as me only having 32,000 Critical Strike. So while I thought I had 50% Critical Strike Chance, I really only have 32% Critical Strike Chance so the enemy has an 18% chance to avoid my Critical attacks.

Each level of content has a set amount of ratings for enemies in that zone or queue. It is important for you to know what the enemies have in the content you’re running, so you know how much of each rating you need to be effective in that content. Currently in Mod 16, enemies have the following rating levels:

Leveling Content-Sub Level 70 Enemy Ratings:

Cloak Tower- 800

Cragmire Crypts- 1,500

Gray Wolf Den- 3,200

Pirate King’s Retreat- 3,600

The Frozen Heart- 4,000

Spellplague Caverns- 4,300

Temple of the Spider- 4,600

Caverns of Karundax- 5,000

Master of the Hunt- 6,125

Intermediate Content- Level 70 Enemy Ratings:

The following queues all have an enemy rating of 7,000.

Dread Legion

Prophecy of Madness

Throne of the Dwarven Gods

Illusionist’s Gambit (Master)

The Merchant Prince’s Folly

Manycoins Bank Heist

Demogorgon

Assault on Svarborg

Rise of Tiamat

Kessell’s Retreat

Temple of the Spider (Master)

Cragmire Crypts (Master)

The Shores of Tuern

Gray Wolf Den (Master)

Malabog’s Castle

Castle Never

Valindra’s Tower

Lair of Lostmauth

Advanced Content- Level 70 Enemy Rating: 

The following queues all have an enemy rating of 7,000.

Demogorgon (Master)

Fangbreaker Island

Spellplague Caverns (Master)

Assault on Svardborg (Master)

Tomb of the Nine Gods

Castle Ravenloft

Cradle of the Death God

Expert Content- Level 80 Enemy Ratings:

Lair of the Mad Mage- 18,000

Tower of the Mad Mage (Mod 17)- 30,000

Defensive Stats:

Maximum Hit Points-

Maximum Hit Points is easy. The more hit points you have, the more hit points you can lose before you  reach 0 and croak. Maximum Hit Points is one often looked over defensive stat. I personally recommend tanks get their HP as high as possible after capping their defensive stats, and quite possibly, forgoing other defensive stats in certain circumstances to get their HP higher. HP is the most important defensive stat because it also adds to how much damage you can mitigate through your shield. In Mod 16, I have 800k HP which means that when I block, I also have an additional 400-600k HP worth that my shield can block before my HP gets touched. I recommend a minimum of 600k HP for tanks. 300k HP minimum for DPS. You may need more or less depending on the content you’re running and the groups you are running with. I definitely don’t need 800k HP for Lair of the Mad Mage for example, but it does make it incredibly effortless. You may need 800K HP, more or less, in Tower of the Mad Mage depending on the quality of the group and how well they can time damage decreasing debuffs and protective buffs.

Defense- 

Defense is your primary form of Damage Mitigation. Defense functions on its on now, as opposed to being converted into what used to be called Damage Taken or Damage Resistance. The cap for Defense now is only 50%, which is quite a bit lower than it used to be in previous mods. While there are still a few forms of Damage Mitigation outside of our stat caps, they are less common than they were before Mod 16 and therefore are not reliable substitutes for stacking actual Defensive stats. This stat is the first one that you’ll try to cap if you’re tanking, and since this stat opposes enemy Armor Penetration, you will need to reach 50,000 Defense + whatever amount of Armor Penetration the enemy has in that queue. Most notably, you’ll need 68,000 for Lair of the Mad Mage and 80,000 for Tower of the Mad Mage.

Critical Avoidance-

Critical Avoidance is your secondary defensive stat, and once Mod 17 drops it will be important to cap this stat as well to protect yourself from enemy critical strikes and severity. In Mod 16, enemies aren’t actually landing critical strikes which is a known issue. This just means that in Mod 16, you can basically ignore this stat. The critical strike chance for enemies is 50% (same as for us) so you need 50,000 Critical Avoidance + 5,000 + enough to counter enemy critical strike. Once Mod 17 drops, you’ll need 73,000 Critical Avoidance for Lair of the Mad Mage and 85,000 for Tower of the Mad Mage.

Once you’ve capped Defense and Critical Avoidance, it is playstyle and situational preference whether or not you’d like to cap the last two stats, or just start stacking into Maximum Hit Points.

Awareness-

Awareness is the stat that counters enemy Combat Advantage. Basically, Combat Advantage means that when you’re surrounded by enemies they deal more damage to you, and Awareness reduces the bonus damage enemies gain against you when positioned in Combat Advantage. In practice, this means that this stat is only useful if the enemies can gain combat advantage against you. In Tower of the Mad Mage for example, Halaster cannot gain Combat Advantage against you except in a very situational circumstance during one of the mechanics. So in the Mod 17 ToMM trial, Awareness isn’t needed. In other content such as Lair of the Mad Mage, Awareness can be helpful if you find yourself in situations where you are suffering from Combat Advantage damage. In this case, a well-played Fighter can forgo Awareness as long as they know how to shuffle the enemies and reposition themselves outside of enemy Combat Advantage. If this is an area in which you struggle, then Awareness is a helpful next Defensive stat to cap.

Deflection- 

Deflection is a form of chance based survivability. Deflection when procced halves the damage that you take (with 50% deflection severity which is the base amount of severity you have). Your damage is first mitigated through your Defense, and then that damage is cut in half when you successfully deflect. Deflection can be a good means of preventing a large amount of damage from taking your Hit Points, but it IS still a chance. You would want a large Deflection % to make stacking Deflection reliable as a means of survivability. 100% deflect would guaranteed that every hit you take is halved, but it is very difficult to achieve that number. You could imagine that if 50% of the time you take half damage and the other 50% of the time you don’t, even 50% percent can be pretty unreliable. If you get hit for 1,000,000 in ToMM and you deflect that to 500,000 you’re going to live, and that’s great! However, because Deflect isn’t 100% consistent/reliable it’s probably the absolute last defensive stat you would want to stack on a tank build.

Offensive Stats:

Power-

Power is your damage. Stacking more Power allows you to hit harder. Power stat does not have a cap, and only at extremely high numbers (200,000+) could only argue that the stat isn’t as effective past a certain point. But considering there is no hard cap, more power equals more damage regardless of how much you have. For a tank, this stat will just help with holding aggro as aggro is a combination of how much damage we deal and how much threat we generate. For a DPS, power is the ultimate way to boost damage once you’ve hit all your other offensive stat cap requirements.

Armor Penetration-

Armor Penetration is the mechanic that pierces through enemy Defense. Armor Penetration is important for both tanking and DPS. DPS need to cap Armor Penetration because they can’t deal maximum damage if they can’t hit enemies past their Defense. Armor Penetration is important for tanks because without it, they will deal significantly less damage than their DPS allies and this will effect the ability to hold aggro. In Lair of the Mad Mage, you’ll need 68,000. For Tower of the Mad Mage, you’ll need 80,000.

Accuracy-

Accuracy is the mechanic that makes it possible to beat enemy Deflection chances. Accuracy is important for both a DPS and a Tank to cap because it will ensure that any damage dealt will be at full value to the target. If you hit an Anvil of Doom for 600,000 and the enemy deflects it down to 300,000, that’s a huge disappointment. It’s not good for dealing good damage as a DPS, and it’s not good for holding aggro as a tank, so make sure you cap this stat. In LoMM you’ll need 68,000 and in ToMM you’ll need 80,000.

Critical Strike-

Critical Strike is otherwise known as Critical Chance %. When you crit, you deal more damage than normal. The Critical Strike cap in Mod 17 is 50%, and all classes have a base Critical Strike of 5,000. This is an important stat for DPS to cap as Critical Hits combined with Combat Advantage and Critical Severity lead to big damage numbers. On tank, crit can be helpful with aggro, especially when you’re positioned for Combat Advantage and are also invested in that stat. I wouldn’t worry about Critical Strike on tank until you’ve capped most of the rest of your stats. You’ll need 68,000 Crit to reach 50% in LoMM, and 80,000 to reach 50% in ToMM.

Combat Advantage-

Combat Advantage in Mod 16 onward is now a main offensive stat as opposed to a Tertiary Stat that while it gave a bonus, wasn’t a huge factor into our stat distribution pre-Mod 16. When you are positioned for Combat Advantage, meaning that you and a teammate are standing on opposites sides of an enemy, you’re in a state of Combat Advantage where you will deal more damage from this positioning. This combined with Critical Strike and Critical Severity helps lead to big damage numbers. The cap for Combat Advantage is 100%, but it’s important to know that all classes have a base Combat Advantage stat of 10,000. Additionally, Fighter has a special General Feature where we gain % Combat Advantage based on how much Stamina/Guard you have left. If you’re at max Stamina that is the equivalent of having 10,000 Combat Advantage stat for free. The stat requirement for LoMM is 118,000 and in ToMM it is 130,000. If you’re confident that you can keep your Stamina bar near maxed most of the time, then you could subtract 10,000 from the above stat goal. Realistically, you can count on this bonus 10,000 CA for DPS Dreadnought, but it is not going to be helpful on Vanguard Tank as we are usually not at full stamina. As a DPS, this stat is mandatory for good damage dealing, and this should be a priority to cap as well as always push to position for CA in your groups. As a tank, CA can help with aggro/damage especially when your hard hitting DPS has invested so much in it, but chances are you won’t completely cap it. Focus on capping this after you’ve capped your main important stats.

Utility Stats:

There are other kinds of stats that are much harder to come by and mostly serve a purpose of utility, and we will call those Utility Stats. Some of the Utility Stats have a high relevance in group content, while some are insignificant and only serve a personal purpose such as Experience Gain, Glory Gain, and Gold Gain. We will mostly be focusing on Utility Stats that have relevance to group content.

AP Gain-

This stat helps you build you Action Points faster. Popping your Daily powers is an important way to protect yourself/teammates if you’re a tank, or deal great burst damage if you’re a DPS. Unfortunately, long gone are the days of Daily Spamming, and therefore investments in AP Gain aren’t really worth it. It’s best to save your daily for the right moment then to try and build for faster dailies and learn to depend on them.

Control Bonus-

This stat helps your control powers to last longer/perform better. This is not a stat we need to focus on in PVE content. In PVP it may help a little bit but it’s still pretty far down the list as far as usefulness goes.

Control Resist-

This stat helps you avoid being stunned, knocked, dazed, etc. Really, it reduces the time that control powers apply to you (so it’s the opposite of control bonus). This is a decent option when it comes to boons but we won’t go out of our way for this bonus. Wearing an Elven Battle armor enchantment is one great way to dump into this stat in bulk.

Stamina/Guard Gain-

This stat helps you regenerate lost stamina. It does NOT slow down the consumption of stamina. This stat is one of the most important functions on a Fighter because we rely on using our shield for protection and in some cases for maintaining damage buffs. An Elven Battle is one way to greatly increase this stat in one go.

Incoming Healing Bonus-

This stat increases the potency of healing both from outside sources as well as self-procced heals. This is probably the single most important stat for a tank in utility now, and it is quite useful for all classes and play styles for ensuring survivability. Additionally, this stat makes it a lot easier for the healer to do their job. This will be the main Tertiary Stat we pursue.

Companion Influence-

This stat increases the amount of stat that companions give to you. This stat is ok, but the stat pales in comparison to Incoming Healing which is the big decision to make as far as utility slots go. Companion Influence improves its value on summoned companions. However, mostly we are using augment companions for their high stat acquisition, and with an augment, companion influence provides very little stat.

Recharge Speed-

This stat makes it so that your powers have a shorter cool down than normal. In reality, this stat isn’t really worth investing. Back when this was tied into Recovery in pre-Mod 16, this was one of the best stats to have. The game has changed, and this stat is now almost completely irrelevant.

Critical Severity-

This stat makes it so that when you crit, you can deal a higher amount of a damage. We will take critical severity whenever possible, and the only time we would hesitate is if the opposing option was power (on our DPS). Critical Severity can help with aggro while tanking, but we would only take it if stats like Stamina Gain and Incoming Healing Bonus weren’t offered.

Movement-

One of the best quality of life stats in the game! The faster you move, the best you can maneuver yourself in combat, and the faster you can complete your queue. Time is money, and there is nothing bad about clearing those long stretches between boss fights even faster. We take movement speed bonus on both Tank and DPS when possible.

Mechanics: 

In this section, I will describe the basic functionality of the Fighter class, as well as some other mechanical aspects of gameplay. In some instances, this will very much be an explanation of tooltips, which some readers of this guide will not need. However, I will try to break things down in a way that is comprehensible for all readers.

*This is the newest section of my guide and I will rely on readers to ask me in the comments which aspects of gameplay they would like explained or wish to gain clarity on. If there’s something you’d like to know, just ask!

Powers:

With the introduction of Mod 16 and the class overhauls, we see a rework to the way powers are shared and differentiated between class Paragons. Which powers are shared among Paragons and which ones aren’t a lot easier to see now. All of the low level powers towards the left of the powers page are shared amongst both Dreadnought and Vanguard, and the higher level power towards the right of the powers page are the specialized powers that are different for each Paragon. Below I’ll list each of the powers, describe their usefulness (or uselessness…), and show you when I use certain powers so you know how to best contribute to your team. If you’re still leveling and you must choose damage encounters as placeholders for my suggested powers, you can always look at the magnitude and go with the highest one available. Usually we want the highest magnitude powers at least for DPS, but not always depending on feats and the combat situation.

Shared Powers- Vanguard and Dreadnought:

At-Wills: 

Cleave- Deals 25 magnitude in an arc in front of you. Wide range for keeping aggro on mobs, but this power is mostly useful on Vanguard for triggering the Cleaving Bull feat on AOE.

Brazen Slash- Deals 55 magnitude and also restores Stamina. This is a good pick for bosses when your Stamina is most important.

Shield Bash- Deals 20 magnitude when used while guarding. Not super useful. This is only available while guarding.

Guarded Strike- Deals 60 magnitude when used while guarding. If you wanted to keep attacking while guarding to maintain aggro, this is the power to use. This is only available while guarding.

Encounters: 

Shield Slam- Deals 200 magnitude in a line in front of you and knocks back enemies. Not super good for Vanguard as you’ll want to group enemies up, not knock them away. You could use the power to know enemies together, but this is probably more work than its worth. This power is useful for AOE DPS on Dreadnought.

Knee Breaker- Deals 500 magnitude, and places a slow on the target for 8 seconds. Slow effect doesn’t work if the target is immune to Control (Bosses). Not useful for Vanguard, and for Dreadnought DPS there are better options.

Bull Charge- Deals 400 magnitude and knocks enemies back by lunging at them from a distance. When feated to remove the knock back, this power has great utility for tanking as it allows you to close the gap and get into the fight first. On DPS, this is arguably the second best damage encounter for our single target rotation.

Shield Throw- Deals 250 magnitude and stuns targets for 3 seconds. This power is useful for use at range. On Vanguard when feated, this power deals less damage but increases aggro and lowers cool down. This is almost always a must on single target boss fights, and works well for mobs and aggroing groups together. On DPS Dreadnought, this power isn’t useful.

Anvil of Doom- Deals 680 magnitude and is a fantastic power for both Vanguard and Dreadnought. On Vanguard, taking the Class Feature for aggro helps ensure effortless aggro on single targets. On DPS, this is our hardest hitting encounter power when feated for the 980 Magnitude and 4 second cool down reduction.

Dailies: 

Earthshaker- Deals 580 damage in a radius and stuns targets for 3 seconds. Given how valuable our dailies are, I wouldn’t waste my AP on this power in AOE either for Vanguard or Dreadnought.

Second Wind- Increases your Maximum Hit Points by 20%, restores the amount of HP increased, and recovers a portion of your damage dealt by most attacks as hit points for 10s. This power is not like it’s former relative, Fighter’s Recovery. The heals are relatively weak and the buff to Maximum HP while nice, is super niche. Since we don’t get dailies often, I wouldn’t count on the bonuses of this daily for regular gameplay. It’s only real usefulness is to buff your HP to survive big one shot mechanics, but only if timed right and if you know your HP is the difference between life and death.

Determination- Removes and grants immunity to most control effects, and increases damage dealt by 10% for seconds. Again, since this power cannot be used often, it’s not super relevant to rely on it for the occasional damage buff and CC breakout.

Class Feature: 

Greater Endurance- Increases your movement speed by 10% whenever your stamina is full. Your speed decreases as your stamina decreases. This is a option for both Vanguard and Dreadnought. Faster movement between mobs equals faster runs and in the case of a tank, a better chance you’ll get to the enemies first to establish aggro. One could leave this on all the time, but really it’s only useful on mobs.

Vigorous Strikes- Increases your critical hit rate by 10% whenever your stamina is full. Decrease the amount of critical hit rate gains as your stamina decreases. Our goal is to cap our stats, so we will avoid this option on principle.

Combat Superiority- Whenever you activate an encounter or daily power, increase the damage dealt by your at-wills by 105 for 10 seconds. This is a good source of extra damage on Dreadnought and aggro on Vanguard. In reality, our at-wills don’t deal a whole lot of damage but it is still somewhat helpful. If you want to be efficient, you’ll be swapping this in and out situationally, but more on that in the rotation section.

Shield Talent- Increases stamina regeneration. This options is ok for beginners, but shouldn’t be needed at end game. This is especially true if you decide to use an Elven Battle armor enchantment.

Vanguard Specific Powers:

At-Wills: 

Tide of Iron- Deals 80 magnitude ti one target, and increases threat generation for 10s. This is a good single target aggro power due to it’s high magnitude and the bonus threat generation.

Threatening Rush- Deals 60 magnitude by lunging at an enemy, and deals increased threat. Some will say this is for single target fighting since it only targets on enemy at a time. However, I’d argue it’s best for AOE because it offers the option of mobility between targets on the field. Being able to close the gap between targets is super helpful, and the threat generation bonus is appreciated on AOE as otherwise we wouldn’t have a threat bonus from our at-wills as Tide of Iron isn’t really suitable for AOE.

Encounters:

Enforced Threat- Threaten nearby enemies within a 30 foot radius, placing you at the top of their threat list. This power also reduces the awareness of all target by 10,000 for 10 seconds. This power is often necessary for holding aggro on AOE as the trick to aggro is to constantly have every target in the room’s attention. Bluntly, you must attack everything always or else the target will get bored and move on to target your healer or dos teammates. This power does not need to be used on bosses unless there are mobs within the boss fight that need tank control.

Knight’s Challenge- Deals 80 magnitude and instantly restores 50% of your stamina. Also, deal damage to your attackers whenever you block. This power isn’t really useful at all, even for the panic 50% stamina refill. We will not want to be in a state of relying on an encounter power for our source of stamina.

Linebreaker- Deals 160 magnitude by lunging at your target and damaging enemies behind them in a cone. This power also increases threat. As this power deals AOE damage and increases our threat, this power is often necessary on mobs, sometimes in conjunction with Enforced Threat.

Iron Warrior- Decreases incoming damage by 20% for 8 seconds. This power has niche use for instances where your can predict the big hits and you know well enough that damage reduction is your source of survivability. For example, this power is relevant in ToMM to help protect from Annihilation damage, but this power should not be needed for regular use as long as you’re not under geared for the content you’re running.

Knight’s Valor- Cover the nearest party member and take the damage that would normally be dealt to them. Threat generated by your covered ally is transferred to you and this effect lasts for 10 seconds. This power is super niche for assisting a teammate you know can’t survive an upcoming hit. Typically, we shouldn’t need to be using this in our power though.

Dailies:

Bladed Rampart- Deals 250 magnitude and decreases enemy damage taken by 30% for 10 seconds. Also, you deal damage to attackers whenever you take damage. When feated, this power also negates the effects of Combat Advantage against you. With the feat, I find this daily to be the best for personal panic moments where your survival rating is uncertain. A huge damage reduction plus the effects of CA eliminated for a brief period can do wonders to take the heat off you long enough for your healer to get you caught back up on refilling your hit points.

Phalanx- You gain immunity to most control effects and construct a barrier around you and allies, reducing the damage taken by 20% for all allies within the barrier. The barrier lasts for 14 seconds, unless canceled early by guarding. This daily power is great for instances where your individual survivability isn’t the issue, but rather the survivability of the party. The CC immunity doesn’t really work as intended, so this really only works when your whole team his huddle together awaiting a huge hit such as Trobriand’s blast after the coil phase. This also only works if you know you can take the hit without guarding so that you’re able to provide the damage reduction to everybody.

Class Features: 

Ferocious Reaction- Deal 24 magnitude to enemies whenever you deflect an attack. Deflection is capped at 50% and the magnitude damage is minimal. This option isn’t really valuable for us at all.

Steel Recovery- Whenever you use an encounter power or Daily power, restore 5% of your stamina. This is a good alternative to Shield Talent if you’re in need of help with Stamina management. However, we shouldn’t need to use this in typical scenarios.

Anvil of Challenge- Anvil of Doom no places you at the top of the target’s threat list. This power only effects on target as Anvil of Doom is a single target power. This power is practically mandatory for single target boss encounters and holding aggro. This feat makes keeping the boss’s aggro much easier.

Enduring Warrior- Take 5% less damage when you are below 25% of your maximum hit points. We should never consistently be this low on HP, and if we are we have bigger problems. We will not be using this options as it is not helpful to us when built properly.

Dreadnought Specific Powers:

At-Wills:

Heavy Slash- Deals 100 magnitude and increases damage dealt by 5% for 12 seconds. This power is one of our few self-buffs and therefore is going to be a mandatory power option for optimizing our DPS output in both AOE and Single Target.

Reave- Deals 30 magnitude. This power isn’t super useful to use with its low range and weak magnitude.

Encounters:

Commander’s Strike- Deals 400 magnitude and increase the target’s vulnerability to physical damage attacks by 10% for 10 seconds. This helps increase the damage that you do, as well as the damage of other physical damage classes to this target such as Rogue, Hunter, and Barbarian. A buff to ours and ally damage as well as good magnitude makes this power mandatory for optimized DPS output in Single Target.

Tremor- Deals 250 magnitude in a 15 foot radius. Combined with the Prepared Slam feat, this power will be mandatory for optimizing our DPS output in AOE.

Into The Fray- Increases the movement speed of yourself and allies by 20% for 8 seconds. Allies must be within 50 feet at the time of casting in order to receive benefits. This power also instantly restores 100% of your stamina. This power is only beneficial if you’re trying to speed up the dungeon run by increasing party movement speed between mobs. If your group is not the speed running type, then you can run all 3 damaging AOE encounters. If your group is extremely efficient and fast paced, you can use this power to speed the run up at the sacrifice of 1 damaging AOE encounter (Shield Slam or Tremor).

Griffon’s Wrath- Deals 840 magnitude by delivering a three-hit combo to the target. This magnitude is for total combo completion, and so failure to complete the combo will result in less damage. Arguably, this is the second best Single Target power for our damage. Bull Charge can sometimes out perform this power due to its quick cast time/animation, and cool down as long as it is feared with Momentum (otherwise Knee Breaker would be the next highest damaging power). Griffon’s Wrath technically has more magnitude, but if you’re in a situation where completing the combo is tough to do, then arguably it isn’t the second best damaging encounter even though technically on paper it deals more magnitude than Bull Charge.

Onslaught- Deals 30 magnitude to nearby targets in a 20 foot radius and stuns enemies for 1 second. This is our most powerful damaging AOE encounter and therefore is mandatory for optimizing DPS output on AOE. This power unfortunately also has the longest animation of all 3 damaging AOE encounters, so use this one as soon as you’ve arrived and positioned for CA to optimize your damage.

Dailies: 

Shockwave- Deals 620 magnitude in a 50 foot line in front of you and knocks back enemies. This power, even when feared isn’t worthwhile. We won’t waste a daily power on mob clears.

Mow Down- Deals 1600 magnitude and knocks back enemies with a two-hit combo. This is our heaviest hitting power in our arsenal and is mandatory for optimizing our Single Target DPS output. When feated, this power does 2000 magnitude when under the effects of Commander’s Strike. This is our single most important source of burst damage on Dreadnought.

Class Features:

Momentum- Bull Charge no locker knocks back targets, but deals an additional 200 magnitude. Movement speed is increased by 20% after running for 2 seconds and movement bonus ceases when movement stops. This options is great for keeping up speed in dungeons, but this option will be mandatory if you decide to use Bull Charge on single target for the increased damage. If you’re going to use Bull Charge as I often do, you’ll run this power full time.

Heated Vengeance- Increases the rate at which stamina is converted into vengeance while under the effect of Seethe. This power is not helpful as it is unnecessary. It is rather easy to keep vengeance topped off so we will not be needing to use this option.

Steady Vengeance- Whenever you are under the effect of a guard and in combat, your vengeance gauge will not deplete. This option has no practical use in group content, as we are able to easily replenish and maintain our vengeance without the help of a Class Feature.

Enduring Vengeance- Every 10 seconds your Vengeance Guage is above 50%, you gain 1% damage and this effect may stack 5 times for a total of 5% bonus damage. This effect ends when Vengeance drops below 50%. This is our best Class Feature option for increasing our DPS. This is mandatory for optimizing both our AOE and Single Target DPS output. This power must always be on if you’re maintain your Enduring Vengeance stacks. If you accidentally swap this power out, you’ll need to build your buff stacks all over again. So even when you’re sitting in the Yawning Portal, this buff should be maintained so that you’re always ready for a queue. If you’re not able to manage the stacks for a long period of time, temporarily swap to a Vanguard load out and your Vengeance Guage progress will be retained until you swap back to Dreadnought and are ready to run content.

