Min-Maxing Gear

There’s one key principle to keep in mind here – and it’s what this guide is built around. If you take one piece of information away from this guide, let it be this. Some pieces have high impact on the hero’s performance and make a huge difference. These pieces are:

The weapon is the single most important piece of equipment for a Fighter or Rogue’s damage output and is a significant part of a Spellcaster’s. If you can only afford to upgrade one piece of gear, it should be the weapon.

Spellcasters (and Dark Knights if they’re using one) get a huge chunk of Attack from their Spell slot items – far more than their weapon if they’re not packing a weapon skill.

Right up there with weapons and Spells (although a little less important), Rings offer a pretty big chunk of Attack. These are pretty important for Rogues and any attacker who can use them.

Additionally, any class with an innate skill that boosts a specific item type should consider those items to be high impact. Most classes like this have bonuses to item slots that have already been mentioned (Thief – Weapon, Monk – Ring, Mage – Staff, Sorcerer – Spell). The others are:

Knights – Shield, All Armor slots

Druids – Herbal Medicine, Meals, Amulets

Velites – Shield

Any other item should be considered low impact. You can potentially call the weapon slot for defensive Fighters a low impact item as well – these classes can do zero damage and still fill their role after all.

Now that we know what pieces are the most important, how do you use this? Simple – high impact pieces should always be Flawless (blue) quality and the highest tier you can give them.

“But Archon, why Flawless?” you may be wonder.

This particular Quality rating has a lot going for it. For one, you can almost always buy the piece you need and the enchantments for it with gold. If you can’t then, it’s not a heavy lift to buy five Superiors and simply fuse them together. Second, the Quality of your gear affects the base stats. Flawless in particular boosts the natural stats (Att / Def / HP – CHC and Eva are unaffected) of the item by 1.5x. These are both pretty great attributes!

For low impact pieces, Normal or Superior quality is fine. These slots matter of course, but they have far less weight than the high impact ones. As for tier, you can get away with dipping down a bit as well. Don’t reduce this by too much – no piece of equipment should be more than two tiers below the maximum you can put on a hero.

As previously mentioned, the weapon is arguably the most important piece of gear on a hero (or tied for it at least). We’ve touched on what Quality and Tier to use, but what about the type? Each class can use several different kinds after all.

• If the hero has a weapon skill for a particular weapon type, use that! As an important note – it’s OK to use a “weak” weapon type if you have a weapon skill for it. You don’t need to care too much about having the best possible weapon skill at any point in the game.
• If they have two weapon skills of different types (Adept and Crossbow Master), then roll off the Common one, you goof. It’s a rare instance of a skill doing literally nothing. Use one of the weapons supported by the Epic one.
• If they do not have a weapon skill at all (or they’re packing an Epic skill that allows you to use multiple types) then you’ll need to use your grey matter a bit. Not all weapon types are created equally and some are better than others.
• Don’t build your heroes around specific weapon types! Spellknights and heroes who can use Dual Wield compatible items can easily fall into this trap. The best weapon choice this tier might not always be the best choice next tier.
  • Spellknights usually have one good weapon option from chest blueprints. This is often one of the best choices for them due to their innate ability, but these items never repeat from one tier to the next.
  • Dual Wield items change the weapon combination every tier as well. A Wanderer for example can use the T12 Slice and Dice because it has a Dagger, but they cannot use the T11 Silken Assailant because it’s two Swords.

First up, Elements. Every item should be enchanted with their class’ respective Element. This is how their skills level up & become stronger. Ideally, you’re going to want to use at least T9 elements on all six items. This gets you to 90 Element power and will get you to rank 3 with all Rare, Common, and Innate skills. If your hero has any Epic skills, then you’ll usually need two Affinity items to hit rank 3 with those. This can be a great investment because T3 skills make a big difference.

If you can’t afford / buy T9, then T7 are still pretty good. Most Rare skills can still hit rank 3 with a full set of these, although eight skills require a bit more than the 60 Element you get from packing six. For those skills, you’ll need between one and three Affinity items to push you over.

If you’re able to use T12, then absolutely do that. Using these is the only way you can hit rank 4 skills. Note that only promoted classes can hit rank 4 (more detail here) and that you’ll need two Affinity items to get that on Epic skills.

• (Note: The three T7 classes require 180 Element to reach rank 4 of their innate instead of the usual 170, so you’ll need to use a third Affinity item for them.)

