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.
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.
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. Haste also increases the anima generated by Freezing Torrent and Bursting Ice.
Spirit gives you the chance to get refunds on Winters Orbs as well as giving 2 Spirit Points per spirit refund. Rising Spirits is a very strong mechanic for Heroes that have a ton of spirit procs. Rime is not one of them.
Rising Spirits: Starting with Early Access Season 3 there is a new mechanic called Rising Spirits. When you get a spirit refund you gain 5% mainstat for 20 sec. The mainstat component stacks but every subsequent stack gives 2 sec on the buff.
The second reason Spirit is not that good is that you get a large amount from Winter's Blessing so you hit diminishing returns inside that cooldown. The third reason spirit isn't that good is that for Rime as of now our Spirit Ultimate, Wrath Of Winter, is not strong enough to warrant losing other stats over it. While the value of spirit has increased this season. I don't see any reason yet as to favor this stat over the others.
Item Modifiers
Below I have listed out the suggested 'BIS' Modifier set-up and provided a Tier Rating for each Modifier, then broken down each Modifier section further. Please note that this is all based on PTC testing and will be subject to change as the Season develops.
Let's take a look at each different Modifier group in detail.
Major Traits
In the new gearing system 1 point into a Trait in usually enough value. There are some exceptions but mostly we want 1 point in many different Traits.
- Emerald Judgement - Always assume that you have at least 6 ranks into Green (Emerald) gem track when using this Major trait. Having 2-4 levels in the trait will enable huge uptime on the First Strike - 15% expertise buff
- Brave Machinations - A single point gives us more weapon damage and 15% cdr on Asha's Chronoshift Spire 180 second cooldown. Meaning the cooldown becomes 153 seconds, knocking it down by a huge 27 seconds.
- Martial Initiative - Using Asha's Chronoshift Spire provides us 18 seconds of +10% mainstat.
- Amethyst Splinters - Increases the damage of all your crits but also scales with haste, causing it to be a very efficient increase in damage.
- Diamond Strike - Not enough damage output to consider running this as a non-healer.
- Sapphire Aurastone - We are not indexing strength into our Spirit ability so the value of this is low.
- Ruby Storm - This is a trait for tanks.
- Heroic Brand - Weapon damage is not enough % of our overall damage to consider this trait.
Heroic Traits
Now that heroic traits can be found as item Modifiers on gear they have been buffed to be brough inline to be closer in strength to the major traits.
- Hunter's Focus - We get 4/4 on this. Rime doesn't really change targets while doing DPS so it is trivial to keep 5 stacks running. The amount of Haste we get is insane.
- Seized Opportunity - Rime does many tiny hits with Frost Swallows, Bursting Ice, Freezing Torrent Making it quite easy to get 20 Crits. The uptime on this is high. A recent log I look at had it at 77% uptime on the crit buff.
- Willful Momentum - Combined with the strength of Eldrin Signet Of Undulating Spirits the uptime on this is high when it matters
- Patient Soul - Good Expertise increase and Max Health increase with surprisingly high uptime.
- Inspired Allegiance - Great group-wide haste buff that also reduces the cooldown of your weapon.
- Vengeful Soul - Averages anywhere from 20% to 40% uptime in a given run depending on your haste. Good value trait as well as consistent.
- 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. The values have changed on this trait. Might be good. More experimentation is needed.
- Hidden Power - Averages low uptime but similar effective main-stat over a run as Vengeful Soul. The problem is it procs less and we have very little control over when it procs.
- Navigator's Intuition - Same problem as Hidden Power.
In a perfect world I would like a Weapon Tree that has Hunter's Focus and any other Heroic trait in the A tier.
Defensive Traits
King Of The Hill - Anything that can prevent one-shots are the best thing you can have.
Heart Of Stone - A bit more effective Health but not as good as King Of The Hill.
Latent Resurgence - Is a bit of a sleeper pick. Lets say you have 50 stacks and are on 60% hp. If you get hit by an ability that does 70% of your hp it will prevent you from dying. If the heal from the stacks is bigger than the damage you would get after reaching 0hp it will heal you even though you hit 0 hp. This becomes less useful when the one-shot overkills by too much.
Blessings
Tier S: Always good
The Monarch - Late game you will have around 30% Haste meaning you will get 6% cooldown acceleration for one item Modifier slot. Given that a lot of Rime's late game power is in Cascading Blitz having Cooldown acceleration is really valuable. Having 1 point in this is a must. Not quite sure on investing 4 points
The Subduer - This season bosses have incredible amount of Health so they will spend a longer time sub 30% HP. Late game when pushing high the extra damage will be necessary. More Frigid Winds cast is also really good to help control casts
Tier A: Most of the time good
The Philosopher - A lot of stats and a lot of uptime. Rime has 3 Major abilities. Ice Blitz, Flight Of The Navir, and Winter's Blessing. Spacing these out in the sequence of Ice Blitz, Winter's Blessing, Flight Of The Navir will give you a ton of uptime. Rime also has multiple ways to reduce the cooldown of these major abilities. Wisdom Of The North reduces the cooldown of all of them. Harrowing Ice reduces the cooldown on Flight Of The Navir. Asha's Chronoshift Spire reduces the cooldown. The Monarch reduces the cooldown.
The Trickster - Strong in conjunction with Eldrin Signet Of Undulating Spirits. When using a spender the crit is applied before the hit.
The Wayfarer - A strong way to gain haste in your rotation. The extra haste helps with cascade uptime.
Tier B: Situational
The Intrepid - This is a good early game Blessing. You will be using a lot of basic abilities to build anima before you send spenders during your Winter's Embrace window. Late game you will get more spirit procs and it will reduce in value as you won't have time to use basic abilities between Spenders.
