Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Vigour is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Haste
- Spirit
- Expertise = Crit
While Item level is very important in Fellowship as main stat has the greatest effect on your damage, healing and survivability, tempering lower Item level pieces and swapping them later can give you an advantage short term.
Haste lowers your cooldowns, GCDs and makes your casts shorter. In essence, you cast more and generate more runes.
Spirit decreases the cooldown of your ultimate and gives you a chance to refund mana and generate extra runes.
Critical Strike has the chance to double the effectiveness of our damage and healing which is already decently strong, however it also interacts with Rune Of Renewal healing and Rune generation.
Expertise increases our damage, healing and absorb effects.
Weapon Traits
The best Modifier set-up for Vigour's end game is shown below, along with a tier rating applied to each different Modifier:
Weapon Traits
In your weapon tree, you will have two offensive rows, two defensive rows, and a major capstone, with multiple options in each row for different pathing up the tree. Getting the right Item Modifiers on your weapon is harder than rerolling into specific Weapon Traits afterwards. So don't be afraid to use some materials to reroll Traits if you get a bad draw on your weapon.
Major Traits
Martial Initiative is BiS in nearly every situation. Especially in combination with Inspired Allegiance, and Forbidden Tome Of Arcanistry, you'll be able to achieve crazy uptime on it.
A single point in Visions Of Grandeur gives you the full benefit of its Spirit Generation, making it a very valuable 1-pointer, reducing the time between Avatar Of Light casts.
If you are going for Emerald 6 (explained further below), you need at least 2 points in Emerald Judgement to make it worthwhile. If you go for Topaz 6, use these points for stat modifiers on your chestpieces or invest them in defensive traits.
Heroic Traits
Inspired Allegiance should be prioritized first. It boosts everyone’s Haste and reduces your weapon cooldown, giving both personal and group efficiency. It synergizes very well with Martial Initiative.
The expertise buff from Patient Soul is negligible, but getting 5% max HP for only a single trait on your weapon tree makes it one of the best budget choices.
Kindling and Hunter's Focus are also good choices to increase single target damage.
Defensive Traits
All the defensive traits are somewhat lackluster unfortunately, with King of the Hill being the only really good option here.
Latent Resurgence may save you from death and is also a very good 1-point trait that you can try to get on your weapon tree.
Same thing for First Man Standing.
Heart of Stone can be useful in certain very high Eternal dungeons.
Blessings
The Monarch is so unbelievably good for Vigour. Having The Monarch 4/4 allows you to have Runic Proliferation ready for almost any healing mechanic any boss has to offer. IIRC, the only exception would be Lightning Rod from Warlord Brogg in Stormwatch. Combined with Grand Proliferation, you'll rarely have to worry about your team dying.
In an endgame build, The Wayfarer can reach great uptime due to Vigour having 2 core abilities, Radiant Blast and Circle of Light, that he basically uses on cooldown, which reduces the time in between activations of The Wayfarer. Both abilities' cooldowns are reduced by Haste. So, by having a lot of base Haste, you'll be able to use both abilities way more often than you'll already do, reducing the downtime of The Wayfarer, giving you a lot of extra Haste to reduce it even further. In addition to that, while being in Avatar of Light and spamming your core abilities without cooldown, you still get the full reduction on The Wayfarer, giving you even more overall uptime on the buff. I wasn't able to test this properly unfortunately, so keep checking out the guide for updates in the upcoming weeks!
The Herald is especially good in 1-boss dungeons, because you'll most likely be able to use Avatar of Light on the first pull and have enough Spirit generation to have it ready on almost every pull going forward. In 3-boss dungeons, having The Celestial might be better overall, since it will gain you approximately double the Spirit points over the entire dungeon than The Herald would, giving you an entire Avatar of Light for "free."
Bonus Stats
The value of bonus stats as item modifiers varies vastly depending on which item they roll on. While a weapon will have 14 secondary stats, rings, for example, will only have 8 secondary stats. Generally, it's recommended to have bonus stats only on your weapon, just because of their high value. This allows you to balance out your stats a little bit more easily without having to refarm entire gear pieces.
Set Bonuses
Tuzari Grace, Sin Warding, and Torment of Bael'aurum give insane value for only 2 modifier slots per set bonus. The other set bonuses, while still being valuable, are usually not worth looking for, especially since you are limited to 2 sets per dungeon type. Depending on your gem setup, you might have to drop Tuzari Grace for Seal of the Heskyr.
Imbued Essences
Gem Imbues are usually very good early on to reach specific breakpoints while gearing up and still farming gems. Once you've collected enough gems, you'll only want a couple imbued essence to unlock the next tier of a gem tree, if it provides a reasonable power boost. Unlocking other gem trees would cost too many Modifier slots currently.
Necklace Traits
Since defensive talents are now gone and baked into the necklace, we got a lot more options to choose from in terms of survivability. Similar to the Weapon tree, you'll be able to choose a trait from each row. However, you're not as limited by pathing when going up the tree. All traits are interchangeable with each other as long as they are in the same row.
The Mountain will be mandatory in really difficult dungeons. Unlike the other options, it won't give immediate on-demand defensive power but will save you a lot of time from minor, lethal mistakes, resulting in saving a lot of time while progressing up the ladder. In addition to that, you'll also be able to plan around this trait for specific pulls/boss mechanics, opening up new routes that were not doable beforehand.
The Boar, The Dragon, and The Stag give you a lot of on-demand defensive power to survive very hard-hitting mechanics or just make your life easier in general. Each of those is very good, and one might beat the other situationally.
The remaining traits are usually not worth considering because either the condition/ability to activate them doesn't make sense or the effect itself is just underwhelming for Vigour specifically.
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.
The game doesn't have gem drop cap anymore but you are limited to 4 slots on your gear: Rings (2x), Bracers and Cloaks.
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 | Stamina | Boss Combat Buffs |
| Amethyst | Critical Strike Chance And Efficiency |
| Topaz | Haste |
| Emerald | Expertise | CDR |
| Sapphire | Stats during Ultimate Ability |
| Diamond | All Stats | Relic CDR |
Vigour Gem Priority
The Gem priority for Vigour is the following:
Seal of the Heskyr (+25% Bonus)
Your main goal is to max out Sapphire for the greater duration and main stat increase after pressing Avatar Of Light and the reduced cost to cast it in the first place.
You take either 6 Topaz because Haste is the only limiting factor for our output and scales very well with Vigour's kit, or you take 6 Emerald combined with 2 Emerald Judgement. This will give you about 60% uptime on the First Strike buff, which is really powerful in terms of increasing your DPS output.
Ruby 6 amplifies your survivability and gives you the biggest output gain against bosses.
With specific Builds, Ruby 9 combined with Ruby Storm can be interesting aswell, but are usually not worth going for.
You can use Method's Gem Calculator to play around with different configurations and create your own.