Rotations:

Below, I will explain my go-to powers for both AOE and Single Target scenarios, as well as reasons I may change powers situationally. Sometimes, rotation and power preferences can be heavily affected by playstyle, so I’ll do my best to explain my playstyle and reasoning for my power choices so you can more easily apply my information into your playing.

Tanking Rotation:

For Tanking, the power usage is more about timing for the correct moment rather than using everything in a pre-determined sequence for optimization (Rotation). Since tanks have to manage aggro, we must appropriately time our powers to make sure that aggro is not lost.

AOE:

I typically use Linebreaker, Enforced Threat, and Bull Charge. I like this set up because Enforced Threat is a hard taunt that forces me to the top of the enemy threat list for each target hit. This hits in an AOE and is one of our most important aggro powers. Linebreaker is great too because it offers a bonus to threat generation and it hits in an AOE which is also super important for managing large groups of mobs. Bull Charge is great for getting into the fight first as it has a very long lock-on range for its lunge. Bull Charge also works well with the Cleaving Bull feat which adds an additional damage proc whenever multiple targets are hit (AOE). I use Threatening Rush for the extra threat generation and the maneuverability on the field. If I see an enemy beginning to aggro on an ally (Yellow Threat Bar), then I’ll smack them with Threatening Rush, especially if my aggro powers are on cooldown. Cleave is used in between encounter cooldowns. When you start the fight, you can charge in with Bull Charge, use Enforced Threat on the group, and hold Dig In until your shield is red. When It’s red, you release Dig In and you’ll deal bonus AOE damage when feated correctly. At this point good threat should be established, and you should take care to alternate Enforced Threat and Linebreaker so that you always have one of those powers in reserve to use on enemies should an ally begin to pull their aggro. Spamming the threat powers back to back leaves you vulnerable to loosing aggro towards the end of their cooldown. If you team has good efficiency, you can time your AOE threat powers so that you always have at least one power ready for each group of mobs by alternating Enforced Threat and Linebreaker as your starting power between mobs. The key to aggro on mobs is to give every single target love and attention. If you’re not constantly attacking, the enemy will get bored with you so the best way to not lose aggro is to use powers that can target in an AOE. Namely, Enforced Threat, Linebreaker, and Dig In should be enough for this once you get the rhythm down. Also, I don’t use my daily powers on AOE.

Optional substitutes which I would sometimes use include swapping out Shield Throw for Bull Charge or Linebreaker. If you’re able to successfully hold aggro on all the enemies then you could swap out Linebreaker for Shield Throw so that you can pull groups from farther away to help group enemies together. If you don’t prefer to charge in with Bull Charge, you could swap Shield Throw here too instead of Linebreaker.

Single Target:

I typically use are Shield Throw, Anvil of Doom, and Bull Charge against bosses. Shield Throw and Anvil of Doom are slotted because they are single target aggro powers (Anvil of Doom is only when use Anvil of Challenge Class Feature). I also like to use Bull Charge to lunge in first to the boss to ensure I set the aggro threshold. In this set-up, I would start with Bull Charge and then just use Bull Charge on cooldown to keep big damage hits on the boss. I would then use Anvil of Doom followed by Shield Throw. Then I would use Dig In for the Red Retaliation proc as described above. At this point you must make sure you’re constantly attacking with at-wills unless you need to block or until your powers are off cooldown. You can actually keep attacking even with your shield up by using your at-will buttons. After the initial usage of Shield Throw and Anvil of Doom, if you want to be safe you can hold your Anvil of Doom until you see any allies beginning to gain threat (Yellow Bar above their health bar) as a panic reset on your threat generation, and just use Shield Throw off cooldown since with the feat, we get to use that every 6 seconds anyways. I like to use Brazen Slash on bosses for the Stamina Regeneration instead of Cleave, and you can use Tide of Iron or Threatening Rush as your second at-will for bonus threat. Usually I just keep Threatening Rush on 24/7 as the maneuverability provides a lot of utility at the cost of slightly less magnate (damage) than Tide of Iron. For Daily powers, I use Bladed Rampart of decreased incoming damage and CA damage mitigation if I’m at risk for dying, or Phalanx if protecting my group from a big one shot mechanic.

Optional substitutes for powers depending on the situation would be Enforced Threat and Linebreaker if you’re in a boss fight with a lot of mobs. A good example of this is the final boss fight in LoMM. In there I will use Linebreaker, Anvil of Doom, and Enforced Threat. Linebreaker and Enforced Threat work for single target too, but the reason we swap in the first place to Shield Throw and Bull Charge is because of damage and cooldown that we gain in exchange for losing the ability to hit multiple targets.  Also, don’t forget to use Dig In to proc Retaliation (Red Shield) for more damage and aggro. In this set-up, use your Enforced Threat and Linebreaker as if you were in an AOE rotation as describe above, and then use Anvil of Doom on the boss when it is off cooldown. Another sometimes useful power is Iron Warrior. Hopefully, if your group is good you shouldn’t need this power regularly, but should you get into a run where your heals are weak or your group is having trouble outlasting a slow DPS fight, this power can help reduce your incoming damage to give you a little bit more time to survive. Usually, I’d just go into my menu and swap this power in real quickly for niche moments such as Gigawatts in LoMM at the second boss, or the battery charge wipe in LoMM at the third boss if the group was weak and took to long to destroy the batteries. Ideally, you shouldn’t need to rely on Iron Warrior regularly.

DPS Rotation: 

For DPS, we will be sticking to a very precise order of powers in order to optimize of damage output (Rotation), as opposed to the sort of timing and power management style of tanking on Vanguard. We will try to do as much damage per second, with a small consideration given for group utility and efficiency.

AOE:

The powers we should use for maximum damage on AOE: I use Heavy Slash and Brazen Slash as my at-wills, Shield Slam, Tremor, and Onslaught as my encounters, and I don’t use my daily on mobs. Heavy Slash is always first because it gives us a damage bonus for 12 seconds. When feated properly, using Heavy Slash will consume its buff overtime I use an AOE power and hit more than one enemy. This means that we will use Heavy Slash, Encounter, Heavy Slash, Encounter, etc when fight mobs. Onslaught is our hardest hitting AOE power so I use Heavy Slash, and as soon as I have as much combat advantage on enemies as possible I’ll use Onslaught. Then I’ll follow up with Heavy Slash and Tremor. Lastly, I’ll finish up with Heavy Slash and Shield Slam. Shield Slam throws the enemies around so I try to use this last so that the move kills the target and I don’t have to worry about the knock back. Alternatively, if needed you can use Shield Slam to actually throw mobs together if they’re too spread out, then use Heavy Slash and Onslaught, etc. If you run out of encounters and are still fighting, just chip away with Brazen Slash and make sure that your Heavy Slash buff stays up (once every 12 seconds, recasting if you use an AOE power).

Optional substitutes for AOE include swapping Into The Fray with Shield Slam to help yourself and teammates move about the dungeon faster. This is really only a valuable option if the group you’re running with can kill mobs fast enough for you to not have to use more than Tremor and Onslaught before moving to the next group. If the group can’t kill mobs that fast, then it’s likely they’ll need your extra damage from Shield Slam to keep the run moving faster. You could always swap between Into the Fray and Shield Slam in between mob encounters if you auto-walk and want to really try to maximize your effeciency.

Single Target:

The powers we should use to maximize our damage on Single Target: I use Heavy Slash and Brazen Slash for my At-Wills, Commander’s Strike, Anvil of Doom, and Bull Charge/Griffon’s Wrath for my Encounters, and Mod Down for my Daily. For the purposes of defining the rotation, we will say that the rotation is everything that can fit within a 10 second window for our burst damage as that is the standard length for Debuffs and buff artifacts as well as mount combat powers. The order is as followed, and the faster you can do it the better. Swarm Combat Power, Soul Sight Crystal, Heavy Slash, Commander’s Strike, Anvil of Doom, Bull Charge/Griffon’s Wrath, and finishing with Mod Down. It seems like a lot but it is all easy to fit with in 10 seconds time frame with some practice. A variation to this rotation can be viable if you’re running with a really good tank and you’re using the Music Box Set. The previous rotation works for Demo set (best overall damage buff), or any other set you have as a placeholder until you get Demo set. The following rotation is adjusted to maximize the use of the Music Box Set, but this set is only good if you have a reliable tank and it’s only good for single target so you’d only use it if the group was extremely efficient: Swarm, Soul Sight Crystal, Heavy Slash, Commander’s Strike, Mod Down, Anvil of Doom, and finishing with Bull Charge/Griffon’s Wrath.

Bull Charge versus Griffon’s Wrath- optional controversial power swap:

Griffon’s Wrath technically deals the second highest damage next to Anvil of Doom (when feated) followed by Bull Charge. Commander’s Strike deals 400 magnitude which is actually 5th place for damage, but it’s always in our rotation to buff Mod Down and all of our physical damage. So when comparing Bull Charge and Griffon’s Wrath, we need to look at a few variables. These variables are damage, cooldown, animation length, and damage window opportunity. In my opinion, with a well coordinated group, Bull Charge is better because while it has a less magnitude than Griffon’s Wrath, it is quick to cast and has a short cooldown. Griffon’s Wrath does more magnitude but you only get the full magnitude if you complete the three-hit combo which sometimes isn’t possible if the boss moves, a phase ends prematurely, or if you get stunned or knocked around. If any of those things happens the Griffon’s Wrath was almost a wasted attempt at dealing damage. Also, the animation time for Griffon’s Wrath is really long, so in the best groups where you can one or two phase the bore worm for example, there is simply not enough time to wait on that full animation. However, in slower groups where buff timing isn’t relevant and phase canceling isn’t a thing, then you would do better to use Griffon’s Wrath instead of Bull Charge, but for top tier groups and fast boss phases Bull Charge is the best. You may even prefer Bull Charge in a slower group if you find yourself unable to complete the Griffon’s Wrath combo as stated above. Keep in mind that this argument is only valid as long as you are using the Momentum Class Feature, which for me is always on.

Feats:

Vanguard versus Dreadnought

The discussion of Paragon Paths and Feat selections were greatly simplified with the reworks introduced in Mod 16. Now, choosing your Paragon is as simple as deciding what role you’d like to play within the game. If you’d like to be a Tank, then you’ll pick Vanguard! If you’d like to DPS, you’ll pick Dreadnought! Of course, one can always skew the lines a little bit by creating a so called “hybrid” build by building for damage on Vanguard or by building for more survivability on Dreadnought to serve as an off-tank, but these hybrid type builds will only be moderately successful and the success mostly will shine through with weak groups. I hope to upload pictures soon as soon as I can deal with the issue of upload quality and resolution but for now, I’ll format this section by describing each feat as the choice you have to choose between and discuss why I picked each feat over the other option.

Vanguard Feats: 

Shield Thrower versus Staying Power

• Shield Thrower– Shield Throw now generates additional threat, its cooldown is reduced to 6 seconds, its magnitude is reduced to 250, and it no longer stuns targets.
• Staying Power- Enforced Threat now grants the added effect of increasing threat generated by at-wills for 6 seconds.

In most situations, I prefer to feat into Shield Thrower because the 5.7 second cooldown on Shield Throw plus it’s added threat generation is an “almost” spammable aggro tool, and its good for throwing ahead to pull the next group of mobs in to help you group up the mobs for an easier DPS clear. On single target, this is an excellent way to boost aggro generation. One could argue that Staying Power is better suited for mobs while Shield Thrower is better suited for bosses, and I would agree with that statement. However, even if one does not use Shield Throw on mobs (I usually don’t anymore), Staying Power is not necessary to use on mobs if you manage Enforced Threat and Linebreaker well. For one load out that works for both mobs and single target, I recommend Shield Thrower. If you want to have a separate loadout for mobs an single target, then you can choose to use Staying Power on mobs, but I definitely don’t think it’s necessary on bosses and not better than Shield Thrower on bosses.

Rising Tide versus Cleaving Bull

• Rising Tide- Tide of Iron now grants the effect of Rising Tide, causing you to deal additional physical damage whenever an attack strikes multiple enemies.
• Cleaving Bull– Bull Charge no longer knocks back targets and now grants the effect of Cleaving Bull, causing you to deal additional physical damage whenever an attack strikes multiple enemies.

I always use Cleaving Bull not only because Bull Charge is a popular tanking power for me (especially on mobs which this feat is aimed towards), but because I do not really use Tide of Iron in practice. Tide of Iron in theory is a great single target threat generation power but so is Threatening Rush. One could use both on bosses for aggro, but boss aggro is really easy and so I do well enough using Threatening Rush the entire dungeon which always helps with threat and provides be extra mobility when needed. Since I’ve already explained my reasoning for not needing or using Tide of Iron, I’ve explained with Rising Tide feat is not useful to me. Cleaving Bull actually IS useful to me though because while Bull Charge is a single target power (but the feat is aimed towards AOE mobs), I use Bull Charge to get into each mob group before the rest of the group by charging in, and so following this playstyle allows me to boost the damage my follow-up Enforced Threat deal additional damage via procs from Cleaving Bull feat. Also, from a damage/aggro standpoint, Bull Charge + 40 magnitude from Cleaving Bull feat is way more damage and threat generation than Tide of Iron + 25 magnitude from Rising Tide.

Critical Deflection versus Combat Balance

• Critical Deflection- Whenever you deflect an attack you recover up to 10 stamina if your critical strike rating matches or exceeds your deflect rating. Stamina recovered decreases as critical rate decreases. This effect may not occur when blocking and may only occur once every 5 seconds.
• Combat Balance– Whenever you are not blocking, decrease damage taken by up to 10% if your critical avoidance rating, deflect rating, and awareness rating are equal. This effect decreases the farther apart the ratings are.

Simply put, Combat Balance is infinitely better than Critical Deflection due to the fact that Combat Balance is a form of damage mitigation that will reduce the incoming damage you take that is separate from any defensive stat cap. This means that if you have all of your defensive stats capped and working in a given scenario, Combat Balance can still provide extra damage mitigation on top of that. For a tank, this feat is unmatched. Also, Critical Deflection has a pretty awkward condition to meet to get the perk, and the uptime of the buff isn’t great. Even if your stats are all over the place at first, you will still get more benefit from Combat Balance, even if you’re only get 1% damage mitigation I’d still recommend it over Critical Deflection.

Sharpened Senses versus Perfect Block

• Sharpened Senses– Bladed Rampart now negates the effect of combat advantage against you.
• Perfect Block- Determination now allows the blocking of most attacks without the use of stamina but a 180 second cooldown is imposed on Determination.

For some people, this feat choice may come down to “which power you like to use,’ but this situation is quite simple for me. Why would I want to impose a 3 minute cooldown on a daily power? If I slot a power, it’s because I find it useful. If I find it useful, I don’t want to be imposed to use it less often than I need it. Fact is, the key words in the tooltip are “allows the blocking of most attack.” This feat isn’t designed to beat tough mechanics but rather to be used as a panic button. As a panic button, I prefer Bladed Rampart. Being able to negate incoming CA damage and decrease overall damage by 30% for 10 seconds every minute (approximate time to fill my Action Points) is much better and much more reliable to be used as your “get out alive” card.

Shake It Off versus Deep Breathing

• Shake It Off– Increases the magnitude of Retaliate by up to 300 base on your remaining stamina. Damage decreases as remaining stamina decreases.
• Deep Breathing- Whenever you are under the effect of Dig In you gain the effect of Deep Breathing every 3 seconds. Deep Breathing increases damage by 4% and healing received by 4% for 10 seconds, and can stack up to 3 times.

With a little explanation, this becomes quite a simple choice to make. In order to make use of the Deep Breathing feat, you’d need to sit on the squatty potty (Dig In) for anywhere between 3 and 9 seconds to gain the buff. In actual gameplay, no one should be using Dig In for that long. The longer you sit on the squatty potty, the longer you’re gone without attacking your enemies and that could lead to a loss of aggro. A skilled Fighter will learn when just the exact right moment to use Dig In or their Shield Block is so as to not waste Stamina or time. Shake It Off is one of our best free sources of damage, which is especially helpful for holding aggro on multiple targets. When you Dig In and take damage you shield will turn red, and this is the visual confirming you’re about to Shake It Off and Retaliate. This effect deals damage in a cone which is great for holding aggro on mobs (but works well on bosses too). The more stamina you have the more damage the Retaliate will deal, so this feat also promotes proper use of the Dig In mechanic as well. The best use of this power is to get right into combat and proc Retaliate and Shake It Off on the first enemy hit you can take in combat , as this will grant you the maximum amount of damage (since your stamina should be full at the beginning of combat).

Dreadnought Feats: 

Heavier Slash versus Weight of Vengeance

• Heavier Slash- Grants your at-will attacks a 20% chance that your next heavy slash will deal an additional 200 magnitude damage.
• Weight of Vengeance– Grants Anvil of Doom the effect of dealing an additional 300 magnitude, recovering from cooldown 4 seconds faster, and consuming 25 vengeance. No effect if your Vengeance Guage is below 25.

As was the case with the first feat in the Vanguard Paragon, the Dreadnought Paragon has a little bit of debate and flexibility revolving around the first feat choice. Weight of Vengeance is by far the biggest increase in our DPS overall because it is a huge boost to our single target damage.  We get to use Anvil of Doom more often and it get s a huge buff to magnitude which makes it our top hitting encounter power. The loss of vengeance is not a big deal once you learn how to manage your Vengeance Meter, which I cover thoroughly in the Rotation tab. Heavier Slash is arguably useful on mobs because in slower groups where we have used our AOE powers, we must resort to a period of only using at-wills until our encounters come off of cooldown. Heavier Slash can bring some nice hits during these down times in our AOE encounter damage, but this is only really useful if your group  is taking a long time to kill mobs and if you are willing to run a second load out with Heavier Slash as the AOE choice and Weight of Vengeance as the Single Target choice. In groups I run with, we kill mobs fast enough where I typically never use my at-wils so for me Heavier Slash would be a waste, but if your groups are slower and you find yourself chipping away at mobs with at-wills, then you could consider Heavier Slash on mobs, but Weight of Vengeance on single target is a must for maximum damage output!

Ricochet versus Prepared Slam

• Ricochet- Shield Throw now bounces to up to three nearby enemies dealing 30% less damage to he second target, 60% less damage to the third target, and 70% less damage to the fourth target.
• Prepared Slam– Whenever you are under the effect of Heavy Slash your encounter powers which deal damage to multiple enemies consumes the effect of Heavy Slash to deal an additional 200 magnitude damage.

This is a sort of a weird comparison of feats. Ricochet is a feat that makes us deal LESS damage just so we can make a single target power into an AOE power. Read that again slowly, and then one more time. This feat actually makes zero logically sense. On DPS we want to deal more damage, and sacrificing damage to make a power AOE when we have three capable AOE encounter powers is a complete waste. Prepared Slam however, is a great damage boost to our arguably weak AOE DPS capability, but one must be sure how to use it correctly. The Heavy Slash damage buff which gives a 5% increase to all our damage dealt for 12 seconds must be used before every AOE encounter power we use, and it must hit more than one target. If these conditions are met, then the damage of each of those encounters powers is almost doubled. When compared to Ricochet that nerfs the damage of an already useless power for AOE DPS, this best choice for this feat is most clearly Prepared Slam.

Crushing Blows versus Roiling Hatred

• Crushing Blows- Whenever you attack you have a chance to deal a crushing blow consuming 5 vengeance to deal an additional 100 magnitude damage. Your chance to deal a crushing blow is 20% when your armor penetration is equal to your power and decreases the lower your armor penetration is.
• Roiling Hatred– Whenever you critically strike and your Vengeance Gauge is at least 50% full, restore 5 vengeance.

Another set of feats here where one choice is so obviously terrible, you wonder how the devs let something so dumb slip into the live game server. Crushing Blows is so terrible for a variety of reasons. First, the best chance to proc the bonus damage is 20% which is already a poor uptime on the perk. The 20% gets even worse since no good DPS is going to over cap armor penetration just so it can be the same as their Power rating, or even worse, lower their Power to match their armor penetration instead of trying to get Power as high as possible for maximum DPS. Also, 100 magnitude is nothing compared the the benefits of Roiling Hatred. Roiling Hatred does not provide a damage proc or buff directly, but when you understand what it does and why it is important. Roiling Hatred is the clear choice. Roiling Hatred helps us to maintain our Vengeance Gauge above 50%. This is extremely important because our Dreadnought Class Mechanic for Vengeance states we earn a 20% damage buff when above 50% Vengeance, and we have a Class Feature that will allow us to obtain an additional 5% damage buff at max stacks. So just for keeping our Vengeance Gauge above 50% we get a 25% damage buff. A damage buff of any kind is going to be way better than a couple random procs for 100 magnitude, but 25% is a hue damage buff! There is absolutely no comparison here as far as discussing which feat will lead to us optimizing our DPS output. With Roiling Hatred, it is very easy to manage and maintain our self-buffs for our damage output.

Landwaster versus Striker’s Mark

• Landwaster- Grants Earthshaker the effect of applying Landwaster when the Vengeance Gauge is above 90%. Landwaster allows the execution of Shockwave with no action points by activating Earthshaker again. Doing so fully depletes the Vengeance Gauge.
• Striker’s Mark- Grants Mow Down the effect of dealing 2000 magnitude damage if the target is affected by Commander’s Strike. Commander’s Strike is removed from the target in this case.

Now, ok the devs really implemented some absolutely terrible feats on the Dreadnought Paragon, but perhaps this one isn’t as obvious. Allow me to explain. Landwaster basically allows you the ability to grant 2 dailies when you’re above 90% Vengeance. 90% Vengeance is extremely easy to maintain and 2 dailies is like double the damage, right? Not at all actually. First, if you have to use 2 dailies to kill a group of mobs, there’s something seriously wrong with the DPS in your group. Second, in case you were wondering, you must use the follow-up Shockwave attacker almost immediately or else the effect and free daily is lost so you can’t use Earthshaker on the first set of mobs and save Shockwave for the next set of mobs. Third, and most important, the effect completely depletes your Vengeance Gauge! Remember how right above this feat we discussed how important it was to stay above 50% Vengeance in order to maintain a 25% damage increase from self-buffs? The fact that you’re supposed to deplete the Vengeance Gauge on mobs and then somehow find time to build it back up to 50%+ again is ridiculous. You’ll either get to the next mob without the damage buffs, or you’ll be late to the party because you spent too much time on the squatty potty building up your vengeance. This is the biggest trap feat we have (trap as in don’t fall for it). On the other hand, Striker’s Mark is probably one of the biggest contributors to our burst damage that we have, so in fact it is ok that they gave us such a crappy alternative against Striker’s Mark. Striker’s Mark buffs our hardest hitting single target power to deal even more damage just as long as you use Commander’s Striker before using Mow Down. for an additional 400 magnitude at a total of 2000 magnitude (plus Mow Down will benefit from Commander’s Striker as well), this feat is a very clear winner for our DPS. Mow Down is only helpful on bosses unfortunately, but for the reason explained above, you can skip Landwaster as it is the exact opposite of useful to use on mobs.

Bloody Reprise versus Executioner’s Cut

• Bloody Reprise- Whenever your Vengeance Gauge drops below 50% you receive the effect of Bloody Reprise. Bloody Reprise states that whenever you use an encounter power, set your Vengeance Gauge to 75.
• Executioner’s Cut- Whenever you attack an enemy with less than 30% hit points, deal 50 magnitude additional damage and restore 3 Vengeance.

Ok folks, you thought they were all done with trap feats but you were wrong! To be fair, this isn’t so much a trap as it is a way to enable poor performance as a Dreadnought DPS. Bloody Reprise sort of acts as a safety net to provide your will a quick way to regain Vengeance should you accidentally mess up and drop your Vengeance below 50%. We talked about this in great detail already, that we should never ever drop below 50% Vengeance because that would equate to a 25% damage loss for us. It’s not hard to keep Vengeance maxed with Roiling Hatred, good critical chance, and constant attacking so don’t fall for this scapegoat of a feat. Executioner’s Cut is not a super stellar feat, but it is functional and provides us with yet another small means to replenish Vengeance (even more reason to ignore Bloody Reprise and why you should never be low on Vengeance), and it provides a small damage increase. While the damage increase is small and conditional, we will take any damage increase as opposed to the alternative which offers no direct damage increase.

CAMPAIGN BOONS:

In Mod 16, the boons page and progression got overhauled, and the choices between boon became a lot more straightforward and simple to determine, so I will not be debating boons in great detail. I will provide a few guidelines for choosing the proper boons based on the current progress of your build. I will also include my own boon selections for where I’m at at with my build and stats currently.

Campaign Boons: 

With the changes to the Boon Page with the introduction on Mod 16, boons became quite easier to navigate and decide which boons to use. I will attach my Boon Page for both Vanguard and Dreadnought below at a later date, but for now, here is the process I use for determining which boons to use no matter what stage of development mine or a friend’s build is at no matter if I am playing Vanguard Tank or Dreadnought DPS.

1. Use your boon points to reach your important start caps. Boons are a good way to round out your stats if you’re just a little bit under the cap so this is the first thing you should do with your boons.
2. If you have met your stats caps and you still have boon points left over, use your points to maximize your Power and HP as those stats do not have caps.
3. If you still have points left to use I would invest in some utility bonuses. The ones I like to invest in are Movement Speed, Companion Influence, and Control Resist.
4. When you get to Tier 5, you will be able to make 2 of these boons. You can choose to use these 8 points to fill in Tiers 1-4 if you’re really behind on stats, or if you’re able to I would take Stamina Gain and Incoming Healing for Vanguard, with Critical Severity being an optional substitute if you’re struggling to maintain aggro. For Dreadnought, I recommend Stamina Gain and Critical Severity, with Incoming Healing being an optional substitute for Stamina Gain if you feel you manage your Stamina/Seethe well enough without it.
5. For the Master Boons, I really like 3/3 in Focused Retaliation. This can lead to big number proc on both Vanguard and Dreadnought but taking damage is the requirement for the damage to proc. This is a must for me on Vanguard, but if you’re running Dreadnought and you feel you don’t take enough damage for Focused Retaliation to be worthwhile, then take 3/3 in Bloodlust.

