Let’s Get Serious About Adornments!
More than a few players have looked at my EQ2 character‘s vacant adornment slots with incredulity. Why have I been so slack on adorning? The answer has multiple parts:
- I never knew when I will replace a piece of gear and thus be out the cost of the adornments or worse unable to carry those adornments forward.
- War Runes have been by-and-large out of reach of my casual heroic gameplay style.
- The purple adornments I really want have been drops behind an unfavorable RNG.
- Green adornments for the most part have lacked significant growth, or just haven’t been worth the trouble to acquire.
- White adornments haven’t kept pace with player power and barely increase stats with the exception of a few slots.
With Tears of Veeshan, Altar of Malice, and recent patches, nearly ALL of these issues have been resolved.
Let’s Get Adorned!
First up, we can now remove and perserve all adornments from all our gear and reuse it on the same character through an ability acquired from completing the Altar of Malice signature quest line. The broken-0ff adornments are NO-TRADE which is the compromise, but still, when you combine this with Armor Gems in Yellow, Blue, Green, Red, and Purple varieties, the ability to upgrade gear in a progression is better than ever.
You can read the History Lesson below on War Runes, but to make a long story short, they contain powerful effects that benefit not only the player but sometimes the entire group. These War Runes used to be very difficult to acquire but over the years they’ve become more accessible and with Altar of Malice, they can be acquired from crafting with a combination of crafting-acquired materials and Ferrin tokens from solo questing, advanced solo dungeons, or grouping. Without raiding (or even grouping if you have the patience of Job), players can now get in on these fantastic adornments that fit on the Primary, Secondary, Ranged weapon slots, as well as Belts and Cloaks.
We’ve heard word that a new tier of Green Adornments is in development and will soon be added to heroic content. In the mean time, they can be acquired through Tradeskill Apprentice research and more common recipes, as well as dropped, but I’m waiting for the good stuff.
Finally, early on in the expansion, there was a lot of gnashing of teeth about how rare Advanced Adornments Volume 11 was. Fortunately it’s now fairly common. Once players got ahold of the recipes, they looked around and realized that the materials to make them, especially the superior ones, are just unbelievably sparse. The EQ2 team seems to have agreed with our assessment and so has added an attractive new item to the Loyalty Merchants — [eq2u]bound incandescent transmutation stone[/eq2u]. This item which costs 10 Loyalty Tokens can be transmuted by a high level transmuter into between 1 and 5 tier 11 [eq2u]Polished Mana[/eq2u]. At the same time, we saw a similar item the [eq2u]incandescent transmutation stone[/eq2u] added to names in the Ossuary of Malevolance contested group zone.
So when you look at all of this, there’s finally, truly, no reason not to be adorned these games unless you just aren’t playing much. The hardest part now is figuring out just which adornments are right for your character.
Which War Rune?
After talking to a number of players in the #eq2wire chatroom, as well as a fascinating thread on the EQ2 Forums called “What does Winds of Obol Actually Do?“, I’ve not only learned a lot more about War Runes and some of their tricky phrasing, but that the vast majority of classes could do worse than to have at the very least these three runes:
- Bolstered Attributes — Increases AGI, STR, INT, and WIS by 150, and then increases all of your stats including STA by 10%. Do the math and that could easily be a net increase of 600 of your Primary stat and 450 Stamina, enough to increase your damage/tanking/heals and power pool by a significant amount, and plenty of health.
- Winds of Obol — Adds another 25% Potency to all damage-based Spells and Combat Arts by all members of the group. If all 6 group members have this adorned, then that’s another 150% Potency on all DPS spells and combat arts, a huge boost.
- Truespirit’s Legacy — Increases the group’s Potency by 18%. If all six group members have this adorned, then that’s another 108% Potency on all healing, tanking, and damage-based spells and combat arts.
After that, the last two slots will take more research as they depend per class and tanks in particular may want some situational choices depending on content. As a scout, I was steered towards:
- Screams of Battle — This adornment grants 6% Flurry, 17% DPS, and 22% AE Autoattack if you’re facing the enemy. This one confused the heck out of me until I remembered the Greek translation for Flurry is “strike the target multiple times”.
Again these are just some of the ones I heard for scouts, including Wild Swings. Tanks will often roll with Relentless Conviction and Bolstered Endurance, but others go with AE Autoattack. I personally went with Astral Dominion as it’s a permanent 50% chance to resist Stun, Stifle, Fear, etc. While it’s not usable by Priests or Mages, some solid choices for priests include Storm Animus and Split-Second Salvation.
Level 96 Gear?
Be aware that there are level 92 and level 96 versions of all War Runes. The level 96 versions are the “new” ones for Altar of Malice and include significant improvements. You’ll need level 96 Belts, Cloaks, Weapons, and Ranged Weapons to apply the level 96 adornments, so keep that in mind before chasing down a hurried crafter.
