Here, I want to go over everything we currently know about the mechanic and rewards of Path of Exile 3.22 Trial of the Ancestors League, as well as the implications this league mechanic will have on, what build you should play, the league’s economy, and Atlas strategies.

That way, you can jump into the league with everything you need to hit the ground running!

Matches & Tournaments

First up, let’s go over everything we know about the league mechanic.

Trial of the Ancestors, which I’ll be referring to as “Trials” from now on, is an autobattler-inspired league mechanic. You’ll be recruiting and upgrading Warriors over the course of a tournament, strategically placing your team at the start of each match to counter the enemy team.

Each position you can play a Warrior has an associated role, which determines how that Warrior behaves in battle. Some will have them on the offense, others on the defense, as well as other specialized roles.

Unlike a traditional autobattler, you will fight alongside your team, much like how Blight is a tower defense game where you fight alongside your towers.

Each Warrior, including the player, has a totem that they revive at a short time after being defeated. If a totem is destroyed, that Warrior instantly dies, and will no longer respawn for the duration of the match. The goal of each match is to destroy all of the enemy team’s totems before your totems are destroyed.

Each match represents a single game in a larger tournament. These tournaments are double elimination. You can lose once without getting knocked out. But after two losses, you have to start over in a new tournament.

Before each match, you’ll get to view each team and what the reward for beating that team is. You then pick your opponent, and pay the entry fee – one Silver Coin, per match.

In addition to the rewards you get from winning each match, you get additional rewards for successfully winning the entire tournament.

Many of the best rewards seem to be exclusively available from tournament wins, so you definitely want to make sure you’re winning the whole thing!

Every time you win a tournament, your ranking will increase. The better your ranking, the higher the difficulty and the better the rewards of future tournaments.

It’s likely that consistently winning and being able to do extremely high-ranking tournaments will be the most profitable way to farm Trials.

Favour & Teambuilding

In between matches, you will get to spend tribe-specific Favour that you receive from winning matches, to recruit new Warriors for your team, and to purchase Equipment and Field Items.

There are a total of 10 different tribes, and each has a different selection of Warriors and Equipment for sale. Mixing and matching will probably be key to creating a strong team.

Field Items can be placed on the battlefield the same way a Warrior can, and serve as single use consumables that you can activate by clicking on them, to get a beneficial effect when you need it most in a match.

Equipment is given to your Warriors, to enhance their abilities. Based on the Equipment GGG has previewed, these POE Items are not simple stat boosts, but are often transformative in nature. For instance, the equipment Dying Roar makes your Warrior explode on death.

Figuring out what Equipment to buy, and what Warrior and Role to use that equipment on will probably be key to victory. For instance, the explosion on death equipment probably combines well with a tanky character, perhaps on a defensive role where they will be fighting enemy Warriors

All of these progression mechanics - Warriors, Field Items and Equipment, are tournament-specific progression only. None of them carry over. You start every new tournament from scratch.

Skill Point Tattoos

So, what are the rewards from doing all this, anyway?

Well, the Trial of the Ancestors League has some pretty spicy new rewards. The first of which are Tattoos.

Tattoos are a new consumable item, which can replace attribute passives on your Skill Tree.

So, for instance, you can overwrite a +10 strength travel node with one that gives 8% Fire Resistance, or another that gives 1% Mana Reservation Efficiency.

These tattoos are permanently applied to the skill point, unless you use an Orb of Scouring or overwrite them with another tattoo. These tattoos offer an incredible amount of power to min-max your character build to levels never seen before!

Every single build needs to take some number of travel nodes. In the past, there really hasn’t been anything you can do about that. But now, you’ll be able to turn all of those travel nodes into far more useful stats. I expect some of these tattoos to be very pricey.

Also Read: 10 Easy Ways To Make Currency On The First Few Days Of POE 3.22 Trial Of The Ancestors League

Omens

Another new type of consumable item available from the Trial of the Ancestors League is Omens.

Omens are automatically triggered and consumed from your inventory upon meeting some trigger condition. For example, one of the Omens previewed creates a portal on death, and another gives you Soul Eater upon leveling up.

While some of these seem marginally useful for mapping, the real money here is in the rare ones, such as the Omen of Fortune, which guarantees your next orb of chance will upgrade an item to a unique.

In order to prevent players from feeling like they need to fill their inventory with Omens, there’s a restriction of only one Omen being able to trigger per zone.

Hinekora’s Lock

The final reward available is a powerful new endgame crafting currency, Hinekora’s Lock.

Hinekora’s Lock has a very unusual effect. It allows you to “foresee” the result of the next currency item used on it.

It’s unclear exactly what this means, and people have different interpretations. Some claim that you have to actually use the currency item, like an Eternal Orb, whereas others believe you’ll be able to see what the outcome would be without actually using it.

Regardless of how it ends up working, one thing is clear: this is an incredibly powerful crafting option that rivals the power of the Eternal Orb. And the Eternal Orb was removed from Path of Exile for being simply too powerful at crafting.

Hinekora’s Lock will end up having a very similar effect. With enough Hinekora’s Locks, you will be able to deterministically craft, getting the exact outcome you want at every step. If it foresees an outcome you don’t like, you simply change the item’s quality, use another Hinekora’s Lock, and check again.

I expect that all of the most powerful items created in the Trial of the Ancestors League will rely heavily upon the use of Hinekora’s Lock. Regardless of how rare or common it ends up being, this will be a chase reward worth many Divine Orbs.

Build Considerations

So, now that you know everything there is to know, the question remains: what should you do to best prepare for the Trial of the Ancestors League?

Well, as far as builds go, it’s likely that strong, single target ranged DPS builds will be king in Trials tournaments. Being able to quickly burst down Warriors and Totems will allow you to simply delete the enemy team, without having to overly rely on the rest of your team.

In addition, POE 3.22 marks the return of the Sanctum league mechanic, which is a league mechanic, and also incentivizes strong single-target DPS builds.

Another consideration is that you may want to pass on playing a stat-stacker. Stat stacking builds won’t be able to take advantage of tattoos in the ways other builds will, and might end up falling short in terms of character power this league. Or at the very least, you’ll miss out on the fun of playing with the new character progression mechanics.

Atlas Considerations

As far as your Atlas and Farming strategies go, it’s worth noting that the new Maven keystone also incentivizes single-target DPS. Boss killers may find that they thrive in this league.

Other than that, something I want to highlight is the way that you interact with the league mechanic. You spend Silver Coins to play matches, but these Silver Coins are just regular POE drops.

As far as we know, they aren’t limited to one per zone or come from special league chests, or anything like that. It’s worth emphasizing just how unusual this is.

GGG hasn’t done a league mechanic like this in years. The last time they had a league mechanic that you started through regular drops off of enemies was Legacy league in 2017, over 6 years ago.

The reason why they normally don’t do this and what makes this so interesting is that it means the amount of Silver Coins you find will scale with player and area Item Quantity, as well as pack size. This means that you have the ability to specialize in farming Silver Coins by magic finding. And some players will be able to farm Silver Coins at absolutely obscene rates.

My understanding is that the current go-to strategy for magic finding is to use the strongbox sextant with the Wandering Path.

It’s worth noting that even though Strongboxes aren’t on the map device this league, the new “Seventh Gate” keystone will allow you to add strongboxes to the map device. And if you go for this niche strategy, you may be able to farm a fortune in Silver Coins, even if you don’t engage with the league mechanic directly.

Other than that, my last observation is that because Hinekora’s Lock only works with crafting POE Currency, other crafting methods that aren’t currency may be far less valuable than usual this league, as players look to craft endgame items via means they can use deterministically.

These would be things, such as Aisling T4 in Betrayal, Harvest, and possibly even fossils.

The Aeromancer is a DPS sub-class of the Specialist. Depending on your Class Engraving, she can be a melee-type or caster-type damage dealer.

Skills

The Aeromancer only has two types of skills. For melee combat, she uses Umbrella Skills. For casting and meter generation, she uses Weather Skills.

Typically, Umbrella Skills have all the utility: Stagger, Weak Point or Party Synergy. Although Weather Skills have utility options, they’re less preferred compared to Umbrella Skills, so Weather Skills are mainly used for damage.

Identity

As for her identity, Sun Shower, you can activate it once you fill up the Raindrop meter. Sun Shower does AOE damage to nearby enemies until the gauge runs out.

While inside Sun Shower, all enemies, including raid bosses, receive an attack damage reduction, which can help mitigate some damage every time it’s up.