Optional:

If you’re going to be running separate layouts for specific content, you can work in taking a few damage boons as they will help with either DPS or Aggro depending on your Paragon Path, but I don’t think it’s worthwhile to invest almost 30% of our boons to running Damage % boons full-time when often times you’re only going to encounter on of those types. Sometimes depending on the content you don’t benefit from any of the Damage % boons. I don’t both with them but if you wanted to have a specific load out for To9G for example (not necessary anymore) then you would probably take the damage increase to undead enemies and maybe even increased damage to dinosaurs. In general though, I skip these boons but if you have few points leftover after maxing Power. HP, my Utility preferences, Tier 5, and Master Boon then you could start dumping into a damage bonus.

GUILD BOONS:  

Power:

Your only viable choices for either DPS or Tanking is to use the Power boon or the Armor Penetration boon. This is personal preference, and will change the way that you build with your gear and enchantments. My philosophy is that one should always go for Power if possible as Power is an uncapped stat. You only need specific amounts of Armor Penetration depending on the content you’re running but more Power will always be beneficial and Power is harder to get than stats like Armor Penetration which can be acquired through Combined Rating.

Defense:

Defense is a bit more complicated. As a tank, you will likely use the Defense boon early on until you hit the Defense cap. After that, you can choose Incoming Healing or Hit Points. I personally choose to get Incoming Healing from elsewhere as Hit Points can be hard to get a lot of without the HP boon. Even better is having access to both Incoming Healing and Hit Points boons so that you may swap between the situational. If you’re unsure which one to use just answer this question. Which is more problematic-Am I dying because the healer isn’t able to heal me fast enough, or am I dying because I’m getting one shot? If you’re dying because the healer is having a hard time filling your HP pool, then Incoming Healing is your answer. If you’re dying because a mechanic or boss is one shooting you, then HP will likely be your answer (assuming your Defensive stats are capped).

Utility:

This boon is 100% personal preference. If you’re new to the game and need power points I would suggest using the experience boon so you can get the extra experience rewards. Otherwise, I keep mount speed bonus on all the time. Revive sickness is a good one but as good players we always hope to not go down in the first place.

PVP:

I’m including this boon since some of you may be in a guild that has this boon available, and some of you may dabble in PVP. When I go into PVP I run the Overload Slayer. My goal is to kill my target in one rotation so the overload slayer boon helps me do that, especially on the tankier classes that I slot overloads for. If you do not have the Overload Slayer boon, I would go for the Stamina Drain boon. Just be sure to use overloads according to the boon you’re using.

Equipment:

Once again, this section is getting a major change (in progress). Armor is now listed as a palette as opposed to pre-made sets in this section. Additionally, this list is not definitive. There are other choices that will work for any of the builds (particularly lower gear), but seeing as the time gap to catching up from fresh level 70 to reaching this new gear eat level 80 is considerably smaller, I have left out older gear such Drowcraft, Dusk, Alliance, Elven, and Dragonflight. If you happen to come across those feel free to use them until you get better gear, however the lists below all consider the most recent modules’ gear selection (Mod 11-17).

When choosing any equipment in this game, there are a few important considerations. The first one being accessibility (costs, content unlocked, seals, etc) and the second being the stat allocation. Below I will list all of the equipment most recent equipment I would recommend in each category, but that does not mean you must use that gear. I will highlight and explain why I’ve picked some pieces over others, but any gear that has made this has the stats required for a good build, and you should feel free to mix and match, and tailor to your playstyle.

Be sure to take a look in your collection to find out information on the stats they have and where to acquire the gear.

Vanguard-Tank Armor:

Helm:

• Protege Helmet
• Mane of the Manticore
• Successor Helmet

Chest: 

• Barkhide
• Successor Chest Piece

Arms: 

• Lazaric Hide Gloves
• Successor Gloves

Boots: 

• Gilded Spike Gaitors
• Sparkly Slippers of Sloopna

Rings: 

• Ebonized Assault Ring
• Ebonized Ward Ring

Shirt:

• Protege Shirt
• Prized Cult Shirt

Pants: 

• Protege Pants
• Ebonized Pants

Artifact Neck and Belt:

• Valhalla Set
• Trobriand Set
• Wyvern Set
• Reflective Set
• Flowers Set

Artifacts:

• Staff of Flowers
• Wyvern-Venom Coated Knives
• Trobriand’s Ring
• Arcturia’s Music Box
• Erratic Drift Globe

• Halaster’s Scepter>Charm of the Serpent>Wyvern>Lantern of Revelation>Thirst>Heart of the Black Dragon

Weapons:

• Lionheart Set
• Burnished Set
• Watcher Set

When considering armor choices on a tank, I am looking for bonuses that either help me with my survivability, provide me utility or group support, or help me with my stats. This list will continue to be update so I can help guide the gear progression for new players. The above gears currently are some of my favorite pieces to use at end game. As always, until you hit your caps, you should just be equipping the new best thing for reach your stat goals. Once you reach your stat goals you can seek out gear with better bonuses and min-max your stats as you change pieces out.

Dreadnought-DPS Armor: 

Helm: 

• Protege Helmet
• Cap of the Omnipotent

Chest: 

• Fured Kiuno of the Bear
• Executioner’s Black Attire
• Ebonized Chest Piece

Arms: 

• Terrored Grips
• Jawrippers

Boots: 

• Enduring Boots
• Heels of Fury
• Boots of the Willed
• Sparkly Slippers of Sloopna

DPS Rings: 

• Shadowstalker +4/+5
• Ebonized Assault Ring

Shirt:

• Protege Shirt
• Prized Cult Shirt

Pants: 

• Protege Pants
• Ebonized Pants

Artifact Neck and Belt:

• Demogorgon Set
• Music Box Set

Artifacts:

• Arcturia’s Music Box
• Staff of Flowers
• Soul Sight Crystal
• Trobriand’s Ring
• Wyvern-Venom Coated Knives

Weapons: 

• Lionheart Set
• Burnished Set
• Watcher Set
• Alabaster Set
• Mighty Set

When considering armor choices on a DPS, I am looking for bonuses that either help me with my damage, provide me utility or group support, or help me with my stats. This list will continue to be update so I can help guide the gear progression for new players. The above gears currently are some of my favorite pieces to use at end game. As always, until you hit your caps, you should just be equipping the new best thing for reach your stat goals. Once you reach your stat goals you can seek out gear with better bonuses and min-max your stats as you change pieces out.

Artifact Sets:

For DPS:

There is only one viable set for full DPS. Demon Lord’s set with the Demogorgon’s Belt, Baphomet’s Infernal Talisman, and the Shard of Orcus Wand artifact. I suppose the next best set available currently would be the Lostmauth Set, but if you’re seriously trying for DPS, the artifact set isn’t the place to cut corners. Even in Mod 13, the Demon Lord’s set is still unmatched. People have asked if I think the Apocalypse set from Mod 14 will beat the Demogorgon set. The short answer is no, but when I get to Mod 14 and can test it, I will pass along my findings.

Artifact Weapons:

Outdated Weapon Sets:

• Golden Dragon Set
• Elemental Fire Set
• Burning, Howling, Earthen, Drowned Sets
• Twisted Set
• Shield bearer Set
• Mirage, Fireforged, Fey, and Abolish Sets
• Wootz Set
• Pilgrim Set
• Pioneer Set
• Primal Set
• Tyrant Set
• Bronzewood/Stronghold Sets

Current Weapon Sets:

• Mighty Set (CTA Seasons Reward)
• Mountaineer Set (Trader Store)
• Burnished Set (Seals of the Deep Vendor-Lair of the Mad Mage)
• Alabaster Set (Master Expeditions)
• Watcher Set (Master Expeditions Watcher Boss)
• Lionheart Set (Tower of the Mad Mage)

So you’re probably wondering, if the weapons are outdated, why even list them? Well, particularly for the new players in Neverwinter, it is important to understand that you’re joining the game late, and so many changes have occurred since the beginning of the game. You will progress through older campaign module content and will come across many of the weapons. It’s important to know that your time grinding for the old weapons, or refining them is not valuable. Unless you want older weapons for transmutes or for very niche gameplay, you’ll do better to just run older weapons at a low rank as a placeholder until you can get newer weapons.

Among the new weapon sets are many options. It’s important to upgrade to a current weapon set not just for the base stats (much higher), but the weapon damage is much higher than older weapon sets. Weapon damage determines the range in which your attacks can deal damage. If your teammates have higher weapon damage then you, then you’re at a huge disadvantage as a tank to try and hold aggro threshold over someone who will have higher base hits than you. As DPS, it’s simply less damage so try to upgrade to a current weapon set as soon as possible.

In Mod 16, what weapons are best can depend largely on the situation one will perform in. For DPS and Tank I would recommend Alabaster or Burnished. In Mod 17, the best weapons in the game will be Lionheart which is a very rare reward from Tower of the Mad Mage. For many, this weapon set will be inaccessible for a while. When you’re ready to try and get the Lionhearted set, the preferred weapon sets for a Tank or DPS to farm ToMM are Burnished or Watcher. Another viable option for DPS in Mod 17 is the Mighty Set if you’re able to get it or have been farming the event.

Enchantments:

Whatever stats you cannot get from your boons, artifacts, weapons, gear, and your mount you will need to supplement with enchantments. A few things about enchantments are that there are single, double, and triple stat enchantments. It is difficult to advise one on which enchantments are best for their character is it is all fine tuning. In Mod16, the game shifted to making relying on gear to get the bulk of our stats we need. This means that really, you can upgrade your Runestones on your companion and get your gear exactly the way you like it, and THEN you should start investing in your enchantments as they offer the least amount of gain for your investment. That being said, upgrading enchantments can take a long time so if you only want to make enchantments once (hard to avoid), then upgrade them last when you have a better idea of what you’ll need. Your other option is to pick an enchantment with a pretty safe spread of options so that you can upgrade them over time and not worry about if you have the totally wrong enchantment for your stat needs. With the newest update to enchantments, at max rank you get about 9% more stats if you use a double stat enchantment instead of single stat enchantment, and about 17% more stats if you use a triple stat enchantment instead of a single stat enchantment. This is quite a bit less of a increase moving to split stat enchantments than we had pre-Mod 16, so if the triple stats work for you then great. If not, you’re not losing enough stats to make it noticeable if single or double stat enchantments are giving you exactly what you need.

In Offense:

For Tanks: 

• Radiant (Power)
• Brutal or Cruel or Vicious (Power/Crit or Power/Accuracy or Power/Armor Pen)
• Black Ice or Demonic or Draconic (Power-Accuracy/Crit or Armor Pen-Power/Crit or Armor Pen-Power/Accuracy)

If you looked closely, you may have noticed that I chose all enchantments that included some amount of Power to them. The reasoning for this is that Power is an uncapped stat. There are people that will argue with me that Power is not necessary on a tank, and those same people will also argue that Combat Advantage is not needed on a tank either and that these are DPS stats. However,  one could say the same thing about Armor Penetration and Accuracy. All these offensive stats aid in the process of dealing damage which whether or not people like it or accept it, does effect aggro to a certain degree. Being able to deal some type of damage matters more when you have very good DPS in your group. Power won’t help you though if you are too low on your other offensive stats so if you are capped on everything then my best recommendation is to take Radiants for maximum Power gain. If you need to fill in some stats, try picking up one of the suggested enchantments that at least includes some Power gain. If none of these enchantments work for you because you’re missing a lot of stats, try gearing up your companion and armor more before worrying about enchantments.

For DPS:

• Radiants (Power)
• Brutal or Cruel or Vicious (Power/Crit or Power/Accuracy or Power/Armor Pen)
• Black Ice (Power-Accuracy/Crit)

The clear winner for offensive enchantments on any DPS class is Radiants. This is because a Radiant has 960 more power than Black Ice and any amount of Power increase is still a damage increase. If you’re low on other stats you cold use a double or triple stat option but you would be doing so at a loss of damage potential. If you’re not capped on your stats however, adding Power won’t help you a whole lot. Definitely get your companion and your armor all set up first to where you are capped on your stats so that you can invest in Radiants without fear of falling short on other stat caps.

In Defense:

For Tanks: 

• Radiant (Maximum Hit Points)
• Brutal or Wicked or Savage (HP/Defense or HP/Deflection or HP/Crit Avoidance)
• Gigantic or Draconic or Demonic (HP-Defense/Deflection or HP-Defense/Crit Avoidance or HP-Deflection/Crit Avoidance)

Once again, if you notice the pattern for the tanks as if with offense, I focused on enchantment options with HP because HP is our uncapped Defensive stat. If you are all capped on all of your Defensive stats, then the best possible choice for an enchantment is Radiant so you get your HP as high as possible. I would like to point out that Demonic is also an extremely strong contender, and the reason is that Deflection and Critical Avoidance are a lot harder to come across on gear and therefore you’ll find they are bit harder to cap than Defense. Since you get HP plus Critical Avoidance and Deflection with a Demonic, that is a very strong substitute for the Radiant enchantment. You’ll gain 720 Deflection and Critical Avoidance each but lose 3,840 HP. Either Radiant or Demonic is a solid option in my opinion.

For DPS:

• Radiant (Maximum Hit Points)
• Brutal or Savage (HP/Defense or HP/Critical Avoidance)
• Draconic or  (HP-Defense/Crit Avoidance)

In general, it’s important to understand that as a non-tank class we have to prioritize our defensive stats even more so than our tank allies. The reality is that if you cannot cap a stat, then the enemy still has countersuit working against you and therefore anything invested in that stat is much less effective. So for Defensive stats, if we can’t cap Defense or Critical Avoidance for instance, then it would’ve been better for us to invest in HP so we can take bigger hits. The only content really requiring heavy defensive stats for DPS classes in Mod 17 is Tower of the Mad Mage. If you want to try and bulk up your survivability a little bit you can try a mix of HP and Defense/Critical Avoidance options as those will be our best two capped sources of mitigation. Otherwise, HP is your best bet for overall use.

Utility:

The number one BiS enchantment for utility slots in PvE content is Tactical for Incoming Healing Bonus, hands down. It’s the only utility that actually provides a quality of life improvement to group content. That being said, you’ll see some people occasionally running Dark enchantments in utility for Companion Influence but realistically you’ll probably want to be capped on your stats before relying on Companion Influence, and your healer will thank you for running Tacticals regardless of if you’re a Tank or DPS.

I understand the need for refinement and occasionally, I find myself needing refinement boosting enchantments. To maximize refinement, use 1 Quartermaster and 1 Dragonhoard as both enchantments have cool downs, so no use running extras. Then use Fey enchantments 1 Fey and 2 Tacticals. If you have no need or interest in these enchantments for refinement, then run all Tacticals Dark for Incoming Healing in all utility slots.

Weapon Enchantment:

The thing to understand about weapon enchantments is that what’s best to use may be situational. It’s not exactly what everyone wants to hear when discussing making a huge investment like buying a weapon enchantment or ranking one up. However, it’s true and the fact is some weapon enchantments stack and some don’t. If you run enchantment A in a group and your buddy uses that same enchantment, you only get the benefit of one enchantment if it doesn’t stack. With that in mind, here are some options.

For Tanks:

Bronzewood– At max rank, this enchantment marks enemies on encounter use, and provides allies with an 10% Damage Buff against the marked targets for 10 seconds. The mark and buff can only be applied once every 20 seconds to a given target, which means this enchantment’s buff has a 50% uptime. Still, for an enchantment that buffs your allies this is still a great thing that we can provide for our allies as tanks. This is the ultimate choice for group orientated building.

Lightning- At max rank, when you strike a foe you have a 50% chance of arcing a bolt of lightning off of them to a nearby foe, dealing magnitude 50 weapon damage. This can chain up to 3 times. This enchantment doesn’t really help the group at all, so the only reason I’m suggesting this enchantment as a substitute for Bronzewood is that it should help you with your aggro on mobs. If you need help with aggro you can try this but Bronzewood is still the best.

For DPS:

Vorpal– A max rank, increases your Critical Severity by 50%. This is going to be the best overall damage increase for a DPS weapon enchantment. This is pretty much the standard for all DPS classes.

Lightning- At max rank, when you strike a foe you have a 50% chance of arcing a bolt of lightning off of them to a nearby foe, dealing magnitude 50 weapon damage. This can chain up to 3 times. This enchantment gets notice because it has been noticed that for some classes without Damage over Time abilities that can crit, Lightning may actually post your DPS on mobs. If you were to invest in a Lightning enchantment for DPS, I’d only recommend using it on mobs. Some people don’t want to manage to weapon enchantments and swapping them out situationally so if that’s the case, just stick with the Vorpal.

Armor Enchantment:

Elven Battle– A max rank, you are 85% more resistant to slows, immobilizes, disables, and stuns. Their duration is reduced. Your Stamina Regen is also increased by 40%. This is our number one choice of armor enchantment for both DPS and Tank. Our shield is important not only to our survivability but also for managing Seethe for increasing our damage on Dreadnought. Therefore, Stamina Regen is a valuable utility buff for either playstyle. The resistance to Crowd Control effects is super nice too. You may not think it does anything as you will still get stunned and knocked around, however if you have run with Elven Battle before and then forgotten it on a different character and ran without one for instance, you’ll have a new found appreciation for how good this enchantment is.

Eclipse- At max rank, increases your Deflection rating by 3,000. Whenever your stamina drops below 20% your stamina is refilled and no longer depletes for 3 seconds. This effect may occur once every 60 seconds. This is a solid choice for a Tank both because of the bonus Deflection rating which is harder to come by. The shield utility buff however is great for both Tank and DPS in dire situations, but because this effect has a major cool down on it, this enchantment is second place to the Elven Battle.

Bloodtheft- At max rank, you have a 10% chance upon dealing damage to heal yourself for 50% of the damage dealt. This can only occur once every 3 seconds. This enchantment provides minor survivability but doesn’t really provide utility, so if you really need a source of self-healing you can try this out, but you’re going to be better off if you can stick with Elven Battle or Eclipse for shield utility, and our shield is our main source of survivability.

Companions:

When you are building your companion team, there are some basics to know.

1. Bonding runestones are what can make a low level character very effective, and a great character BiS. They share stats from your companion and add them to your own stats. These are the single most important runestone/enchantment on your whole character and these should be the first thing ones that you upgrade.

2. Some stats share from your companion to you, and some don’t. Power, Crit, Armor Pen, Accuracy, Combat Advantage, Defense, Deflection, Critical Avoidance, and Awareness all share. Maximum Hit Points does not share through Bondings currently. However, if your companion has HP on it that can share through your Bolster bonus but equipping HP to your companion will not share to you.

3. Bolster is a new feature where the more companions you have ranked up in a certain category boosts the amount of stats you gain from activating any companion from that Bolster group. The companion groupings are Fighters, Creatures, Invokers, Mystical, and Beasts. 15% Bolster is the max meaning you have 5 Legendary ranked companions in that category. You want to run a companion from the group that has the highest Bolster available to you. If you want to run a specific companion as active, then you should work on upgrading companions from that category to increase the Bolster.

4. You now get 5 companion bonus slots. On Fighter, these are fixed as being 1 Offense, 3 Defense, and 1 Utility bonus slots. you can run any bonuses that you’d like as long as they fit within those categories, and what you run does not have to coincide with your summoned companion. This means that if you really like to run the Bulette Pup as your active companion, you do not need to use Bulette Pup companion bonus just because you have that companion active. The higher quality the companion is that you’re using for bonuses, the higher quality the bonus will be when you equip it.

5. Your active companion can equip 3 pieces of companion-only gear, and it does not matter what type of gear it is like it did in the past. This means that you can now just pick gear with the stats you need without having to worry about if it is a ring, neck, sword knot, etc. This gear all has IL and Combined Rating on it so when picking new pieces of gear, in general it will always be better to have higher IL gear as you’ll get a higher Combined Rating which is an improvement to all of your stats except Power and HP.

6. Your active companion can now has have an Enhancement which is a bonus applied directly to your character upon meeting certain conditions. Each companion has a different Enhancement but many companions can have the same Enhancement. The Enhancement is always the same rank and effectiveness no matter what level your companion rank is at. You do not need to use the Enhancement that came with your current summoned companion.

7. There are two types of companions: Augments Companions, and what I’ll refer to as Summoned Companions. An Augment companion is a pet that follows you around but is non-combative. These companions provide higher stats to the user, but they have no combat powers and cannot fight. These are the most popular type of companion currently as capping stats is extremely important to proper gameplay. Summoned companions are pets that can engage in combat and sometimes can even provide useful bonuses for the user or the user’s group. If one is to use a Summoned Companion, the reasoning would be very specific to provide a particular bonus for the group that is worthwhile and would outweigh the amount of stats one would get from an augment. Augments differ from each other not by combat powers, but by Augment Enhancement Stats. Each Augment offers 3 main stats in which it has more of than the rest of its stats, and these stats effect what is shared to you. So the user can choose their augment based on the bonus stats it provides in its Stat Enchantment to help the user reach vital stat caps. When choosing the proper active companion, we will need to consider Augment Stat Enhancements and Summoned Companion Powers that are of an asset to us.

Summoned (Active) Companion:

For Tanks:

For Tanks, we want any Augment that will provide us with that stats we need to cap as its Stat Enhancement. Otherwise, all Augments function the same and therefore as long as you have one, the Stat Enhancement is a very minor factor to consider. Once you are close to maxing out your character, you can change Augments to min-max your stats if you’d like. Some suggested Augments are:

Bulette Pup- Provides extra CA, Defense, and Power. Power is uncapped and CA is hard to cap so this is a solid choice. The companion bonus that comes with Bulette is also viable for a tank so you can’t go wrong with this Augment.

Red Dragon Ioun Stone- Provides HP, Deflect, and Defense. This is a very defensive based State Enhancement but it works great for a Tank, and its companion bonus is one of the best ones available for a tank so this is another solid choice for getting the most bang for your buck.

Goldfish- Provides HP, Crit, and Deflect. There is a mix of offensive and defensive Stat Enhancement here, but the companion bonus is viable for a Tank.

Chicken- Provides Critical Avoidance, CA, and Defense. This provides too of our most important defensive stats plus a hard to cap offensive stat. Solid choice for Stat Enhancement with another viable companion bonus option.

On tank, we could provide the group we are running with some utility by running an Active Companion. At this time, there are only a few that I would possibly recommend. It’s important to understand that by running an Active Companion though, you are severely cutting down the amount of stats you can gain on your character so being high-leveled, end game, and near min-maxed on your enchantment and runestone choices will be imperative to running an Active Companion without the loss of stat effecting your gameplay. A few suggestions of viable Active Companions are:

Black Death Scorpion- This companion upon attacking provides forced Combat Advantage to the target to make sure your DPS is always dealing Combat Advantage even if they can’t both to position themselves correctly. CA positioning is super important for maximizing damage so this is a great utility feature you can provide to your team, especially in situations where positioning for CA isn’t feasible or possible. The uptime on this feature is 100% which makes this one of the best Active Companions we could use.

Pseudodragon- Poison Sting damages the target with its poison barbed tail, poisoning the target for 5 seconds. Rampant Venom provides Combat Advantage against targets that are poisoned. This companion can use Poison Sting once every 8 seconds so with a 5 second uptime on the forced Combat Advantage, this is a pretty good buff for ensuring your DPS are always dealing Combat Advantage damage even if they are too dim witted to position correctly.

Dread Warrior- Siphon Strike deals damage to a target and heals allies near the target and increases the power of those allies by 5,000. Warrior’s Thirst increases the damage of allies healed by Siphon Strike by 10%. This effect lasts for 5 seconds. This buff is actually pretty good but the uptime isn’t great because the attacks are slow. Still, if you can cap your stats without an augment and you want to provide your team with some extra firepower this is one way to do so.

Harper Bard- Bardic Inspiration provides allies with HP above 50% additional Power and Critical Strike. Allies with below 50% HP are granted Defense and Deflection instead. This effect lasts for about 7 seconds from the time cast. The only reason to run this would be to help increase your allies Power to increase their damage. The uptime isn’t great, but it could be a decent option if you already had this companion from previous mods. It’s Companion Bonus is one of my favorites for the tank so if you follow my guide closely you’ll likely have this companion sitting around anyways.

For DPS:

For DPS, we want any Augment that will provide us with that stats we need from its Stat Enhancement. Mainly, we want Power as one of the 3 stats and then the other 2 stats can be any offensive stat we may still be short on. Otherwise, all Augments function the same and therefore as long as you have one, the Stat Enhancement is a very minor factor to consider. Once you are close to maxing out your character, you can change Augments to min-max your stats if you’d like. Some suggested Augments are:

Bulette Pup- Provides extra CA, Defense, and Power. Power is uncapped and CA is hard to cap so this is a solid choice.

Icosahedron Ioun Stone- Provides Crit, CA, and Power. Again, Power is uncapped and CA is hard to cap, and we get another offensive stat thrown in here as opposed Defense with Burette Pup. This is another solid option if you’re low on the crit, but if you play tank too this may be a very marginal upgrade for you from the Burette Pup unless you’re really hurting for Critical Strike.

On DPS, we don’t really want to be running an Active Companion because doing so makes it much harder to cap our offensive stats and to stack power as high as possible.