So how do you get level 96 weapons, belts, and cloaks? Most of the best Heroic upgrades for those are in Green zones, so if you are still mostly running Blue zones, there’s an alternative. From all advice I’ve received, your best bet (and the approach I intend to take) is to have Mastercrafted Bows, Belts, Cloaks, and Weapons made for you. Once they’ve been crafted with Refined materials and Experimented, with the proper adornments applied, these items will likely completely blow away anything you had from the Tears of Veeshan expansion and hold you over until the better heroic gear comes along.
Cyan Adornments?
We’re also seeing a fairly new color of adornments on weapons — Cyan. Previously only seen as craftable items from Fabled Deathtoll and drops from Highkeep Contested, these have recently been added to Altar of Malice contested zones including Brokenskull Bay and Ossuary of Malevolence.
These exist as regular and “Lesser” versions, in Primary, Secondary and Two-Handed versions.
Reforging Targets?
There is so much that could be said about Reforging and how Adornments can be used to push stats up that are then easy to reforge into more useful things and I don’t want to speak beyond my knowledge level, but there are some really smart people out there crunching the numbers and that sometimes, you want to stock on a stat that you are already Hard Capped on just for the Reforge value.
The Recipe for War Runes & Other Purple Runes
As so helpfully posted by Mermut on her guild forum, War Runes are now crafted with some newish components:
How the recipes are obtained:
- Armor (eye-shaped) runes: Purchased from a Far Seas Supplier for 25 Far Seas Trading Company Tokens
- War Runes (square): Purchased from a Far Seas Supplier for 45 Far Seas Trading Company Tokens or researched on TS apprentices for a base of 20 days
To Craft:
- Armor rune: 1 [eq2u]Blank Rune[/eq2u] and 1 [eq2u]Far Seas Kindling[/eq2u] (plus some regular mats)
- War rune: 1 [eq2u]Blank Rune[/eq2u], 2 [eq2u]Far Seas Kindling[/eq2u] and 1 [eq2u]Transcendent Quintessence[/eq2u] (plus some regular mats)
The [eq2u]Blank Rune[/eq2u]s can be purchased from a Far Seas Supplier for 90 [eq2u]Far Seas Trading Company Token[/eq2u]. They are tradeable though, so they can also show up on the broker
The [eq2u]Far Seas Kindling[/eq2u] can be purchased from a Far Seas Supplier for 35 [eq2u]Far Seas Ferrin[/eq2u] and 75g.
A [eq2u]Transcendent Quintessence[/eq2u] is a rare return from salvaging lvl 96+ fabled+ gear.Far Seas Trading Company Tokens are tradeskill currency, available from various TS quests while leveling as well as from the daily and weekly AoM TS quests (5/15 respectively)
Far Seas Ferrin are the new adventure currency. There are 5 daily solo quests for them (1 each), 7 daily advanced solos (3 per), 5 Event Heroics (5 per), 10 Heroics (15 per) as well as a large number of weekly quests, including a raid weekly that requires killing 3 epics (65 Ferrin).
For example, here’s the recipe for Adamant Defiance on EQ2U.
Conclusion
If you have questions about what specific adornments you should try on your Priest, Mage, Scout, or Fighter, please post a comment under this article with a link to your character on EQ2U and hopefully someone will chip in their advice on things you can try!
Postscript: A Brief, Optional History of War Runes
In the expansions prior to Destiny of Velious, the most powerful item effects and procs were found on raid gear, avatar gear, and other difficult-to-acquire items. If you wanted these effects, you had to acquire those items. With the introduction of DoV, the most popular of these effects were moved to “War Runes”, a special type of red adornment that would only apply to Cloaks, Belts, and Primary, Secondary, and Ranged weapons. By defeating enemies and looting a War Rune, your character would be “flagged” and could henceforth buy as many of that adornment as they wanted from a special vendor. This was devilishly complex on the backend, requiring hundreds of hidden quests to work and was not carried forth with subsequent updates.
With 2013’s Tears of Veeshan expansion, the dichotomy of Red and Yellow adornments was replaced with the Purple adornment, and suddenly all forms of gameplay could find *something* to put on all their gear, no matter what their gameplay style. Purple adornments became available from crafting, soloing, grouping, and yes raiding. Now four years after the release of Destiny of Velious, a path has been presented for all players to get in on the awesome War Rune action, but it’s not cheap.
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Comments (26)
Mermut
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Astral Dominion is tank/scout only. A good one for priests is Storm Animus.. 8% max health and 200 of every stat for the entire group
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Feldon
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Fixed the link to Astral Dominion and note. Added Storm Animus and Split-Second Salvation. Thanks!
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Caela
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How timely! I was just looking earlier today to get my adornments up to snuff. They are almost all previous tier adornments that I ripped off.
Luckily I have a guild mate that has all the recipes for the purple adornments.
However, I will never have enough Ferrin given my play style.
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Feldon
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Don’t forget the 10 repeatable overland timed quests in Tranquil and Phantom Seas.