If you can use T14 enchantments, then these are even better. You can ignore Affinity gear and slap six T14 Elements on everybody to get max rank skills. This also lets you get a little creative – you can drop one or two elements in favor of matching the item’s Affinity to get slightly higher stat power and still retain rank 4 skills. This is a little tricky to do (and is slightly outside the scope of this guide), but can be valuable.

Spirits give you a lot more flexibility. Refer to the Spiritual Guidance page if you would like more detail on any of these.

If you want to go absolute dirt cheap, then the T4 spirits have a lot to offer. You realistically won’t see huge returns due to their comparatively low power, but they’re a good way to get a little extra muscle on a very tight budget.

• For Spellcasters, go Wolf. It’s a small but no-nonsense bonus to their primary stat. Eagle is a good option as well since that 12% total extra CHC provides a lot of additional damage via more frequent crits.
• Rogues will want either Eagle for offense or Cat for defense. Generally, go Cat if you have less than 50% Evasion. The extra 12% crit chance from Eagle won’t help the Rogue deal damage if they can’t live long enough to actually use it.
• Fighters can go Ox or Ram.

T7 Spirits are generally pretty underwhelming with the exception of Lizard. Lizard is excellent for Rogues who already have solid Evasion and can work well on Fighters who have their toes dipped into that stat as well.

T9 Spirits are where things really open up.

• Bear is great on all classes. The combination of HP and Attack is great – absolutely everybody can use at least one side of this. Spellcasters in particular love it. The HP helps mitigate one of their biggest weaknesses and the Attack lets them do their job much better.
• Fighters can make good use out of Walrus, Mammoth, or even Tiger if they have some Evasion.
• Rogues greatly enjoy Lion for its great combo of Evasion and Attack.

If you’re able to use T12 Spirits (note that the hero doesn’t need to have the ability to wear T12+ stuff to use T12 enchantments!), then here are some good general rules:

• Fighters, use half Phoenix / half Tarrasque. You can go full Phoenix or full Tarrasque if you sim it and it works better for your specific setup. Christmas > Phoenix if the fight averages 8 turns or less.
• Rogues who don’t need Evasion & crit based Spellcasters use Chimera.
• Rogues who do need Evasion (or CHC) use Carbuncle.
• Spellcasters otherwise use Kraken.

If you can use T14 Spirits, then you’ll want to refer to the BiS page for some good choices. Important note – these won’t ALWAYS be the best, but they’re very strong options in the majority of cases. When in doubt, sim it.

Finally, we get to the F2P route. If you’re not running Royal Merchant, then you have to deal with the constant annoyance of replacing gear. This means that each piece needs to be a bit more disposable because you’re going to be buying it several times.

The good news is that most of this information still applies. You’ll may want to consider downgrading gear quality across the board since gear breaks are more impactful = gear needs to be more disposable. An example of this would be to drop the high impact items to Superior (green) quality and everything else to Normal (white) quality. You’ll still want to double enchant everything, but consider looking into the more budget-friendly lower tier options for enchantment.

Using lower quality items gives you a surprising bonus – break bait. Higher quality gear has a lower chance to break, so a hero with five Legend quality pieces and one Normal one will have the Normal item break far more frequently than the Legend items. This means that a hero with one Flawless or Epic quality item and five Normals will typically get to keep the Flawless or Epic item for far longer. You can replace the Normals pretty easily by buying new ones and use your Repair Kits on the stuff you want to keep.

Lower TIER items can be used to good effect as well. A good example is the Evasion armor items. If you need some Evasion on your Gloves, maybe you’re using Gants d’Artagnan (T12). However, they’re not the ONLY option. Raptor Wings (T11), Mountain Man Mitts (T9) and Patchleather Bracers (T3) all offer Evasion as well and are viable options. These will be much cheaper than Gants and thus far easier to replace if they break. You can do this with Affinity items too! If your Berserker / Jarl is using one piece of Vermillion Guard item ‘set’ (T12) to get their Fire affinity, you can drop that to Juggernaut (T10) and get similar results.

The skill Extended Warranty (and it’s less-loved little sibling Maintenance) can be hugely valuable. This skill has real value for player who aren’t running Royal Merchant (along with all its other underrated effects) so it’s absolutely worth keeping on any hero who naturally rolls it.

I joked about Rudo and his burly physique earlier, any squad led by him has a 50% reduced chance to break their items, on top of all other effects. That said, this is only ONE team (and it’s still just a chance reduction), so it’s not a simple catch-all solution.