Companion Enhancement: 

Tank: 

Redemption- Chance on hit to heal you and your companion for 4% Maximum Hit Points over 15 second when your companion is nearby. This is a great utility buff for helping your survive a bit longer even if your healer isn’t able to keep your alive. Realistically, this doesn’t replace a healer but it will help take some of the pressure off of them.

If you don’t have Redemption or if you are still struggling to reach stat caps, you can use a different bonus that helps fill up your missing stats. This isn’t a good long term solution though as capping stats only under certain procs and conditions is not reliable, and you’ll eventually want to cap from stats alone.

DPS: 

Potent Precision- Chance on hit to increase you and your companion’s Critical Severity by 5% for 15 seconds the your companion is near. This is the best source of bonus damage from a Companion Enhancement bonus. The value of the buff depends on the quality of the active pet. The only other source of damage we could gain here is from adding Power as I’ll show below, but the amount of Power you gain does not increase our damage more than the Critical Severity will.

Potency- Chance on hit to increase your power by up to 2,000 and your companions critical avoidance by up to 4% for 15 seconds when your companion is near. The value of the buff depends on the quality of the active pet. This is a substitute for Potent Precision in case you don’t have the bonus yet, but Potent Precision is the best damage increase we can get so we should use that over Potency.

If you can’t get Potent Precision, and you don’t have Potency to use in the meantime, use an Enhancement that helps your reach your stat caps. This isn’t a good long term solution though as capping stats only under certain procs and conditions is not reliable, and you’ll eventually want to cap from stats alone.

COMPANION GEAR:

In Mod 16, leading into Mod 17 I am wearing 2x Choke Chain of the Companion, and 1 Plated Belt of the Companion. On companion gear, we want the highest amount of stats possible but they need to give us stats that are useful for us as tanks too. In Mod 16, the devs didn’t really release a lot new companion gear so our options are a bit limited. We want high item level gear so we can gain a high combined rating which will make capping all of our stats a lot easier. My current set-up doesn’t have me capping out all my stats, but it does have me capping all of the mandatory stats for high-level performance. When I get access to the Mod 17 companion gear, I will update the gear I have swapped to in order to cap more stats and prepare my tank for the Tower of the Mad Mage.

Companion Bonuses: 

Tank: 

Defense Power- Harper Bard (16,000 Maximum Hit Points and 2,000 Awareness)

Offense Power- Zhentarim Warlock (16,000 Maximum Hit Poitns and 4,000 Combat Advantage)

Defense Power- Iron Golem (16,000 Maximum Hit Points and 2,000 Defense)

Defense Power- Red Dragon Ioun Stone (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 8,000 Maximum Hit Points)

Utility Power- Energon (32,000 Maximum Hit Points)

Viable Substitutes:

Offense- Goldfish (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 2,000 Critical Avoidance), Werewolf (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 2,000 Defense), Galeb Duhr (10% chance on using an encounter power to restore 5% Max Stamina.

Defense- Duergar Theurge (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 2,000 Armor Penetration), Ioun Stone of Allure (10% Incoming Healing and 2,000 Power), Burette Pup (Taking more than 20% HP in a single blow procs a heal over time that heals your for that 20% HP over the next 5 seconds once every 60 seconds), Chicke (+40% movement speed and a 7.5% damage buff on your attacker if you take 25% of your HP or more in a single blow, once every 30 seconds).

Utility- Battlefield Medic (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 2,000 Combat Advantage), Dedicated Squire (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 2,000 Accuracy), Acolyte of Kelemvor (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 4,000 Deflection), Pig (5% of your Max HP healed every second you are controlled), Pseudodragon (10% chance on using an at-will power to restore 4% of Max Stamina), Shadow Demon (A deflection does almost no damage and does 20% weapon damage to the source of the defected attack once every 30 seconds). Dread Warrior (10% chance on damage taken to become enraged, increasing threat generation by10% for 10 seconds).

DPS: 

Defense Power- Minstrel (4,000 Power and 2,000 Awareness)

Offense Power- Tamed Velociraptor (You gain 2,000 Power per ally running this companion with a cap of 10,000 Power)

Defense Power- Ioun Stone of Allure (10% Incoming Healing Bonus and 2,000 Power)

Defense Power- Ioun Stone of Might (2,000 Power and 4,000 Deflection)

Utility Power- Alpha Compy (Increases your power by 5%. 10% when in Chult)

Viable Substitutes:

Offense- Deepcrow Hatchling (8,000 Power), Mercenary (4,000 Power and 2,000 Combat Advantage). Batiri Runt (5% bonus damage to bosses). Anything that helps you reach your offensive stat caps.

Defense-Anything that helps you reach your offensive stat caps; there are no other Power options for this slot.

Utility- Mercenary (4,000 Power and 2,000 Combat Advantage). Anything that helps you reach your offensive stat caps.

Companion Runestones:

What runestones your should use is going to depend on a combination of the Companion Gear you have available to use, the Enchantments you’ve chosen to use on your character, and the gear and artifacts you’ve chosen in order to reach your stat caps. Currently at the time of writing this, I am set-up for Mod 16 content and awaiting access to the new companion gear in Mod 17. When I get access to the new companion gear, I will be able to determine what combination of runestones is best for capping stats in the new trial. In Mod 16, I am running 6 Rank 15 Empowered Runestones all in Offense Slots. The reasoning for this is because Power has no cap, and with the limited about of high-end companion gear available in Mod 16, I did not feel it was wise to invest in anything other than Power for runestones. Fact is, if I need to use a mixture of different runestones to cap different offensive and defensive stats in Mod 17, I will easily be able to sell or reuse my Empowered Runestones. As my set-up changes, I will let you all know exactly what I am running going into the Tower of the Mad Mage for Mod 17.

SUMMARY:

Companions can be expensive and time consuming to upgrade, but upgrading this part of your character is one of the most important things you can do. You can either build for where you’re at now, or build for the future. However, it is probably inevitable that you’ll find yourself ranking a companion up completely, only to toss it to the side as you improve your character or as the game changes. Try to think ahead but don’t get frustrated if any investments you make don’t end up being good forever, because this has happened to all of us playing this game. The summary is that you need to use your companion page to cap your stats, help provide you with useful bonuses if you can work them in around capping your stats, and if you’ve done all that and have room you can explore using Active Companions that will assist your team in performing better.

Insignia Bonuses, Insignias, Equip/Combat Powers:

To start, mounts can be pretty expensive. You can get them through Auction House, The Tarmalune Trade House, and through the Zen Market. While it is cheaper in AD to buy the mount you need through the Auction House usually, there is benefit to buying it through the Zen Market. If you are someone that runs multiple characters or plans on running multiple characters, you can reclaim any and all mounts purchased through the Zen Market. This makes for getting your characters good mount bonus and extra stats fast. I will say each mount that I am using, it’s stat and combat powers if relevant, it’s insignia bonus I use, and then I’ll list insignia bonuses and insignias that I like to use. The below mounts are very expensive, but you do not need those mounts to gain the listed insignia bonuses. Legendary mounts only differ from epic mounts in that the equip power is doubled from its epic counterpart, and you gain a combat power. You can build the below listed insignia bonuses with epic mounts on the zen market and the auction house. You can find a good list of mounts for the bonuses needed here.

Vanguard Tank Insignia Bonuses:

For Tanking I have two different insignia bonus set-ups that I like to use. I have a general use set-up for when I run with random or new groups, and then I have a set-up for when I speed run dungeons. There is only slight variation between these set-ups so feel free to mix and match as it suits you.

Tank Survival Set-Up: 

Gladiator’s Guile- When your Stamina is above 75%, you move 10% faster. When your Stamina is below 25%, gain 10% Stamina Gain.

Survivor’s Blessing- Whenever you Deflect an attack, you are healed for 1% of your Maximum Hit Points over 5 seconds.

Knight’s Rebuke- Whenever you receive Combat Advantage damage from an attack, you are healed for 1.5% of your Maximum Hit Points over 5 seconds.

Oppressor’s Reprieve- Whenever you are Stunned, Knocked, or Rooted, you are healed for 5% of our Maximum Hit Points over 5 seconds.

Barbarian’s Revelry- Whenever you perform a Critical Strike, you are healed for 1% of your Maximum Hit Points.

Since the point of this set-up is to use it when I don’t know the skill of the group, this provides me a bit extra heals just in case the healer isn’t on top of their game. I don’t do big pulls ahead of the group and speed run if I don’t know the group as they won’t be ready for it, so 1 Gladiator’s Guile is enough for this set-up.

Tank Speed Run Set-Up:

Gladiator’s Guile (3x)- When your Stamina is above 75%, you move 10% faster. When your Stamina is below 25%, gain 10% Stamina Gain.

Knight’s Rebuke- Whenever you receive Combat Advantage damage from an attack, you are healed for 1.5% of your Maximum Hit Points over 5 seconds.

Oppressor’s Reprieve- Whenever you are Stunned, Knocked, or Rooted, you are healed for 5% of our Maximum Hit Points over 5 seconds.

Since the point of this set-up is to speed run dungeons, I removed some of the heals that I thought were weaker or that I felt weren’t as relevant for pulling big groups of enemies in end game content. I chose 3x Gladiator’s Guile as that is the max amount of Guile’s I’ll use because when I added a 4th copy and ran next to a friend with 3 copies of the bonus and the same movement speed as me, there was no noticeable difference gained from adding a 4th Gladiator’s Guile. Crowd Control effects is probably one of the biggest annoyances in end game content so Oppressor’s Reprieve was relevant to me still even when speed running. When speed running, often times I’m not as concerned about positioning out of Combat Advantage because I’m counting on the group being strong enough to wipe out the enemies before any real damage is done, and then quickly moving on to the next group. However, I opted to keep Knight’s Rebuke as a safety net for this fast and loose type of dungeon running.

Tower of the Mad Mage Considerations: 

Gladiator’s Guile- When your Stamina is above 75%, you move 10% faster. When your Stamina is below 25%, gain 10% Stamina Gain.

Champion’s Return- Whenever you are reduced to 50% Maximum Hit Points, you instantly recover 1-% of your Stamina and are healed for 10% of your Maximum Hit Points over 10 seconds. This effect can occur once every 60 seconds.

Shepherd’s Devotion- Whenever you use a Daily Power, you and your teammates’ Defense is increased by 1500, and Movement Speed is increased by 20% for 10 seconds.

Magistrate’s Patience- Whenever you receive damage from a Critical Strike, you gain 2500 critical Avoidance and up to 4 teammates receive 2500 Defense for 5 seconds. This effect can trigger once every 10 seconds.

Victim’s Preservation- Whenever you take greater than 35% of your Maximum Hit Points in pre-mitigated damage from a single blow, you gain 2500 Defense, Critical Avoidance, Awareness, and Deflect for 5 seconds. This effect can occur once every 10 seconds.

I am going to be experimenting with a completely different set-up of insignia bonuses for Tower of the Mad Mage. The reasoning behind this is because as opposed to a dungeon where you have 1 healer, Tower of the Mad Mage is built to be ran with 2 or 3 healers. Provided that 2 or 3 healers should be able to keep me alive without the use of insignia bonuses (which won’t really help during a one shot anyways which is a lot of the worry with this trial), I opted to use more bonuses that cater towards supporting the group and that would help me in dire situations.

Each of these set-ups serves a purpose for the content I am running or for the skill level of the groups I am running with. I will say that while you will observe me often running a plethora of healing insignia bonuses, they result in about a a few million heals per run total compared to the healer in the group which is about 4x as much healing as my self-heals. So while they can be useful for topping off, they aren’t all necessary or game breaking. Some are better than others but I haven’t had the time or resources to isolate each one and test them to compare their overall effectiveness to place them in an order of priority and significance. Reading the bonuses and determining your ability to meet the conditions should help you out though. For example, if you’re very good at positioning out of Combat Advantage then Knight’s Rebuke isn’t necessary, and if you have a low Deflect chance then you don’t really need Survivor’s Blessing. Take what works for you because since Mod 16 dropped, most of the bonuses aren’t very good. Previous to Mod 16 there were almost mandatory bonuses for high performance in content, but that is not he case anymore for insignia bonuses, so take my suggestions and try them for yourself to judge the best set-up of mine that works for you.

Dreadnought DPS Insignia Bonuses: 

Gladiator’s Guile (3x)- When your Stamina is above 75%, you move 10% faster. When your Stamina is below 25%, gain 10% Stamina Gain.

Assassin’s Covenant- You lose 1000 of your Defense, Deflection, Critical Avoidance, and Awareness. you gain 1000 Accuracy, Armor Penetration, Critical Strike, and Combat Advantage.

Cavalry’s Warning- Whenever you activate a Mount Combat Power, you gain 1000 to all of your ratings for 10 seconds.

Optional Substitutions:

Artificer’s Persuasion- Whenever you use an Artifact Power, your cooldowns are reduced by 2 seconds.

Assassin’s Covenant- You lose 1000 of your Defense, Deflection, Critical Avoidance, and Awareness. you gain 1000 Accuracy, Armor Penetration, Critical Strike, and Combat Advantage.

Combatant’s Maneuver- When you control an enemy, you gain 5% Combat Advantage damage for 10 seconds.

With the changes to insignia bonuses in Mod 16, many of the previously “mandatory” insignia bonuses have faded into being something less than useless. I tend to run the same insignia bonus set-up on Dreadnought for regular groups, speed running, and trials currently as the bonuses for a DPS Dreadnought just aren’t that great. Artificer’s Persuasion can be used instead of Cavalry’s Warning or Assassin’s Covenant if you’re above your offensive stat caps, but this bonus isn’t super helpful in well coordinated groups, especially on bosses since we will be saving our encounters for timing with group buffs and debuts. A second Assassin’s Covenant is only worthwhile as a substitute for Cavalry’s Warning if you’re low on offense stat caps and/or you do not have a legendary combat power. Combatant’s Maneuver is only worthwhile if you’re insisting on using powers that proc Combatant’s Maneuver. If you’re following the way that I play with my rotation and powers/feature set ups, you will not be pricing Combatant’s Maneuver. If you deviate from my choices though you may find some use in this power such as using Knee Breaker on bosses instead of Anvil and Bull Charge (with Momentum). Onslaught and Shield Slam can proc this power on AOE so if you’re 5,000 short on your CA cap you can use this.

Insignias:

There have been HUGE changes to Insignias in Mod 16, as well as over the past few mods since I really overhauled this section of my guide. A few things to know about insignias include that they come at, Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary quality. Insignias can be swapped via load outs since they don’t require gold to move around, and probably the biggest change (besides the fact that you can upgrade Epic insignias to Legendary quality now), is that insignias are now one of the best ways to upgrade your stats. In previous mods, it may have been one of the last things you would do in order to upgrade your toon or round out your stat caps. Now, the amount of stats insignias give, especially when at Epic or Legendary, is tremendous. For this reason, it is actually pretty important to start upgrading insignias early. Your first goal is to get insignias of any quality in the stat and variant that you need for the Insignia Bonuses you’re going to use. Then your next goal will be to save until you can buy Epic qualities of the insignias you’ve chosen, but be sure to keep all Common and Rare copies of the insignias you’ve chosen to use as you’ll need them when you go to upgrade your Epic insignia to Legendary. Once you have enough copies of the insignias, you can upgrade to Legendary. Since this can be a long process and quite frankly expensive, I have chosen to go with options for my insignias that were good long-term investments.

Vanguard Tank Insignias: 

On my Tank, I felt that the safest long-term for upgrading insignias was to use Prosperity and Fortitude which both provide HP. Prosperity is considerably more affordable than Fortitude since Fortitude is a premium insignias type that only drops out of special boxes in the Zen Market. HP is the safest long-term investment for you as HP does not have a cap, and even if you’re lacking on defensive stats a little bit, a huge HP pool with good Incoming Healing Bonus and a suitable healer will still get you through the dungeon pretty effortless if you’re playing your tank well. At end game, 15 maxed out HP insignias will next you a total increase of 67,200 HP. Even if you can only afford to get the insignias to Epic, you will still walk away with a 33,600 HP increase. Now, since Fortitudes can be quite expensive, if the insignia bonuses you chose to take don’t support Prosperity, then you can pick up insignias that help with your other defensive stats such as Deflection and Critical Avoidance. It cost me millions to get 3 Illuminated Fortitude insignias so there will be no shaming here if you can’t afford those. The Prosperities cooperate very well with the self-healing insignias bonuses so if you go that route then you will only need to sub-out 3 Fortitudes for other insignias if cost is an issue. In Mod 17 with the stat caps raised, it is still my goal to run all HP insignias with the hopes of capping all of my defensive stats through my runestones, enchantments, and companion gear.

Dreadnought DPS Insignias: 

On my DPS, I decided to invest in the only insignias that may have some long-term value which was Power. DPS is always looking to increase their Power, so without knowing where you stats will balance at end-game, Power is never a bad investment. If you ever needed tossup out a Power insignia for to gain another offensive stat such as Critical Strike, then you would be easily able to sell off your Power insignia. Power also has no cap, so on the premise of trying to cap all offense stats without losing opportunities to increase our Power, then Power insignias are the only way to go for maximum damage. Dominance insignias have power on them and they’re pretty old school. Take Dominance everywhere you can on your DPS. Some insignia types don’t support Dominance insignias, and for those slots your only options for gaining Power would be to use Brutality insignias. Brutality insignias are premium insignias only available on the Zen Market in insignias packs, so these can be wildly expensive. They’re so expensive in fact, that I have not been able to afford to upgrade mine yet. The Dominance is pretty reasonable to upgrade but just requires patience. If you can’t/won’t afford the Brutality insignias to fit the Insignia Bonuses I’ve suggested for Dreadnought, then I suggested investing in Skill insignias for Critical Strike and Combat Advantage as CA is the highest cap to hit. Otherwise, sub in any insignia offering an offensive stat boost to help you hit your stat caps if the Brutality insignias are too expensive to acquire.

Mount Equip Powers:

The mount power is the stat or bonus gained by equipping a specific mount. Each epic and legendary mount has a mount equip  power. Rare and common mounts do not have mount equip powers. Epic mounts generally have 5,000 stats while legendary mounts have 10,000 stats. There are exceptions to this rule such as a few mounts that have % bonuses and the HP mount has 25,000 HP at epic and 50,000 HP at legendary.

Vanguard Tank Mount Equip Powers:

Stalwart (25,000 HP-50,000 HP)- I use this one most often as it increases our survivability by a tremendous amount. This mount has been hailed as necessary even for non-tank classes in Tower of the Mad Mage due to the mount of damage received in that content. HP doesn’t cap, so having a way to jack ours way up is very nice.

Opportunism (Activating an Artifact Power reduces all of your cooldowns by 15%-30%)- This bonus has a nice niche application when you combine it with the artifact Wyvern-Coated Venom Knives. Per the artifact bonus, if you use the artifact and miss the target, you can reuse the artifact again 15 seconds later (at max rank). Doing this allows you to have nearly 100% uptime on this cool down reduction ability. This is nice for making sure that you always have your encounters ready for the next mob encounter. Some people use this at bosses too to help with damage or aggro by increasing the amount of powers they can cast in a fight. This playstyle is not for everyone but worth mentioning. It’s a valid way of playing, but it is not my preference at this time.

Fast Striding (5%-10% Movement Speed)- I use this one if I am running with a group specifically trying to speed run through content as fast as possible. Some classes have very good movement speed and so this is one of those features that can help make sure you don’t fall behind. If you don’t want to speed run though, there’s no real need to invest in this option.

Other than those three, you can use an Epic Mount Equip Power that helps you reach your stat caps! If you’re going to invest in a Legendary Mount Equip Power though, I wouldn’t really recommend investing in ones that I have not listed. All three of the bonuses I have listed above are ones you should use ONLY if you’ve reached your stat caps. Since I can’t see each reader’s individual build and stats, I can’t exactly advise which one for you to pick up, but this is the direction you would go wafter capping your stats (hopefully from other sources).

Dreadnought DPS Mount Equip Powers: 

Dominant Force (5,000-10,000 Power)- Power is one of biggest increases to damage so if you can cap all of your other offensive stats while maintaining this bonus then that is your best option. Keep in mind, if you only have the 5,000 Power version, a legendary Fierce Predator is better for more overall stats while maintaining the same amount of power as the epic version of Dominant Force.

Fierce Predator (2,500 Power & 2,500 Armor Penetration-5,000 Power & 5,000 Armor Penetration)- This is one of the next best options for DPS. This option is great if you want to gain more Power, but you aren’t quite ready to handle 10,000 Power from Dominant Force while maintaining all of your other stat caps. Many DPS will run this bonus to help take he edge off of stat cap management while still investing in some Power increase.

Opportunism (Activating an Artifact Power reduces all of your cooldowns by 15%-30%)- This bonus has a nice niche application when you combine it with the artifact Wyvern-Coated Venom Knives. Per the artifact bonus, if you use the artifact and miss the target, you can reuse the artifact again 15 seconds later (at max rank). Doing this allows you to have nearly 100% uptime on this cool down reduction ability. This is nice for making sure that you always have your encounters ready for the next mob encounter. Some people use this at bosses too to help with damage or aggro by increasing the amount of powers they can cast in a fight. This playstyle is not for everyone but worth mentioning. It’s a valid way of playing, but it is not my preference at this time.

Fast Striding (5%-10% Movement Speed)- I use this one if I am running with a group specifically trying to speed run through content as fast as possible. Some classes have very good movement speed and so this is one of those features that can help make sure you don’t fall behind. If you don’t want to speed run though, there’s no real need to invest in this option.

Other than those four, you can use an Epic Mount Equip Power that helps you reach your stat caps! If you’re going to invest in a Legendary Mount Equip Power though, I wouldn’t really recommend investing in ones that I have not listed. All three of the bonuses I have listed above are ones you should use ONLY if you’ve reached your stat caps. Since I can’t see each reader’s individual build and stats, I can’t exactly advise which one for you to pick up, but this is the direction you would go wafter capping your stats (hopefully from other sources).

Combat Powers:

These powers only come with legendary mounts, so if you’re lucky enough to pull one or you think you’re ready to buy one, here are a few to consider.

Vanguard Tank Combat Powers: 

Legendary Tyrannosaurus Rex (Rex’Em)- Summons your Tyrannosaur, causing your enemies fear, rooting them for 5 seconds, and lowering their defense by 10% for 10 seconds. If targeting a minion, the Tyrannosaur will consume them.

Legendary Armored Griffon (Piercing Screech)- Summons your Armored griffon to release an earsplitting screech, reducing the damage nearby enemies deal by 15% for 6 seconds.

Legendary Swarm (Bat Swarm)- Summon a swarm of bats which will release you from most control effects and increase your damage by 5%. your target will be slowed by 5%, take 5% more damage, cause 5% less damage, have their critical chance reduced by 5%, and have their Action Points Gains reduced by 5% for 10 seconds.

Legendary Carpet of Flying (Vortex)- The Carpet of Flying rushes in and circles the target causing a vortex which pulls nearby enemies towards the center. All enemies caught in the vortex take periodic damage based on their level.

There are quite a few choices here and unfortunately in order to play your best or be the most useful to your group, what you need to run isn’t always about what you have as available options. Sometimes, it is better for you to be the flexible player that has many viable options available to increase the effectiveness of the group. The best 2 are bolded above, but in reality, it depends on what the rest of the group is running. In Mod 17, Rex debuffs no longer stack. This means that if another player in your group has one and uses it, then you won’t be able to use yours and have it be a worthy contribution to the group. At that point for a debuff perspective you’d want to have a Swarm available since the Swarm debuff still stacks. If you’re in really difficult content like Tower of the Mad Mage, you may want the Armored Griffon for your team to help them survive huge amounts of damage. These don’t stack but timing them opposite of each other can help take some of the edge off of the damage and lighten the demands on the healers of the group. The Legendary Flying Carpet gets a pity mention for those that may already have one or for those that are super into speed running. If you’re super into speed running then the carpet Vortex provides some utility by group mobs up for an easy mob clear, however it is virtually useless in all other aspects of gameplay, so unless you are into speed running and have millions to blow, you’ll just stick to using one of the top three combat powers. Some people will probably be upset to read that the Legendary Golden Lion is no longer mentioned here. Unfortunately, in Mod 16 the devs broke this combat power and it now gives next to no shields. In a state of the game where you could just bring a Paladin to give your teammates shields, a broken Golden Lion-Aureal Armament combat power is useless.

Dreadnought DPS Combat Powers:

Legendary Swarm (Bat Swarm)- Summon a swarm of bats which will release you from most control effects and increase your damage by 5%. your target will be slowed by 5%, take 5% more damage, cause 5% less damage, have their critical chance reduced by 5%, and have their Action Points Gains reduced by 5% for 10 seconds.

Legendary Tenser’s Disk (Tenser’s Transformation)- You are transformed into a virtual fighting machine, becoming stronger tougher, faster, and more skilled in combat. For 12 seconds, you gain 10% Power and move 10% faster, and gain +2 Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution.

These two combat powers are the only ones that are going to really provide you any noticeable damage increase so as far as a DPS investment, don’t look into other mounts if you expect to optimize your damage output. Bat Swarm is the best one to use overall because of its damage buff combined with a damage increasing debuff, a damage decreasing debuff, and the two debuffs that the power has helps out all of your teammates. Tenser’s Disk is a close second choice for increasing damage, and while the bonus to Strength and Dexterity boosts our damage as well as the Power, the increase to Power does not outweigh the % damage buff the Swarm gives as well as the group damage increase via debuff.

