Essence Armor for DPS AND High Mits?

[Gambien]

Okay, unless I am completely missing something, I've calculated different combinations of essences for Morale/PM/Crit/and Phys/Tac Mits and with limited slots I don't see how I can create a combination that is any better than what I currently have with crafted/loot armors.

Right now sitting at 45k PM and only 25% crit (including htr trait, so still missing about 5% for cap. With said essences above there is just not enough room to significantly increase PM without taking a significant hit to Morale/crit/ and mits. Am I doing the math wrong? I know to increase PM, some things will have to be sacrificed, but just to get 5k more PM, crit will go down to 20% and then no room at ALL for mits of any kind, let alone Morale essences.

Am I just better off keeping Fangorn/L100 crafted/instance armors then wasting time with daily gold coins and farming essences?

[Farasilion]

52k+ PM, 28%+ crit (5% from trait), 18k+ morale, 45%-50% both mit (without traiting Survival Gears) and 30%+ crit defence unbuffed, all those at same time, is easily doable with essence gears. Kind of impossible to achieve the numbers with just instance/crafted armour.

Regarding the crit loss, the key is to look for crit from other sources instead of having crit essence (which sadly, offers a very bad tradeoff ratio compared with LI relics and jewellery).

Try building up each part of your gears to an extreme maybe, then combine those extremes for a balanced overall result. This usually offers better outcome than having every part balanced out seperately.

[Patriotp3a]

52k+ PM, 28%+ crit (5% from trait), 18k+ morale, 45%-50% both mit (without traiting Survival Gears) and 30%+ crit defence unbuffed, all those at same time, is easily doable with essence gears. Kind of impossible to achieve the numbers with just instance/crafted armour.

Regarding the crit loss, the key is to look for crit from other sources instead of having crit essence (which sadly, offers a very bad tradeoff ratio compared with LI relics and jewellery).

Try building up each part of your gears to an extreme maybe, then combine those extremes for a balanced overall result. This usually offers better outcome than having every part balanced out seperately.

Pretty much agree with everything here.

For crit, I actually use double T10 Dexterity gems because it gives crit AND agility. Slot another mastery essence instead of the 2 crit you would have used and you are ahead a little, or use other stats its up to you.

I build my pieces to extremes, that way I can easily pick which stat I want to boost using a single piece. This way you can also mix and match dps and t2 pieces easier.

[Aedfrith]

Yup. It's worth putting specific "extreme" essences into specific armour pieces, something I learned about halfway through making my armour. So I have some "defence" pieces (mits, morale, 1 crit def), an "always" piece (2 supreme tac mit and 2 greater morale) and some "offence" pieces (agi and mastery). If you are lucky enough to get gold essences, I advise grouping them into as few pieces as possible following the above schema rather than spreading them through your gear - minimises the cost of reclamation scrolls later!

Your best source of crit is jewellery, cloaks and relics IMO. Far more efficient than essences; I think you may need 1 crit essence at most.

[Gabli]

Your best source of crit is jewellery, cloaks and relics IMO. Far more efficient than essences; I think you may need 1 crit essence at most.

I actually use 0 critical essence, and still have a bit too much critical rating (~16900 unbuffed). The amount of crit in settings/gems is just so much better than the amount of mastery you would gain by switching them that it's not worth it. Having Fate stat legacies on both LIs helps a lot too to reach high critical rating, along with School of Tham Mirdain's earrings and Tomes of Fate if you have them.


And yes, concerning essences it's best to have specific pieces rather than mixed ones as its better to adapt to possible encounters. I have an "all-out dps" build, wich is only mastery essences except one finesse (still wondering wether I should switch it out or not...).
Then I have to pieces I can slot to gain morale and/or tactical mitigations : one is full morale (2x greater and 2x major) and one is 3x tactical mitigation and 1x major morale.
If I know I might recieve heavy physical (type, so common most of the time) damage I will just equip the morale piece over a mastery one. If I know I will recieve heavy tacical damage (Durin's Bane and Ivar for exemple) I will equip both the morale and the mitigation pieces.
Equiping both pieces gets me with captain buffs (out of combat), trail food, hope token and scrolls to >47% mitigations, >62k mastery, >22k morale, >17k critical rating


I have 0 critical defence for PvE on my hunter. I explained it on another thread before, but as a hunter you are simply not supposed to be criticaly hit. That is because bosses "special attacks" cannot crit, and you are not melee so you should be out of range of strong mobs AoEs (such as Dol Guldur's amours or Ost Dunoth's Bone-Gnawers). Only place I can see critical defence usefull on a hunter is DG's twins if you are range-tanking the girl, but even that I have done without problem with 0 critical defence.