Two Class Engravings - Wind Fury & Drizzle

Aeromancer has two Class Engravings. The first one is called Wind Fury, which primarily uses Umbrella Skills. The Wind Fury Aeromancer is very flexible in terms of raid mechanics, such as Stagger Check or Weak Point Check.

The other one is called Drizzle. Drizzle increases your Sun Shower duration by 100% and also increases your Weather Skills damage up to 30% when Sun Shower is active.

So, Drizzle is recommended if you would like to play the Range Caster style of Aeromancer or use Weather Skills as your main damaging abilities.

Let’s start with Wind Fury.

Instead of attack damage reduction to enemies, your Sun Shower will give bonus attack speed and movement speed to your party members inside the AOE circle. On top of the identity changes, you gain bonus Crit chance based on your movement speed and Crit damage based on attack speed.

If you choose this Class Engraving, you would want to have at least a little of Swiftness in general. On the other hand, you don’t want to go Mass Increase, because it would reduce the Crit damage provided by your Class Engraving.

The Wind Fury Aeromancer uses Swiftness and Crit as their main combat stats with a lot of play style variations. This Class Engraving mainly uses Umbrella Skills. They can also use a few Weather Skills as DPS or to generate identity gauge.

However, Umbrella Skills are your primary abilities. The core gameplay pattern of the Wind Fury Aeromancer is to use your preparation skills with the Current Occurrence tripod, then use spender skills with the Reversal tripod. Her preparation skills with the Current Occurrence tripod will give you a very special shield called Current Shield when you successfully land a hit with them.

The majority of the Wind Fury Aeromancer’s damage comes from the Reversal tripod. You need to make sure you always have a Current Shield from the Current Occurrence tripod before you use your spender skills.

Only if you have the shield from the Current Occurrence tripod, do you have a chance to trigger Reversal tripods? This shield is classified separately from any other shields, so you can’t trigger the Reversal tripod with a Protection Rune or shield effects from your support.

Looking a little deeper, you can’t use the Barricade Engraving, because the Reversal tripod consumes the Current Shield before it does damage. But Barricade needs you to be shielded for it to apply.

As for the Engravings, she typically uses Wind Fury, Grudge, Raid Captain, Adrenaline and Hit Master. None of her primary damage skills are positional, so it’s ideal to use Hit Master.

Relic Set

When it comes to the Relic set, the Wind Fury Aeromancer has multiple options depending on your playstyle. Of course, you need to prepare a lot of Lost Ark Gold, so that you can choose the Relic set you want.

Usually, Hallucination with high Swiftness is recommended, since it’s very agile and performs well in almost every situation.

Option two is the Dominion Set. You can go six Dominions or mix with two Nightmares for less mana consumption. The Dominion Set technically does more damage than the Hallucination Set. But it’s not always preferred since it’s a hassle to maintain the set buff.

The final option is the Nightmare Set. Crit will become your primary stat to cover the lack of Crit chance. This option is going to make you slower than the other two options. However, it does the most damage in a shorter damage window.

Gems

As for gems, all you need is to make sure you have Attack and Cooldown gems on your Reversal spender skills.

Then, it varies based on whether you use three spenders or four spenders, one Weather or two Weather Skills.

There are only minor differences among the variations, so the best way to figure out what to use is for you to try it yourself.

Also Read: A Summary Of Recent Lost Ark Updates And Improvements On KR Server- New Contents & Class

Wind Fury Aeromancer

The Wind Fury Aeromancer doesn't rely on many Runes unless you're looking to run a Dominion Set, which will require you to proc Conviction and Judgment before you cast your Awakening.

Since the Aeromancer is a very mana-hungry class, Conviction, Judgment and a few Focus Runes are great for her regardless of the Relic set.

Drizzle Aeromancer

Moving on to Drizzle, if you're looking for a more skill-shot-based and less spammy class so you can focus on your positioning and decision making, then Drizzle is the path you'll want to follow.

Unlike Wind Fury, Drizzle relies on Weather Skills to do damage, while Umbrella Skills take care of utility, like Party Synergy or Counter.

As an Engraving, Drizzle increases your Weather Skills up to 30% while your identity, Sun Shower, is active.

So, your goal as a Drizzle Aeromancer is simple. All you need to do is build the Raindrop meter as fast as you can without using your primary Weather Skills, which are Wiping Wind and Scorching Sun.

When Sun Shower is active, you want to use everything on cooldown.

Standard Stat Distribution

As for the Drizzle Aeromancer's combat stats distribution, she uses Specialization as her primary stat, because her weather skills scale with Specialization and it helps with Raindrop meter gain.

She doesn't have any sort of Crit modifier outside of her Awakening and Party Synergy, so Crit is recommended for her secondary combat stats.

Most of her damage comes from two skills, Wiping Wind and Scorching Sun, during the Sun Shower state. You can squeeze them in two times each in a single Sun Shower once you achieve a certain amount of cooldown reduction.

Gem Setup

As for the gem setup, the Drizzle Aeromancer needs damage and cooldown gems on both Wiping Wind and Scorching Sun. Unless you can cast these two skills twice in one Sun Shower, otherwise you should give priority to the Cooldown gems of these two skills.

Then, all you need to do is place a damage and cooldown gem again for Whirlpool and Rainstorm.

Similar to the Wind Fury Aeromancer, Drizzle also uses Conviction, Judgment and Focus Runes. It's easy to proc Conviction and Judgment with Weather Skills for extra cooldown reduction and mana regen.

However, they're not necessary and the heavy mana consumption can be covered with multiple Focus Runes instead. It's best to have at least two Wealth Runes for optimal gameplay since Drizzle relies on filling the identity meter.

Engravings

Drizzle Aeromancers typically use Grudge, Keen Blunt Weapon, Drizzle, Adrenaline and Hit Master.

Same as Wind Fury, none of her primary damage skills are positional, so it's ideal to use Hit Master.

Relic Set Options

The Drizzle Aeromancer uses Hallucination for her Relic set. She doesn't use Salvation since the bonus attack speed from Salvation isn't that beneficial for Drizzle.

You don't use Nightmare since the damage from her Sun Shower is a good chunk of your overall damage, but it isn't affected by the Nightmare Set, because the identity doesn't consume mana.

Hallucination is the best option here as she has a fairly low Crit rate.

A Rule To Follow As A Drizzle Aeromancer

There's a simple rule you need to follow as a Drizzle Aeromancer: hold.

You need to hold damage skills when you don't have Sun Shower active and you need to hold the meter generator when Sun Shower is about to run out. So, you can fill up the meter as soon as possible.

Usually, you should be able to fill up the whole meter with these two skills, but if anything, you can always use Whirlpool, which is another great meter generator that also does really high damage.

So, this is your emergency button if you have just a little more meter to fill up. Otherwise, you want to squeeze this skill in your Sun Shower rotation for extra damage from the Drizzle Engraving.

Drizzle's damage is heavily back-loaded. Wiping Wind and Whirlpool do more damage on their later ticks and Scorching Sun takes more than two seconds to land all the hits. So, you need to be patient and look carefully for a damage window. In other words, the better you know the fight, the more rewarding Drizzle is.

Conclusion

In closing, both Aeromancer Class Engravings can be as fun as you make it. Whether it is an unstoppable blade to slice and dice your enemy with Wind Fury or calling upon nature's power to strike your enemy with Drizzle, the Aeromancer has a little something for everyone.

I’ve spent most of the last week researching the best new items coming in WOTLK Classic Phase 4. And let me tell you something. They aren’t going to come cheap.

What I found confirmed one thing: you’ll need more WOTLK Classic Gold for Phase 4 than you needed for all the other phases combined. There are just so many big-ticket items you won’t want to miss out on, like the Deathbringers’ Will trinket, the new 264 item level BOEs, and Invincible, which is the most impressive mount in the game.

If you’re curious on exactly how much gold, you’ll need to save up you should check out my top 10 most expensive ICC items guide first. No matter what items you plan to go for, there’s no doubt the need for gold making in Phase 3 is really ramped up.

I’ve personally settled on farming 150,000 gold to get everything I need from Quel’Delar to full BOEs on every character and maybe even work on a Shadowmourne down the road.

So, here’s exactly what I’m doing to save up that gold in the next 45 days.

Making Passive Gold With Dailies

The first thing I’m doing every day is making sure not to miss out on any passive daily gold.

I do have Jewelcrafting on three characters, which means I get over 320 gold per day in just a few seconds turning in the daily. I’ve managed to pre-farm the Jewelcrafting daily, which you can do by making the items as you collect them. This is also the time where I take advantage of Alchemy transmute on my Death Knight, where you could easily fit in your Titansteel transmutes as well.

