Ardeos Stats, Traits & Gems - Fellowship Guide

Stat Priority

The Stat priority for Ardeos is as follows:

Item level / Intellect
Haste
Crit
Expertise
Spirit

Item level is king in Fellowship as main stat has the greatest effect on your damage, healing and survivability.

Haste lowers 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 for more Dots which is more Detonate damage.

Expertise is a simple stat that increases our damage and healing.

Spirit decreases the cooldown of your ultimate and gives you a chance to refund any Cinders spent on Detonate. This stat scales horribly for us.

Weapon Traits

Due to the random nature of Weapon Traits, it can be a game of cat and mouse trying to get the ideal weapon tree. You have two offensive rows, two defensive rows, and a major capstone, with multiple options in each row for different pathing up the tree. 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 weapon traits for each type.

Master Traits

For our Master Trait we want to aim for Visions Of Grandeur or Amethyst Splinters. Generally Visions Of Grandeur is a good well rounded trait that works in all scenarios allowing us to get our Spirit Ability faster and resetting our weapon when we use that Spirit Ability. With max ilvl gear Amethyst Splinters is going to provide us with a slightly higher damage output but does remove some utility and defensiveness that comes with resetting our weapon.

A notable exception for choosing Visions Of Grandeur is if you are using Frozen Staff Of An'zhyr as it has a very short cooldown so it does not gain as much value as our other weapons. Here I'd suggest running Brave Machinations or Amethyst Splinters. The crit chance from Brave Machinations also effects the damage over time component which leads to more Fire Frogs spawning.

Heroic Traits

Heroic Traits are fairly simple thankfully as our choices don't change no matter which weapon we use. Inspired Allegiance is very strong for group damage and weapon cooldown reduction is very powerful. Kindling will provide us a decent boost in single target and Vengeful Soul is a nice option that works in all scenarios.

Defensive Traits

Defensive Traits for us are also fairly simple. We want King Of The Hill and either a situational defensive trait like First Man Standing which is very strong for dungeons like Empyrean Sands or another well rounded trait like Heart Of Stone for increased maximum health. Well rounded traits are a lot more forgiving as the name implies but at the highest levels more situational traits are incredibly important.

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.

It’s worth noting that some socketed gear can additionally drop with a 35% gem power increase (100% for a Legendary). This makes it so you’ll want to prioritize socketing higher quality gems into these items. For example, Legendaries come with a 100% increased gem power socket, making it ideal for your larger gems.

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	Stats during Ultimate Ability
Diamond	All Secondary Stats

Ardeos Gem Priority

The early game Gem priority for Ardeos is the following:

Topaz > Amethyst > Ruby > Emeralds > Diamond > Sapphire

Later on I'd recommend getting at least to Sealed Fate - II (node 6) in the Amethyst column, before spreading out your gem power into Topaz, Ruby and Emerald. Generally in maxed out gear Amethyst 10 is seeing a lot of success but is very passive damage where as you'll certainly feel the impact of Topaz 10 or Emerald 10 more but output seems to favour Amethyst 10.

As the cooldown from Blessing Of The Commander - II (Emerald 10) is also applied to all spells (except for your interrupt), it is a good utility and defensive option that's worth considering.

Below is what I consider our BIS setup at endgame. This setup provides optimal damage while combining extra survivability and boss damage from Ruby. We can move one tier 2 Topaz into Tier 2 Emerald for dungeons such as Empyrean Sands where First Strike gains significant value.

Ruby