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Stat Priority
The Stat priority for Tariq is as follows:
- Item level / Strength
- Crit
- Haste = Expertise
- Spirit
Item level is king in Fellowship as main stat has the greatest impact on your damage.
Critical Strike has the chance to double the damage of your abilities. It synergizes well with our talent Spit It Out, increasing the power of our Crits further.
Haste increases the overall pace of your rotation by reducing the GCD, reducing Heavy Strike's swing timer, and reducing the cooldown of rotational abilities such as Leap Smash and Culling Strike.
Expertise is a simple stat that directly increases damage.
Spirit increases the chance that using your Fury spenders (Skull Crusher, Hammer Storm, and Culling Strike) results in a "spirit proc," which refunds the Fury spent and generates 1 spirit charge towards your spirit ability Raging Tempest.
When gearing, keep in mind that there is a very heavy secondary stat DR above 1647 rating, so you should try to keep your crit, haste, and expertise rating all below 1647 while minimizing spirit.
Weapon Traits
It is incredibly unlikely to randomly loot a weapon with all of your BiS traits on it so this will naturally take some playing around with to get the best results. You are able to reroll the Traits on a weapon so if you happen to come across a weapon with your best Master Trait then it might be worth rerolling the Heroic traits instead of holding on hoping for a better weapon to drop. This could also be worth doing with ideal Heroic traits, however the cost of rerolling the Master Traits is significantly higher both in gold and the Legend's Godstone.
High level Tier List to support this discussion below:
Master Traits
The best Master Traits are Visions Of Grandeur and Amethyst Splinters. Visions Of Grandeur requires a little extra thought in sequencing around Raging Tempest resetting the cooldown of your weapon, while Amethyst Splinters just gives you extra passive damage that you don't have to think about.
Heroic Traits
The Heroic Traits are pretty close to each other in throughput contribution, so rerolling for the best ones is going to be the last part of optimizing your gear and you don't have to worry about these until everything else is sorted. That being said, Kindling is the best, and Vengeful Soul and Hidden Power are strong for providing multiplicative primary stat increases with good uptime. Seized Opportunity and Navigator's Intuition provide critical strike rating that will be heavily affected by the secondary stat DR once you are in optimized gear.
Defensive Traits
Against All Odds and Ancestral Intervention are the two new Defensive Traits this season that are honestly S+ tier in how far ahead they are above the alternatives. There's just no competing with a true cheat death with 5 seconds of damage immunity and one-shot protection on a 15-second cooldown. These two traits just let you bypass damage mechanics and recover from mishaps in a way that can't be gained from any of the other defensive traits. Thus they are high priority for weapon trait rerolls.
Gems & Gem Builds
The gem system in Fellowship is pretty unique. You socket gems into your gear to gain gem power, which then unlocks various gem bonuses. Smaller gems can be combined into larger gems using Gem Fusion at Master Craftsman Braggi, where you can fuse 3 of the same gem color and size in order to create a gem of the next size up that provides additional gem power. You can also now use Gem Budding to create more small gems directly, instead of relying entirely on looting them as in Season 1.
Some socketed items can also drop with increased gem power on the socket itself, 35% on regular items and 100% on Legendaries. Because of that, you’ll want to prioritize putting your higher-quality and larger gems into those boosted sockets. For example, a Legendary with a 100% increased gem power socket is the perfect spot for one of your biggest gems.
There is also a hard cap on how many gems you can hold. Once you have acquired 92 total small gems, you’ll be unable to acquire any more, whether from looting or from gem budding.
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 and Boss Combat Buffs |
| Amethyst | Critical Strike |
| Topaz | Haste |
| Emerald | Expertise |
| Sapphire | Spirit |
| Diamond | Main Stat and all Secondary Stats |
Tariq Gem Priority & Ideal Setup
The gem priority for Tariq is: Amethyst 6 (Sealed Fate - II) > Sapphire 6 (Ancestral Surge - II) > Amethyst 10 (Blessing Of The Deathdealer - II) > Diamond 6 (Harmonious Soul - II) or Emerald 6 (First Strike - II) or Ruby 6 (Might Of The Minotaur - II).
The crit synergies of the amethyst tree align best with Tariq's talents Spit It Out and Left Hand Path. Sapphire 6 (Ancestral Surge - Ii) was significantly buffed and are very valuable for everyone even if Tariq doesn't care for the bonuses to his spirit stat. Once you have all your gems and sockets, you can pick between going for Diamond 6 (Harmonious Soul - II) for AOE-heavy dungeons, Emerald 6 (First Strike - II) if you want more burst damage, or Ruby 6 (Might Of The Minotaur - II) if you want to be stronger in boss fights.