Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Aeona is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Crit
- Haste
- Expertise
- Spirit
Item level is king in Fellowship as main stat has the greatest effect on your damage, healing and survivability.
Critical Strike has the chance to double the effectiveness of our damage and healing. It scales well through Oblivion's Embrace. On top of that, your absorbs have a chance equal to your Critical Strike chance to ignore 50% of any hit. The real reason it’s Aeona’s best stat, though, is that when a Chrona builder crits, it generates 50% more Chrona.
Haste lowers your GCDs and makes your casts shorter. It also reduces the cooldown of your Temporal Barrage. There’s also a commonly played breakpoint: once you’re at 32.28%+ Haste, Hastening Doom or your Epoch Break allow your Entropy's Claim to get an extra partial damage tick, and because each tick still grants 4 Chrona, that can mean a “free” extra 4 Chrona per cast when it happens.
Expertise increases our damage, healing and absorption effects, making it fairly decent for Aeona.
Spirit decreases the cooldown of your ultimate, and generates a small amount of Chrona and mana when it procs.
Item Modifiers
Season 3 gear is built around item rarity, mods, and Tempering. Higher rarity items have more stats and modifiers, and can also be tempered more times. Tempering adds extra stats to an item. New Systems like Soul Dust, rerolls, and rarity upgrades let you improve good pieces over time.
Item rarity decides how many stats and modifiers an item can roll. Higher rarity items are stronger because they can have more different stats, more mods, and more Tempering upgrades.
- Uncommon (Green) items have 1 stat.
- Rare (Blue) items have 1 stat and 1 mod.
- Epic (Purple) items have 1 stat and 2 mods.
- Heroic (Yellow) items have 2 stats and 2 mods.
- Regal (Red) items have 2 stats and 3 mods.
Your Necklace is also a big early upgrade target in Season 3. Once it is of Epic quality, it unlocks Attunements, giving you access to extra defensive choices that used to sit in the talent tree. Because of that, it’s usually worth investing into your neck early, even if it is only a Contender piece.
I've listed out my suggested BIS set-up for item modifiers below:
Best-in-slot gearing is a lot less straightforward in Season 3 than it was before, and there is not yet a clear consensus on the perfect trait setup. However, we do know enough to make a solid rough priority. The key is understanding Season 3’s new ability categories and where Aeonas’s healing actually comes from.
For Aeona, the ability categories are currently split like this:
- Basic – Time Shard
- Core – Echoes Of Ruin, Entropy's Claim, Temporal Barrage, Flash Revision
- Major – Fleeting Hour, Unfolding Doom
- Power – Oblivion, Restore Continuity, Amend Fate
- Control – Intercession
- Defensive – Time Skip
- Utility – Revert Magic
Due to the random nature of Traits, it can be a game of cat and mouse trying to get the ideal bonuses.
With that in mind, you can start to see how gaining access to a “BiS” set-up might prove tricky. Don’t be afraid to use some materials to reroll Traits if you need to.
Below I’ll separate and list the ideal traits for each type:
Master Traits
- Martial Initiative is great for the on demand damage reduction and mainstat it provides
- Emerald Judgement is a huge bonus in combination with First Strike (Emerald Gem Power), as it gives you 15% Expertise every time it procs.
- Heroic Brand when paired with The Sand Of Seasons is also a great option, as it allows it to almost always top the party instantly.
Heroic Traits
- Inspired Allegiance grants some Haste to yourself and allies but more importantly it reduces the cooldown of your weapon ability with each proc.
- Hunter's Focus provides about 5% extra Haste when fully stacked. Its especially great to increase your healing on bosses.
Defensive Traits
- King Of The Hill is a very consistent, high value defensive trait in most cases.
- Heart Of Stone is a decent secendary option.
Necklace Traits
With defensive talents being moved out of the talent tree and onto the necklace, the way you handle your survivability is now much more flexible. The necklace works a bit like the weapon tree, where you pick one trait from each row, but you are not really locked into strict pathing. As long as two traits are in the same row, you can swap between them freely depending on what the dungeon needs.
For Aeona, I would usually aim to play The Boar and The Stag. Both give you consistent defensive value that you can plan around.
The Boar gives you a strong on-demand defensive tool, which is always useful when you know a mechanic is going to hit hard or you simply need extra safety during dangerous pulls.
The Stag is especially good for Aeona because it gives you 20% damage reduction during Unfolding Doom. Since you usually want to time Unfolding Doom around big damage events anyway, this lines up very naturally with how Aeona already plays.
The Mountain is still a very strong option for difficult progression content. It does not give you direct defensive power like Boar or Stag, but it can save you from mistakes that would otherwise kill you. If you are pushing very high dungeons or learning dangerous routes, this kind of safety net can be extremely valuable.
The Wolf and The Dragon can also be good, but they come with the downside of tying your defensive value to Time Skip. That means you have to use Time Skip as a defensive cooldown instead of saving it for movement, which can feel awkward depending on the fight.
The remaining options are harder to justify right now. Either their activation conditions are awkward, or the effect just does not compete well enough with the stronger defensive traits.
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Gems & Gem Builds
The Gem system in Fellowship is fairly unique. You can obtain powerful gems to attach to sockets in your gear, which gives you Gem Power that enables different Gem Bonuses. There are multiple Gem sizes that provide you with more Gem Power. You can combine 3 of the same gem type and size using Gem Fusion (Master Craftsman Braggi NPC) to create a gem of the next size up.
Gem Types & Bonuses
The Gem types each follow a pattern of the type of bonus they provide, a simplification of the Gems is shown in the table below.
| Gem Type | Gem Bonus |
| Ruby | Main Stat / Boss Combat Buffs |
| Amethyst | Critical Strike |
| Topaz | Haste |
| Emerald | Expertise |
| Sapphire | Spirit generation / Stats during Ultimate Ability |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats |
Aeona Gem Priority
The following gem-set up is what I'd suggest for the late-game:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Explanation:
- 10 Red is the best first pick because it increaes your bosshealing by 15% and gives you 6% Intellect from Might Of The Minotaur - II. Intellect is your best stat, making this an easy choice.
- 6 Purple is great, because Aeona values Crit so highly. Sealed Fate - Ii gives 15% Crit on targets above 50% hp, and it doesn’t count toward the diminishing returns described in the Stat section, so you get full value out of it.
- 6 Yellow is good because Haste is Aeonas second best stat.
- 2 Grey is mainly taken for its synergy with your BiS Master Trait, Diamond Strike.
You can use Method’s Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.