I also still do a handful of dailies for 200 more gold on my Druid per day. That’s mainly because the single best perk of dual specing Boomkin is just how quickly I can destroy an entire island of Kvaldir.

Of course, you can’t forget the Daily Heroics. I have been enchanting on my Paladin, so it feels fantastic vacuuming up all the epics.

Plus, I definitely want to keep stockpiling Emblems for Epic Gems in Phase 4.

Open World Goldfarming

The next key thing I’m doing to save up over 150,000 gold is Open World Goldfarming. There are three different fantastic spots in Phase 3 right now, all with different benefits and some small drawbacks.

1. Frostfloe Deep

My first favorite spot that I keep coming back to is the Frostfloe Deep cave in Northern, Storm Peaks. The Wailing Winds mobs here drop an insanely high amount of Crystallized Fire. That sells for three gold each on Faerlina and I know the prices are even higher on some servers.

The trick here is to bring a friend to farm the upper area while you farm the lower section. And that’s because this is a true hyperspawn where the enemies instantly respawn when they’re killed.

With a good farming class, you can easily push 700 GPA. There’s also a side benefit, which is that the Crystallized Fire can be sold instantly. That means you can immediately turn around and invest that gold or do flips with it.

2. Wetlands Gnolls

My second favorite spot is the Wool Cloth farming in the Wetlands.

This is a consistent 800 gold per hour farm because you get instant farming mobs that drop Wool Cloth at a really high rate. On my server, the wool is always worth at least 70 silver and it sells instantly. So, this just prints money.

But I do have a bunch of new optimizations to make it better.

The first big optimization is to bring Scrapbots, Jeeves, and the MOLL-E mailbox. Because this method generates so many inventory problems.

Then, I like to use Speedy AutoLoot to grab all the wool really fast. Whenever my inventory is full, I can use TradeSkillMaster to sell the trash and BOEs to a Scrapbot. I try to maximize Scrapbot usage by selling multiple times with one Scrapbot. Then, whenever my character has a lot of wool, I’ll just mail it to my Alt using the MOLL-E mailbox.

One of the big tricks I realized is that the Linen Cloth is basically worthless. So, I started destroying it. Also, having a second Alt logged out at the same location, able to drop another mailbox and more Scrapoots is a huge well.

3. Converted Heroes

The other farming spot I’ve started to really enjoy recently is the Icecrown, Converted Heroes.

These are a very comfortable 800 gold per hour. I always did this farm wrong in the past by sticking to the wall and I didn’t realize there were way more spawns throughout the entire area. This is definitely one of those farms way better on a class with AOE, like a Mage, and it’s even better with Tailoring. These mobs drop a ton of Frostweave Cloth and you get even more with the tailoring passive.

Also Read: WOTLK Classic: How To Prepare For Phase 4 Icecrown Citadel? - Investing & Goldmaking Guide

AFK Goldmaking Methods

I’ve really enjoyed doing AFK gold making methods, like Potion Crafting and making Leathers recently.

The numbers are deceiving because there’s still a lot of profit to be made on things, like Potions of Speed, Potions of Wild Magic and Mighty Frost Protection Potions. I would definitely recommend crafting everything in the process like the Pygmy Oils and also having Master of Potions.

I also like to do a lot of AFK Leatherworking, making things like Heavy Borean Leather and Heavy Knothide Leather. You can’t forget classics like Netherweave Cloth, either.

I just post a low price bait cloth and then anything under 15 silver is pure profit crafting heavy bandages. I’m not just relying on AFK gold making though since I’ve also recently begun mastering flipping.

Flipping is able to consistently generate me over 4,000 gold per day. I like to primarily do an undercut strategy with fast selling items. The main items I like to flip are things like rare and epic gems, leatherworking items, and Enchanting Vellums.

I’m using the Auctionator for these quick flips. And in order to get your Auctionator to look like mine, you’ll need to enable some settings in the options. The main settings you’ll need are the “Show Crafting Costs” and “Show Bag Items” in the Selling panel.

The main thing is to check prices using Auctionator and then craft 3-10 of any given item based on profit. Some of my favorites are the gem flips like the Runed Cardinal Ruby flip as well as the Leatherworking leg armor flips like the Icescale Leg Armor. I also love Enchant Weapon like Berserking and Mighty Spellpower, too.

The key though is that the bigger the number of profitable recipes you craft each day, the more profit you’ll make. You can even do better than me if you have one of every profession, since tailoring an Inscription is also very profitable.

From the many hours of flipping the last month, the biggest tip I can give you is that the number one spot on any item will always get 99% of the sales. Don’t be afraid to run a cancel search and then repost since it’s so fast if you have a hotkey set up.

The other tip is that raid times are when most of the sales will happen, so don’t get into undercut wars at five in the morning. Either way, if you don’t want to be up until five in the morning making gold, you should definitely switch to more profitable professions.

Kafka has brought some of the biggest twists into the meta.

In this guide, I am going to talk about things that you need to know about her, whether you have her or not, as well as cover important questions like how game-changing some of the build decisions are. And most importantly, I will showcase the most insane teams you can build with her. Believe me, these teams are amazing and it’s not something you want to miss out on.

1. New Teams

I honestly didn’t think Kafka would be this good because there were a lot of rumors going around that she would end up inferior.

But I am happy to tell you that the woman who gave life to our character is pretty amazing if not broken. So, if you are still struggling to add Kafka to your Honkai Star Rail Account, my answer is yes.

So, let’s take a look at some of the teams that are currently dominating Memory of Chaos.

*First of all, we’ve got an interesting comp made up of Sampo, Bronya, Kafka and a healer.

Now, what’s amazing about this team is the synergy with Kafka and Bronya. Basically, Kafka can trigger DoTs immediately upon using her skill and the Ultimate can also trigger Shock state on the enemies as well. So, Bronya gives Kafka an extra turn and with the massive ATK buff in addition to sometimes having Bronya ATK boost from Ultimate, Kafka will shred enemies to pieces.

And let’s not forget Sampo is also doing a lot of good damage from his DoTs, which will get triggered by Kafka’s skill.

However, there is a big drawback to using this team as well as a few others and that mainly has to do with an extremely high skill point usage. Activating Kafka’s and Bronya’s skill each turn puts a huge pressure on the skill point economy, especially if you’re not using Luocha. Because any other healer might need these skill points to keep the team alive. So, in this case, you will most often use Sampo’s basic attack and this team becomes kind of a single target killer.

But don’t get me wrong, this is probably the most fun team I’ve played with so far and the synergy is really good here.

Also, the pressure on SP becomes lower if you have E1 Bronya since then she has a chance to refund the 1 SP from her skill.

*Now, the next team is a pretty unique. Silver Wolf is yet again showing up here because it’s made up of her, Kafka, Tingyun and Bailu. This Mono Lightning team is amazing when the enemy has Quantum Weakness.

First of all, Silver Wolf can then consistently apply Lightning Weakness on them. But in addition, Tingyun’s ATK boost coming from both skill and ultimate as well as her restoring so much energy to Kafka, means that Kafka can dish out her Ultimate really often.

Although, this team won’t have that many DoTs going on, since Kafka will be the only one here doing the DoT damage. But regardless, it’s a unique comp that you can build if you have Silver Wolf.

Also, one important thing I wanted to mention here is that normally, Kafka’s best in slot relic set is Sizzling Thunder. But with this comp and against Quantum weak enemy, Genius of Brilliant Stars is way better for her. And I am talking about actual personal damage increase you wouldn’t see otherwise in other teams.

Still, keep in mind, this relic set has an extremely niche use-case. But if you do have it, it’s going to be amazing for Kafka in this team.

*Now currently, I am seeing a lot of player reports coming that Sampo, Kafka, Silver Wolf and Luocha is one of her best teams right now, which makes sense since you’re getting a massive DEF shred and RES reduction from Silver Wolf, while Luocha keeps the skill point economy happy and thriving and Sampo is the best or should I say top-tier team mate you can pair with Kafka. So, this team can easily clear the hardest content you’ll go up against.

*But what about Luka? Well, he is also really good with Kafka. You’ve probably seen a team made up of him, Sampo, Kafka and a Healer in other content creator videos. And what I really like about Luka is that the Bleed he applies from his skill scales super well with the enemy’s health, although it does have its limit that’s tied to his ATK.

So, as you can imagine, since Kafka can trigger the DoTs immediately with her skill, this bleed becomes amazing, especially since you don’t actually reduce the remaining turns on the DoTs triggered. So, the enemy will keep bleeding and Kafka will keep smiling.

