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Character progression and where to from here?

E

Elrojo

LoMS Member
Hello all,

First of all, thanks for the invite into the Cabal. I’ve been spending a few hours each day progressing through the story and have now reached BF and about to commence that story line (Lumi side). I just hit lvl 50 so now am starting to become conscious of gear level and what I might be behind in, where i should concentrate my efforts and what can be vendor/AH food and what might just be empowerment-only stuff.

I rolled the Blood/AR at the start and have levelled up the Active skills fully in AR, Ele and Blood. From the options presented I think i will focus on DPS. I don’t have a blue Ele weapon as they have been few-and-far-between from mission reward bags. I do have lvl 25 blue 2-pip AR and Blood weapons. Tali’s are a mix between various level blues and perhaps 1 green and 1 purple they 2-3 pip. I don’t have any signet or glyphs equipped and not sure when i should bite the bullet and start to glyph some tali’s. I have about 30-40 Glyuph bags stacked, but nothing really levelled. Nothing i have is from dungeons etc. All just mission rewards and cache bag opens.

So, what sort of gear is needed for dungeons and lairs to be useful? Also where should i be focussing on with respect to getting gear? Is it all a case of hopping in on dungeons, opening caches, AH buying or just plain old mission rewards?

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
Welcome!

Regarding Blood, if it's on your main hand, you need to set your your sights on an Eldritch Tome, there really isn't any other as powerful.

Pips can be imbued (at a cost or as a gift from an event) but suffixes are what they are, so it's important to go with a good suffix for your build. For builds, Havoc is the go-to. You could do Destruction, but that's not as good as it's a fix bonus damage, while Havoc is a percentage (and that's where a 3-pip will shine with 7.5% added crit, otherwise 2-pip will do).

If you're running Blood on your off-hand, whether it's Eldritch or other is less important, but again, Havoc is the thing, especially as you're ranged.

I'm not up-to-date on AR, others with better knowledge will chime in :)

Glyphs, my standard: it's absolutely not The One, but a general guideline

Accurate glyph:
  • you will need a minimum glance reduction in order to hit, if you don't hit, you don't do damage, much less critical, so accurate must pace the weight of enemies you face. By level 50 and in Transylvania you should aim for 20% glance reduction, as you'll also be doing lairs. It will need to rise to 30% (40+% for Occult Defense above wave 18)
  • accurates are not terribly expensive, I run with one on head and one on each weapon (weapon glyphs count as one, as they process as the wep is used, and you use one wep at a time)
  • the important factor here is total percentages, so where you put your glyphs will be defined by cost - you could do two accurates (one for each of two talis) and put devastating glyphs in the weapons, and later a third dev in a talisman. Fierces go on talis, always, as they're very expensive, no need to waste a fierce on a weapon that's being used part-time
Fierce glyph:
  • run with 4-5 fierces, they'll give you crit chance. So, all three majors talis and one or two minors - you can start with 5 fierces, and concentrate on leveling up 4 of them, the fifth is for adding some extra crit chance while you level them up. When you get about 10-15% crit chance, you can think about swapping your 5th weak arse fierce for a second devastating

Devastating glyph:
  • they'll define your crit power, how much extra damage you'll do if and when you land a critical hit. Just grow them up, first one glyph, and then the second, you'll end with about 125+% bonus crit damage by end game. Fierce (crit chance) is more important than how much damage you do when you do crit, as there are several other bonuses in weapons and and talis that are triggered by a critical hit
I'll go through talis later, if someone doesn't do them before :)
 
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Definitely keep an eye on AH: you can find bargains there sometimes. For AR, KSR is best for main; possibly Hellfire for off-hand. Depends a bit on play-style.
 
MIRV is actually a very good AR before you get to high enough crit chance that energy will not be an issue. Though it will always be an issue. For Hammer/AR, Energy is the best suffix by far. Concerning Elementalism focus, the best one by far is the Orochi Thermal Inverter, at least when you play it offhand (which you should).
Concerning glyphs and talis: you want to slot them as soon as possible.
For glyphs, the recommanded setup is two crit power, one hit rating and everything else crit rating. Keeping in mind that whatever you put in your weapon will have to also be on the other weapon, as both count effectively only for one. It is recommanded as well not to put hit in your weapons, and to put crit power there since it's cheaper to get 3 pip ones than 3 pip crit chance ones.
For signets: go with Nemain for the wrist slot, time&space for the belt slot, quickness for the occult slot and cruel delight for the luck slot. For the other three slots (head, finger and neck), go for whichever one increases the damage of the weapon you want to main in the future.
For talis: there are clear best in slot items for most of the slots. Ashes of Fate's Chosen for the Head, Ring of the Hollow Tree for the Ring, Egon Pendant for the Neck, Iron-Sulfur Bracelet for the Wrist, Anima Infused Keepsake for the Luck unless you run AR or Hammer in which case it's Cold Silver Dice, Razor-Sharp Fossil for the Occult, and whichever belt fits your main weapon. You will want to get 3 pips over special items, at least at first, since pips for talis directly affect how they boost your stats, unlike weapon pips.
 
