Housing Blueprints
Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Ardeos is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Haste
- Crit
- Expertise
- Spirit
Haste lowers some of your cooldowns, GCDs, and makes your casts shorter. More importantly it increases the tick rate of your DoTs, increasing the rate you generate Cinders.
Critical Strike has the chance to double the damage of your abilities and DoT ticks. This is great as it also increases the spawn rate of your Fire Frogs when playing Pyrophibian Frenzy.
Expertise is a simple stat that increases our damage.
Spirit gives you a chance to refund any Cinders spent on Detonate. When this occurs you also generate 1 spirit towards using our ultimate ability and gain a stacking 5% main stat buff. This stat scales the worse for us as we do not attempt to trigger spirit as often as other characters.
Item Modifiers
With Early Access Season 3, the itemisation system has undergone some massive changes with items now able to roll up to 3 Modifiers. There is a pool of modifiers that every item can draw from and a few locked slots.
Most items can have up to 3 Modifier slots based on their rarity, where Uncommon (Green) items have no Modifier slots and Regal (Red) items have 3. We still have a Weapon Trait tree but each node only grants us 1 rank of the Trait. It's important to note, besides Bonus Stats and Set bonuses, Modifiers can be assigned anywhere on your gear.
Below is my Tier List and recommended set-up for Modifiers:
Major Traits
Here we want to make sure we get 4/4 in Visions Of Grandeur, 1/4 Brave Machinations and 1/4 Martial Initiative. This paired with Asha's Chronoshift Spire allows us to do our big Incinerate combo every time it's ready where we use Chronoshift before and after Incinerate to get maximum value from the weapon.
As extra's we want to pick up Amethyst Splinters whenever we can and 1 rank in Emerald Judgement when we have up to track 6 of the Emerald gems.
Heroic Traits
Nice and simple here, Seized Opportunity and Hunter's Focus are a good amount of extra Crit and Haste.
Defensive Traits
We'll always have 2 here from our weapon. Ideally we want King Of The Hill and Heart Of Stone. As we push higher into Eternal we may need to invest more into Defensive Traits.
Blessings
For Blessings we have a lot of options. The Wayfarer is our most powerful trait with a high amount of uptime on a sizable haste buff. The Sinister is also powerful but notable does not effect Fire Frogs spawned from Pyrophibian Frenzy.
As an extra note here we have 2 powerful Blessings that effect our Basic ability, Infernal Wave. These are The Vainglorious and The Vehement. It's yet to be seen how powerful these will be but where we now have 4 talents that empower Infernal Wave I've listed these as A-tier as there will certainly be a build which incorporates these.
Bonus Stats
Bonus Stats are the only modifier which differs depending on which item they role on. With your weapon, chest and leg slots gaining the most. We still want stats and I'd recommend getting Haste, Crit or Intellect in these slots. Expertise is acceptable and we generally want to avoid Spirit and Stamina when we can.
Set Bonuses
Set bonuses are very valuable and we'll want to pick up 4 of them. They effectively take up 2 modifier slots each where you need to get them to 2/2 to activate the bonus. Our best bonuses this season will be Dark Prophecy and Seal Of The Heskyr as our most powerful. Then Death's Grasp and Drakheim's Absolution as our final 2. If we need to get additional survivability options we may swap these out for Torment Of Bael'aurum and Sin Warding.
Gem Essence
Gem essence is powerful early and useful for getting to various breakpoints depending on what your gems ranks currently are. With max ranked gems I'd suggest taking 2 Sapphire Essence bonuses as combined with the new Seal Of The Heskyr set it lets us get to 10 Sapphire, 6 Emerald and 6 Amethyst.
Necklace Traits
With Early Access Season 3, each hero lost 3 defensive nodes in their Talent trees. Those Talents have instead been inserted into a new Trait tree on our necklaces. This is on all necklaces in the game that are Purple (Epic) or higher. If you are struggling with survivability and happen to have a lower rarity neck this is a good option for using some upgrade materials as it will automatically be added once it reaches Purple (Epic).
Below is my tier list of the current necklace traits:
The two major stands outs are The Boar and The Lake. These both provide an enormous amount of passive benefit. The Boar consistantly negating scary boss mechanics and The Lake providing 20% damage reduction from area damage which is the majority of damage effects in the game that DPS and healers have to worry about.
Close behind these are The Mountain and The Gryphon. The Mountain covers any potentially lethal mistakes that might be made and the only reason it's not S is with correct play you'd potentially never see any use out of it. Why cheat death when you can avoid dying in the first place? The Gryphon is very similar to The Lake just to a lesser extent.
The River, The Stag, The Dragon and The Dune are all buffs to Flame Ward. While valuable if we're pressing our defensive it's unlikely we will die unless something has gone very wrong. These effects are situationally useful such as The River extending our Flame Ward's duration for scary mechanics will last longer than 4 seconds.
The Viper and The Wolf. While both of these are powerful they are attached to us dealing damage, either through healing when we press Flame Ward or tier to Wildfire. While not unusable we want to be doing damage when we can rather than holding our offensive output to mitigate boss mechanics.
The Oak, while not completely unusable is primarily for tanks who are taking consistant physical damage, therefore we'll be avoiding it for other more powerful options.
Gems & Gem Builds
With Early Access Season 3, the gem system has become more streamlined. You now only have 4 gems sockets which are guaranteed on Purple (Epic) Rings, Cloak and Wrists. There are still multiple Gem sizes that provide you with more Gem Power and you can still 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 | MAximum Spirit, Lower cost Spirit Ability, Stats during Spirit Ability |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats, Main stat |
Ardeos Gem Priority
Gem priority for Ardeos is the following:
Sapphire > Amethyst > Emeralds > Ruby > Topaz > Diamond
Below is my currently recommended gem setup, the 2 essence slots can go anywhere on your gear.
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