Still, keep in mind this team is also extremely SP hungry. So, the best healer, unfortunately, is the limited Luocha here. But you can make it work yet again by sometimes not using Sampo’s skill if you have another healer built. And also, Luka’s skill only needs to be triggered seldom, since Bleed lingers around for 3 turns.

I mean, however you look at it, the fact that you can trigger DoT damage that ranges from 30 to 80k is insane and this team is super fun to play. And of course, you could replace Luka with Serval here who, by the way, can have her Shock exist along with Kafka’s.

However, one of the best things about triple DoT team that has Luka is that he can equip on himself Pearls of Sweat Light Cone, which helps him reduce enemies DEF further with his ultimate, while Serval is an Erudition unit, so she can’t even equip this great DEF shred cone.

In fact, if you’re running this triple DoT team, using Before the Tutorial Mission Starts light cone on Kafka, can help her regain energy so fast. Most of the times you will be able to trigger her ultimate every 2 turns, since Luka will be shredding Enemy’s DEF with his ultimate and the Pearls of Sweat light cone.

*Finally, one of the more quirky team comps that is a bit experimental at this point. But it’s made up of Himeko, Asta, Kafka and, of course, a healer.

I’ve been mentioning healers all the time. But you can use a Preservation unit, provided that they can keep the team alive. But I digress. So, this team is pretty funny because both Asta and Himeko can produce Fire DoT on enemies. Of course, Kafka can trigger them with her skill. But in addition, Asta can boost her ATK and increase her SPD, which are both important when building Kafka.

So, these are the teams that have had the most success with her. And there’s definitely a lot of variations you could go for. For example, instead of Silver Wolf, you could use Pela in a team with Sampo and Healer. So, keep in mind these teams are not set in stone.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail 1.2: The Newest 5-Star Lightning Nihility Unit Is Coming! - Kafka Pre-Release Analysis & Builds

2. Build Considerations

Now, when it comes to Kafka’s build considerations, they aren’t that super complex, but there are some major things you need to be aware of.

Basically, you want to build her with ATK Body and either ATK or SPD boots. If you have her signature light cone, going with ATK boots is fine, but for the most part, there are certain breakpoints that allow her to take more turns as you can see here:

• 121 SPD Extra Turn Every 2ND Cycle of New Enemy Wave
• 134 SPD Extra Turn Every 1ST and 4TH Cycle of New Enemy Wave
• 161 SPD Extra Turn Every 1ST, 2ND and 4TH Cycle of New Enemy Wave

So, you can aim for these thresholds as long as you can hit them.

Just keep in mind that if you play her with Sampo or other DoT character, make sure she has at least 1 less speed than them, so they can take their turn first and then she can trigger their DoTs with her skill.

Now, as for the main relic set, obviously, Sizzling Thunder 4-set is amazing for her. But if you don’t have it, you can go with two pieces Hacker/Sizzling or Sizzling and Musketeer.

As for Planar Ornaments, it’s super simple. You can choose Lightning DMG Sphere and ATK% Rope. You can go with Break Effect instead, but it’s not always easy to guarantee Kafka will be the one breaking the enemy toughness. So, ATK% remains far more reliable.

And honestly, there’s not much to the sets themselves. Space Sealing Station is by far her best in the slot, although again if you want to go with that Break Effect build, then Talia: Kingdom of Banditry is a good choice.

And as for the overall build, you can see the overview here:

SPD> ATK%> EHR Substats

Just focus on SPD, then ATK% substats, while picking up some Effect Hit Rate won’t hurt you along the way.

Now luckily, even if she applies status conditions on enemies, you don’t need much Effect Hit Rate. In fact, you only need 10% from substats because the other 18% comes from her traces, which is perfectly enough to land her Shock DoTs consistently.

But here’s where a bit of complexity comes in. So, there’s a lot of good light cones for our mommy character. But which one you should go for?

Well, truth be told, if you haven’t got the signature cone or Good Night Sleep Well 4-star gacha cone, then her best choice is going to be Fermata, which you can easily obtain from the Forgotten Hall shop.

In fact, I would argue Fermata is really strong on her because at max superimposition, she will consistently deal 32% more damage and even when she breaks enemies, she will have 32% more Break Effect.

Although, Good Night Sleep Well does outperform it when using her in a team with other Nihility debuff characters. But I wouldn’t sweat it too much. Because the only sweat you do need to care about has to do with the Pearls and that usually goes on to Sampo or Luka.

But everything else shown here would be her best and recommended cones:

• Patience Is All You Need
• Good Night Sleep Well
• Fermata
• Eyes Of The Prey
• In The Name Of The World
• Incessant Rain
• Resolution Shines As The Pearls Of Sweat
• Before The Tutorial Mission Starts

But keep in mind, only the signature light cone comes out on top. But even then, I would say her selection of light cones is super flexible. So, you don’t have to worry which one is best for her because the selection process is pretty easy.

3. Eidolons & Opinion

So, I think in terms of the so-called Meta that’s honestly kinda similar to Genshin Impact’s, I would say Kafka is a pretty strong unit. But the biggest thing about her has to be her ability to enable multiple new teams, which in my opinion, is the most exciting aspect of any new character.

She deals good damage. I often would see her ultimate ranging from 70 to 110 thousand. And then afterwards, enemies would take 30 to 50 thousand DoT damage depending on the team comp, which in my opinion is pretty impressive, not to mention the fact it’s funny to watch my foes die before they can take their turn.

And what’s amazing here is that I have some of the worst relics equipped on her. So, imagine how much better she would be with proper stats.

Still, if I had one minor complaint, then it would be the Skill Point problems that you’ll run into unless you’re using Luocha. I will admit it. Initially, I thought Luocha was only good because of the enemy lineups we had when he first came out. But now it’s pretty clear that the best-selling point about him is the auto-healing that doesn’t require that many skill points.

With any other healer, you will quickly notice how you will run out of SP pretty fast, especially in the triple DoT team with Sampo and Luka or the Bronya comp I showcased earlier. So, you need to resort to things like Sampo only using his basic attack, to preserve some of that SP.

And I am not sure if Kafka’s at fault here. Maybe once we get a new DoT character who isn’t skill point hungry, then we can see teams that are more flexible with healers other than Luocha. Or maybe we get a healer who is similar to the coffin guy and can heal without using that much SP.

Also, when it comes to her Eidolons, her 1st one is seriously busted. It’s a bit specific and requires more Effect Hit Rate than usual to make it work all the time. But she gets about 19% DMG increase, which you won’t see happen again until E6.

And her second eidolon is literally made for DoT teams. But that would be pushing too hard if you’re F2P and if you still enjoy her using, maybe on her rerun you can go for E2.

But overall, I think Kafka is a great character that has a fun new playstyle, enables fun new teams, and I can finally have her look at me like I am not worthy of her.

This guide will show you eight tasks in The Elder Scrolls Online that you can complete every day. This is what your daily routine in ESO should look like.

1. Collect Your Daily Rewards

Every day that you log into The Elder Scrolls Online, you get a free reward. This can be anything from collectibles, potions and poisons, XP Scrolls, ESO Gold, and other forms of currency.

Claiming your login reward should be your very first action every day.

2. Upgrade Your Mount

You should upgrade your mount skills as early and as often as possible.

There is a stable master in every major town marked with the horse head icon. Talk to them to upgrade your mount’s Speed, Stamina, and Carry Capacity. You can only apply one point every day at the cost of 250 gold.

Note: Mount upgrades are not shared between your characters. So, if you have multiple, make sure to buy an upgrade daily on each of them.

3. Complete Daily Crafting Writs

Crafting Writs are special daily quests for the seven crafting disciplines that offer extra XP and gold for fairly low effort.

Any character at or above level 6 can do the Writs as long as they are certified for the specific crafting profession.

Talk to Millenith or Danel Telleno to complete the certification process. They can be found in all major cities. You can complete your Writs from the local writ board every day.

If you’re on PC, you can use add-ons to speed up the process. But for those on consoles, the best way to improve time spent is by setting your tables to the quest only option.

Your maxed out professions with full skill points allotted to the top passive in the tree have a chance to earn a Master Writ in addition to gold, XP, crafting materials, and Survey Reports that you can use for even more crafting materials.

This will take a few minutes. But the selling prices for materials and Master Writs are a great way to make gold fast.

4. Researching Crafting Traits

While you are completing your Writs, start researching traits. This is especially important for using Transmutation to change your Traits on your gear later or if you are just interested in crafting.

You should always have research active, at least with your dedicated crafter character.