Consumables: 

Consumables, often referred to as “potting up” (no double meaning here), is an important part of maximizing your characters stats. If you are still developing your toon, it can be a great way to supplement your build (kind of like taking your vitamins). The game has changed what consumables can be stacked over the years, and so it’s important to know what your options are. When stacking consumables, there are a few rules to follow to know whether or not a consumable stacks or not. Here are a few things to consider:

• 1 Stronghold Food
• 1 Event Food
• 1 Potion
• 1 Elixir
• Special consumable should stack such as Scrolls of Fate, Dragon Protection Scrolls, and Dragon Slaying Potions.
• 1 Potion Tray Buff Trinket such as Tymora’s Coin, Adorable Pocket Pet, and Chain of Scales.
• You may have other utility items in your Potion Tray with only cooldowns to consider including Liira’s Bell, Champion’s Battle Horn, Alliance Battle Horn, Healing Potions, Doohickey, Owlbear Figurine, and Stone of Health. Read below to see what my most used items are for both Tanking and DPS.

For Vanguard Tanks: 

• Stronghold Food- Any food that helps you reach your stats caps, and if you’re capped then I use Prime Rib.
• Event Food- Caprese or Lathander’s Dew.
• Potion- Superior Potion of Vitality or any other potion that helps you reach an important stat cap.
• Elixir- Foehammer’s Elixir or Sunlord’s Elixir.
• Potion Tray- Chain of Scales, Alliance Battle Horn, and Stone of Health.

The above listed consumables are ones that I feel give me the most gain on my Tank. As far as the Stronghold Food and Potion options go, there is some flexibility there for you to pick the consumable that helps you with your stat caps. After reading the Stats/Ratings tab, you should have a pretty good idea of which stats you are low on that would make the most difference in your build performance. If you happen to cap stats without potions, then you can use anything that will boost your Power or HP as those are uncapped stats. Foe hammer’s Elixir is great if you have high Deflect but if you aren’t close to capping, then you may prefer Sunlord’s Elixir for more passive AP Gain.

On the Potion Tray, I recommend Alliance Battle Horn and Stone of Health on at all times. The Liira’s bell can be used to revive your companion, but this is only relevant if you are using a summoned companion as your active companion since augments can’t die. The Champion’s Battle Horn can be used to catch up to the group if you’re behind but typically won’t be necessary.. Chain of Scales, Adorable Pocket Pet, Tymora’s Coin can be used to pop their buff and then swapped with Stone of Health on the tray if you don’t want to dedicate one slot to just potion tray buffs. The items should cooldown from your inventory and you get to keep that third tray slot useful. Use Chain of Scales first, then Tymora’s Coin because if you get a bad buff of Chain of Scales (Regen), you can try Tymora’s Coin or Adorable Pocket Pet to see if you get a better buff. The reason to use Chains first is the buffs are better and last longer than Tymora and Adorable Pocket Pet, and you can’t have both active, so try Chain of Scales first.

For Dreadnought DPS: 

• Stronghold Food- Prime Rib or any other food that will help you reach your offensive stat caps.
• Event Food- Watermelon Sorbet or Squash Soup.
• Potion- Superior Flask of Potency or Potion of Force.
• Elixir- Wild Storm Elixir or Elixir of Fate.
• Potion Tray- Chain of Scales, Alliance Battle Horn, and Stone of Health.

The above listed consumables are ones that I feel give me the most gain on my DPS. Anything that gives you Power such as Prime Rib and Watermelon Sorbet are going to be your best options for DPS, but you can use a variety of Food and Potion combination to give you stats other than Power if you need them to meet required offensive stat caps. In my potion slot, instead of the full Power potions I prefer Superior Flasks of Potency because they give not only Power, but also Critical Severity. I find this to be better than just gaining Power in the potion slot in most scenarios.

On the Potion Tray, I recommend Alliance Battle Horn and Stone of Health on at all times. The Liira’s bell can be used to revive your companion, but this is only relevant if you are using a summoned companion as your active companion since augments can’t die. The Champion’s Battle Horn can be used to catch up to the group if you’re behind but typically won’t be necessary.. Chain of Scales, Adorable Pocket Pet, Tymora’s Coin can be used to pop their buff and then swapped with Stone of Health on the tray if you don’t want to dedicate one slot to just potion tray buffs. The items should cooldown from your inventory and you get to keep that third tray slot useful. Use Chain of Scales first, then Tymora’s Coin because if you get a bad buff of Chain of Scales (Regen), you can try Tymora’s Coin or Adorable Pocket Pet to see if you get a better buff. The reason to use Chains first is the buffs are better and last longer than Tymora and Adorable Pocket Pet, and you can’t have both active, so try Chain of Scales first.

For Speed Running-Tank or DPS:

• Stronghold Food- Sambocade
• Event Food- Lightwine
• Potion- Potion of Speed
• Elixir- Elixir of Fate
• Extra Consumables- Scroll of Fate: Movement
• Potion Tray- Chain of Scales, Alliance Battle Horn, and Stone of Health.

This set-up is only used when the entire group I am running with is attempting to speed the run up. Many of these consumable options are expensive and therefore I only use them if I know the rest of the group is investing in them and that they are a strong enough group to do a speed run. Most of these may seem obvious, but my choice to use Elixir of Fate was determined by the very minimal increase in Dexterity for movement speed. This is the weakest option of them all and you could easily swap to an Elixir that would give you more damage or survivability if you prefer.

Additional Consumables: 

There are other consumables that you may find helpful. These consumables can be stacked since they are less potent or situational. Dragon Slayer Potions and Dragon Protection Scrolls may help in certain instances, such as the FBI Dragon Turtle. Ever frost consumables can also help in FBI for protecting from Everfrost damage. If you want extra consumables, you can utilize Invocation Blessings and Scrolls of Fate in order to gain more stat. It is also important to make sure you always have your campfire buff on; just visit a campfire every 30 minutes or sooner to refresh the buff.

Useful Links:

Overload Enhancements Tests

• This is the most update state on Stronghold Overload Enhancements. Some work and some don’t so check it out.

Janne’s Site for Game Mechanics

• Janne’s Site explains in-game mechanics such as damage calculations, buffs, debuts, cool down education, aggro, etc. For anyone looking for more of the math “under the hood” this is the place.

Bethel’s Mount Insignia Bonus Guide

• Use this if you’re having trouble figuring out what mount has the insignia bonus you need. This guide is a bit outdated (Mod 10?) but there are plenty of choices here for your insignia bonus needs.

RJC9000’s Together We Ride GF Guide

• RJC has done a lot for the GF community in providing quality information to Guardian Fighter’s on all platforms (including myself). Some things we do are similar and some are different, but it would be wrong not to mention his guide, and since you all should be reading everything you can find, this resource is of high quality.

Neverwinter Dye Preview

• In case you haven’t truly maxed out your character until it looks good.

Neverwinter Guardian Fighter Facebook Page

• This page is a nice and clean resource for you to reach out and ask questions about the class, your build, or just share with the community. Myself and the other admins are active in conversation and moderation. If you have questions about this guide you can find me there as I check it daily.

The End:

Thank you all for reading if you got this far! If you have any questions about the guide, or would like to submit possible correction or suggestions for information you would like to see added, please message me on here and I will try to maintain my inbox. If this guide helped you please rate it a 5! If you rate it lower and feel it can be improved or corrections can be made, please send me a message and I’ll be glad to help.

Xenakis

Introduction

About me

Hi, guys. I’m Viperion (Vip for short), and I’ve been around in Neverwinter for quite some years. My first character was a wizard and then I thought of playing more so I also tried the ranger, and eventually the warlock. For some reason, rogues, fighters and barbarians (GWFs) never grabbed my interest. Then… an idea struck me: to try out the support and tanking roles. We needed clerics in the guild also, tbh. And a few years ago I also created a cleric and a paladin and I’ve been playing both ever since.

Mod 16 has been quite a twist of the game but some players do like the changes we’ve been presented. Myself included. I have adjusted my cleric’s support play-style from a buffer bot to a heal bot.
Mod 17 brings further complexity for the life of healers. Powers costs are now higher and their healing potency is reduced. The Tower of the Mad Mage trial (ToMM) challenged healers as well in every possible way.

Guide contents

In this guide we will be covering the following topics:

• Set up a cleric properly for healing
• Divinity management tips
• Habits a healer should develop
• There is no designated section for ToMM requirements, however it is mentioned several times throughout this guide.

Contact me

I hope you’ll enjoy this build. If you do, make sure you vote those fancy stars
If you have more questions or you’d like to discuss in the game, my cleric is Viperion Nexus@vasile1991

Race

For a healer I think that it doesn’t matter very much which race you pick, as long as you’re eyeballing WIS, DEX.

I am currently a human with +3 to WIS for the outgoing healing bonus. I used to be a dragonborn in the past, which is a good option, also.

Ability Scores

I have picked WIS+DEX. WIS helps generally with healing and DEX helps with critical healing.

Powers & Feats

The powers which are not grayed out in the image below are the ones I find useful. We will discuss them individually below.

At-wills:

• Sacred Flame – Single target At-will with good Magnitude. Nothing special about it OR Scattering Light – for AoE purposes.
• Blessing of Light – boost for the next healing spell.
• Soothe – quite a waste of time, really

Encounters

• Bastion of Health – never leaves the bar, the main healing encounter
• Intercession – never leaves the bar because always somebody messes up and needs that quick heal
• Exaltation – for extra outgoing healing.
• Healing Word – it’s now useful for the 80 feet radius heal effect but use it cautiously as it eats divinity even faster than before! I recommend using this only in large groups like Trials where the other 9 people are scattered everywhere. For groups of 5 players, I recommend avoiding this power as there are better choices.
• Cleansing Light – for clearing negative effects such as DoT (e.g. Hati fight in FBI or Ras Nsi fight in ToNG)
• Divine Glow – for extra divinity regeneration (use this if there’s extensive need of your healing)
• Astral Shield – shield the tank or the entire party from very high damage (Trobriand Brink of Death phase in LoMM or various needs in ToMM)

Some other situations could require Sunburst (e.g. the Yester Hill BHE in Barovia or demonic heroics).

Dailies

• Guardian of Life
• Hallowed Ground OR Guardian of Faith

Use Guardian of Life when healing with Bastion of Health doesn’t seem to be enough.
Both Hallowed Ground and Guardian of Faith are situational. I use Hallowed Ground for phases when a big blow is about to happen (e.g. Trobriand’s or Ras Nsi’s one shot). The only situation I use Guardian of Faith so far is during Arcturia’s mimics phase, if the tank I’m teamed up with didn’t manage to defeat the mimic in time.

Class Features

The only good ones I consider are worth slotting are:

• Hallowed Armor – you take 5% less damage from all sources and 10% less damage when you pray (TAB)
• Expanded Faith – your divinity meter is increased by 150 units (from 1000 to 1150). You can use this for start until you learn to save your divinity. Then you can switch to Hallowed Guide (described below).
• Hallowed Guide – heal for 5% more when you’re close to your target (15 feet).

Feats

• Repeated Blessings – this helps with Healing Word when running Trials. The other choice targets boosting Soothe, so it’s a clear nope.
• Battle Prayer – this helps slightly regenerate more divinity after you used an encounter which costed divinity. Not a big game changer as the values are very small but the other feat to pray until you get the effect. Sometimes you need to jump out of praying mode and assist your party.
• Blessed Armaments – when using Exaltation or Divine Glow you also get an additional 10% reduced damage. The other feat increases your damage by 10% depending on how full your divinity meter is – this makes no sense, in my opinion for a healer who should heal not deal damage…
• Persistent Guardian – helps with more healing over time from your Guardian of Life daily. Usually you use that daily when your encounters are not enough to handle the situation, so this feat which extends the healing of the daily over time, is just pure gold. The other feat based on Annointed Army can also be slighly good but on a different loadout for damage buffing.
• Light of Devotion – with every 4 seconds of praying, your next healing is boosted by 5%. Stacks 3 times. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that you will have to pray every now and then to keep your divinity up. Just remember to do it for at least 4s to trigger this bonus. The other feat, Angel of Life is not good because those 30 stacks are way too much to achieve and over time you might just lose them all (e.g. unskippable long CoDG cutscene…).

Gear & Enchantments

The following image displays what I decided to use starting with mod 16. You won’t need to follow strictly these items, we will tackle them individually and provide alternatives.

Stats explanation

Probably the big question is – why all that crit?
The short answer is this: for healers, the chance to critically heal is calculated differently than for a dps. The power stat is also considered in the formula. The complete explanation is provided by Janne in the Heals section.

healing crit chance = critical strike / (power * 2.5)

So to reach the 50% critical strike chance cap, you actually need your critical strike to be higher than your power stat. Or in other words, your power must be 80% of your critical strike. It’s not really acceptable to have a low Power stat. Then your regular heals will be too low. If you are increasing your power, do the same with critical strike. Check the companions section later on for some guidelines on boosting this stat.

Weapon set

Here’s a list of weapon sets to get, from best to worst:

• Lionheart set (from ToMM – Tower of the Mad Mage)
• Watcher set (from special bosses in Master Expeditions ran with 3 runes)
• Burnished set (via Seals of the Deep obtained from LoMM)
• Alabaster set (from Obaya’s chests)

Right now, the Lionheart set isn’t accessible to most people as the trial is very difficult. The Watcher and the Burnished set are actually close in terms of set bonus. And here’s how to proc the Burnished set bonus more often than you’d think:

The Burnished set bonus grants 5% bonus to power and defense when you are hit by an enemy or healed by a healer. However, the bonus procs even if you attempt to heal yourself with a Bastion of Health/Intercession/Healing Word, regardless if you actually healed anything or not. The part about getting hit isn’t too acceptable for a healer role, it’s what a tank is good at. You must make sure you will not develop this weird habit of healing yourself all the time to proc the bonus, instead of efficiently spending your divinity on your party. One good advice I have here is to make sure that when you heal somebody, you’re also in the area of effect of the Bastion of Healing.

Artifact equipment set

First of all, let me clear this out – you don’t need necessarily to wear the items as a set. But since sets have some extra bonuses, it’s nice to pair the items as a set. However, I strongly recommed to use some of the new mod 16 artifact equipment set items just because they have so much better HP compared to the previous ones. That extra HP will help you with better survivability.

I am currently using the Enchanted Thumb set (more commonly known as the flower set). It’s not a cheap one, mainly because of the artifact, the Staff of Flowers which drops from Zok’s chests (the Yawning Portal pretty face goblin). The artifact is very good for a support to use as an active. Also the set belt, has WIS+CHA which are good for a support healer. For alternatives, I suggest the Constructed Demiset set (more commonly known as Trobriand set) since the ring piece should be part of your equipment. Or, if you’d like to have the Wyvern-venon coated Knives artifact as an active, go for the Wyvern set.

Enchantments

Radiants for your offense slots (more Power means better heals)

Radiants for your defense slots (more HP means better survivability). Alternatively, you can use Demonics like me to also cover some Deflect and Crit Avoidance defense stats.

Dark for your utility slots for companion influence (if you think that stat actually can make a difference). Alternatively, Quartermasters for RP bags.

Vorpal for your critical heals.

Soulforged for a 2nd chance to dodge that red better.

Armors

• Headpiece: Crown of the Lost King (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests) OR Broken cap of the Omnipotent (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests) OR a piece of the Successor set (from Lair of the Mad Mage).
• Chestpiece: Gurdunn’s Defense (from Master Expeditions or Zok’s chests). OR a piece of the Successor set.
• Gloves: Crash Guards (from Master Expeditions) because of the Power-based bonus.
• Feet: Gurtunk’s Booties (from Master Expeditions) because of the Power-based bonus.
• Rings: any rings with critical strike and 2x offense slots. Rings are a main source of high critical strike rating.
• Shirt: a piece from Fragment Expeditions that has 4k critical strike.
• Pants: Prized Restoration Trousers of the Cult (from Master Expeditions) OR some pants which are part of the Protege set (with Seals of the Deep from Lair of the Mad Mage). Preferably, the pants should increase your defense and critical avoidance.

Artifacts

Mainly use artifacts which have the Power stat on them. With mod 16, the Staff of Flowers and Trobriand’s Ring are especially good due to their 3k Power each.

Other good options are: Wheel of Elements (bonus damage to use on a DPS character), Sigil of the Cleric (some AP over time), Sigil of the Paladin (damage resistance buff and heals).

Armor reinforcement Kits

Power kits for armors. The +1s are slightly better.

Stamina regeneration kits for accessories. Since the stamina regen ones won’t be too much of a game changer, you can alternatively use Combat Advantage ones for the times when you run content with other people as Arbiter.

Boons

Aim for all the Power boons, all the HP boons, the Resistance boons vs Demons/Undead, Companion Influence, Movement Speed, Critical Severity and Outgoing Healing.
The Master boon can be either between Blessed Advantage and Blessed Resilience. I prefer Resilience for the stamina refill which is especially helpful for tanks.

For the Stronghold boons, make sure to use the Power boon, the defense boon (if you didn’t cap defense yet) or the HP boon.

Companions

There are two important things to mention here:

• use an augment-type companion as your active
• use companions with powers which deal with Power increase and Outgoing Healing increase.

Bonding runestones must be as high as possible.

There can be other choices of companions, of course, but this is what I’m currently using for now:

• Deepcrow Hatchling – At legendary it grants 8k Power.
• Ioun Stone of Radiance – At legendary gives 10% Outgoing Healing and 2k Deflect.
• Baby Polar Bear – Summoned Companion. The tooltip for this companion is quite messed up but it’s 6% Outgoing Healing for Rare quality, 8% for Epic and 10% for Legendary.
• Neverember Guard – 10% Outgoing Healing at Legendary quality.
• Rebel Mercenary – 10% Outgoing Healing and 2k Awareness at Legendary quality.

During Undermountain, make sure you find all the 9 relics in the Expeditions to get the starter companion gear. After you unlock the Master Expeditions in Yawning Portal and the Warden/Fragment Expeditions in Stardock, farm for better equipment. I will not post a recipe for equipment here because that varies a lot based on a lot of items players might have, but I can tell you this – a big portion of my critical strike comes from here. So I use companion gear with critical strike in all my slots.

I’d say this is the ideal combination of companion gear to go for:

• 12k Critical Strike item
• 7.1k Critical Strike / 4.7k Ddefense item
• 12k Critical Strike item OR 7.1k crit/4.7k Critical Avoidance (capping Critical Avoidance for ToMM is very much needed)

In offense slots, use Empowered Runestones for more Power.
In defense slots, use Profane Runestones for better Defense.

Mounts & Insignias

Mounts

Any mount with 5k Power boost is fine. Even better, one with 10k Power boost such as the Arcane Whirlwind or the Black Ice War Horse.

Insignias

Domination insignias, right? To boost my power! Yes. No. No? what?
The truth is this is very debatable. Power is good to improve your healing but it comes with a cost: you must improve your critical strike at the same time. And actually it’s ideal that your critical strike is higher than your power to have a decent critical chance for healing. My personal opinion is that you opt out domination insignias and feel no guilt about it. They are so expensive so let the DPS characters battle over them

I very much recommend using defense-oriented insignias. However, due to the ToMM frenzy and the increased defense requirements for ToMM, the prices of defense insignias have risen as well. Here’s what I suggest for an ideal setup (I’m not really there yet, but close) to prioritize :

• Prosperity insignias – because a dead cleric is of no use to the party. Increased HP means increased chance of survival against strong hits.
• Refuge insignias – because critical avoidance isn’t only for tanks but also for the others. ToMM teaches this to people the hard way.
• Insignia of Skill – as Power grows, Critical Strike needs to as well.
• Courage insignias – defense should be a stat that should already be capped from other sources but in case you didn’t manage to achieve that, these types of insignias are fine, if only temporary.

Healbot Play Style

In this section we will speak about the DOs and DON’Ts a cleric healer should keep track of in a group.

I’ve heard this way too many times: Cleric divinity just sucks! The Cleric healer is an awful experience. To be honest, I have thought so too in the beginning. However, I took a step back to analyze the cause which creates this awful feeling about this healing spec. The big truth is it’s a class that requires some discipline, you can’t just throw out all your healing and then the next moment the boss sneezes, you find yourself out of divinity.

Divinity Management Tips

Here’s a list of situations or issues which cause your divinity meter to go down fast:

1. Healing when not needed.

The truth is I’ve seen far too many healers who just heal all the time. This will decrease your divinity meter fast and in the end, you’ve barely been effective with anything.

2. Healing in too many places at once.

This is a painful situation for a healer. It’s obvious that healing in two or more places causes your divinity to go down much faster.

When you run in a group, especially with ranged characters, you will notice people might be scattered all over the place. The tank aggroes the boss, some DPS who actually takes advantage of the Combat Advantage is on the other side of the boss, and some other wizards are dealing damage but from a distance. This is at least three spots to heal: one for the tank, one for the smart DPS that deals Combat Advantage from the other side of the boss and one for the far-away wizards. Oh, and you too!

Some bosses have certain mechanics that ignore the threat from the tank, and just target the DPSes or the healer. I think it’s obvious where I’m hinting. To keep your party alive, you need to heal 3-4 times for the 3-4 spots where players are located. This will cause you to run out of divinity very fast with 3x or 4x Bastion of Health at once. But you’d think you have a solution – Healing Word! Healing Word is eating 1/4 of your total divinity in only one go. That’s not a solution for a group of 5 people. The solution is to “educate” the players to stick together. It’s simple as that. One cast to heal them all Well, two actually, cause if they’re right near the tank, they’re probably dead.

3. Dealing damage instead of praying

You might want to be useful with something, so you want to deal damage. Worse, you’re using divinity-based damaging encounters like Daunting Light… Please stop.

You’re helping the party by healing them and keeping them alive. That’s your job. Your damage can very easily be covered by a competent DPS character. So embrace your role of a healer as you’re not there to outdps anyone.

Now that we’ve covered having to heal instead of dealing damage, we also have to make sure you pray to recover your divinity. Between fights of clearing monsters, it’s nice to pray out of combat to regenerate the divinity faster. However, for longer fights like boss fights, you will need to identify small timeframes when the fight is going just fine without your intervention, and just pray to recover your divinity. This habit will extend the overall ability of spamming healing with Bastion of Healing. An alternative is to introduce Divine Glow on the skill bar. In my opinion, at the moment, all dungeons in the game (except ToMM) can be managed without Divine Glow.

Healer Habits

This section will just reiterate some of the previous points. It will also add a few new tips that should help to your overall experience as a healer:

• Heal when a player actually needs healing.
• Buff with your active artifact only for enemies worthy of your key press (bosses or tougher enemies)
• Do not deal damage with divinity-based encounters. Save your divinity for healing.
• Use Cleansing Touch for dungeons where debuffs are applicable to players (Hati fight in FBI, Ras Nsi fight in ToNG). Its main use is to remove debuffs so don’t use it instead of Bastion of Healing.
• Use Intercession to quickly heal the tank or a player in need. Don’t waste it on things that Bastion of Healing could’ve easily handled because Intercession has a relatively high cooldown.
• Some players don’t know or realize they’re not using the positioning correctly for gaining Combat Advantage. Your mere location can help. Go to a spot so that the others get the Combat Advantage. Of course, do this only if the boss fight mechanics allow it (not in CoDG when fighting the Atropal).
• Watch people’s HP bars. I have customized my UI to drag the party HP bars closer to the center of the screen. It’s now right of where the Arbiter sparks meter should be displayed. This provides you an easier way to spot when a player’s HP suddenly goes down and needs healing. Additionally, you can even enable to show HP bars above party characters as they move. This also helps a lot!

Character Creation

Race Selection

Keep in mind that race bonuses are very small and that the most important thing to consider when creating your character is how good it looks to you. You will play with this character for many hours, maybe hundreds, even thousands, if you really like the game. There are ways to change the race or appearance of your character, but you won’t get them often, at least not for free (you can pay ingame money to get them though).

Any race is good enough. There are races which give better bonuses for Devout Clerics (healers) and races which give better bonuses to Arbiter Clerics (damage dealers). You can play both Devout and Arbiter with the same character : you get 2 loadouts at level 30, and that’s only when you choose your paragon. And there are premium races, which have to be unlocked if you want to play them (most of them can be bought with real money, some of them with ingame money, not all of them are always available). The most important bonuses for Devout Clerics are Wisdom, Critical Strike and Dexterity (in that order). The most important bonuses for Arbiter Clerics are Bonus Damage, Intelligence and Dexterity (again, in that order). If you have to pick where to put your ability scores, put them where it matters most for the role you want to play in dungeons.

Best races for a Devout Cleric : Half-Orc (I didn’t except that either, but it makes sense), Dragonborn (premium), Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn (premium), Wood Elf, Human, Menzoberranzan Renegade (premium), Drow, Dwarf, Half-Elf.

Best races for an Arbiter Cleric : Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn (premium), Dragonborn (premium), Tiefling, Half-Orc, Gith (premium), Sun Elf, Moon Elf (premium) Wood Elf, Human, Half-Elf.

There’s nothing wrong with making an Halfling Cleric.

Details for each race :

Human : +3 to any ability score (wisdom ~= +0.5 – 0.75% outgoing healing for Devout Clerics, intelligence ~= +0.6 – 0.75% damage for Arbiter Clerics), +250 to all stats (including power, ~= 0.1% damage, 0.05% heal, a bit easier to cap stats, slightly better defensive stats)

Half-Orc : +5% critical severity (~= +1.67% damage/heal), +2 Dexterity (= +1% critical severity, +0.5% movement speed), +2 Constitution (+1% base HP ~= 284 HP at max level, +0.5% action point gain) or Strength, 10% movement speed bonus at start of combat.