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Caela
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I tried to do the truffle quest – I found about 3 mounds in the time allotted, and they were all traps. I gave up. I’m pretty bad at those quests where you have to find something on the ground – always takes me longer than everyone else.
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Feldon
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There’s one around every large tree in the area. If you get trapped, target the trap with your mouse and spam F. If you run out of time, you can try again in 90 minutes.
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Deeku
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When you examine a mound, it will either reveal a trap or a truffle, you need to click on the truffle to get it update. Getting only 3 traps says that you didn’t click on the truffles as the mechanism prevents you from getting two traps in a row.
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Wirewhisker
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Still waiting for those +tradeskill and +harvesting adornments. 😎
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Oakmiser
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that would actually be cool lol. + .2% rare harvest, +15 mining skills, +3% critical success chance + 50 progress
lol i’m a nut for crafting a harvesting gear
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Wirewhisker
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As am I, fellow adventurer.
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Armageddoux
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An absolutely definitive and final paper on the subject.
I prepared one by following one more or less the same approach for my site, but I shall never have made as well!
Bravo Feldon: nothing to add, I will have, one more time, to content me to translate your writing
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Eric Poling
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I still just get confused at all get out when trying to parse all these stats. LOL
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TheSauce
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Nice write up. Regarding the eye shaped armor runes, many of the more basic ones are offered on the ferrin merchant for 45 ferrin and plat. The master crafted recipe versions offer upgraded stats over these and also some additional unique choices such as mitigation, block and hate gain. Superior versions of all of the basic armor runes can be looted in raids or heroics and offer the highest stat values. These runes also give set bonuses (called sigils) when used in certain combinations. For instance on a scout, the flurry, AE auto and DPS runes all belong to the damage sigil and each add DPS mod in addition to the base rune stats. Equipping at least 3 runes from the damage sigil wil give a bit more AE auto and flurry as a bonus! The set bonuses can be viewed on examine.
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Outlaw
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A small note for the possibly forthcoming article on reforging…the new Mastercrafted armor/equipment is NOT reforgable that I can see. This is a bit of a serious roadblock to realigning stats to a better balance. Not sure why this should be, but Refined, MC’ed, experimented and adorned is nice, yes, but a bit of reforging would be even better.
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Eric T Lewis
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use to be I would chew you out for not being adorned. If you showed up for raid, there was always that one person who did not care. Not that life has changed and I am no longer raiding due to time constraints with the wife, job, life, and other factors. I still using purple adornments from the last xpac. I just don’t have the ferrin to do it all, have yet to run more than 5 heric zones, and its been 6 months since I raided.
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Melanore
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Hop! This article has been added in my favorites 🙂
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Leahyla
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Screams of Battle is a bit odd. When I have Battle Cry on me and I’m using Screams of Battle, I will get the extra flurry and dps.
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Kitalya
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Thanks for the article! I just picked up the expansion, and am starting on the quests, so this really helped make sense of the craziness.
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Carnifex
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Glad I made my cash before dissertations like this came out =))
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Sychocharley
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I thought you was supposed to be able to get Transcendent Quintessence from salvaging handcrafted also? I have tried this with no success though
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Feldon
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It went from a 1:27 chance to a 1:billion chance. I quit trying after the nerf. I made over 30k plat before the change though. 😉
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Sychocharley
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I figured something of that nature had happened. It is pretty hard getting 96+ fabled gear at this point in time haha and what i do get I hate salvaging haha sorta like a double edge sword
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Mermut
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I’ve found it to be about 1/100 average on handcrafted. Sometimes I’ll get 2 or 3, other times I’ll get zero. But it tends to average at 1/100. Not a good ration, but given the rarity of transmuting mats, better then salvaging 96+ level gear instead of transmuting them
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Pheidra
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Don’t forget that there are a number of purple adornments that are only available on the merchant – specifically the Fighter-specific cb/potency ones, Flurry, and AOE Auto-attack, and these do still count towards a set bonus!
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Sychocharley
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I have found that there are superior adorn recipes that are dropped that do include the things like the CB / Power / and Potency. They also have better stats but you are correct they cant just be crafted the recipes that I have found have a 1 combine limit on them
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Armageddoux
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French translation of this article is available on : http://www.guerrier-celeste.fr/experts/l-art-de-la-guerre/utiliser-les-ornements.html
Feldon : I used the same way and approach as you do and began to write some articles on the same subject : “How to got a good AoM stuff without heroic dungeons”.
The other articles in my articles serie are :
http://www.guerrier-celeste.fr/progresser/vers-l-excellence/maitre-es-artisanat.html
http://www.guerrier-celeste.fr/progresser/vers-l-excellence/la-recolte-tout-un-art.html
http://www.guerrier-celeste.fr/experts/survivre-a-phantom-sea.html
And a great number of small articles to study the different parrallels arts needed : Experimentation, salvaging, reforging etc … you will find these ones as link in previous articles.
At least translating your article (instead of writing it from scratch) gave me a lot of time I will spend at other ones 😆
For that I must say you a great : “Thank You Feldon”
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