Hello,

thank you all for help above. I have started to glyph up a bit. I went with the advice to do Hit in head and weaps and then crit and lastly crit power in the talis. I have maxed the ele, AR and blood active lines and just trying to work through the passives now.

I was using blood/AR, but only really using blood actives and that was 'ok' but i found it a little low on heals if ES was on CD and so i was just waiting between encounters and it was a little slow.

I swapped to AR with a heal consumer and heals are fine, but DPS is slow and i'm not used to the grenade thing. In TSW classic there was a high DPS heal+leech consumer that i think was called "anima shot" or similar. The closest i could find was 'vital shot' is this supposed to be the equivalent?

I tried the AR build recommended in the "how to build weapons" guide on the forums, but i was dying to group mobs a lot. So i'm thinking i dont have enough passive heals for AR yet, or im just not rotating well. I am used to the TSW build x5/consume rotation that is clearly not relevant in SWL, so any advice on the appropriate rotations would be useful.

I'm up to IP 154 or so and thinking now i should be trying to get in on a few dungeons if that is about the basement level for these runs? In TSW glance was a problem after HE, is that still the same if you aren't high in hit by then?

in TSW there were a few added story line missions from the expansions that gave a nice unique talisman on completion. One was Last train to Cairo, there was also a dream sequence in KM. are they still in SWL and do they still give a nice bonus?

thanks in advance!
 
Don't put hit glyphs in your weapons; you only need the one, after all, so putting it in the head is good enough.
AR DPS is the highest DPS in the game by far, but that's assuming you play with grenades. Be also aware that Blood offhand is very, very underwhelming, especially compared to other offhands. Heal-wise, fist far outperform it; DPS-wise, elementalism far outperform it.
Iirc, the "how to build" guides are out of date/just plain bad. But I can't help you much with that since I don't play AR at all. But what I know of it is that the idea is to get incendiary grenades out as fast as you can, and not bother with heals since you burst everything into nothingness.
Concerning dungeons: just ask around and do the highest Elite level you can get into. Glance is not an issue if you're carried, after all... And if you're not carried, glance progresses based on Elite levels, not on what dungeon you're running.
Every non-dungeon, non-raid mission that was in TSW is in SWL (still missing some raids and dungeons though), but they don't reward you with anything special now. In fact, no mission gives you a special reward like that, bar the odd event mission here and there.
 
AR rotation does need some time to get used to, you have to watch your energy meter and the grenade status.
Basically for DPS you use placed shot as basic, burst fire as primary attack and to load grenades and incendiary grenade once it has loaded and is cooked. Grenades mostly load on crit hits, so its important you crit often. AR is energy hungry, so you should go for the AR belt and cold silver dice as talisman.
Self heal is nowadays provided by the cruel delight signet. If that is not (yet) strong enough, replace the placed shot basic with leech ray.
Passives should at least contain stability, slow burn and secondary explosion.
As Trich said, put crit glyphs in your weapons. Max hit glyph in your head piece first, then focus on the crits, last crit power.
 
As Triche says, devastating on weps could be a more efficient use of glyphs. Accurate, by endgame you only need one. With the caveat that two accurates are more efficient to upgrade (until they turn purple or gold) for the same amount of glance reduction* - if you solo a lot (which I do) you may consider using two accurates to get high enough hit to not matter what you encounter in zones until South Africa. Once you get up to about 20-25% glance reduction, you can exchange one of the accurates for another fierce.

* put one accurate on head, and second one on another tali. Bring the first one to green max, then the second one. The again the first one to blue max, then the second one. When the first one is at purple max, bring the second to purple max, take it out and fuse with the first one to gold. Or you can decide to stop at max blues and fuse into one purple instead. It depends on play style and on where you're at in the game
 
Ha! Baggie used to forbidden term: "endgame".

Since endgame is a very wobbly term with a lot of different opinions where endgame starts, i'd like to elaborate a bit (only talking about dps here):

When you start to play you raise in character levels - 1 up to 50.
Depending on if you do all missions in every zone before advancing to the next zone or just the ones that are necessary for story progression, you will hit level 50 at the end of Egypt or somewhere in Transylvania.