Wood Elf : +1500 Critical Strike (~= +0.3% heal if crit is not capped, easy to cap as Arbiter, hard to cap as a Devout), +2 Dexterity, +2 Intelligence or Wisdom (Intelligence for an Arbiter, Wisdom for a Devout), 10% resistance to slow

Sun Elf : 2% action point gain, +2 intelligence, +2 dexterity or charisma, 10% resistance to control effects

Dwarf : +2000 defense, +2 constitution, +2 strength or wisdom, 20% resistance to knock or push

Halfling : +1500 deflect, +2 dexterity, +2 charisma or constitution, 10% resistance to control effects

Half-Elf : +1500 deflect, +2 constitution, +2 charisma (about 60 in all stats with a legendary augment pet, +0.5% recharge speed) or wisdom (pick wisdom if you’re ever going to heal, even rarely, the charisma bonus is almost useless), +1 to one ability score (intelligence for clerics)

Tiefling : +5% damage to targets below 50% HP (effectively, a total of about 2 – 2.5% damage increase), +2 charisma, +2 constitution or intelligence, 10% chance to reduce attacker’s attack by 2.5% for 5 seconds.

Drow : +2 dexterity, +2 charisma or wisdom (pick wisdom if you’re ever going to heal, even rarely, the charisma bonus is almost useless), increased HP regeneration out of combat (HP regeneration out of combat is already pretty high for everyone), 5% chance to reduce attacker’s defense by 2000 for 4 seconds (useless if you have capped armor penetration)

Dragonborn (premium race) : +1500 critical strike, +3% damage, +2 to any 2 stats (dexterity + wisdom or intelligence), +5% incoming healing

Metallic Ancestry Dragonborn (premium race) : +1500 critical strike, +3% damage, +2 to any 2 stats (dexterity + wisdom or intelligence), +3% incoming healing, +3% HP (if that’s base HP, that’s 850 HP at lvl 80… not much)

Gith (premium race) : +5000 combat advantage, +2 dexterity, +2 strength or intelligence, +3% stamina regeneration

Moon Elf (premium race) : +1% action point gain, +1% stamina gain, +2 intelligence, +2 dexterity or charisma, 10% resistance to control effects

Menzoberranzan Renegade (premium race) : +2 dexterity, +2 charisma or wisdom (pick wisdom if you’re ever going to heal, even rarely, the charisma bonus is almost useless), increased HP regeneration out of combat, 5% chance to reduce attacker’s defense by 1500 and attacker’s damage by 2.5% for 4 seconds (same comments as regular Drow race)

Class Selection

Alright, that is the most important step ! Don’t mess up. Be very careful and…

– Pick Cleric ! –

Ability Scores

Ability scores really do not matter much, but you won’t be able to change these in the future (maybe with a race reroll token, which you can get in the Zen market). So, you have to consider which of the Devout or Arbiter will be your primary role.

If you want to be mostly a healer, priority is wisdom > dexterity > constitution > intelligence > charisma.

If you want to be mostly a dps, priority is intelligence > dexterity > constitution > charisma.

Charisma is slightly more important for other classes which have long cooldowns (Cleric cooldowns are almost non existant). You would still pick charisma after your main ability score and dexterity. Strength is only useful for melee classes. Clerics do not have melee attacks (sorry, no War Cleric, this is not the pen and paper game).

Appearance

That’s your avatar ! Spend as much time as you want on this one. You’ll be able to cover your character’s face if you feel like it. Also, you can get a free Change Appearance Token at around lvl 60. And you can buy more at the Zen market.

Deity

Your choice. It doesn’t make any difference. My Cleric may hate you for not picking Lathander (Amaunator), you heretic ! But she is a fanatic. I advise taking a colourful icon.

You will be able to invoke your god’s favours up to 6 times a day for a bit of refinement points, zen market coupons, ardent coins (which you can eventually exchange for an angel companion, or a mount, and a couple other things), and celestial coins (which let you get coffers of celestial artifacts, in which you can loot coalescent wards, which let you automatically succeed an enchantment upgrade… save these for the highest ranks).

The icon will be displayed greyed out when your invocation timer is on cooldown. If your god icon is greyish, it will be harder to see when you can invoke again. There’s a timer and a sound that tells you when it’s available again, but it’s easy to miss when in the middle of a fight.

Background

Just like your appearance, that’s your story. It has absolutely no impact on the game, so pick the one that sounds the closer to your character.

Overview

What’s your name ?

Ready ?

Welcome to Faerun !

Leveling

Leveling is pretty straightforward : follow Sergent Knox instructions in Protector’s Enclave.

Bags

There are a couple of bags you can get along the way :

• Adventurer’s Knapsack (18 slots), in the Blacklake District
• Embroidered Bag of Holding (12 slots), at the end of the Intro Campaign : The Staff of Savras
• Adventurer’s Pack (12 slots), in the Neverdeath Graveyard

You need to complete most of the quests in each region before getting the quest that rewards the bag. Do not miss these ! The only other way to get bags is to buy them from the Zen market (or the auction house) or during a couple of events… and they are pretty expensive !

Random Dungeons, Astral Diamonds

Starting at lvl 12, you have access to random dungeons, which reward Rough Astral Diamonds (RAD). You can refine up to 100k RAD to Astral Diamonds (AD), the main currency of the game. To refine your RAD, go to the menu -> Items -> Riches and click on the Rough Astral Diamonds line. They also automatically refine when invoking your deity if you forgot to refine them.

The first random dungeon queue of the day rewards 5500 RAD, + 2500 if your role is in demand. Usually, tanks are in demand, sometimes healers. I think I’ve seen dps in demand only once, after playing for more than a year.

Eventually, you will unlock :

• Skirmishes, at item level 14k, which reward 6000 RAD
• Trials, at item level 16k, which reward 50k RAD
• Epic Dungeons, at item level 17k, which reward 25k RAD

DO NOT go into Epic or Trial queues without looking at their strategy. They are not hard, but it’s easy to mess things up if you do not know what to do.

DO NOT go into Epic or Trial queues without an augment companion, you would only embarrass yourself and make things hard for others.

Do all the queues available once a day (or more if you feel like it, for fewer RAD rewards on completion but more chances for good loot), to cash in easy AD !

A good start

Now, you know how to make some AD. You will be able to buy a couple of things that will make your life so much easier !

• An uncommon augment companion (Cat or Watler are very cheap)
• Rank 8/9 bonding runestones
• 965 item level companion gear
• rank 8/9 empowered runestones
• a rare Spider mount for the Wanderer’s Fortune insignia bonus

First of all, after your first random dungeon, you can buy an uncommon augment companion (companion section in the auction house). Augment companions do not fight with you, but they give their stats to you, making you a lot stronger ! No need to upgrade its quality, you will buy better companions later. They don’t give more of their stats to you at higher rarity anyway. They just have slightly better stats.

Then, you can buy bonding runestones (refinement section in the auction house). These give you even more stats from your companion (whether it’s an augment or not), up to 2.1 times at max rank (each bonding runestone rank 15, giving you 70% of your companion stats). They are the most important thing in the game with an augment pet, together they can make up to 3/4 of your total stats ! Needless to say : upgrading them to max rank is an absolute priority.

You can get very high level companion equipment (companion section in the auction house) with armor penetration, accuracy, and critical strike as main stats, and defense + 2 other stats as secondary stats. Prices can vary, so pick the items that work the best together for you. To search for them in the auction house, type in : charred, barbed, cracked, or imperial quartz. There are 3 different items with each of these names. Of course, their stats are transferred to you (once thanks to your augment pet and at least once more thanks to your bonding runestones).

You can buy empowered runestones (refinement section in the auction house), which fit in your companion gear (you can remove them later when you get better companion gear). These give power, a stat that never caps (so you never have too much power) which improves your damage and heals. At highest rank, with an augment pet and rank 15 bonding runestones, each of your empowered runestone gives you 4092 power. Not bad !

Finally, you can buy a rare Spider mount for the Wanderer’s Fortune insignia bonus. You need a Crescent, a Regal, and an Illuminated insignias, to get this bonus. It will help you get Refinement Points (which you will need tons of).

Undermountain and Expeditions

At lvl 70, you can start the Undermountain Campaign. Go to Sergent Knox and read the note behind him. You will get free gear that is better than anything you got so far. In Undermountain, you will lvl up to 80. When you finish the campaign, you will have access to expeditions, in which you can find the best items in the game !

There are 3 types of expeditions in Undermountain :

Master Expeditions (ME) : the quest is given by Obaya Uday, on the first floor of the Yawning Portal. It can be taken 3 times a day. In these, you have to collect 9 relics (3 in each zone, you cannot go back so make sure to collect them all) in order to get the best rewards from the quest. You often get pieces of gear as rewards from the mini-bosses. But the best rewards are the Alabaster weapon set, and +% damage gear and rings (these are better for dps than any higher item level gear). These may (or may not) have better chances to drop or to be a quest reward if you use 3 Crystalized Resonances (often called runes) at the start of the expedition.

Warden Expeditions (WE) : the quest is given by Yrlakka in the Stardock. It can be taken twice every 2 days (as long as you complete Illithid an Githyanki reconnaissance quests every day). You do not need to collect relics for these, but the end boss is a bit stronger. The end boss always loots a piece of companion gear (maximum quality being 1010 item level epic, listed under Undermountain’s Companion Gear in the collection). All of the pieces are bound to account (and do not bind to character, so you can send your main character companion gear to a completely new character if you want a fast progression with them), with the exception of 965 item level companion gear (which are the ones I recommand buying on a new leveling character).

Fragment Expeditions (FE) : the quest is given by Yrlakka in the Stardock. It can be taken twice every 6 days (as long as you complete Illithid an Githyanki warden expeditions every 2 days). You do not need to collect relics there either, but the end boss is a lot stronger. The end boss always loots a piece of clothes (pants or shirt, maximum quality being 1010 item level epic, listed under Rings of Undermountain in the collection… don’t ask me why).

Zok Boxes

Now, the biggest rewards come from Zok boxes. In order to get them, you need to complete any expedition with at least one rune (Crystalized Resonance) used at the start of the expedition. This will allow you to open a chest at the end of the expedition. You can enter any expedition, as long as someone in the group has the quest to start the  expedition, but you can only open the chest if you have the quest for this expedition. In this chest, you will receive rewards corresponding to the type of runes used, plus a Rune Etching. This Rune Etching has to be brought to Zok, a little guy hiding below the stairs at the Yawning Portal. He will reward you with 5500 RAD, a potion, and an item. This item can be one of the best artifacts in the game (Staff of Flowers or Arcturia’s Music Box, or their associated belt or necklace), a piece of gear (highest item level being 1000, listed in the Antiquities of Undermountain in the collection), a piece of companion gear (same as in WE’s), or a vanity pet. Of course, it’s totally random. So, cross fingers to get the things you want ! With all the expeditions, you can get an average of 4.33 Zok boxes a day (that’s almost 24k RAD, not bad !).

How to get Crystalized Resonances ?

After you finished the Undermountain campaign and completed your first Master Expedition, you need to talk to the Runemaster Sinyé (close to Obaya Uday, on the same floor, next corner). She will ask you to collect resonances in Runic Encounters (the big coloured bubbles you’ve seen around Undermountain) and a Runic Resonator. To get the resonances, simply go to any runic encounter and hit monsters (no need to kill them, just hit them, a lot). The Runic Resonator requires you to kill monsters though. Once you have completed that quest, you can take the next one… and forget about it (it’s not worth it). Taking the quest will let you to collect more resonances in runic encounters. You need 10 resonances of the same type to be able to make one Crystalized Resonance (on the altars at the start of any expedition). It sounds a lot of work, but getting plenty of resonances is actually pretty fast.

So, that’s it ! That’s how you will get most of your end game gear !

Priorities at lvl 80

The most important thing is your main hand weapon. Get Alabaster weapons in Master Expeditions as soon as possible. And upgrade them to legendary, with a focus on the main hand.

If you still do not have an augment companion, get one ! If you do not have a mount with the Wanderer’s Fortune insignia bonus, that’s a good time too.

You can spend everything on your main companion while you farm for equipment in Undermountain expeditions. A legendary augment companion, with proper equipment, and rank 13 bondings is a very good start. Upgrade bondings to rank 15 as soon as you get the materials.

Once you and your companion are properly equipped, you can focus on legacy campaigns (with the help of Sybella in Protector’s Enclave).

Then, you can focus on your mounts. At least get 5 rare mounts with proper insignia bonuses and fill them with rare insignias (you will find lots of them in dungeons). Higher quality insignias are not a priority.

Get rank 9 enchantments everywhere (mostly radiant and tactical).

Get a weapon and an armour enchantment. Low rank are good enough (especially for the Soulforged enchantment). You will upgrade them as you get materials.

Then, you can focus on your artifacts, with a priority on your active artifact.

You can also upgrade your empowered and profane runestones.

Finally, you can upgrade all of your enchantments and insignias to maximum.

Once you have a maxed out character, you can think about which legendary mount to get.

And you can max out your Bolster.

Ability Scores

As you level up, you will get 2×6 points to improve your ability scores, +2 points in every one of them. It is obviously best to put 6 points in the 2 ability scores that matter the most for you. These points are bound to your loadout. This means you can have a different repartition of points between Devout and Arbiter.

First, let’s review what 6 points in each stat can give you :

• Strength : 3% stamina regeneration, 1.5% physical damage boost
• Constitution : 3% base HP (850 HP at lvl 80), 1.5% action point gain
• Dexterity : 3% critical severity (about 1% heal/damage increase if critical strike is capped), 1.5% movement speed
• Intelligence : 3% control bonus, 1.5% magical damage boost
• Wisdom : 3% control resistance, 1.5% outgoing healing (about 1% improved healing with the proper companions)
• Charisma : 3% companion influence (about 180 in all stats with a legendary augment companion),1.5% recharge speed

Ability Scores for a Devout Cleric :

• 6 x Dexterity
• 6 x Wisdom

Obviously, you are going for full dexterity and wisdom ! Healing better is your goal, but movement speed and control resistance are also very useful to avoid being hit by a big attack or to be able to heal sooner after being controlled.

Ability Scores for an Arbiter Cleric :

• 6 x Dexterity
• 6 x Intelligence

An Arbiter Cleric only deals magical damage and their cooldowns are not what restrict their use of encounter powers, it’s their divinity. So you are going for full dexterity and intelligence to deal more damage.

Stats

Stats for a Devout Cleric

The most important stats for a Devout Cleric are :

• Defense
• Weapon Damage
• Outgoing Healing
• Power
• Critical Strike / Critical Severity
• Hit Points
• Critical Avoidance

A capped Defense means you will take half damage from anything, anyone should have this capped. It’s the most important defensive stat.

Your Weapon Damage determines how efficient your powers are (healing powers too). So, always use the weapon with the highest weapon damage you can find.

Outgoing Healing is the main multiplier for your heals. You can get 50% from your passive companions. Wisdom and boons are another source. You can also get some from Class Features like Overflowing Spirit or powers like Exhaltation.

Power is a stat that boosts damage and healing with a multiplicative factor : ( 1 + Power / 100.000 ). With 100k power, your damage and healing are twice as effective as with 0 power. It has no cap, so put power everywhere you can (except where you can put Outgoing Healing).

Landing a Critical Strike or Critical Heal improves your damage or healing by your Critical Severity. Your chance to land a critical is capped at 50%. To reach this cap, you need 1.25 times your power for a critical heal. This means that if you have 140k power, you need 170k critical strike to reach the cap for healing. There are companion gears and rings that boost critical strike quite a lot. Critical Strike is usually not as good as power to boost your healing, so always favour Power over Critical Strike wherever you can. Boosting Critical Severity through weapon enhancement and vorpal weapon enchantment is also a good idea (though not a priority).

More Hit Points are always good. Sacrificing a bit of power for tons of HP in a couple of places (mostly mount power and mount insignias), where the ratio HP/power is good, is quite fantastic if you can already properly heal people in your group. Being able to tank hits means you will survive longer, and you will be able to heal your group even in very bad situations.

A capped Critical Avoidance means you will never take a Critical Strike. This is huge in improving your survivability (though it doesn’t decrease damage taken that much). It is necessary to have this stat capped for the last trial in the game (tomm) when you are playing as a healer. It is not as important everywhere else, but still very good to have.

Stats for an Arbiter Cleric

The most important stats for an Arbiter Cleric are :

• Defense
• Weapon Damage
• Armor Penetration
• Combat Advantage
• Critical Strike / Critical Severity
• Accuracy
• Power
• Hit Points
• Critical Avoidance

A capped Defense means you will take half damage from anything, anyone should have this capped. It’s the most important defensive stat.

Your Weapon Damage determines how efficient your powers are. So, always use the weapon with the highest weapon damage you can find.

Armor Penetration negates your enemy Defense. It basically doubles your damage if it’s capped.

Combat Advantage makes you deal more damage when you surround an enemy. It can double your damage if it’s capped. But cap is higher than other stats.

Critical Strike improves your chances to land a critical strike and deal additional damage corresponding to your critical severity. A capped Critical Strike means you will land a critical 50% of the time. Critical Severity plays a big part in improving your damage if Critical Strike is capped. There is also a feat that makes you automatically critical strike on Searing Javelin from time to time. This makes Critical Severity even more efficient. Critical Strike and Critical Severity can improve your damage by more than 50% if your Critical Strike is capped and you have a Critical Severity of 100% or higher.

Accuracy negates your opponent’s Deflect. It basically makes you deal 33% more damage.

Power is a stat that boosts damage and healing with a multiplicative factor : ( 1 + Power / 100.000 ). With 100k power, your damage and healing are twice as effective as with 0 power. It has no cap, so put power everywhere you can… after capping all of the stats above !

More Hit Points are always good.It’s important that you can survive at least 2 big hits, so that your healer can react fast enough to heal you. A dead DPS deals no damage, and actually loses power and defense until they go to a campfire. Damage is important, but staying alive is even more important.

Critical Avoidance makes you take less critical strikes. You won’t cap this stat, because that would be too much to ask. But the more Critical Avoidance you have, the less likely you are to take two consecutive critical strikes. It does improve your survival chances.

Stats Caps

Power and Hit Points do no cap, you can have as many as you can put on, and take benefits from these.

In PVE (player vs environment), stats cap at :

• Enemy Ratings + 50k for : Armor Penetration, Defense, Critical Strike (when hitting things), Critical Avoidance, Deflect, and Awareness
• Enemy Ratings + 60k for : Accuracy (Clerics require 10k more than the others, who only need 50k + ER, due to a General Power that gives them 10k more points which diminish as stamina goes down)
• Enemy Ratings + 65k for : Critical Avoidance (Clerics and Paladins require 10k more than the others, who only need 55k + ER, due to a General Power that gives them 10k more points which diminish as divinity goes down)
• Enemy Ratings + 100k for : Combat Advantage
• 1.25 times power for : Critical Strike (when healing)

That is, for most stats / accuracy / critical avoidance / combat advantage :

• 57k / 67k / 72k / 107k in random dungeons (but your stats are scaled down there, more info in the Dungeons and Scaling tab)
• 60k / 70k / 75k / 110k in the Undermountain campaign area and Stronghold
• 68k / 78k / 83k / 118k in the Lair of the Mad Mage dungeon (LoMM)
• 80k / 90k / 95k / 130k in the Tower of the Mad Mage trial (ToMM)
• 85k / 95k / 100k / 135k in the mod 18 area and dungeon

In PVP (Player vs Player) :

• Armor Penetration caps at opponent’s Defense stat
• Defense caps at opponent’s Armor Penetration stat + 50k
• Critical Strike caps at opponent’s Critical Avoidance stat + 50k
• Critical Avoidance caps at opponent’s Critical Strike stat
• Accuracy caps at opponent’s Deflect stat
• Deflect caps at opponent’s Accuracy stat + 50k
• Combat Advantage caps at opponent’s Awareness stat +100k
• Awareness caps at opponent’s Combat Advantage stat

Getting more stats than the cap has no benefit nor drawback. It’s just a waste of stats. Hitting the cap on the stats listed in the previous sections is quite important though.

Secondary stats like Outgoing Healing, movement speed, and such, have no cap, but the ways to get them are limited.

More Info on Stats and Formulas

You can find all the formulas on Janne’s website. It has everything you need to calculate damage, healing, stat improvements… A fantastic resource !

Powers

Powers for a Devout Cleric

At-Wills

• Sacred Flame : single target damage spell
• Scattering Light : AOE (area of effect) damage spell
• Soothe : single target heal, not worth using (costs time and divinity and heals nothing)
• Blessing of Light : boosts next heal by 10%, long to cast, small effect (a bit of a trap)

I am using both damage spells. They don’t do much but they are better than nothing. You should only use them when your divinity is full and you have no one to heal. You can apply the Dread weapon enchantment (debuff to enemy’s Defense) with them too if you are using this enchantment. Blessing of Light is an option but you can’t cast it very often and it doesn’t help much. If you are using it, do not try to improve all of your healing spells : you need time to regenerate divinity. Divinity comes first, otherwise you won’t last long. If you are casting Blessing of Light, you can’t cast a Bastion of Health before you finish casting Blessing of Light… It may have dramatic consequences.

Encounters

• Bastion of Health : your main heal, the one and only spell that you will spam all the time
• Divine Glow : divinity regeneration, quite useful in long fights
• Geas : decreases the damage of the target by 5% with a 20s cooldown. I would like this one if the duration was longer and cooldown shorter. Developers, if you read me, I command you…
• Healing Word : a heal over time which is okayish to consider as a support healing (heals once at 400 magnitude, then heals 7 times at 250 magnitude, so 1/3 of a Bastion of Health, every 3 seconds). It can crit. Make it crit then renew it infinitely with Bastion of Health and the Repeated Blessings feat. It will always heal the same amount for its whole duration unless you cast it again, so make sure it’s a big one ! You can even change the power while in combat and still continue to renew it. It costs a lot of divinity and it’s useless when people are at full life… but you can apply it at the beginning of a fight and forget about it. Honestly, I don’t like it. The divinity cost means you won’t benefit from Overflowing Spirit for a long time; the heal over time is too small to be really relevant by itself; and it’s once every 3 seconds… which means people can die pretty easily before a single tic comes, or you will have healed them long ago (make it tic every second for it to be useful…). But it may help if you are having trouble healing people (as long as they don’t die instantly).
• Exaltation : a very small boost to damage and outgoing healing for 8s with a 19s cooldown. Not worth it.
• Cleansing Light : removes one negative condition for everyone in an AOE (doesn’t always work first time, so you may have to cast it twice). Necessary everywhere enemies apply debuffs or DoTs (damage over time / poison)
• Astral Shield : reduces damage by 10% for people in the shield (small area), has to be channelled. Good if you know when big hits are coming. But very situational.
• Intercession : THE Emergency Button ! Fully heal the party member with the least HP% (or almost, when it’s a tank with plenty of HP), no need to target them.

Use Bastion of Health then restore divinity. And do only that if you can avoid doing anything else. Use Intercession when someone takes a big hit and Bastion of Health is not enough (or the guy is playing hide and seek and you can’t figure out where he is… That really happens, this spell is a lifesaver.. you still need to be at range and line of sight, ie : it won’t work on someone hiding behind a pillar but it will on someone behind you). Intercession is also good to trigger Battle Prayer, in order to restore divinity faster when you know you won’t need Intercession soon. Cleansing Light is a must have anywhere you can take debuffs or DoTs (expeditions in Undermountain, FBI first boss, T9G, LoMM last boss, Svardborg…). Healing Word is good when you need lots of healing on long fights : make it crit, renew it, and forget it ! But its efficiency is not fantastic. Divine Glow is very useful in long fights where you need to heal constantly for long periods of time (that is LoMM second boss mostly, ToMM is a good place to have Divine Glow too). That’s the spell you will take if you remove Healing Word. Astral Shield is a solid option if you need to mitigate damage and you can predict when (but it’s not healing much).

Daily’s

• Guardian of Faith : good damage, awesome on mimics in LoMM. Helps a bit with dps (mostly to burst small things) and triggers Persistent Guardian if you have the feat.
• Hallowed Ground : a must have. 10% damage mitigation + heal over time. The best thing to mitigate damage.
• Anointed Army : a reserve of life + a 3% damage boost for every member of the party for 10s. You need the Anointed Arms feat to benefit from all the effects.
• Guardian of Life : Emergency healing if you failed to manage your divinity, or can’t keep up with the damage the party takes. Also triggers Persistent Guardian if you have the feat.

I’ve been using Guardian of Faith + Hallowed Ground for the whole mod 16. I’ve recently changed Guardian of Faith for Anointed Army because I don’t run LoMM a lot nowadays, and boosting the party damage is great (even though it doesn’t last long). Guardian of Life (coupled with the Persistent Guardian feat) can be a solid option if your outgoing healing is low and you have trouble keeping up divinity or healing people, otherwise Hallowed Ground is a better version (no initial heal but a 10% damage reduction for the duration).

Class Features

• Hallowed Armor : 5% less damage taken, 10% when channelling divinity. Have you ever survived a red dragon’s breath ? I have !
• Expended Faith : a 15% bigger pool of divinity. Not too useful if you can manage your divinity properly.
• Desperate Prayers : up to 20% more outgoing healing when your divinity is below 50% with a maximum when your divinity is depleted (useless when your divinity is above 50%). Realistically, that means a maximum of 16% more outgoing healing on your last Bastion of Health… which is about a 10% better Bastion of Health if you already have 60% outgoing healing.
• Swift Prayers : you can move, very slowly, when you channel divinity. Sounds cool but you will often have to stop channelling divinity when you are in a red area anyway.
• Hallowed Guide : 5% increased healing when the target is within 15′. A small increase but it works.
• Overflowing Spirit : when your divinity is full, your outgoing healing is increased by 25%. A big boost, a good reason to never forget to regenerate your divinity. Most of your heals can be improved with this (especially Healing Word). A big yes !

