Playstyle Overview
Aeona revolves around utilizing her unique mechanic: Beacon of Time, to smooth out her allies' damage intake. With this passive effect, all damage you and your allies take is split into two portions:
- The initial hit (50%)
- A delayed portion (50%) that deals damage to you every 3 seconds
At a baseline, Beacon of Time converts 50% of damage taken into that delayed effect, essentially reducing the initial damage taken of anything by 50%. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve reduced the amount of overall damage you’ll take, you’ve just delayed it.
You then have 2 different abilities, one single target and one group wide, which can clear 50% of the delayed DoT amount. For the most part you’ll likely be cleansing your tank with Amend Fate, and your group with Restore Continuity. There is more nuance to it but that’s a simple way to look at it.
Alongside your Beacon of Time, you have 2 separate resources. One is a traditional Mana pool that regenerates in different ways and you spend it with the majority of your abilities. The other is Chrona. This is Aeona’s builder spender resource that enables you to cleanse Stagger or deal massive damage.
To help achieve our goals there are a couple simple rules we should look to be following:
ABC: Always be casting. When in doubt, Time Shard. You want to be generating as much Chrona as possible and to do so we need to always be doing something to aid that. It’s important to learn what generates Chrona and what doesn’t to ensure you’re not falling behind and unable to cleanse any built up Stagger.
Keep important abilities on cooldown: Temporal Barrage and Entropy's Claim are rotational spells with short cooldowns, make sure you’re using these frequently as well as our major CDs like Unfolding Doom and Fleeting Hour.
Avoid Wasting Chrona: it is our only way to cleanse Stagger. It’s important that you’re not overcapping this, unless you’re holding it for an expected damage event.
Rotation
Aeona’s damaging abilities convert a portion of your damage dealt to healing. With this, a lot of your gameplay is going to revolve around doing damage to effectively heal through certain damage events and your Stagger mechanic.
Healing in general doesn’t have a particularly strict rotation and is much more of a priority list, but everything you do revolves around Beacon of Time and Chrona.
Time Shard, Echoes Of Ruin, Entropy's Claim, and Temporal Barrage are your primary damaging abilities. You use these fairly liberally and the healing conversion will cover most AoE healing required. Using these abilities generates Chrona as well, which allows you to either cleanse Stagger through Amend Fate for a single target, or Restore Continuity for multiple. You also gain access to Oblivion which is a huge amount of damage for a small Chrona cost. If you don’t need to cleanse Stagger you’ll use this to simply deal damage and heal through any Stagger accumulated.
Deciding how to use your Chrona is the key to effectively playing Aeona, and your cooldown Shifting Sands effectively increases your damage, which increases your healing in that window.
Early on you don’t have many tools or cooldowns to assist in large group healing, so a lot of your AoE healing comes down to your damaging effects converting over. Because of this, making sure you have a fair amount of Echoes Of Ruin debuffs active on enemies as much as possible is very important. Also using Entropy's Claim often will do a large amount of both damage and as a result, healing.
Your primary way of single target healing early on revolves around using Temporal Barrage on the ally you wish to heal. Flash Revision is another option but because of the mana cost you should avoid this unless you have nothing left and desperately need to spam. You will likely run out of mana fairly quickly though.
Your gameplay loop doesn’t really change much as you progress and gear, however you can rely more on your damage to cover the majority of healing required at the top end.
Utility
Revert Magic - This is Aeona's Dispel ability. This should be used on any dispellable debuffs when possible.
Fleeting Hour - A simple 20 second cooldown that grants you 50% Cooldown Acceleration for 20 seconds. Super useful for having more access to your CD's, allowing you more throughput and more utility overall.
Intercession - Instantly silence up to 8 enemies in the target area for 7 seconds. This is a really powerful AoE CC tool. Baseline it's a 5 minute cooldown, but you can reduce this a lot in combination with Fleeting Hour. It is a little inconsistent and unreliable with what enemies it silences if there are a lot of enemies, but it's still solid.
Ultimate Ability
Epoch Break - This is Aeona's Ultimate ability. It's effectively a group wide immunity for 6 seconds, where all damage taken is accumulated into your Stagger amount. During this effect, all of your abilities have no Mana or Chrona cost. You are also granted 30% Haste and 600% Mana recovery for 20 seconds. How you use this is entirely related to what damage your group is taking at the time, but try not to lose uses of this over the course of a dungeon, since the ability to spam Oblivion constantly in it's duration is a significant amount of damage. Just make sure you clear any accumulated Stagger in the end.
Tips
One of the most basic, but important things you can do in Fellowship is mark specific targets or locations. In the input settings you will notice you have the ability to keybind “Mark Unit” and “Mark location”. These can be exceptionally useful for designating targets to kill or important stack points on bosses.
Interrupts
In Fellowship, interrupts are incredibly important, and as a result being able to see other party members interrupt cooldowns as well as let them see yours is key to success in a lot of dungeons. In input settings you can keybind “Select Interrupt Target”, which will attach a little Hero Icon on the nameplate of whatever target you choose. In combination with this you can then use the "Trigger Interrupt Target” key-bind to always interrupt that enemy when pressed. This allows you to be hitting different targets and able to swiftly interrupt without having to find the nameplate of your Interrupt target again. When used, it’ll show your interrupt is on cooldown to everyone in the dungeon and display a timer for when it’ll be ready again. It’s extremely handy and I 100% recommend setting this up.
Buffs & Debuffs
Buffs and Debuffs in Fellowship are extremely important, but unfortunately the base UI doesn’t place the display of these in a great location. As a result, I’d recommend moving them closer to the middle of your screen using the “EDIT HUD” feature in the game menu.