Research takes real time to complete. The more Traits on an item that you have completed, the longer it takes to complete the next one.

Research can take only a few hours or up to a whole month, depending on how many you have left. So, the sooner you start, the better.

There are also skills in the crafting tree to improve research time and the number of items that you can research at one time. This will speed up the process of researching all Traits, considerably.

5. Complete Daily Endeavors

You can find available Endeavor quests in the Activity Finder under the Endeavors tab.

Endeavors include both weekly and daily quests, with a limit of three dailies per day and one weekly per week.

Endeavors reward with gold and the Seals of Endeavor currency, with which you can purchase Crown Crate items that are available with the active crates.

Also Read: Elder Scrolls Online: The Best Arcanist Build You Need To Try In Necrom - One Bar Stamina Build

6. Random Daily Dungeon

Completing the daily random dungeon for the first time per day will give you a huge chunk of XP, 10 Transmutes, and other items.

It is best to do this once per day every day to get the most out of the rewards. You can do this on Normal or Veteran to get the same rewards and can complete it every day on each character that you have if you are needing the Transmutes.

7. Random Daily Battleground

Just like the dungeon daily, completing the random Battleground daily will give you a huge chunk of XP, gold, more transmutes, and other items.

This is a PVP game mode. But you get the rewards whether you win or lose.

8. Daily Pledges

When you reach level 45, you can start accepting Pledges by reading the Undaunted Enclave Invitation that you receive in your level up rewards.

Pledges our special daily dungeon quests that ask you to complete specific dungeons. You can pick up the Pledges from the NPCs found in the Undaunted Enclave. The Undaunted Enclave is located in the capital city of every Alliance, way rested in Stormhaven, Mournhold, Deshaan and Elden Root in Grahtwood.

By completing Pledges, you’ll receive keys to open monster shoulder chests in addition to some Transmutes, gold, and XP. Make sure to save any Undaunted Keys until you hit the gear cap of a 160 CP.

Pledges can also help you to level the Undaunted Skill Line in which are some very useful passive skill that can be unlocked.

Benefits Of Doing These Tasks & Additional Dailies

These tasks can help you to level up faster, make gold faster, and increase your overall in-game efficiency.

Most of them will only take a few minutes, but will help you to progress and build your character.

These are just some of the dailies available. There are tons of other daily quests gathered throughout Tamriel, including the Mages Guild daily, the Fighters Guild daily, Zone dailies, Tales of Tribute dailies, Arena dailies, and Trial dailies that you can include in your daily routine. So, get out there and explore!

It’s official that Fontaine is finally the next destination in Genshin Impact. And these are the top 5 new features coming with the 4.0 update.

Feature 1: New Region

I am sure a lot of you are anxious about the whole water exploration mechanic. And honestly, it looks pretty decent.

First of all, you can use any character to swim around, not just the Traveler. And there is no annoying Oxygen bar to worry about. So, you can take your sweet time exploring the depths, although there is a stamina bar for sprinting. But you won’t die or anything if it runs out. And there are even these currents that you can swim to and increase the speed.

But when it comes to the actual Fontaine region, it looks amazing. The devs were clear that you will barely see any empty spaces when going underwater. There’s chock full of stuff to explore, many different and cute water creatures living here and some you can even utilize for various things, like gaining a shield and there are tons of different areas to explore on the ground. So, you won’t be just swimming underwater all the time.

Now, when it comes to new enemies, we saw some cool designs of these Clockwork Meka. But there’s also two new bosses that got introduced.

The first one is called Icewind Suite. And this boss fight is going to be really unique because you’ll need to do adapt to different mechanics that you’re not used to seeing. And the other boss is going to be the big Mr Crab with a volcano on its back called the Emperor of Fire and Iron.

However, probably the biggest change we are going to see in the game is going to be this system called Arkhe. But vision users from Fontaine have this unique attribute and the Arkhe is made up of two opposing energies - Ousia and Pneuma.

But basically, characters from Fontaine will yield this power and you will be able to use against enemies of Fontaine or other various objects.

For example, the Clockwork Meka who holds a shield can be removed from it if you use one of the Fontaine characters. Or, in other example, if Ousia and Pneuma energies are aligned, the Annihliation reaction is triggered, and it generates energy.

As far as I understand, it’s not as intricate as the elemental system. But it will be the unique aspect of any Fontaine character that you pull for. Like to me, all of these sound superabstract as now and we’ll need to see how these mechanics work when the update is live.

Finally, in order to reach Fontaine, you will be able to either take a boat from Sumeru or if you have completed the Archon quest in Mondtstadt, you will be able to quickly teleport to Fontaine instead.

I guess Hoyo finally realized a lot of new players have a massive backlog of quests before they can reach a new region. So, it’s really nice to see there’s some help to fast forward this process.

On a final note, the Archon’s quest will persist from 4.0 to 4.2 update, which is great to hear this. Because the Archon quests of each nation are really exciting when playing through without filler content in between.

Feature 2: New Events

With the new 4.0 version, we’re getting a bunch of events.

Now, the major event that will be happening is going to be called Mega Meka Melee, which consists of a few activities, including some underwater timed challenges, a combat game mode and a rhythm mini-game called Dance Dance Resolution. And your reward for completing these mini-games is going to be good-old Benny boy, along with tons of materials shown here.

The next event called Relic Records will require you to collect different types of mats and defeat the monsters in the Fontaine region. To me, this looks like an introductory event to help us get better acquainted with the new region.

Then, there’s also going to be a Photo event. It’s pretty simple. Take some photos of Fontaine region, learn more about its locations and get some rewards.

There’s also a dedicated combat event called Verdict of Blades. It seems like it will be using few unique mechanics to make the combat feel a bit more different, so that’s kinda nice.

Finally, we can see all the events condensed into one place and from the looks of it. There’s also going to be a Leyline Overflow event some time later.

However, in my opinion, the biggest surprise here is the free Lynette that everyone will be able to obtain as long as they have reached Adventure Rank 25. And if that’s not all, there’s more love coming from Hoyo for the beginner players and you’ll also get enough materials to get Lynette to first ascension.

Feature 3: New Characters

Finally, we will take a closer look at the 4.0 characters.

Lyney

Starting with Lyney, he’s a 5-star Pyro Bow user. And it seems like he will have a similar playstyle to Ganyu.

His charged shot has two levels. The first charging level is just a regular charged shot while the 2nd one can become a Prop arrow and after unleashing, it will deal increased damage and summon a Grin-malkin hat. But I prefer calling it the cat in a hat. This little buddy of his will taunt the enemies and have some health. But when it expires or gets destroyed, it will deal Pyro damage to enemies.

Finally, his burst turns him into the cat in the hat. You can move around with him, damage the enemies and then, afterwards, explode to deal damage once more and create a new cat in the hat. So, it looks like his burst feels very similar to Fischl’s and I feel like his entire kit is like a mix between of Ganyu and Fischl.

Lynette

Now, the other one of the two performers is Lynette.

At first, I honestly thought she is going to be a dedicated support for Lyney. But it seems like she is more of a support that you can use with many characters.

Basically, her skill has a similar feeling to Yelan’s. You can either tap it to deal damage or hold down the button and enter this shadowy state where she runs around and has an ability to mark an enemy. And then afterwards, when the skill ends, she deals damage to the marked enemy.

I am not sure how useful it is going to be in combat, besides applying Anemo. But having more characters who have an increased run speed is great. Because Genshin’s exploration is getting bigger by almost every update.

And as for her burst, it’s really cute. Just like Lyney, she summons a cat in a hat and it will periodically deal Anemo damage in an AoE. In addition, this burst has elemental absorption. And what’s cool about it is that the element it absorbs, it will shoot out the same element attacks to enemies.

This will be really interesting to see if it applies enough of the elemental gauge, so that some characters who utilize Vape or Melt can perform it more consistently.

Also, I am not sure if Lynette has an ability to group the enemies, like other Anemo characters. But maybe this will be possible with constellations.

Also Read: The Best Guide To Wanderer In Genshin Impact! - Best Artifacts, Weapons, Teams, Playstyle & More

Freminet

And then, we finally have the last sibling, Freminet.

He is a 4-star Cryo Claymore user who has a cute penguin Pers that helps him in combat.

By activating his skill called a Pers timer, his normal attacks will increase Pers Pressure Level and unleash waves of frost damage and other varying attacks that will combo on top of each other. These attacks will vary on the Pressure Level and honestly, he seems way too interesting for a 4-star, so here’s hoping we can have some fun with his playstyle.

