Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Rime is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Haste = Crit = Expertise
- 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. Due to the strength of the Amethyst gem powers and the Grievous Critical Strike mechanic this stat is quite strong.
Expertise is a simple increase to our damage and healing. It's worth noting this scales into Weapon Traits / Weapon Abilities as well.
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.
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
At the moment there is only 2 Master Traits you truly want to have, Amethyst Splinters being the most important. Heroic Brand is also usable but I would only really use this for the Stoneskin Curse.
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: In my opinion this trait is overrated now however it's hard to beat the fact this is a group-wide buff. Thus, this will always be S-tier.
- Hidden Power: Averages low uptime but similar effective main-stat over a run as Vengeful Soul. I personally prefer Vengeful Soul.
- Patient Soul: Extremely strong trait in specific situations that can be the difference in you being one-shot or not as you push higher & higher levels of Eternal.
In a perfect world I would like a Weapon Tree that has Kindling, Vengeful Soul or Hidden Power, as well as the ability to swap either of those to Inspired Allegiance / Patient Soul.
Defensive Traits
These are straight-forward. King Of The Hill and Heart Of Stone will be your most consistent value EHP boosts in all content.
However, I think it's important you also have Treasure Hunter's Delight available to you to swap off either of those for. This Defensive Trait is very crucial on specifically Cithrel and can make surviving her bleeds into Path of Oblivion much easier.
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 / Cooldown Reduction |
| Sapphire | Stats during Ultimate Ability |
| Diamond | All Secondary Stats |
Rime Gem Priority
The early game Gem priority for Rime is the following:
Amethyst > Topaz > Emerald > Ruby > Diamond > Sapphire
Early Game Gem Configurations
Before you reach Eternal and more importantly, gem cap (92 gems), try to swap all your non-purples to purple and acquire a Flawless Amethyst ASAP. It'll make your life a lot easier, and you can split the gem back out to Splendids for when you start going for 0-set configurations.
2-Set Early Game Configuration
1-Set Early Game Configuration
Late Game 0-Set Gem Configurations
There's been a ton of testing done by many Rimes as well as myself, but its been hard to conclude what's truly the "best". Therefore I will suggest a few configurations below and you can choose which one currently fits your current situation socket wise.
8 Empowered Sockets Configurations
The build above opts for Might Of The Minotaur instead of taking the 6th node at Topaz (Adrenaline Rush - II).
The build above favours Adrenaline Rush - II over Might Of The Minotaur.
This last build forgoes Emerald in favour of reaching the 9th Topaz node.
You can use Method's Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.