After that, you will continue with the story, level up your gear and you weapon actives & passives. The main visible progression indicator is your Item Power (IP). You can see that in your character stats, along with you health, your glance reduction, crit chance and crit power rating.

Access to almost all solo or group content is gated by that IP. You can see the available levels and the ones accessible to you in the activity finder (open with Shift+V). So having an IP of 50 allows you to enter E1 (Elite level 1) content. IP 450 equals to E5, starting from E10 (1000) it continues in steps of 100 to the currently reachable max of 1752 (E17).

There's a lot to do after you finished the main story line, Baggie already convinced me to do a summary info for the loms website. (That's what you get for telling them the info is outdated - they promote you and assign the task :p)

So to get back to the glyphs/endgame:

As Baggie explained, the standard mantra to go for is 1-5-2 (1 hit, 5 crit, 2 crit power). But you do have 9 gear slots (plus 1 gadget slot) ?!?
Remember, the gyphs in your weapons are only active one at a time - whenever you use an ability of that weapon. Thats why the glyphs in your weapons are counted as 1 and why you should have the same glyph in both weapons. All other talis glyphs are cumulative.

You want your hit glyph active always and at any time in your fight. So you put the hit glyph in a talisman. A lot of players put it in the head talisman. Sorted.

Now, if you want to do 1-5-2 with crit in your weapons, you need 1+6+2 glyphs.
If you want to use crit power in your weapons, you need 1+5+3 glyphs.

So there is only one reason for the question if you put crit power (devastating) or crit (fierce) glyphs in your weapons: the price, and even more if you plan to use more than your two main weapons (e.g. for tanking) since you need additional leveled glyphs for them too.
It doesn't matter for your damage, the number crunchers tested that out long time ago. If you do not have the patience to wait for a lucky drop of a 3-pip glyph while playing, you need to buy them at the auction house. And fierce glyphs are more expensive than devastating glyphs (because every player needs at least 5-6 of them).
If you have a lot of time to play and can do your daily missions challenges almost every day, the cost will be no problem to you.

So whatever you decide, you can do very well with this setup for all content up to aprox. E15 (getting there will take quite some time, so no hurry).

Once you are doing faction missions, Dark Agartha or Occult Defense (wave 23+) at this level, you will realize that you start to glance again in a significant amount. So once you are around E12, you should start leveling a second hit glyph to have it at hand once you reach E15.
Then you have to make up your mind if you want to take out a crit or a crit power glyph for it. Most players tend to replace one of the 5 crit glyphs since the impact on your damage output is not as significant as replacing one of two crit power glyphs.
Which seems to speak in favor of putting crit glyphs in your weapons even if it is a bit more expensive.

Again, this is from a DPS perspective. If you want to know about special considerations for tanking, Elal and Morganey will be able to help you.

Urgh sorry for the wall of text - but that is probably one if the most asked subjects ingame.
 
I will preface by saying (good or bad) I am a paying SWL player (i had the GM in TSW, but no one at FC seems to want to respond to my support email to see if i can transfer that to SWL). I dont have a huge problem buying some Anum here and there if its well-spent.

Thanks all for the responses thus far. It has helped streamline the build somewhat. I did a lot of the story missions along the way, so i did indeed hit lvl 50 around the last part of SD. I have a semi-useful build for BM and have done most of the missions there and moving on to SF now. I have an IP of around 170.

I dont have a very good AR as nothing has dropped and nothing on AH, but its passable. I have an Ele weap i am trying to level up. But I am finding if i just pop RH on mobs with blood then burst the others down the DPS is passable and all my little FATE and Guardian helpers help the DPS a bit. I will swap out blood when my ele passive tree is a little more full and i have at least a purple Ele.

At the moment with the accurate glyphs I only have a glance reduction of 6-7%. They are intricate and lvl 20 green. I hope to level them up and as i get passive hit rating boosts then i will reconcile into 1 glyph as advised. I am feeling the Fierce glyph shortage. Very painful!

I assume the mechanics of the SWL dungeons are roughly the same as the TSW versions? I ran all except Fac and Ankh ad nauseum, but probably a little rusty and want to make sure i am 'overgeared' for my level to just make sure i contribute. At what point is it useful to try and do scenarios and those missions in Agartha?

It is good that there are 'walls of text' on these subjects as it means there isnt just one cookie cutter build that everyone has to have to be useful. But its bad also as i'm totally indecisive and some times get choice paralysis!

With regards to starting to upgrade items after they turn purple, especially talis. What is usually the best way? So far all the missions give green rewards and on occasion a cache gives me useful purified distillates, but its slooooow going and expensive on anima to feed greens into purples.