Overflowing Spirit is a must have. If you want better heals, Hallowed Guide is a good one. I prefer Hallowed Armor, because you can be the last one standing and revive your whole party from time to time, or kill a boss with the last dps alive. Staying alive is generally a good idea.

Feats

1. Repeated Blessings vs Empowered Soothe : infinite heal over time. If you need more healing, that’s not too bad. The other is useless.
2. Rhythm of the Heavens vs Battle Prayer : I’ve never tested Rhythm of the Heavens, but you stop channelling divinity when there’s an AOE under your feet or someone needs healing. There’s no time for a mechanic like Rhythm of the Heavens. With Battle Prayer, you can cast a Bastion of Health every 4 seconds at full divinity. Battle Prayer will always be active.
3. Blessed Armaments vs Towering Light : Blessed Armaments for ToMM (10% damage resistance after using Divine Glow). Towering Light for LoMM (up to 10% more damage for killing mimics). Both have some utility.
4. Anointed Arms vs Persistent Guardian : 3% more damage using Anointed Army or a beautiful heal bot after using Guardian of Faith or Guardian of Life. Pick this feat depending on the daily you use. Both have value.
5. Light of Devotion vs Angel of Life : a small boost to your next heal when you channel divinity for more than 4s, or encounters that cost no divinity for 12s once every blue moon. I’ve tested Angel of Life for a while, it almost never occurs and you don’t necessarily control when it occurs, so you can’t really take advantage of this feat. Light of Devotion will at least trigger once in a while.

General

• Divine Protection : Critical Avoidance is increased by 10k when your divinity is full, diminishes as divinity goes down.
• Composed Insight : Accuracy is increased by 10k when your stamina is full, diminishes as stamina goes down.

Do not forget about these. Accuracy is not too useful for a Devout Cleric, but Critical Avoidance is a big stat, especially for ToMM.

Powers for an Arbiter Cleric (Tipping Scale / Angel of Death / Burst Solo build)

When playing solo, this is a fantastic build. You never run out of divinity and you are not relying on a mechanic that necessitates you to use powers in a specific order. Just burst your way through anything, and it works !

At Wills

• Scattering Light : AOE
• Lance of Faith : Single Target

You only want Burning Judgement for your encounters.

Encounters

• Sun Burst : okay, this one is fun for leveling. But you should never use it ever after.
• Divine Glow : divinity regeneration is good. Getting a full stack of Burning Judgement through Tipping Scales is the main reason to use it though.
• Searing Javelin : after using an at-will and Divine Glow, that’s an AOE encounter with a magnitude of 720. Goodbye monsters.
• Forgemaster’s Flame : after using an at-will and Divine Glow, that’s a single target spell with a magnitude of 1250… as strong as a daily !
• Chains of Blazing Light : you were so great when you were dealing damage, before mod 16… Good old times.
• Break the Spirit : yeah, well… Why would you bother when you can burn it down with Forgemaster’s Flame ?
• Prophecy of Doom : deals 30% of the damage you dealt for the last 10 seconds to a dead body. Now that I think about it, that could be useful against undeads…

Let’s be honest, most of the time you open up with Searing Javelin to kill the small monsters, and Forgemaster’s Flame to finish the big one and jump to the next group of monsters. If you need more firepower, an At-Will and Divine Glow will double your encounter power while restoring some divinity. Any time you have Radiant Judgement, you channel divinity to never run out of divinity. Any time you need divinity, an At-Will + Divine Glow can solve the problem. On longer fights, you use At-Wills to charge your Encounters. That saves divinity.

Daily’s

• Guardian of Faith : simple and clean.
• Hallowed Ground : Yes, you can heal yourself !
• Flame Strike : do you have time for a barbecue ?
• Celestial Prominence : if you are okay with waiting 5s.
• Hammer of Fate : that one can be interrupted midway…

Hallowed Ground is a must have to be able to survive any kind of situation. You will have full stacks of Radiant Judgement from time to time, Guardian of Faith is a great way to use them, when you don’t need divinity. Celestial Prominence is another option but I really don’t like the way it works. You end up losing plenty of time waiting for the daily to be charged, and the AOE is not that big, monsters can move away by the time it’s charged. Flame Strike is even worse (though it can deal good damage on a static target). Hammer of Fate is an alternative to Guardian of Faith but it uses Burning Judgement instead of Radiant Judgement. You’d rather use your Burning Judgement on your Encounters. Guardian of Faith may not be the daily that deals the most damage, but it works really well.

Class Features

• Hallowed Armor : 5% damage mitigation, 10% when channelling divinity.
• Pilgrim’s Light : 5% more damage when there are no party members nearby
• Expanded Faith : 15% more divinity.
• Critical Insight : restores 10 divinity when you land a critical strike. Basically reduces the cost of your encounters by about 30 divinity if you charge them with your At-Wills.
• Doomsayer : 10% more damage for 10s after using an encounter that inflicts a negative condition (Geas, Chains of Blazing Light Break the Spirit, Prophecy of Doom ?)… You don’t use these with this build.
• Light of the Scales : Increases the divinity restored by Channel Divinity by 10% when it consumes Judgement.
• Divine Equilibrium : 15% more damage when your divinity is at 50%, decreases as divinity gets full or empty.

More damage = faster fights = less use of divinity and less damage taken, right ?

Feats

1. Lightspeed vs Piercing Javelin : guaranteed critical strikes on Searing Javelin, yes please !
2. Focused Light vs Tipping Scales : how to save divinity and burst though things at the same time.
3. Sudden Verdict vs Inner Balance : Encounters filling the Judgement gauge 25% of the time = plenty more divinity (or a fully charged Guardian of Faith). You will never benefit from the maximum amount of divinity Inner Balance can give you… and that’s pretty low anyway.
4. Critical Sun vs Burning Path : Well, whatever…
5. Perfect Balance vs Angel of Death : it doesn’t happen very often, but being able to spam encounters like At-Wills is fun.

General

• Divine Protection : Critical Avoidance is increased by 10k when your divinity is full, diminishes as divinity goes down.
• Composed Insight : Accuracy is increased by 10k when your stamina is full, diminishes as stamina goes down.

Do not forget about these. Critical Avoidance is not too important for an Arbiter Cleric (though it helps), but Accuracy is.

Powers for an Arbiter Cleric (Focused Light / Perfect Balance / Sustained Damage Dungeon build)

Let’s be honest, I have never played this build. But if you want to play in dungeons and to be efficient against bosses, this build is probably better than the previous one.

At Wills

• Lance of Faith : Single Target
• Conflagrate : AOE

These two are simply better than the other two.

Encounters

• Daunting Light : boosted with Forgemaster’s Flame to burn bosses down, or to kill groups of monsters.
• Geas : reducing the target’s damage by 5% may be useful.
• Searing Javeline : to burst through groups of monsters faster.
• Forgemaster’s Flame : the highest single target damage spell.
• Break the Spirit : increasing the target’s damage taken from magical and projectile attacks by 10% for 10s every 20s. With pretty decent damage.
• Prophecy of Doom : deals 30% of the damage you dealt to your target after 10s. Could be more efficient than Break the Spirit if you are the only dps

On groups of monsters : Break the Spirit then alternate Searing Javelin + Daunting Light

On bosses : Break the Spirit then alternate Forgemaster’s Flame + Daunting Light = massive damage

Daily’s

• Guardian of Faith : 1300 magnitude damage on 1 target + AOE stun. 1.5s casting time.
• Hallowed Ground : if your healer is not good enough.
• Flame Strike : massive damage on static targets in an AOE.
• Celestial Prominence : if you are okay with waiting 5s and wasting time reactivating it.
• Hammer of Fate : 1500 magnitude damage on 1 target, can be interrupted midway.

I think Flame Strike is more reliable than Celestial Prominence against static targets, just like Guardian of Faith is more reliable than Hammer of Fate. But pick the ones that feel best to you.

Class Features

• Hallowed Armor : 5% damage mitigation, 10% when channelling divinity.
• Expanded Faith : 15% more divinity.
• Critical Insight : restores 10 divinity when you land a critical strike. That’s not much.
• Doomsayer : 10% more damage for 10s after using an encounter that inflicts a negative condition. Start all of your fights with Break the Spirit !
• Light of the Scales : Increases the divinity restored by Channel Divinity by 10% when it consumes Judgement.
• Divine Equilibrium : 15% more damage when your divinity is at 50%, decreases as divinity gets full or empty.

As a dps, you just want damage. But if divinity is hard to manage, Expanded Faith is a solid option.

Feats

1. Lightspeed vs Piercing Javelin : you won’t use too many at-wills, Piercing Javelin won’t be too useful.
2. Focused Light vs Tipping Scales : that’s what makes you good vs bosses.
3. Sudden Verdict vs Inner Balance : every time Sudden Verdict procs, you can consume Judgement to restore your divinity.
4. Critical Sun vs Burning Path : make them burn !
5. Perfect Balance vs Angel of Death : you cannot cast all of these encounter powers without a way to restore your divinity.

General

• Divine Protection : Critical Avoidance is increased by 10k when your divinity is full, diminishes as divinity goes down.
• Composed Insight : Accuracy is increased by 10k when your stamina is full, diminishes as stamina goes down.

Do not forget about these. Critical Avoidance is not too important for an Arbiter Cleric (though it helps), but Accuracy is and you need to be able to evade red areas without hesitation.

Boons

Campaign Boons

Anyone, any class, any role

• Every Power node
• Every HP node
• Marathon Runner (12.5% movement speed)
• Simple Support (10% companion influence : 622 in all stats + 2242 HP with a legendary augment companion, worth it with power and HP alone)

Devout Cleric

• Tier 5 : Blessed Touch (4% Outgoing Healing)
• Tier 5 : Call of Power (4% Action Point Gain = Anointed Army more often) or Severe Criticism (4 % Critical Severity = 1.33% more healing)
• Master Boon : Blessed Advantage (more power and reduced cooldowns for the party)
• Remaining Points : Critical Strike (unless you are capped), Deflect (always useful), Disenchanting Aura (Control Resistance is good too), Demonic Mastery (mod 18)

Arbiter Cleric

• Tier 5 : Severe Criticism (4% Critical Severity)
• Tier 5 : Call of Power (4% Action Point Gain)
• Master Boon : Blood Lust (chance for decreasing target awareness by 1500 + 150% weapon damage attack + 1.5% action point gain on encounter use) or Deathly Rage (chance for 1500 combat advantage buff + 6% more damage + 12k damage per attack, on kill, for 10s). I like Blood Lust better, because it’s more reliable. But Deathly Rage is more powerful, for sure ! Do you want to kill big monsters on your own (Blood Lust), or to kill groups of monsters even faster (Deathly Rage) ?
• Remaining Points : any stat you haven’t capped. Demonic Mastery for mod 18.

There are not too many cultists, dinosaurs, nor undead. At least, they shouldn’t be a problem for you when you meet them. Taking the corresponding boons is a waste for most content, and not necessary where you can benefit from them.

Guild Boons

Being in a high level guild is a huge advantage : you will have access to 3 very big boons at their maximum power (and that’s also 1500 item level for you, useful to unlock dungeons).

Devout Cleric

• Offense : 15% Critical Severity (or 8k Power if you don’t have access to this one)
• Defense : 32k HP (or 8k Defense if you need this amount to cap your stat)
• Utility : Experience Points Bonus (that’s some free RAD for you at level 80) or Mount Speed Bonus (if you want to speedrun the rare dungeons where you actually can use your mount… there are not too many).

Arbiter Cleric

• Offense : 15% Critical Severity (or 8k Armor Penetration if it’s not capped, or 8k Power if you don’t have access to this one)
• Defense : 32k HP (or 8k Defense if you need this amount to cap your stat)
• Utility : Mount Speed Bonus (faster quests = you can do more stuff), Experience Points Bonus (free RAD), Treasure Hunter (when you are collecting mastercrafting materials from explorer’s charts, which you get in the Stronghold)

PVP

I’m not into PVP, so I leave that to you. Keep in mind that your opponents will have quite different stats than monsters.

First boon for a Devout would be HP if you’re not changing your Defense (oponents will have their Armor Penetration capped anyway), Defense if you’re going to put more Defense on yourself (you need tons to make it useful but it will be pretty efficient if you can have 130k+). Armor Penetration for an Arbiter (if you want to be efficient against high defense players).

Second boon would be control resistance, or AP gain (if you can cast a daily often enough).

Third boon would be Deep Wound (Role Reversal is also useful for an Arbiter).

Companions

Augment Companions

Augment companions are companions which have the Augmentation and the Enhancement powers. They do not fight with you, but follow you around. The non augment companions usually have 2 active skills, 1 passive that enhance their skills and 1 passive that improves their stats (role expertise). They do fight with you but, with the exception of a couple of them, do not expect much from them.

The Augmentation skill is available at lvl 1 and makes your companion share their stats to you. You get all of their stats, including companion gear and runestones slotted in your companion gear. That’s about 3 rank 8 bonding runestones you get for free, on top of your own bonding runestones. Thanks to this skill alone, an uncommon (green) augment companion lvl 25 gives you more stats than a non augment epic (purple) companion lvl 35. And a rare (blue) lvl 30 augment companion gives about the same stats as a legendary (orange) non augment companion lvl 40. At lvl 40, a legendary augment companion gives an average of 8k more stats than a legendary non augment companion.

The Enhancement power (unlocked at blue quality, lvl 30) gives 1k bonus to 3 stats of your companion… Which translate to a 3.1k bonus to these stats for you (with rank 15 bonding runestones). The Enhancement power is what makes all the augment companions different. They would be strictly identical otherwise. And so they are, below lvl 30, which is why it doesn’t matter which augment companion you get for leveling.

In higher end dungeons, you need very high stats to be able to perform properly. But, in lower end dungeons, the scaling mechanic makes your stats melt. In both cases, a non augment companion will perform very poorly. You absolutely need an augment companion if you are going to play random dungeons. Otherwise, you are just a dead weight for your party.

Upgrading Companions’ Quality

The best way to upgrade your companions is to wait for a sale in the ZEN market (you can also get 25% coupons from time to time by invoking your god), and to buy Companion Upgrade Packs (that’s 75 tokens for a maximum of 375k AD). Upgrading an Uncommon companion with companion upgrade tokens without a sale is not worth it, but it is at rare and higher quality. With any sale or coupon, it becomes worth it for an uncommon companion… and upgrading an epic companion to legendary costs less than half price with companion tokens ! Never ever upgrade your companions directly with AD. Always transfer AD to ZEN to get these Companion Upgrade Packs (75 tokens each).

Bonding Runestones

Now that we have established the fact that an augment pet is a necessity because they gives 100% of their stats to you… Consider the fact that Bonding Runestones can transfer up to 210% of your companion’s stats to you. Yes, they are absolutely fantastic, and an absolute priority for everyone. Get these to rank 15 as soon as possible. The only thing you should buy before upgrade your bondings is your active companion for your main role (and upgrading it to epic if it’s not already). To upgrade your bonding runestones, better start with rank 9 (super cheap) while you are leveling, then buy rank 13 one after the other, then upgrade them to rank 14 and 15 with materials you will collect along the way. If you buy the next upgrade and sell the previous one, you will lose 10% of the value of each upgrade in auction house fees. By getting rank 13 directly, you will only lose 10% of the value of your rank 9 bondings when you sell them, and nothing else. The best way to get wards for upgrading your rank 13 is to wait for a sale in the ZEN market and to buy regular wards (you need an average of 38 wards per bonding)… or wait to get free ones during an event ! The best way to get wards for upgrading your rank 14 is to invoke your god every day (on all of your characters) in order to get a Coalescent Ward. This will guarantee an upgrade, and you will get it for free ! The marks of potency can be acquired by completing weekly missions (which help completing your legacy campaigns) given by Sybella in Protector’s Enclave. The enchanting stones rank 6 can be acquired in the hardest dungeons (many of which are in the epic dungeon queue and are pretty accessible).

Bolster

Bolster improves your companion stats by up to 15% at maximum (with 5 companions at the legendary quality in the same category as your active companion). Each rarity improvement on one of your top 5 companion in a category gives you 0.5% Bolster. Let’s face it : 1% in Bolster with a legendary augment companion only improves your stats by about 130 points. Upgrading Bolster is not worth it. You will get plenty of companions along the way, there’s no need to spend AD for a useless companion.

Companion for Leveling

Make sure to have an uncommon augment companion (cat, watler, goldfish, goat, whatever), rank 9+ bonding runestones, 965+ item level companion gear, and empowered runestones, as soon as possible. Nothing can make you stronger than these while you are leveling (at such a cheap price too). Bonding runestones and most of the companion gear items are account bound (not character bound) or not bound at all, so you can transfer some good gear to your new Cleric if you have a high level character.

Devout Cleric

Active : Polar Bear Cub

The best active companion for a Devout Cleric is the Polar Bear Cub. It is an augment pet that gives a bonus to Power, Critical Strike, and Awareness. Power and Critical Strike are the two most important stats for you. The only other augment companion with a bonus to Power and Critical Strike is the Icosahedron Ioun Stone, but it gives Combat Advantage instead of Awareness, which is less useful to you. On top of being the best augment companion, the Polar Cub also is one of the passive companions you will have equipped all the time, making it the most important companion for you. The first companion you should buy and upgrade to legendary.

Passives

• Polar Bear Cub : 10% Outgoing Healing + 2k Defense
• Quickling : 10% Outgoing Healing + 2k Critical Strike
• Ioun Stone of Radiance : 10% Outgoing Healing + 2k Deflection
• Neverember Guard : 10% Outgoing Healing + 2k Awareness
• Rebel Mercenary : 10% Outgoing Healing + 2k Accuracy

Of course, you want those sweet 50% Outgoing Healing bonuses. They will boost your healing more than anything else. There’s also one version of the Faithful Initiate that gives Outgoing Healing, but with Combat Advantage as a secondary stat, not too useful. The Quickling is very expensive but it’s also one of the best passive companions due to it giving Critical Strike, a stat you almost never have enough of.

Enhancement

• Potency : chance on hit to increase Power by 2k (<= 1% healing) and companion’s Critical Avoidance by 4% (it doesn’t work, at least not shown on your companion sheet, and doesn’t transfer to your stats either).
• Potent Precision : chance on hit to increase Critical Severity by 5% (> 1.5% healing if Critical Strike close to cap)

It works both with an augment or a non augment companion. The chance is pretty high too !

Potent Precision is better than Potency by a solid margin, even with relatively low Critical Strike.The Rebel Mercenary (which you want for its passive), has this enhancement. Enhancement scales on your summoned companion quality. The quality of the companion which has Potent Precision doesn’t matter.

Companion Gear

• Gold Icon of the Companion (12k Critical Strike, 2 Empowered Runestones) x2
• Platinum Icon of the Companion (12k Critical Avoidance, 2 Profane Runestones)

You can get these by completing the questline in the Stardock (12 days) on 3 different characters. That’s the easiest way, as it doesn’t rely on RNG. With these, you will easily cap your Critical Strike (unless you have tons of Power), and your Critical Avoidance. The Profane Runestones will help you cap Defense and the Empowered Runestones will give you 4k power each at rank 15, with Bonding Runestones at Rank 15.

These are the Companion Gear I’m using. If you do not have your Defense capped, it takes priority over Critical Strike or Critical Avoidance.

Arbiter Cleric (Solo)

Active : Stalwart Golden Lion

Or Xuna, if you are rich, and do not care about her being nerfed in the future.

But ! Wait ! What ?! You said augment pets are everything and all… And now, you’re telling us to get a non augment one ?!!

Yes ! That’s what I’m saying… But ! And that’s very important. Only, and only if, your stats are capped for solo content (60k for most stats) with the Stalwart Golden Lion. That is, if you have rank 13+ bonding runestones. Otherwise, an augment companion will be better.

The reason of this is because it’s fairly easy to cap stats at 60k, even with a non augment companion. All the stats above the cap do not matter, so you do not lose anything except Power when you use a non augment companion. On the other hand, you get easy access to Combat Advantage. Combat Advantage can double your damage if it’s capped and you are surrounding an enemy. But it doesn’t do much if it’s too low (i.e. : when you are leveling). You also get access to the best companion power in the game : the one of the Stalwart Golden Lion. And you also get benefits from your companion powers (Xuna’s Insane damage, or the Stalwart Golden Lion buffs).

If your stats aren’t capped, use the Deepcrow Hatchling : it’s a bit expensive, though you can get it for 800 tarmalune trade bars (which you get by being VIP for about a season), but it’s the best budget pet considering it’s an augment pet, epic from the start, which is also one of the most important passive pet you’ll always use.

Passives

• Deepcrow Hatchling : 8k power
• Stalwart Golden Lion : 10% damage buff (equivalent to 25k power if you have 150k power) for 10 seconds after your companion uses a power (50% chance, for 10s, 15s cooldown). Only works with a non augment companion !
• Tamed Velociraptor : 10k power (actually 2k per player with the Tamed Velociraptor in the group, but it’s bugged and always gives 10k)
• Githyanki : 4800 power + 8% stamina regeneration (best power in utility after the Alpha Compy, which is not worth it currently at millions of AD but may be available again in the future, and after the Stalwart Golden Lion). Comes from the Gith Booster Pack (which is very valuable if you have multiple characters, because it gives a 30 slot bag, an epic mount and an epic Githyanki companion to all of your current and future characters, and more, for 4k Zen).
• Any companion which lets you cap your stats or gets you more power. List available here (thanks to Rainer). Keep in mind that 4% Critical Severity is only better than 4k Power if you have more than 200k Power and less than 100% Critical Severity (formula here, thanks to Janne), but companions with Critical Severity may be valid options if they are cheaper than companions with Power.

Enhancement

• Potency : chance on hit to increase Power by 2k (<= 1% healing) and companion’s Critical Avoidance by 4% (it doesn’t work, at least not shown on your companion sheet, and doesn’t transfer to your stats either).
• Potent Precision : chance on hit to increase Critical Severity by 5% (> 1.5% healing if Critical Strike close to cap)

It works both with an augment or a non augment companion. The chance is pretty high too !

Potent Precision is better than Potency by a solid margin, even with relatively low Critical Strike. Companions with the Potent Precision Enhancement are : Fire Archon, Hawk, Panther, Rebel Mercenary, Swashbuckler, Traveling Entertainer, War Boar, Werewolf, and Xuna. Pick the cheapest you can find (or the Rebel Mercenary for your Devout Cleric build). Enhancement scales on your summoned companion quality. The quality of the companion which has Potent Precision doesn’t matter.

Companion Gear

• Noble Emerald of the Companion (7k Armor Penetration, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Prestine Belt of the Companion (7k Combat Advantage, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Imperial Diamond Belt of the Companion / Prestine Belt of the Companion (7k Combat Advantage, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Burnt Belt of the Companion (7k Accuracy, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Silver Talisman of the Companion (7k Accuracy, 5k Combat Advantage, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Gold Talisman of the Companion (12k Armor Penetration, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Gold-Clasped Sword Knot of the Companion (12k Accuracy, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Chained Talisman of the Companion (7k Armor Penetration, 5k Accuracy, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Gold-Leafed Grimoire of the Companion (12k Combat Advantage, 2 Empowered Runestones), it’s a 4 leaf one !
• Ivy Grown Grimoire of the Companion (7k Armor Penetration, 5k Combat Advantage, 2 Empowered Runestones)

Any combination with 5k Defense, 7k Armor Penetration, 7k Accuracy, and as much Combat Advantage as possible is great. You do not need Combat Advantage if you are playing with an augment companion. But as soon as you cap your stats with a non augment companion, you should use one instead, for benefiting from Combat Advantage and doubling your damage output.

Only the single stat companion gear can be acquired from the questline in Stardock. You will have to farm WE’s (and Zok Boxes) quite a lot to loot the best pieces of Companion Gear. But there are slightly lesser pieces of gear with an item level of 990 instead of 1010 which are about as good. Worst case, non epic companion gear has very good stats too. You will only miss out a runestone slot, not as important as the stats on the items, really.

Arbiter Cleric (Dungeons)

Active : Deepcrow Hatchling

Bulette Pup, Quasit or Icosahedron Ioun Stone have a better enhancement power for a dps and are considered best in slot (bis), but they are not a priority : you need rank 15 bondings first to really take advantage of their enhancement power anyway. Polar Bear Cub is also good. Deepcrow Hatchling is the best budget augment pet, as it is epic from the start, can be bought with tarmalune trade bars (vip rewards), and gives 8k power at legendary. So, get a Deepcrow Hatchling before even thinking getting a Bulette Pup or any other bis companion.

Passives

• Deepcrow Hatchling : 8k power
• Tamed Velociraptor : 10k power (actually 2k per player in the group but it’s bugged and always gives 10k)
• Githyanki : 4800 power + 8% stamina regeneration (best power in utility after the Alpha Compy, which is not worth it currently at millions of AD but may be available again in the future). Comes from the Gith Booster Pack (which is very valuable if you have multiple characters, because it gives a 30 slot bag, an epic mount and an epic Githyanki companion to all of your current and future characters, and more, for 4k Zen).
• Any companion which lets you cap your stats or gets you more power. List available here (thanks to Rainer). Keep in mind that 4% Critical Severity is only better than 4k Power if you have more than 200k Power and less than 100% Critical Severity (formula here, thanks to Janne), but companions with Critical Severity may be valid options if they are cheaper than companions with Power.

Enhancement

• Potency : chance on hit to increase Power by 2k (<= 1% healing) and companion’s Critical Avoidance by 4% (it doesn’t work, at least not shown on your companion sheet, and doesn’t transfer to your stats either).
• Potent Precision : chance on hit to increase Critical Severity by 5% (> 1.5% healing if Critical Strike close to cap)

It works both with an augment or a non augment companion. The chance is pretty high too !

