Housing Blueprints
Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Meiko is as follows:
- Agility
- Expertise = Crit
- Spirit
- Haste
For the most part, item level is king in Fellowship as a tank, as your mainstat and armour has the greatest effect on your damage and survivability. However, in Season 3 there is much more nuance because of the new 'Tempering' ugprade system. Regardless, here's what I recommend for Meiko's stat prio.
Expertise increases your damage and healing. Most notably, the Peacefield talent double dips with expertise and crit.
Critical Strike is valuable on Meiko as the more damage you do equals the more healing you do. However, the healing is only based on your damage so you don’t triple dip. You’ll still heal more since you’ll be doing more damage, but you won’t crit the heals in combination of your damaging abilities.
Spirit increases the chance of refunding Earthfall and Stormfall charges spent. When you get a refund, you gain Spirit Armour, increasing your Armour by 50% for 12 seconds and also gain a Stone Shield.
Haste: With Meiko your GCD isn’t hasted, so the only thing Haste does for us is reduce the CD on Stone Shield and cast time of Earthfist Barrage. It is our worst stat, but you also don't want absolutely 0.
Item Modifiers
In Early Access Season 3 our gear can now roll up to +3 additional Modifiers. You're limited to 35 Modifiers per Hero from gear and 5 from weapon traits. Below is a very powerful set-up that I recommend aiming for with Meiko.
Major, Heroic & Defensive Traits
Martial Initiative is the best Major trait available. The large amounts of synergy it has with multiple aspects of our kit and builds make this a very powerful trait to have. Emerald Judgment is also very strong, doing a large amount of damage and providing an additional form of AoE CC that procs very often.
Being able to pick up Visions Of Grandeur without sacrificing Martial Initiative in Season 3 makes it an extremely appealing Trait to even just get 1 rank of, the same can be said now for Brave Machinations.
Inspired Allegiance is easily the best Heroic Trait available. The additional Cooldown Reduction, alongside the stat procs for yourself and your team can be incredibly impactful. After that Kindling is our best single target dps option, with Seized Opportunity being a powerful defensive option.
Iron Spikes is one of the best, if not the best Defensive trait for all Tanks now. It provides a large amount of armour to protect us from the most prominent source of damage in the game: Melee attacks, and does a large amount of damage on its own.
King Of The Hill and Treasure Hunter's Delight are also very powerful, with King Of The Hill having more overall value but lacking the agency over when you'll have the DR in comparison to Treasure Hunter's Delight. You do however lose the ability to really use any utility relic whilst using Treasure Hunter's, it's incredibly greedy.
Blessings
Blessings are a Modifier that we can get on our gear that augment our abilities, providing certain effects when those abilities are cast. They divide our abilities up by type, between Core, Basic, Power, Major and Movement.
The Trickster is incredibly strong on Meiko with effectively 100% uptime on the crit buff since all of our combos are considered Power abilities.
The Celestial is another incredible blessing that generates A LOT of additional spirit.
The Subduer is also notable, making our Major abilities (Shatter Earth and Twin Souls: Bulwark), reduce the CD of our mob control abilities (Cyclone and Stone Stomp). It's also got a very strong damaging effect giving us great execute damage.
Necklace Traits
With Season 3 comes the introduction of Necklace Trait Trees. The traits attached are all purely defensive, and require your neck to be at least Epic (purple) rarity to unlock. Once you've acquired the appropriate rarity necklace, you're then met with a 2 row tree with 4 nodes to choose from.
I've gone ahead and listed the best Neck Traits for Meiko below!
The Oak is the single biggest flat DR amount available to us as tanks for physical damage reduction. It's extremely powerful, a must have.
The next best trait is The Dragon. This provides a huge absorb every single time you press Stone Shield. It is a game changer for dealing with dangerous tank busters and even just has a crazy amount of value overall.
The Mountain, The River, and The Stag are all solid options, but aren't anywhere near as good as the S tier traits listed.
Getting a strong Necklace is one of the biggest defensive gains there are for us as tanks and are a complete game changer once acquired. Make sure you're rerolling your traits if necessary and upgrading low rarity necks with materials if you're lacking a Necklace early on!
Gems & Gem Builds
In Early Access Season 3 you can now only equip four gems total, with one slot on your Cloak and Wrist and two slots available for your Rings. The 35% gem power increases on sockets no longer exist but you can still get large amounts of gem power through Modifiers and even a new set bonus. You can also 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 | Stats during Ultimate Ability |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats |
Meiko Gem Priority
The early game Gem priority for Meiko is the following:
Emerald > Sapphire > Amethyst > Ruby > Diamond > Topaz.
With a lot of Gem Power being tied to gear modifiers now, it'll be a little harder to target gem power for specific tracks early on, but you'll want to prioritize aiming for this set-up:
- 10 Emerald, 6 Sapphire, 6 Amethyst
This end-game gem set-up is shown below (mouse over the icons for information about each ability):
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Fortunately, due to the new modifier systems and the introduction of the Seal Of The Heskyr set bonus, Gem power is actually slightly higher than previously in BiS set-ups, allowing us to easily opt for this set-up with only 200 additional gem power needed as modifiers to complete our gem set-up.
You can use Method's Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.