Also, if you use him in your party, he will reduce the underwater sprinting stamina bar by 35%. So, right now, he is the most OP character when it comes to underwater swimming.

But let’s not forget that we also got a sneak peek at the banners and the first phase will have Lyney and Yelan with Lynettte while the 2nd phase will have Zhongli and Childe as well as Freminet.

By the way, the 2nd phase banner is a nice nostalgic callback to 1.1 if anyone remembers. And the 5-star bow for Lyney will also be featured.

Feature 4: New Equipment

If it’s a new major update, you know we’re getting some new equipment. And in this case, we’re gonna be able to farm 2 new artifact sets.

However, Hoyo seems to be playing sneaky here and I cannot talk about these artifacts officially. Because nothing has been revealed about them. But on the brighter side, we’re getting 5 new craftable weapons and 5 new Battle Pass weapons as well. If you find it difficult to obtain or craft these weapons, you can directly purchase a Genshin Impact Account. This will save you a lot of time and energy.

What’s cool about the Battle Pass is that these new weapons will be added alongside the existing ones. So, if you’re still not done refining some of them, you can still take your time or start collecting new ones.

Also, for those who you who have powered through fishing quest to obtain The Catch, a new 4-star sword will be available if you’re ready to go on another fisherman’s phase.

Feature 5: Quality Of Life

Couple of a few more things I want to mention come from the developer’s discussion.

First of all, 8 of these artifact sets are going into the strongbox. And I cannot tell you how happy I am to see Emblem and Tenacity in here. Because as much as I love Shimenawa’s set, I was mostly in that domain trying to obtain godlike Emblem pieces. And I don’t even have to tell you how salty I would feel after trying to farm the Tenacity set and all I am getting are Pale Flame HP Drops.

Also, we will be able to destroy 4-star artifacts more quickly with the new button added, although I am not sure who’s crazy enough to waste that precious artifact experience here but more power to you, I guess.

And for those 5 people who are still playing Genshin TCG, you’ll be able to now observe duels, which in all honesty, it’s a cool feature to have.

Then, there’s a really cool party system update. Not only will characters enter with unique animations and stand in awesome poses, but the party screen will also have different backgrounds.

Finally, I am not sure about you, but this is one of the top anticipated quality of life changes that I needed. We’re actually getting a multi-layered map.

Part of a reason why I stopped exploring Sumeru’s desert regions is because it just became too overwhelming to navigate the areas without a proper map system. So, now that we have this, I might actually just go back and see what’s hiding in the desert.

All in all, we’re getting a new region of Fontaine that features underwater mechanics, a bunch of events that give out free rewards, including the new 4-star Lynette. While when it comes to the banners, phase 1 will have Lyney and Yelan with Lynette, and phase 2 will feature Zhongli with Childe and Freminet.

Finally, two new artifact sets, 5 new craftable weapons and Battle Pass are also coming with the new update. And there’s the new fishing sword. But that’s basically 4.0 in a nutshell.

These are all the differences between Path of Exile 1 and its independent sequel, Path of Exile 2 that we know about after the conclusion of ExileCon 2023.

Crafting In POE 2

As it currently stands, crafting is entirely different in Path of Exile 2.

Firstly, the Crafting Bench no longer exists unless there is a replacement that has not been detailed yet. This means you can no longer add an extra affix to your gear with ease, whether it’s Fire Resistance, a bit of Maximum Life, or a few points of damage.

Additionally, metacrafting might be gone with this removal, too. This means all the metamods like suffixes cannot be changed that enable players to craft powerful items might no longer be accessible. This system was originally added to Path of Exile 1 in 1.2 Forsaken Masters and was seen as a good update by many. It’s going extinct in POE 2.

Alongside the removal of the Crafting Bench, multiple crafting currency items have been changed or removed in POE 2. Orbs of Alteration, the POE Currency that allow you to re-roll the affixes of magic items are gone completely. So are Orbs of Scouring, the POE Currency that allow you to transform a rare or magic item into a normal item. Chaos Orbs have also been changed.

Now, they randomly remove one affix and add another. Essentially, they’re re-rolling a single affix on a rare item, not all of them as they used to. As you’ve seen in the picture below, every currency item is getting a facelift with the sequel. The art looks objectively incredible.

Vendors & Gold

Sticking to the currency subject, vendors will not trade you shards or full-on currency orbs in Path of Exile 2. When you sell them items, they will give you Gold.

This Gold can be used to purchase POE Items from various vendors who are supposed to have well stocked actually decent items in their shops.

Plus, you’ll be able to use Gold to gamble for items, even unique items. It’s a bit like POE 1’s Gwennen Gambling system in Expedition.

Flasks are getting a major shake-up in POE 2. Normal monsters will no longer grant flask charges instead, only magic, rare, and unique mobs will. This drastically decreases the rate at which your flasks recharge.

Plus, flasks will no longer fill entirely upon visiting a town. You must use a well in the town to refill them. Utility flasks are also catered to be reactionary, not enhancements.

We don’t exactly know which flasks will remain in POE 2. But we do know Quicksilver Flasks currently do not exist in the sequel to POE 1. These are the flasks that increase your movement speed.

Big Boss Changes

The core mechanics surrounding boss fights are also updated in POE 2.

Corpse rushing or the act of respawning and rushing an already injured boss, is dead. If you die during a boss fight, you’ll need to begin the fight from the beginning. In the same vein, logging out midfight will no longer save you from Deadly Strikes. When you log back in, you’ll zone in to the moment you left. The boss will have no mercy on you. This kills the log out macro used by many hardcore POE players.

Unlike POE 1, every single area in the game will have a meaningful boss encounter. Most are as in-depth as the present-day Pinnacle Bosses. This will lead to POE 2 to launch with at least 100 distinct bosses in the campaign. This doesn’t account for a new endgame or Pinnacle Bosses.

Bosses are also integral even to base POE 2 character power progression. Certain optional bosses and core bosses will reward statistical character-based passive bonuses upon killing them. This function is in a similar vein to the current kill or ally with the bandits questline in POE 1 Act 2, except it appears the bonuses are varied and far more frequent.

For example, one boss might grant +5% Fire Resistance while another might increase your Maximum Life by 50%. Additionally, bosses will now be a good source of great items the first time you kill them. In the campaign, the first time you kill each boss, it will have a huge bonus to rarity, encouraging you not to skip them.

Those aren’t the only big boss changes. You are also able to stun and freeze bosses in POE 2. Each boss has a custom stun animation. Many bosses and creatures, for that matter, can now be much larger too as they’ve redone how hitboxes work. All hitboxes in POE 1 are square, but in POE 2, they can greatly customize that and allow for huge encounters.

Skill & Gem Updates

As discovered in 2019, we no longer socket gems into our gear. We socket support gems into skill gems.

A further difference between POE 1 and POE 2 revealed in Exilecon 2023 is that we initially find uncut gems and then can choose what gem to transfer support those into, selecting from dozens of scales.

Uncut gems are various tiers, which allow access to each different tier of skill gems. Firestorm might be a tier 2 skill and always begin as a fifth level gem while Fireball might be a tier 1 scale and always begin at first level.

POE 2’s new gem system will not be brought into POE 1. The system shall remain distinctly different. Many skill gems are also hyper fixated on a specific situation or use, as you can have up to 9 six-Link skills in POE 2.

Touching on support gems briefly, many don’t add raw damage anymore and instead focus on adding quite specific mechanics to your skill gems. Pure damage adding supports do still exist, but they’re fewer in number.

Unlike POE 1, weapon swapping will be important and consequential in the sequel in POE 2. You can tie specific clusters of your passive skill tree alongside specific skill gems to either of your weapons.

For example, you can have a fire damage ax and a cold damage ax. When you use a certain slam scale tied to fire damage, you will pull out the attached fire damage ax and use a passive skill tree tied to dealing more fire damage. When you use a different slam skill tied to cold damage, you will automatically swap to the cold damage ax and the version of your skill tree tied to enhancing cold damage.

This could allow characters to actually build out a weapon and skill specifically for bossing accompanied by another set catered to clearing huge packs with the ability to swap seamlessly between. The two the possibilities here are absolutely ridiculous.

Layered on top of these gems and weapon differences is the fact that GGG is designing many skill gems to be tied to specific weapons, an amount far larger than in POE 1.

The most prominent example at Exile Con was the Warrior demos, using the two-handed mace. Many of the skills used were either tied explicitly to maces or, even more specifically, two-handed maces. This is intentional, meant to give each weapon an identity.

