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Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Rime is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Crit = Expertise
- Haste
- 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.
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 worth noting this scales into Weapon Traits / Weapon Abilities as well.
Spirit gives you the chance to get refunds on Winters Orbs as well as giving 2 Spirit Points per spirit refund. 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. This stat is not too strong for Rime as of now simply because our Spirit Ultimate, Wrath of Winter, is not strong enough to warrant losing other stats over it.
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
With the change to Spirit enabling a much larger amount of ults, Sapphire Aurastone starts to really shine dealing immense damage when inside your ultimate. When combined with Sapphire Gem investment, the Drakheim's Absolution set, and the Eldrin Amulet Of Undulating Spirits, Sapphire Aurastone becomes the highest damaging master trait in the entire game.
Visions Of Grandeur is the other high performing master trait at the moment. With the sheer amount of ultimates that Rime is able to use with the Eldrin Amulet Of Undulating Spirits, being able to double use your weapon ability (notably Void-Touched Conduit) becomes immensely powerful.
Heroic Traits
These traits are a little less straight forward than the Master Traits so I will go into details about some of the top rated Heroic Traits:
- Kindling: Averages anywhere from 2%-6% of your overall damage. Extremely high amount for a Heroic Trait and also works as prio on trash as it procs fairly often on your target.
- Vengeful Soul: Averages anywhere from 20% to 40% uptime in a given run depending on your haste. Good value trait as well as consistent.
- Inspired Allegiance: Great group-wide haste buff that also reduces the cooldown of your weapon.
- Hidden Power: Averages low uptime but similar effective main-stat over a run as Vengeful Soul.
- Patient Soul: Good Expertise increase and Max health increase with surprisingly high uptime.
In a perfect world I would like a Weapon Tree that has Kindling, Vengeful Soul or Inspired Allegiance, as well as the ability to swap either of those to Hidden Power / Patient Soul.
Defensive Traits
The two newest additions to the game, Ancestral Intervention and Against All Odds are significantly out performing every other defensive trait there is. Ancestral Intervention is able to save a large amount of pulls and is vital to pushing the highest end content. Against All Odds has a very low cooldown of 15s which is able to proc constantly and allow you to survive a large amount of burst that you wouldn't normally live.
If a weapon does not have either of these traits, I highly recommend rerolling your defensives until you have at least one of them.
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. You are also able to use three transmutive materials to create a copy of any gemstone, enabling you to accelerate your acquisition of gems.
It’s worth noting that some socketed gear can additionally drop with a 35% gem power increase (100% for a Legendary). A new currency was added in Pre Season 2 called a Divine Aether, enabling you to put a 35% socket onto any gear that can have a socket (Non-set pieces) making 35% socket bonuses much more accessible.
Make sure to socket your higher level gems into either the 100% bonus from your legendary or any 35% socket to get the most out of your 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 / Cooldown Reduction |
| Sapphire | Stats during Ultimate Ability and more Ultimates |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats |
Rime Gem Priority
The early game Gem priority for Rime is the following:
Sapphire > Amethyst > Emerald = Topaz > Ruby > Diamond
Early Game Gem Configurations
As you are progressing through the Leagues and Eternal, the best Gem configurations you can do is putting as many Large Gems (240 gem power) into your sockets as possible and doing what people call a "rainbow setup". This is particularly strong when you don't have too many gems or sockets.
Rainbow Setup Example
Early Game Sapphire Configuration
Once you acquire more sockets and more currency to reroll your gems, the best color to invest into is Sapphire. Achieving Ancestral Surge - II is extremely powerful, enabling you to bank up spirit power and use Ultimate much more freely. The best set to run with this setup is Drakheim's Absolution, making your ultimate even stronger. This is currently seen as the strongest base configuration to any gear setup.
While we are investing into Sapphire, investing heavily into the Spirit stat is not recommended.
2-Set Configuration
Once you get more 35% sockets, this becomes the next progression of the build. It enables you to use two sets (particularly Drakheim's Absolution and another set of your choice) and still get a large amount of power from your gems.
Feel free to swap the Purple 6 investment for Yellow 6 or Green 6 depending on your personal preference.
End Game Gem Configurations
The following Gem Configurations are mostly theory crafting but will be constantly updated with more testing. While you are farming to achieve the gear and gems required for these configurations, make sure to be filling out your sockets with Large Gems of different colors where you can.
There are a lot of small alterations to gem builds that you can do. Currently there is no single gem build that is performing the absolute best in keys. Play around with gems and play the variant that you feel the strongest and enjoy the most.
10 Blue Configuration
This is the current best gem setup for Rime.
Thanks to the buffs to Eldrin Amulet Of Undulating Spirits, this build has become the most popular and powerful in the entire game. With the 10 Blue investment, your ultimate lasts almost 40 seconds, generates a very large amount of spirit points, and decreasing the cost and increasing the cap of the ultimate. It is possible to very high uptime of the Spirit of Heroism buff using this build. Thanks to the Eldrin Amulet Of Undulating Spirits, we're also able to jumpstart our ultimate usages and immediately start a dungeon with 100 spirit power.
Overcapping Sapphire Gem investment gives us more overall mainstat and power than investing in other colors.
Non-Neck Configuration
If you find yourself without a neck legendary or don't particularly enjoy going all in on Sapphire, this is the recommend configuration. Even without the Eldrin Amulet Of Undulating Spirits, getting Blue 6 is still the best.
In this setup, the Green 3 investment can be swapped out with the Yellow 3 or Red 3 investments. Green 3 is recommended due to it's strong defensive.
You can use Method's Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.