The Mystic - Because of Winter's Blessing Rime has a high amount of average Spirit. Situational because a single point will have a higher impact in late game when you have more spirit.
The Sinister - Powerful in Torrent builds that utilize Soulfrost Torrent.
The Vehement - Great synergy with Drakesblood Tapestry. Read the Legendary section of the Gearing portion for more information.
The Celestial - Rime doesn't press enough spenders to do justice to this blessing. This season is looking like a Icy Talons season. Meaning pressing spenders even less. It is maybe possible to use in a Spirit ability build with 10 ranks in the blue track and further investment into Spirit synergies.
The Herald - Perhaps useful in a Spirit ability focused build.
The Vainglorious - Very low % of our overall is basic abilities. A great synergy with The Vehement and Drakesblood Tapestry. The calculation of the poison damage depends on your crit but also the damage of the basic ability itself. The calculation is (Cold Snap damage + The Vainglorious) x Stacks of Drakesblood Tapestry
Tier E
The Usurper - Could maybe be good in high crit builds. More experimentation would be needed.
The Heretic - Don't spend enough time casting core abilities.
Necklace Traits
Of all the defensive traits, The Mountain is indisputably the best one. It will save you from lethal mistakes and it can provide avenues for new strategies. For example on the Empyrean Sands boss, you can decide not to kill any orbs to instead tunnel dps into the boss, resulting in all the orbs exploding at the same time and having everyone proc The Mountain instead of dying.
The second trait you go for depends very much on what problem you are dealing with. Are you having trouble surviving Auga Handhafi The Blind of Drakheim? Use The Boar. Are you having trouble surviving Bael'aurum? Use defensive traits that help you pass a heal check or make Frost Ward stronger. For the rest of the traits I put them in the following categories.
Does it prevent one-shots outside my defensive Frost Ward?
- The Wolf
- The Boar
Does it prevent one-shots while Frost Ward is active?
- The Dragon
- The Dune
- The Stag
Does it help me pass a heal check?
- The Viper
- The River
Remaining
- The Gryphon
- The Oak
- The Lake
Gems & Gem Builds
The Gem system can seem pretty complicated at first so let me explain the different gem tracks.
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 gem budding to create a copy of any gemstone, enabling you to accelerate your acquisition of gems.
Early Access Season 3 Changes:
- You can only equip four gems, one on your Cloak and Wrists and one on each Ring.
- You can get +100 Gem Power from the 'Imbued Essence' item Modifiers.
- A new item set (Seal Of The Heskyr) provides +25% total Gem Power.
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
Owing to the changes to the gem power system in Early Access Season 3, it is my opinion to invest into a 6 6 6 6 Rainbow set up. It only costs 600 gem power to get to Rank 6 on a gem track. It cost an additional 900 to get the last rank which makes it more costly the further we invest. The best/most versatile setup will be to strive for 4 x rank 6 into different tracks.
The early game Gem priority for Rime is the following:
Sapphire > Emerald > Amethyst = Ruby = Topaz> Diamond
Ancestral Surge - II (Sapphire 6)
Provide the most value as you don't waste any spirit points. The biggest issue with Spirit Ults is getting 100 points while the mob pack has 20% health left. Meaning for the time the pack is still alive and the time you are travelling to the next pack you are generating 0 spirit points. A second benefit is you can bank 130 points for a boss fight. If the boss fight takes a sufficient amount of time you will be able to Ult twice.
First Strike - II (Emerald 6)
Provides the second most value when used in conjunction with the item modifier Emerald Judgement. Getting 2-4 points in Emerald Judgement will see a huge uptime on 15% extra expertise.
Sealed Fate - II (Amethyst 6)
Provides a lot of crit early on in the pack. Which is usually when you are strong. Going into a pack you will have 5 winter's orbs and your cooldowns. Making your damage windows even stronger
Remaining Gem power
I am torn on the strength between Investing into Ruby or Topaz. Ruby will probably get you more overall damage but the feel and enjoyment of the spec is improved a lot by Topaz. Personally I will go Topaz after Amethyst. I think both are valid options.
Early Game Gem Configurations
As you are progressing through the Leagues and Eternal, the best Gem configurations you can do is putting as many lower-tier gems 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
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
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. Early game you will spend a lot of your time on bosses while in your ultimate. Making the set stronger. As you get into Late Paragon and Eternal other sets will become more powerful.
While we are investing into Sapphire, investing heavily into the Spirit stat is not recommended.
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Mid Eternal Rainbow
As you progress through the leagues you will get more gems and marks of fellowship to fuse gems. You will also probably have Emerald Judgement or an other Heroic trait that you can reroll into Emerald Judgement. You can substitute Amethyst for Topaz if you are running a build that has as goal Ice Blitz combined with Cascading Blitz uptime.
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Tier 3 gems
You can substitute Amethyst for Topaz if you are running a build that has as goal Ice Blitz combined with Cascading Blitz uptime.
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
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.
End-Game Experimentation: In the end-game, there are a ton of alternative gem builds that are possible! Currently there is no single gem build that is performing the absolute best in Dungeons. Play around with gems and play the variant that you feel the strongest and enjoy the most.
4x6 Rainbow
All purpose gem set up. This will perform well with any talent build.
From here you can experiment with different build setups.
You can substitute Ruby for Topaz if you are running a build that has as goal Ice Blitz combined with Cascading Blitz uptime.
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
10x Blue Configuration
This is for builds that focus on using their Spirit ult
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Crit Based Configuration
Build focused on crit
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)