[Patriotp3a]

I removed the finesse essence from my full glass setup and slotted major morale instead, hit rate is still really high without it.
As for the crit D, I feel the same way but I keep a 3 crit D 1 major morale just to have it. Using x4 supreme tactical mitigation essences and slotting physical virtues while in a group(scrolled too) should solve any mitigation poblems and still maintain competitive offensive stats.

[Farasilion]

Probably best without the finesse essence imho. Managed to get 9.4k finesse with zero essence (double BB earrings, double SH bracelets as I have a gold ring, BG sword), compared with my 'fully ignoring finesse' build, this one has 900 less morale (still nearly 15.5k after the lose in full DPS), 800 less PM, same crit (16.5k, at cap with cpt IDoME) but 6.2k more finesse.

And seems like finesse is only useful in the Moors or in T2s - even with just 3k, I hit more than 97% in T1 (but total B/P/E + partial B/P/E can be 12%-20% in T2 with 3k, which is way too painful...).

About crit defence, the fire gem's random attacks in Fire of Smaug does tactical and it can crit - kind of inevitable if a hnt attacks the gem, but not an issue without crit def ofc. I'm not too sure about what damage type the beast has, but probably also tactical? If so, then in these two cases a hunter might be critically and tactially hit. But yeah, indeed boss special attacks cannot crit, and in most cases crit defence isn't much needed against tactical damage as a hunter.

I have a 2 crit def 2 phy mit piece in bag in case of inevitable or should-be-avoided-but-oh-****-moment-can-happen-kind-of heavy common damage which might crit like a trunk, but usually running without it... keeping just for feeling safe.

[Patriotp3a]

but usually running without it... keeping just for feeling safe.

Makes me feel better too

[pibob314]

FWIW, my defensive setup uses the following essences:

4x Greater Morale
4x Greater Critical Defence
4x Greater Tactical Mitigation
2x Greater Physical Mitigation
10x Supreme Physical Mastery.

I sit at 50k mastery (with food and scrolls), 30% crit chance, mitigations are capped with scrolls (so I sit at 58% in my raid build) and also have crit defence at 56%. All this with 16.9k morale unbuffed.

Clearly to get a tanky build as outlined above you need to sacrifice dps, but it's not horrendous if you are smart about it.

[Vehdren]

Some please explain to me why medium armour classes have to get their mits to 18.9k to cap whereas, light cap at 12k and Heavy at 16.8. It seems to me that Medium should cap somewhere around 14.5k rather than having to allocate 6 or 7 slots for mitigations. It's ludicrous making hunters and burglars more gimped than they already are.

[Kander]

Some please explain to me why medium armour classes have to get their mits to 18.9k to cap whereas, light cap at 12k and Heavy at 16.8. It seems to me that Medium should cap somewhere around 14.5k rather than having to allocate 6 or 7 slots for mitigations. It's ludicrous making hunters and burglars more gimped than they already are.

I think it comes from RoI, where mitigation caps raised (from 30-40-50% i think, to 40-50-70). And what was the main way to get mitigations?, yes, vitality, so medium and heavy could have same mitigation value with the same gear, so they wanted to make medium and heavy require same rating (around 15k on RoI) to reach their respective caps. Now, on HD they lowered cap of heavies to 60%, but didn't change the rating to % conversion curve. And also removed vitality contribution to mits making armour only source (what heavies got plenty) so heavies could cap mits at 17k and medium cap at the same rating that heavies would need to cap 70% (19k). They just changed a lot of stuff but didn't balance some details. Either they would need to reduce cap rating requirement for medium (which would be best given vit no longer contributes) or increase heavy armour requirement for mits to around 21k.