BiS Gear
The Best in Slot (BiS) Legendary, Weapon and Relics for Ardeos are shown below.
Best Ardeos 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 Ardeos Weapons
Ardeos actually has a couple options when it comes to weapons depending on what you prefer. Each one likely has dungeons it’ll perform better in, but in general here is what I think are the best weapons for Ardeos:
Asha's Chronoshift Spire - This weapon is a channelled AoE that pulses damage around you. While you channel, you get 400% increased CDR and take 50% reduced damage. It’s crazy good and enables you to use your big burn more often.
Frozen Staff Of An'zhyr - This weapon is a targeted ground circle that drops some icicles on enemies inside. It applies a debuff to enemies inside it for the full duration, making them take more damage from consecutive uses. The more important aspect of this weapon is that it can proc Fire Frogs, playing into our actual kit more.
Stats
The Stat priority for Ardeos is as follows:
- Item level / Intellect
- Haste
- Expertise
- Crit
- Spirit
Item level is king in Fellowship as main stat has the greatest effect on your damage, healing and survivability.
Haste lowers your cooldowns, GCDs, and makes your casts shorter. More importantly it increases the tick rate of your DoTs, increasing the rate you generate Cinders.
Expertise is a simple stat that increases our damage and healing.
Critical Strike has the chance to double the damage of your abilities and DoT ticks. This is great as it also increases the spawn rate of your Fire Frogs for more Dots which is more Detonate damage.
Spirit decreases the cooldown of your ultimate and gives you a chance to refund any Cinders spent on Detonate. This stat scales horribly for us.
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
- Rubies provide 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 > Emeralds > Diamond > Sapphire