BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Ardeos are shown below.
Legendaries
On Ardeos you have 3 Legendaries that all are powerful in their own right, and each has the potential to be the strongest.
Currently I would suggest the Boots legendary for Engulf (Draconic Boots of the Devouring Flame) is our strongest as it gives us a lot of funnel and single target damage with a Rolling Flames build.
In maxed gear I can see the Fire Frogs legendary becoming incredibly powerful where we have scaled our haste and crit high enough and the Fireball/Apocolypse legendary is very versatile and allows us to have significant burst we were missing before for priority targets on boss fights.
Weapons
Ardeos actually has a couple options when it comes to weapons depending on what you prefer. Each one likely has dungeons it’ll perform better in, but in general here is what I think are the best weapons for Ardeos:
Asha's Chronoshift Spire - This weapon is a channelled AoE that pulses damage around you. While you channel, you get 400% increased CDR and take 50% reduced damage. It’s very powerful and enables us to stack more Engulfing Flames on a target and gets our burst window back quicker.
Frozen Staff Of An'zhyr - This weapon is a targeted ground circle that drops some icicles on enemies inside. It applies a debuff to enemies inside it for the full duration, making them take more damage from consecutive uses. The more important aspect of this weapon is that it can proc Fire Frogs, playing into our actual kit more.
Gear Sets
Set bonuses have the capacity to be extremely powerful. Different dungeons drop different sets allowing you to farm your best in slot bonuses. Ideally you’ll only want 2 of your gear pieces to be set bonuses and the rest socket pieces (because of how gem power works). Below I’ve listed the most important set bonus you’ll want to acquire for Ardeos, as well as an alternative.
Dark Prophecy: This gives your abilities a chance to increase your haste by 25% for 20 seconds. It procs roughly once per minute so it has around a 25-35% uptime which is super nice.
Torment Of Bael'aurum: This is a nice and simple 4% increase to Intellect and a pseudo cheat death which can come in very useful.
Relics
Relics are entirely utility focused in Fellowship and they mostly aren’t unique to specific heroes so it allows for a lot of change. While you can use any relic, there are a couple that are considerably notable and arguably the best of the bunch in a general sense.
S-Tier Relics
Sinbinding Stone - Grants 15% damage reduction to yourself and nearby allies for 15 seconds on a 3 minute cooldown. This Relic is extremely powerful, particularly on some of the harder bosses in the game.
A-Tier Relics
Grimoire Of Resurrection - A simple combat rez. It has a small cast time with a 5 minute cooldown. Great if your party lacks the ability to rez.
Ancient Wardstone - Instantly dispel all harmful magic effects from yourself and allies on a 2 minute cooldown. This can be extremely good in some dungeons depending on how you’re pulling.
Saltwash Elixir - Instantly heals you for 40% of your max hp on a 2 minute cooldown.
Ancient Poultry Fetish - Turns your target into a chicken. Permanently. This cannot be used on Bosses but there are pulls in dungeons where utilizing this Relic makes life so much easier. It has shared uses by the party on a 3 minute cooldown, so its value lessens with multiple users in the same party, alongside the fact there are much better relics on offer.
B-Tier Relics
Orb Of Shadows - Party wide invisibility for 15 seconds on a 6 minute cooldown. There aren’t too many notable uses of this but it can be strong if you plan around skipping packs with this.
Bloodrite Drums - A 12 second, 50% movespeed increase for you and your allies. It’s not great.
Humming Portalstone - Opens an interactable portal. You can only have 1 of these active at any time and there is a short cooldown on how often you can take the portal. It has a 2 minute cooldown. With co-ordinated play it could be useful but for most it’s not a great option.