Thanks again for help!
 
if you have GM or are a patron, then the daily cache key will help along with good distillates. They are not totally random, you get better distillates as you progress and start to get all golden - Dark Agartha arsenal is my favourite cache at the moment, because it drops the best finger and luck talis.

Events (the 3 year megaversary is coming up in a few weeks) will give an imbuer, for making radiants and intricates, and a fusion catalyst, for making a fully leveled purple into a golden. Money always help, ofc, so imbuers and catalyst can be bought for aurum at the shop - or you can accumulate marks of favour and exchange them into aurum.

Dungeons, lairs, scenarios (mainly glyphs and signets) and MBs (megabosses, for signets) all give good rewards, better at higher elite levels, ofc. In Tokyo, there's containers which also contribute nice distillates and good gadgets. Depending on your time-zone, you'll find one or another slayer calling for dungeons or raids. And you can always ask if there's anyone who wants to do a specific scenario or dungeon level with you.

I love blood, run it myself, and I don't mind using it as secondary in some builds because I'm lazy and run mostly solo - then there's no one to give me crap that my damage is low and I stroll around at my own pace :p Still, be warned, blood is less than optimal at being run secondary, I'd say it's an obligate primary weapon.

The same can be said about elementalism, only it's underwhelming as primary and finds its better use as secondary - and then it's the orochi thermal inverter the one to go for, even as a two-pip, as it does higher damage at low heat instead, and as secondary it's most of the time at low temps.

Any weapon and combination is good, as long as you're not pressed for results, and it's fun to play around with possibilities, or aesthetics. I run two toons with a generalist waist and generic weapon signets in head, neck and finger, just to be able to play around swapping builds. It's great fun :)
 
Basically, for Elementalism offhand, there's two abilities you need to slot: Crystallised Flame (with its passive) and Blizzard. That way you get the best offhand DPS possible (especially with the Orochi Thermal Inverter), item level being equal.
The dungeons have kept their mechanics, bar those that required AEGIS and are plain not ingame at all. And don't worry about being overgeared, since there's a good chance you'll be carried anyways. And even without that, it's better to know how to use your build/gear than to have high gear.
Try and run scenarios, the faction missions and the raid as often as you can since they give you the best distillates for your Elite level if you do them at the highest Elite level you can run. Not to mention, they give you almost every kind of distillates. Plus, you don't need peeps for them (well, you do for the raid).
To upgrade items once they reach purple, use the distillates. To get distillates, run dungeons, scenars, the raid (once per week), the faction missions, open the caches... And vendor the greens or use them to build new fusion fodder.
 
Just one addition on the ele abilities recommendation from Trich:
If you run against single targets like Dark Agartha bosses, Mjolnir with its passive is very effective when used with an thermal inverter.

On upgrading talis:
If you have the luxury of being a patron you get your daily cache keys. One of the nice things that drop from any cache are Third Age Fragements (TAF). There is a vendor in mallgartha (the two blajini) that will sell you a purple weapon or talis for 300 TAF. That can speed up leveling fusion gear for yellow/red levels a lot.

If you are not short on anima shards, you can make some use of all the green talis drops:
Get a green talis to green 20 and then use that for empowerment in your yellow or red talis. Since Empowerment of green talis is very cheap, you get more XP for less shards compared to using green 1 items for empowerment.

And don't try to level all talis etc. at once. Pick 3 or 4 and sell the rest either for 100 shards each to a vendor or try to sell them for MoFs - depends on what you need more :)
 
Thanks guys,

I got my Orochi thermal to purple so I gave it a go. Seems ok for burst damage. I’m still feeling out rotations so its a little clunky. Regularly self destructing grenades on myself. Any suggestions or mods to help with that?

I assume I don’t get 1:1 experience from an already empowered item when i use that to upgrade. I.e. if i spent 3000XP and its maybe level 3, I don’t get all 3000XP when i use that into a higher level item. Is there any estimation on the % loss scale?

I have slightly over 300 TAF so i guess i will use those items as fodder in upgrades. Currently I’m not short on either MoF or shards, but as these games go, I assume at the pointier end of the gear levels there will be a crunch on shards as upgrade costs exceed the ‘usual’ daily shard accumulation.
 
Unsafecrayon said:
Try using the AR passive Explosive Expert :)
Click to expand...
I logged on at work thinking this was going to be some sort of auto launcher function! Turns out i already have this slotted. I also have "slow burn" so maybe i don't need both. I know the grenade is cooking, i just forget about launching haha
 
Having Slow Burn seems reasonable if you can fully cook it for the extra damage. But since I use a Hellfire AR, I'm not the authority :p But, yes, it might be better to have one passive or the other. Pay attention or don't. That is why I have the Hellfire tbh, totally phoning it it with AR :)
 
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