Additionally, weapon implicits are going to be far wilder. For example, a mace implicit might destroy enemy corpses if they are killed with a critical hit, while a dagger might break an enemy’s armor by a certain amount upon crit. This is far more very than POE 1 where, for example, sword implicits are all tied to accuracy rating.

Also Read: Everything We Know About Path Of Exile 2 So Far - 11 Points

POE 2 Character Classes

In Path of Exile 2, there are 12 character classes. The only class missing from Path of Exile 1 is the Scion, which wouldn’t mesh well with the new class identities GGG is going for with the sequel.

The six new classes are the Warrior, the Sorceress, the Mercenary, the Monk, the Huntress, and the Druid.

Like the initial six, each is tied to a specific attribute or attribute combination. Each of the matched classes starts at specific points on the new massive passive skill tree. But they all have unique gem rewards and a set of three new ascendancy classes attached.

Each of the 12 POE 2 classes has their own batch of three ascendancies, stacking up to a total of 36 total ascendancy classes. All of these ascendancy classes are different to the ones in Path of Exile 1.

For example, the Ranger in POE 2 can ascend as a Beastmaster, a Tactician, or a Survivalist. But in POE 1, she can become a Deadeye, a Pathfinder, or a Raider. These sets of new ascendancies will greaten the divide between the predecessor and its sequel.

As will the fact that you do not ascend via the Labyrinth, there is a new Ascension mechanic in POE 2.

Lots Of Small POE 1 & POE 2 Differences

Now, here’s a barrage of miscellaneous differences between the two games.

Passive skill tree masteries will not be in Path of Exile 2. They’re a POE 1 only feature for now.

Portal Scrolls now have about a 2.5 second casting animation during boss fights, only you can be knocked out of the animation. This is similar to how the Portal gem in POE 1 functions.

Many league mechanics are unlocked by specific quests. For example, the revamped Delirium mechanic is unleashed upon interacting with a quest involving the strange voice. In POE 1, most league mechanics just occur randomly at first.

The world map is massive, sprawling, and far more detailed than Path of Exile 1’s.

Player characters, our Exiles, speak much more and dynamically adjust choices we make during our playthroughs. For example, if we zoom past NPCs without speaking, they’ll remark to us and will retort.

Fewer items drop from monsters. Vendor shops are more incentivized. Perhaps this is a campaign-only concept with loot becoming a bigger slice of the pie in the late game.

Area maps are much larger and they feel much larger due to the lower overall speed of movement. Fortunately, they do appear to be swarmed with monsters and boss fights.

All item icons will have a consistency between them, unlike in POE 1, wherein some icons might be cartoony or just enhanced pictures. Iconic unique items, like Headhunter and Chaperone’s wrappings, will be in POE 2.

Staves as a weapon will always include a mana free spell skill attached as implicits, while Quarterstaffs will fulfill the melee staff experience.

Resistances no longer go below zero. The new resource Spirit is used for all skills that usually dealt with Mana Reservation. There will be new support for it on the passive skill tree and items.

Scepters are extremely minion and aura focused weapons now. Additionally, Traps and Mines are now actual weapons, not skill gems.

Complete Wrap-Up

Overall POE 1 and POE 2 are both ARPGs set in the world of Wraeclast developed by Grinding Gear Games.

They do appear to have fundamental differences, especially when it comes to maintaining resources. But I’m confident both will be excellent games to play and I plan on continuing to play and cover both of them as long as I’m having fun.

Today, we will be looking at how damage works in Honkai Star Rail.

So first, an in-depth guide on the damage formula, and then we will go through all the ways we can boost this damage, as well as how effective these boosts are.

For example, we will see how strong DMG% is versus ATK%, including any additional DMG% if you already have a ton. We will also look at how efficient crit ratios are, and how speed substats fare versus crit substats, as well as how well defence shred and resistance shred boost our damage, and much more.

The Damage Formula

First, let’s look at the good old classic damage formula.

It is composed of 7 different elements, but some formulas also show 8. We have 3 elements that we can affect by boosting our characters, and 4 elements that depend on the enemies and how we affect them.

So, for character dependent elements, we have our Base Damage, the Crit Multiplier, and the Damage Boost Multiplier.

Base Damage Explanation

First, we have our Base Damage, which is the skill multiplier multiplied by the scaling stat, plus any additional damage.

Seele’s ultimate at level 10, for example, does 425% of her attack, meaning her ultimate’s base damage will be 4.25 times her total attack, which at 3k attack would be 12750 damage.

If it scales off HP or Defense, or anything else, you use those values instead, multiplied by their respective skill multiplier.

How Do CRITs Work?

We then have the Crit Multiplier.

If you crit, your base damage will be multiplied by the crit multiplier, which is equal to 1 + your crit damage percentage. So, if you have 100% crit damage, your crit multiplier is 2, and your base damage will be doubled upon critting.

To find your average damage, you multiply your base damage by your crit rate and your crit multiplier, and add it to your base damage multiplied by 1 minus your crit rate.

You’re adding the damage of a crit with the damage of a non crit, respectively multiplied by their chances to happen.

At a crit ratio of 80 to 160 with our same ultimate damage from before, we do the following calculation, giving us an average damage of 29070.

How Does DMG% Boost DPS?

We then have the Damage Boost Multiplier.

Any damage% bonuses are totaled up and added to the base multiplier of 1, which will then multiply your damage again.

You have general DMG% bonuses that work on all attacks, like Bronya’s DMG% boost on her skill, then you have specific DMG% bonuses, like Subscribe for More, which are only taken into account on Basic Attacks or Skills. Or, another example is Elemental DMG% bonuses, which only work when said attack is of the corresponding element.

If, for example, we have a Quantum DMG% orb on our Seele, and our talent at level 10, we have a DMG% boost of 118.9%, and we thus multiply our previous damage by 2.189, giving us 63634.23 damage.

Next, we are onto the enemy multipliers: the DEF Multiplier, the RES Multiplier, the Vulnerability Multiplier, and finally the Broken Multiplier (this is part of a Universal DMG Reduction Multiplier that enemies have).

How OP Is DEF Reduction?

The DEF Multiplier is first.

It is calculated by a division. The numerator is your character’s level plus 20. The denominator is the enemy’s level + 20 multiplied by 1, minus any defence reduction or ignore effects. And this is then added onto your character’s level again plus 20.

What this basically means is your DEF multiplier depends on two things: the level difference between you and the enemy, as well as any defence reductions or ignore effects.

At the same level as your enemy, you are dividing your level by your level times two essentially, so your defence multiplier is 0.5, and your damage is halved.

As the enemy’s level increases, the denominator increases and your multiplier drops. This is why we calculate with a defence multiplier of 0.476, because we are level 80 versus level 90 enemies.

As we include defence reduction, the enemy level is multiplied by a smaller and smaller number, increasing our division’s final multiplier, until we hit 100% defence reduction, where we will now be dividing your level by your level, giving us a defence multiplier of 1. And Defence Reduction doesn’t go further than 100%.

Versus a level 90 enemy with a level 80 Seele, equipped with the 4 piece quantum set, we will ignore 20% of their defence and multiply our damage by this long number, dropping our damage to 33848.

Why To Fight Weak Enemies?

The second multiplier is the Resistance Multiplier.

You have the base resistance multiplier of 1, and then you subtract the subtraction of the enemy resistance with your resistance reduction or penetration. So, if the enemy has 20% resistance, you get a resistance multiplier of 0.8. If they have 40%, 0.6, etc.

If you have resistance reduction, you are removing this resistance, and any further reduction still counts towards your resistance multiplier, now boosting your damage. If you have 20% resistance reduction on an enemy with 20% resistance, they now have 0% resistance, and your multiplier is back at 1. If they have 0% resistance, your multiplier is at 1.2, and so your damage is increased.

This is why we generally bring DPS to an enemy with a weakness corresponding to our DPS’ type, since any enemy that is weak to an element has 0% resistance to that element, and so your base resistance multiplier is 1.

Including Seele’s A4, which gives us 20% RES PEN, versus a Quantum Weak enemy, we now have a resistance multiplier of 1.2 on our damage, increasing our damage to 40617.6.

Vulnerability Modifiers

Next up is a very simple one, the Vulnerability Multiplier, which is indicated by text saying increased damage received or increased damage taken by enemies, like Welt’s A2, or Silver Wolf’s signature Light Cone. By the way, if you haven't pulled Silver Wolf by now or find some of her Light Cones too hard to get, buying a Honkai Star Rail Account would be a good option.

