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.

• One Handed Rune: Weapon Damage
• One Handed Rune: Heal Focus

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.