Potent Precision is better than Potency by a solid margin, even with relatively low Critical Strike. Companions with the Potent Precision Enhancement are : Fire Archon, Hawk, Panther, Rebel Mercenary, Swashbuckler, Traveling Entertainer, War Boar, Werewolf, and Xuna. Pick the cheapest you can find (or the Rebel Mercenary for your Devout Cleric build). Enhancement scales on your summoned companion quality. The quality of the companion which has Potent Precision doesn’t matter.

Companion Gear

• Noble Emerald of the Companion (7k Armor Penetration, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Prestine Belt of the Companion (7k Combat Advantage, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Imperial Diamond Belt of the Companion / Prestine Belt of the Companion (7k Combat Advantage, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Burnt Belt of the Companion (7k Accuracy, 5k Defense, 1 Empowered Runestone, 1 Profane Runestone)
• Silver Talisman of the Companion (7k Accuracy, 5k Combat Advantage, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Gold Talisman of the Companion (12k Armor Penetration, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Gold-Clasped Sword Knot of the Companion (12k Accuracy, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Chained Talisman of the Companion (7k Armor Penetration, 5k Accuracy, 2 Empowered Runestones)
• Gold-Leafed Grimoire of the Companion (12k Combat Advantage, 2 Empowered Runestones), it’s a 4 leaf one !
• Ivy Grown Grimoire of the Companion (7k Armor Penetration, 5k Combat Advantage, 2 Empowered Runestones)

Any combination with 5k Defense, 7k Armor Penetration, 7k Accuracy, and as much Combat Advantage as possible is great. As long as you can cap all 4 of these stats with an augment pet, you will perform well in dungeons (if you are using a Guiding Ring, with tons of Accuracy, put more Combat Advantage instead). Combat Advantage is necessary here, you should always position yourself properly around monsters to benefit from it.

Only the single stat companion gear can be acquired from the questline in Stardock. You will have to farm WE’s (and Zok Boxes) quite a lot to loot the best pieces of Companion Gear. But there are slightly lesser pieces of gear with an item level of 990 instead of 1010 which are about as good. Worst case, non epic companion gears have very good stats too. You will only miss out a runestone slot, not as important as the stats on the items, really.

Mounts

Mount Speed

Mount speed usually depends on the mount quality.

• Green : 150%
• Blue : 180%
• Epic : 210%
• Legendary : 230%

It can be improved by up to +20% with the guild boon Mount Speed Bonus. A legendary mount only goes 8.7% faster than an epic mount with this boon. But an epic mount goes 35% faster than a green one. So, it’s a pretty good improvement.

Despite being a rare mount, the Frozen Demon Sled has a mount speed equal to an epic mount. It may be a cheaper option than an epic mount to get some good movement speed. The faster you go, the more things you can do !

There are many opportunities to get Epic mounts during events. There will even be a Legendary mount accessible with the Hell Pit event, running throughout 2020 (playing through many of them will be necessary to get the mount). Check the calendar to know if you can get a good mount soon.

Mount Combat Powers

Only Legendary mounts have a Combat Power. Legendary mounts are luxury items. You do not need one. I do not have one. You can send one to me at Astrielle@Obikin89 on PS4 (only on this platform)…

The best Mount Combat Powers are :

• Armored Bulette : monsters in front of you take 500 magnitude damage and deal 10% less damage for 8s
• Armored Griffon : monsters around you deal 15% less damage for 10s
• Commander Tyrannosaur / Warpainted Tyrannosaur : monsters around you take 10% more damage for 10s
• Swarm : monster around you take 5% more damage and deal 5% less damage for 10s
• Swift Golden Lion : party members get a 30% HP shield for 10s, then a 6% damage buff for 12s
• Tenser’s Floating Disk : for 12s, you get 10% power, 10% speed, +2 strength / dexterity / constitution

Most of the others deal about 500 magnitude damage to monsters around you… Which is still pretty good, considering the fact most of the encounter powers deal less than that.

Mount Equip Powers

All of the epic and legendary mounts have an Equip Power, that’s one more reason to have an epic mount. The legendary mount powers are usually twice as good as the epic mount powers (though it’s not worth it to buy a legendary mount for their mount power unless you have upgraded everything else before)

The best Equip Powers at epic quality are :

• 5k Power (Apparatus of Gond, Enchanted Broom, Guard Drake, Heavy Giant Spider, Heavy Twilight Nightmare, Trained Basilisk, Whirlwind)
• 25k HP (Armored Bear, High Forest Bear, Triceratops)
• 12.5k HP + 5% movement speed (Blue Butterfly Swarm, Red Butterfly Swarm, Yellow Butterfly Swarm)
• 5k in any stat you need to cap

The best Equip Powers at legendary quality are :

• 10k Power (Arcane Whirlwind, Black Ice Warhorse, Crystalline Warhorse)
• 50k HP (War Triceratops)
• 10% movement speed (Armored Giant Strider)
• 10k in any stat you need to cap

HP are very valuable, especially when your defense is capped (and you need to cap defense). Consider the fact that, at 150k Power, getting 10k more Power makes you deal 4% more damage or heal 2% better. On the other hand, 50k HP make you 12-20% tankier. That’s also a ratio of 5 HP for 1 power, which is pretty good.

Of course, an Arbiter Cleric would always pick Power if they can manage not dying. But sometimes, it’s better to deal a bit less damage to ensure victory at a slow and steady pace. Remember that a dead dps deals no damage… and gets a debuff until they get to a campfire. Surviving is often a good idea to be able to deal more damage.

Movement speed is also a good option to make things faster, if you do not need HP or Power. It’s also good to be able to avoid big attacks.

Mount Insignia Bonuses

Of course, the best insignias are Dominance (Power and Companion Influence) and Prosperity (HP and Glory and Gold gain, ratio of 4 HP for 1 power, not as good as the Equip Power but still quite good). Brutality insignias (Power and Armor Penetration) are also great for an Arbiter Cleric, though not as useful for a Devout Cleric. But any insignia which helps getting your stats capped is good too !

The best Insignia Bonuses are :

• Gladiator’s Guile : 10% movement speed (5% for the second one, maybe less for the third)
• Wanderer’s Fortune : chance to get gemstones (refinement points) when killing stuff
• Traveller’s Treasures : chance to get extra RAD when killing stuff (small but useful)
• Barbarian’s Revelry : on critical strike, you are healed for 1% of your HP
• Shepherd’s Devotion : when using a daily power, 1500 defense + 10% movements speed buff for the party for 10s
• Berseker’s Rage : when action points are at 10% or lower, get 2500 deflection. When they are 90% or higher, get 2500 Critical Strike

Any mount (rare or higher) with the good combination of insignias is good enough. So, fill your stable with rare mounts. Cheaper is better. You only need one epic mount for its movement speed and equip power.

Pick Gladiator’s Guile 2 or 3 times for a good boost to movement speed. It makes it easier to avoid big attacks and you run faster in dungeons, makes your dailies faster too. Black Stallion, Moss-Daubed Horse, and Wolf of the Wild Hunt are 3 rare mounts with access to Gladiator’s Guile.

Wanderer’s Fortune is the first thing you should get though. It lets you get plenty of refinement points (RP). You need about 500k refinement points to upgrade an artifact to legendary. Needless to say, you need tons of RP. Wanderer’s Fortune is a very good start. Gilded Giant Spider, Suratuk’s Giant Spider and Suratuk’s Teal Spider are 3 rare mounts with access to Wanderer’s Fortune.

Traveller’s Treasure is not fantastic but it helps getting daily RAD. Good to have, but not necessarily worth it at first. Trained Basilisk, Gold-lined Apparatus of Kwalish, and the Apparatus of Kwalish are 3 Epic mounts with access to Traveler’s Treasure (no rare mount with this bonus).

Barbarian’s Revelry won’t really help much in dungeons but any HP count. If you are playing Arbiter, that’s a good one to have. It really shines while playing solo. Polar Bear is the only rare mount you can buy with access to Barbarian’s Revelry.

Shepherd’s Devotion and Berserker’s Rage are not really great powers… But you can fill all slots with Dominance insignias. More Power is always good ! There’s also Artificer’s Persuasion, Alchemist’s Invigoration, Combatant’s Maneuver, Protector’s Camaraderie, but these powers are mostly useless for a Cleric. Many mount possibilities, so I won’t list them all.

List of Mounts

Refer to this for the full list of mounts (thanks Rainer again).

Gear

Let’s start with the fact that higher item level (ilvl) doesn’t mean better gear. Of course, stats are important but the Equip Power, which do not influence ilvl, is much more important. This is why low ilvl items with +% damage are way better on dps than high ilvl gear with only better stats.

While leveling, just pick whatever you find. The only thing that makes a difference is your main hand weapon (for its weapon damage), so make sure to always have a weapon at a proper level (you can exchange tokens for rare equipment in most regions, always pick the main hand weapon first). Stats on gear are meaningless if you have an augment companion with good bondings and companion gear.

Equipment for Devout Cleric

Weapons

• Lionheart (1010 ilvl) : reward from ToMM, the hardest content in the game. Increases damage dealt and outgoing healing by up to 10% when stamina is full. Decreases damage received by up to 10% when stamina is empty. Nothing is better.
• Burnished (980 ilvl) : 5% more Power and Defense for 10s, if you are hit or healed for more than 15% of your HP. You can buy them with Seals of the Deep (LoMM)
• Alabaster (980 ilvl) : 5% more power and Critical Strike for 1 minute against a single monster, or 1% to 10% for 10s against multiple monsters, renewed when killing an enemy or at start of combat. Random quest reward from ME’s (requires finding all 9 relics).
• Watcher (980 ilvl) : up to 5% more Power, Armor Penetration, Critical Strike, Defense on fights that last more than 25s (1% per 5s). Reward from rare bosses in 3 runes expeditions in Undermountain (boss spawn after talking to a ghost and giving it an essence. Main hand loots from Regret, off hand from Longing)… Not really worth the time.
• Any weapon with the highest weapon damage. Upgrading anything else than the weapons above is a waste of resources.

Weapon Modifications :

• Main Hand : Sacred Flame (best for killing mimics and doing something against bosses)
• Off-Hand : Critical Severity (really 7.5% Critical Severity, that’s 10% of your base Critical Severity) and up to 2.5k Power (or 10k HP, that’s a good option too)

I’m using Alabaster because they’re good enough for dungeons and they’re great in solo content. Burnished are better for a Devout Cleric. Watcher are usually not as good as Burnished but may have a better uptime in longer fights like ToMM. Lionheart are better just with the weapon damage increase alone. Weapon Damage is very important to determine both damage and healing.

Neck and Waist

• Woven Vine (neck) and Blooming Cord (waist)

Armor Enhancement Kits : 2% Stamina Regeneration from Major Stamina Regeneration Jewel (lvl 70 Jewelcrafting, affordable from AH)

They are the only ones you should consider. Very affordable too. Plenty of Critical Strike, some Critical Avoidance, Constitution and Wisdom… They are just perfect for a healer. Too bad the set bonus is not good (but that also means you do not necessarily need the Staff of Flowers, which is very expensive). The Tiamat Set is an okayish alternative for scaled content (you lose stats, yes even in scaled content, but you gain a bit of outgoing healing).

Head

• Guise of the Wolf King (940 ilvl) : 2k Power when in a party, 2k Defense when solo, 940 Critical Avoidance, 940 Combat Advantage. 15k Guild Marks at the Mysterious Merchant (temporary structure at the Stronghold, west gate outside, look at your alliance structures or ask for one if there’s none).
• Crown of the Lost King (1000 ilvl) : 2k power when against a single enemy, 1k Armor Penetration, 1k Accuracy. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Sood’s Good Wood Hood (1000 ilvl) : +1500 Defense and Critical Avoidance when against a single enemy, 1k Deflection, 1k Combat Advantage. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Crowned Coif of Halaster’s Successor (1010 ilvl) : 5% Critical Strike for 10s when killing an enemy, 1414 Critical Strike, 606 Critical Avoidance. Found in ToMM.
• Crowned Coif of the Successor (990 ilvl) : 5% Critical Strike for 10s when killing an enemy, 1386 Critical Strike, 594 Critical Avoidance. Found in LoMM
• Protégé’s Crowned Coif (980 ilvl) : 5% more damage in Undermountain (including LoMM and ToMM), 1372 Critical Strike, 588 Critical Avoidance. Bought with Seals of the Deep (LoMM rewards) at the Yawning Portal.
• Coif of the Spy’s Guild (940 ilvl) : 5% more damage in Undermountain (including LoMM and ToMM), 1316 Critical Strike, 564 Critical Avoidance. Bought with Seals of the Mountain (Random Dungeon rewards) at the Yawning Portal.
• Leafy Disguise of the Wanted (950 ilvl) : +1500 Critical Strike -2500 Critical Avoidance, 950 Armor Penetration, 950 Critical Strike. Found in Zok Boxes and ME’s.
• Stealer of the Star’s Hood (1000 ilvl) : 1% Action Point when killing an enemy, 1k Critical Strike, 800 Critical Avoidance, 1k Accuracy. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Broken Cap of the Omnipotent (1000 ilvl) : 5% Power for 10s after killing an enemy (30s cooldown), 1k Critical Strike, 1k Combat Advantage. Found in Zok Boxes.

Armor Enhancement Kit : 880 Power from Major Power Armor Kit (lvl 70 Blacksmithing, affordable from AH)

Let’s be honest, all of the equip powers here are very situational, and you won’t benefit from them very often if they require you to kill something. The one exception, the one that is always good, is the Guise of the Wolf King, because it gives 2k power when in a party, but it doesn’t offer Critical Strike. The most useful for ToMM is the Crown of the Lost King but the Sood’s Good Wood Hood is valid too if you need defensive stats. The Protégé’s Crowned Coif, or its lesser version, the Coif of the Spy’s Guild, is best in slot in LoMM for killing mimics.The Crowned Coif of Halaster’s Sucessor, or its lesser version, the Crowned Coif of the Successor, would be the best everywhere else, for the stats alone, if you do not have the Guise of the Wolf King. The Leafy Disguise of the Wanted is an interesting one if you have too much Critical Avoidance, it will give you the most Critical Strike. The Stealer of the Star’s Hood and Broken Cap of the Omnipotent are good enough if you do not have the others.

Armor

• Ebonized Scalemail (882 ilvl) : 1% Power for 10s when you hit or heal your target for more than 10% of your maximum HP (stacks 10 times, getting a new stack does not renew the others and you get a maximum of 2 at a time), 1764 Deflection. Found in Zok Boxes and ME’s.
• Stealer of the Star’s Hides (1000 ilvl) : 1% Power for 10s when you hit or heal your target for more than 15% of your maximum HP (stacks 5 times, getting a new stack does not renew the others and you get a maximum of 2 at a time), 1k Armor Penetration, 1k Critical Strike, 800 Critical Avoidance. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Gurdunn’s Defense (950 ilvl) : +1500 Power -2500 Defense, 950 Armor Penetration, 950 Accuracy. Found in Zok Boxes and ME’s.
• Robes of the Last Profit (1000 ilvl) : every 5s in combat, gain 125 Power, up to 2875 after 1m55s. You lose this buff if the fight is longer than 2 minutes long. 1k Armor Penetration, 1k Awareness. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Shattered Plate of the Fallen (950 ilvl) : every 5s in combat, gain 125 Power, up to 2875 after 1m55s. You lose this buff if the fight is longer than 2 minutes long. 950 Deflection, 950 Awareness. Found in Zok Boxes and ME’s.

Armor Enhancement Kit : 880 Power from Major Power Armor Kit (lvl 70 Blacksmithing, affordable from AH)

As you will never have full stacks with the Ebonized Scalemail (you can only sustain healing 2.5 times per 10 seconds with Bastion of Health, meaning 5 stacks at best, often less, even while spamming Bastion of Health…), the Stealer of the Star’s Hides are better in unscaled content (LoMM, ToMM), unless you are using Healing Word (each tic can trigger stacks). The other items are options to consider if you do not have the Ebonized Scalemail or Stealer of the Star’s Hides. Ebonized Scalemail are bis in scaled content (most of the dungeons).

Arms

• Stealer of the Star’s Braces (1000 ilvl) : At-Wills do 3% more damage. 2k Critical Strike, 800 Critical Avoidance. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Protégé’s Trimmed Gloves (980 ilvl) : 250 Power per player in the party (1250 Power in a full group), 980 Critical Strike, 980 Deflection. Bought with Seals of the Deep (LoMM rewards) at the Yawning Portal.
• Braces of the Spy’s Guild (940 ilvl) : 250 Power per player in the party (1250 Power in a full group), 940 Critical Strike, 940 Deflection. Bought with Seals of the Mountain (random dungeon rewards) at the Yawning Portal.
• Primal Restoration Isikrinis (700 ilvl) : 1% Power for 10s when you hit or heal your target for more than 15% of your maximum HP (stacks 5 times, getting a new stack does not renew the others and you get a maximum of 2 at a time). Does not stack with Stealer of the Star’s Hides, but does with Ebonized Scalemail. Can be bought with Seals of the Crown (random dungeon rewards) at Protector’s Enclave (marketplace).

Armor Enhancement Kit : 880 Power from Major Power Armor Kit (lvl 70 Blacksmithing, affordable from AH)

The Primal Restoration Isikrinis already requires 2 to 3 stacks to make up with the loss of stats compared to having a higher ilvl item… It’s also hard to maintain more than 3 stacks at a time unless you are using Healing Word. I advise not picking this one, except for scaled content if you feel like it (which is still most of the dungeons). On the other hand, Protégé’s and Braces of the Spy’s Guild give a constant Power buff while in a party, while also having pretty good stats with Critical Strike and Deflection. Stealer of the Star’s Braces can also be interesting for a small damage buff (good on mimics in LoMM) and a high Critical Strike value. Not as good as Protégé’s for healing, but almost.

Feet

• Stealer of the Star’s Boots (1000 ilvl) : 250 Power per enemy in battle (up to 3750 with 15 enemies), 1k Critical Strike, 800 Critical Avoidance, 1k Combat Advantage. Found in Zok Boxes.
• Gurtunk’s Booties (950 ilvl) : 250 Power per enemy in battle (up to 3750 with 15 enemies), 950 Critical Strike, 950 Combat Advantage. Found in Zok Boxes and ME’s.
• Sparkly Slippers of Sloopna (950 ilvl) : 5% movement speed + 1k awareness at the start of combat for 30s, 950 Critical Strike, 950 Combat Advantage. Found in Zok Boxes and ME’s.

Armor Enhancement Kit : 880 Power from Major Power Armor Kit (lvl 70 Blacksmithing, affordable from AH)

More Power is always better… unless you feel like speedrunning things.

Rings

• Restoration Ring of the Spy’s Guild (940 ilvl) : 7896 Critical Strike, 3384 Defense, 3% more damage with daily powers, 1 offense and 1 defense enchantment slots. Bought with Seals of the Mountain (random dungeon rewards) at the Yawning Portal.
• Protégé’s Restoration Ring (980 ilvl) : 8232 Critical Strike, 3528 Defense, 3% more damage with daily powers, 1 offense and 1 defense enchantment slots. Bought with Seals of the Deep (LoMM rewards) at the Yawning Portal.
• Striking Ring of the Veteran (1010 ilvl) : 20200 Critical Strike, 3% more damage with melee powers (we don’t have these), 2 offense enchantment slots. Random drop from ToMM, very expensive at the Auction House.
• Striking Ring of the Master (990 ilvl) : 19800 Critical Strike, 3% more damage with melee powers (we don’t have these), 2 offense enchantment slots. Random drop from ToMM, still very expensive at the Auction House.
• Dragon Turtle Scale Ring (1010 ilvl) : 12120 Critical Strike, 8080 Defense, targets are poisoned for 5s after using a daily power, 1 offense and 1 defense enchantment slot. Random drop from ToMM, very expensive at the Auction House.
• Hydra Scale Ring (990 ilvl) : 11880 Critical Strike, 7920 Defense, targets are poisoned for 5s after using a daily power, 1 offense and 1 defense enchantment slot. Random drop from ToMM, quite affordable at the Auction House.

Armor Enhancement Kits : 2% Stamina Regeneration from Major Stamina Regeneration Jewel (lvl 70 Jewelcrafting, affordable from AH)

The Hydra Scale Rings are just better for tons of Critical Strike and Defense at an affordable price. Restoration Ring of the Spy’s Guild are the first rings you should get, then upgrade to Protégé if you are doing LoMM. Dragon Turtle Scale Rings are such a small improvement over Hydra Scale Rings, they’re not worth it. Striking Rings of the Master/Veteran are too expensive and you need to put some defense on yourself too. I don’t think they are worth it at all, even though they give tons of Critical Strike.

Shirt

• Shirt of the Champion (1010 ilvl) : 4040 Critical Strike, 10% chance to reduce encounter powers cooldown by 1s. Random loot in Fragment Expeditions.
• any other with Critical Strike

There’s just one best and many others which look alike but are behind. Protégé and Spy’s Guild, which can be bought with seals at the Yawning Portal, are good ones to start with.

Trousers

• Pants of the Sentinel (1010 ilvl) : 4040 Defense, 10% chance on critical strike to gain 25 action points.
• Star-Bleached Pants of Silk (1010 ilvl) : 2020 Defense, 2020 Critical Avoidance, 10% chance on critical strike to gain 25 action points.
• any other with Defense

Once again, there’s one best and the others. The Star-Bleached Pants of Silk are interesting alternatives if you need Critical Avoidance. Protégé and Spy’s Guild, which can be bought with seals at the Yawning Portal, are good ones to start with.

Equipment for Arbiter Cleric

Equip Powers

When considering equipment for an Arbiter Cleric, Power is important but +% damage is way more important : 3% damage = 7500 power at 150k power. Equip Powers matter much more than item level. You can stack equip powers which have the same name but not the same numbers (like butcher’s might on the Ebony Stained Hide and on the Primal Restoration Isikrinis). You can have the Sniper’s Perk twice (Ranged Powers do 3% more damage). But the other equip powers won’t stack.

Ideally, you want :

• Sniper’s Perk (Ranged Powers do 3% more damage) x2
• Encounter Perk (Encounter Powers do 3% more damage) x1
• Executionner’s Blade (5% more damage when you have Combat Advanatage) x1
• and any other equip power like At-Will Perk (At-Will Powers do 3% more damage), Daily Perk (Daily Powers do 3% more damage), Butcher’s Might (1% more power when you damage your target for more than 10%/15% of your maximum HP, stacks 10/5 times, actually less than 1% of your total power though)…

Weapons

• Lionheart (1010 ilvl) : reward from ToMM, the hardest content in the game. Increases damage dealt and outgoing healing by up to 10% when stamina is full. Decreases damage received by up to 10% when stamina is empty. Nothing is better.
• Burnished (980 ilvl) : 5% more Power and Defense for 10s, if you are hit or healed for more than 15% of your HP. You can buy them with Seals of the Deep (LoMM)
• Alabaster (980 ilvl) : 5% more power and Critical Strike for 1 minute against a single monster, or 1% to 10% for 10s against multiple monsters, renewed when killing an enemy or at start of combat. Random quest reward from ME’s (requires finding all 9 relics).
• Watcher (980 ilvl) : up to 5% more Power, Armor Penetration, Critical Strike, Defense on fights that last more than 25s (1% per 5s). Reward from rare bosses in 3 runes expeditions in Undermountain (boss spawn after talking to a ghost and giving it an essence. Main hand loots from Regret, off hand from Longing)… Not really worth the time.
• Any weapon with the highest weapon damage. Upgrading anything else than the weapons above is a waste of resources.

Weapon Modifications :

• Main Hand : Lance of Faith
• Off-Hand : Critical Severity (really 7.5% Critical Severity, that’s 10% of your base Critical Severity) and up to 2.5k Power (or 10k HP, that’s a good option too)

Lionheart are the very best weapons, but also a very long term goal. Alabaster are the best for solo, and the easiest to get. Burnished and Watcher are alternatives for longer fights, which you can consider if you are attempting ToMM (the hardest trial in the game).

Neck and Waist

• Baphomet’s Infernal Talisman and Demogorgon’s Girdle of Might (575 ilvl) : coupled with the Shard of Orcus’ Wand (artifact), up to 10% more damage (after nerf) as the difference in HP% increases between you and your target. Low item level but an average of about 4% more damage for you. Best in scaled content, still good everywhere else.
• Jhesiyra’s Tattered Mantle and Trobriand’s Conduction Cable (980 ilvl) : coupled with Arcturia’s Music Box (artifact), 15% more damage if you have combat advantage for 10 seconds after using a daily power. Great for bursting.
• Necklace of the Mad Mage and Belt of the Mad Mage (980 ilvl) : coupled with Halaster’s Blast Scepter (artifact), 5% more damage and movement speed if you stand still for 3 seconds or more. Standing still is usually not a good idea though…
• Skin of the Serpent and Wrap of the Serpent (700 ilvl) : coupled with the Charm of the Serpent (artifact), up to 5% more damage if you move for 15s, removed if you stand still for more than 5s. Call it Hit and Run.
• Vistani Pendant and Vistani Raiments (700 ilvl) : coupled with the Tarokka Deck (artifact), when hitting a single ennemy with an aoe (area of effect / multitarget spell), the target takes 5% more damage for 5 seconds. Good for solo, fantastic for boss fights. It would be better on a melee class though, because it gives strength and no intelligence.
• Apocalypse Choker and Apocalypse Bindings (ilvl 700) : coupled with the Apocalypse Dagger (artifact, only available during the Day of the Dungeon Master Event), whenever you hit an enemy with a critical strike, the target takes 1% more damage for 5s, stack 5 times. Depending on how stacks work, this can be great or not.