BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Rime are shown below.
Best Rime 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.
Chalice Of Al’zerac’s Essence - returns 30% of your maximum mana. Vigour only really has mana problems early on in the game while you’re primarily using mana costing spells, so this trinket loses value the more you gear and get access to your talents.
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.
Best Rime Weapons
Rime actually has a couple of options when it comes to weapons. There is a best weapon that stands above the rest, but the others are still definitely usable and later on can provide some very powerful weapon trees.
The Best in Slot weapon is Asha's Chronoshift Spire, and a good alternative is Void-Touched Conduit.
Asha's Chronoshift Spire - This weapon is a channeled 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 you to do so much more to the point it’s even worth using this inside a Winter's Embrace window itself.
Void-Touched Conduit - This is what I’d say is the next best thing. This weapon applies a debuff to your target for 15 seconds which stores 20% of all the damage you deal and once you have done a certain amount of damage or the effect expires, it explodes to deal additional damage to the target. It’s a very good priority damage option that always explodes prior to expiration.
Stats
The Stat priority for Rime is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Haste
- Expertise = Crit
- Spirit
Item level is king for Rime, as main stat has the greatest effect on your damage, healing and survivability.
Haste lowers your cooldowns (most importantly Cold Snap), GCDs, and makes your casts shorter. You’ll be able to generate more Winter’s Orbs, casting more of your spenders for big damage.
Spirit decreases the cooldown of your ultimate and gives you the chance to get refunds on Winters Orbs. Being able to cast your spenders more often can enable you to deal much more damage, particularly inside Winter's Embrace windows. However, you do get a large amount from Winter's Blessing so you hit diminishing returns inside that cooldown. Even with that I think Spirit is a solid stat and more of it will increase the consistency of your damage outside of Winter's Blessing.
Critical Strike has the chance to double the damage of your abilities. It doesn’t double dip and increase the healing from Winter's Blessing. Many of our talents interact with Crit to some capacity so it’s nice to have more of it for the synergies associated.
Expertise is a simple increase to our damage and healing. It’s a solid stat but it’s less valuable than the others.
Gems
The gemming system in Fellowship is fairly unique. You can obtain powerful gems to attach to sockets in your gear, which can be fused together for upgrades at the cost of some currency.
I wouldn’t stress about min maxing this much early on as you won’t have much choice in regards to what gems you’re actually acquiring, and it’s much better to simply not reroll tier 1 gems and save your currency for higher tiers. Gems aren’t too important until around Paragon or higher.
An important thing to factor is your gears gem power. You obtain pieces of gear with gem power and want to prioritize socketing ones with more power attached. For example, Legendaries provide 100% gem power, whereas normal gear only provides 35%.
A simplification of gems:
- Topaz provides Haste
- Ruby provides main stat
- Diamonds provide all secondary stats
- Sapphires provide stats inside your Ultimate
- Emeralds provide Expertise
- Amethysts provide Crit
When working with Tier 1 gems, I would prioritize the following:
Topaz > Amethyst > Ruby > Diamond > Emeralds > Sapphire