You have a base multiplier of 1, and any vulnerability modifiers will increase it by their respective percentages. Say we have Welt on the team with his 12% vulnerability, we multiply our damage thus far by 1.12, increasing our damage to 45491.7.

Why Breaking Is Important?

Finally, we have the Broken Multiplier, which is part of enemies’ total damage reduction, and is dependent on the toughness bar. The broken multiplier is 0.9 when the enemy has a toughness bar, and 1 when they don’t.

So, you gain a 1.11x damage increase if you hit a broken enemy, meaning if you can save that juicy ultimate for when the enemy is broken, it’ll give a final nice boost.

TLDR On Boosting Damage

Now, onto how we boost our damage.

For an easy summary, we boost our damage by boosting each of these multipliers. So, we increase our trace level or scaling factor for our base damage, then we increase our crit ratio for our crit multiplier, and add DMG% buffs for our damage.

Applying def reduction debuffs or gaining def ignore will boost our def multiplier, the same with resistance reduction for our resistance multiplier. Inflicting vulnerability will boost our damage too. And finally, breaking an enemy’s toughness bar will grant us more damage.

But then come the questions of balancing stats. How much attack% I should have? How much crit should I have? Is DMG% better than ATK%? What if I have 100 DMG% already? And that is what part 2 of this guide will explain.

DMG% VS ATK%

Our first comparison is DMG% versus ATK%. This also works for any other scaling factor, like DMG% vs ATK HP% on Blade. At no buffs DMG% beats ATK%, due to characters and light cones having a base attack, and the gloves relic piece having a flat 352.8 attack.

For example, 10% of damage is worth a lot more than 10% of attack. This only further increases as we add ATK% buffs and main stats to our units. Adding an ATK% main stat skews the difference in favour of damage% even more. If we only add a damage% orb instead, ATK% becomes a bit stronger than damage%.

However, we will naturally be building a lot of attack%, and damage% only comes from the orb, set bonuses, and ally buffs. Attack% can be on the chest, boots, orb, rope, and also comes from a ton of set bonuses and ally buffs.

So, as you can see, two attack main stats make DMG% very favourable even with a DMG% orb. Even with a 66% buff from Bronya’s skill, it still comes out ahead.

DMG% VS CRIT%

DMG% versus CRIT% is similar, except they are both multipliers onto your base damage. CRIT also has the problem of only being valuable if you have enough of it.

For example, from no DMG% or crit buffs or pieces,100% damage is equal to a crit ratio of 55/110 in boosting your damage. Getting a better crit ratio improves the damage boosting capabilities of more crit, but it also doesn’t mean DMG% should be wasted. With a lot of DMG%, crit becomes very valuable, but so does crit with a lot of extra damage%.

ATK% VS CRIT%

Finally, in this three way match up, we have ATK% vs CRIT%, which is compared in increments of 2 substats, so 2 ATK% subs versus 1 crit rate and 1 crit damage sub. This is considering a base crit of 5 to 50.

For example, crit stats without initial crit are useless, and attack% is favoured even after two main stats. Now if we have a favourable crit ratio, any additional crit stats are worth a lot more.

So, don’t go adding some crit to a unit when you won’t hit a high enough ratio for it to be worth it. This also shows that DPS does want crit, as ATK% is pretty saturated, and it’s why we go crit chests on our DPS to avoid any DPS loss.

The Perfect CRIT Ratio

Now, onto Crit Efficiency, this one is a classic from Genshin Impact, and just shows, depending on your crit rate or crit damage, how effective extra crit damage or rate is to the perfect 1 to 2 ratio.

This shows that, for example, 50 crit rate to 100 crit damage is a nice ratio, but having 15 extra crit rate, or 30 extra crit damage, won’t impact your ratio too much, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the perfect crit ratio.

We can also see this in the average Crit Multiplier, which is how we find our average damage dependent on our crit rate and crit damage. We used this earlier in the Seele calculation to find our average ultimate damage.

At the base 5 to 50 crit ratio characters have, our average damage is not increasing by much at all. But we also see that whilst the perfect ratio will boost our damage by the most amount, not having a 1:2 ratio is still great for damage.

Speed Breakpoints

Now, we are onto speed and their comparisons.

Remember, speed varies a lot, and speed can make tuning buffs better, or worse, and this is just showcasing how effective speed is for DPS turns and damage gain.

We first have the standard speed breakpoints. You have probably already seen this from Grimro. It shows how to get additional actions per cycle in the first 8 cycles.

For example, if we want 10 actions by the 6th cycle, we need 154 speed. This also shows the infamous 134 speed breakpoint. That gives us an additional action every 3 cycles, including the first cycle.

So, we get 2 actions in our first cycle, and then 6 in our 4th, and so on so forth. As for effective damage gain, we compare how many actions we get to the standard 1 action per 1 cycle.

So, getting two actions by the first cycle is a 100% damage gain. But 3 actions by the second cycle is only a 50% damage gain, since you’re already supposed to have 2 actions. This doesn’t mean you should just go for 161 speed breakpoints for damage gain. It just shows the potential.

SPD% VS ATK%

To further showcase that just going for speed is bad for DPS, we now have two comparisons: speed substats versus attack subs, and speed versus crit. These are my favourite comparisons, since they show the breakpoints really well.

SPD versus ATK shows 1 minimum sub of speed versus 1 minimum sub of attack. Obviously, having more attack will win until you hit a speed breakpoint. And having stats is important too.

Going for just speed for more turns won’t give you much gains, unless you have the stats to do damage. This also shows how important speed boots are for DPS gains. But that too much speed is unneeded as well.

With attack% buffs and a mainstat, getting an additional attack main stat does not prove as significant as speed boots, since we get our damage multiplied by more than 8 cycles, and we are closer to a future breakpoint for even more damage.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail 1.2: 5 Things You Need To Know About Imbibitor Lunae - Stats, Ultimate, Skill, Technique & Gameplay

SPD% VS CRIT%

SPD% versus CRIT% is the same concept, but with the added nuance of crit needing a good ratio to be worth in the first place.

If you hit breakpoints, it’s great, but so is the value of the crit for your damage. You will be needing a good crit ratio in the first place, but getting extra crit is very valuable for damage.

DEF% Reduction

Now let’s look at the defence shred.

As we saw with the formula earlier, and as we can see in this graph, it’s an exponential DPS increase as you stack more and more defence shred.

Pela’s ultimate will give us a 26.5% damage boost, Silver Wolf’s talent and ult 38.4%, but combined they give us a 95% damage boost.

RES Reduction

Resistance shred gives us a linear boost instead. But we can see the value of the resistance shred for our Resistance Multiplier.

The more resistance the enemy has, the more gain we get from the resistance shred. But since we aren’t bringing our DPS to a fully resistant enemy, this doesn’t mean much to us.

We want to be fighting enemies of our elemental weakness for the most damage.

DEF VS RES Reductions

Next, let’s compare defence reduction and resistance reduction in their effect on multiplying our damage.

Versus a weak enemy, defence shred comes out ahead of course, but takes time to ramp up versus resistance shred, which is linear.

Also remember, defence shred can max out, and resistance shred doesn’t. So, having a combination of both will improve our damage a ton.

We can also see, for example, how effective Silver Wolf is in boosting our damage. Versus a non weak enemy, we get a 95.53% damage boost to our damage, which can boost our whole team’s damage.

Combined with Seele’s A4 and the quantum set, our damage goes insane.

Vulnerability

Adding Vulnerability is an additional multiplier, and very simple.

Every % of vulnerability multiplies our total damage by an additional %. It is linear and having it on the enemy is great for damage boosting.

Broken Multiplier

We then have the Broken Multiplier and its effects on our DPS. It’s even smaller than vulnerability in its complexity.

You either gain 11% DPS from attacking a broken enemy, or you lose 10% potential DPS by not attacking a broken enemy.

So again, try to hit them when their toughness bar is broken. But it’s okay if you don’t. It’s just an additional boost of DPS.

Break Damage Boosts

So that’s all the damage multipliers for standard damage, and how they fare versus each other. Let’s also quickly look at break damage and how it scales on our level.

So, Break Damage scales exponentially on our level, and is why it was so slept on in the past. It still won’t beat out standard DPS builds unless you break a lot, which is always tricky to calculate, or unless you are a support like Asta that doesn’t traditionally do a ton of damage.

Level is very important for break damage. Going from level 40 to 50 gives us a 113% damage increase on our break damage at level 40, which is compounded onto future levels.

So, even though from level 70 to 80 we get another 41.66% increase, that’s a 41.66% increase on our break damage from level 70, which is a 62% increase over the break damage from level 60, and so on.

With future break effect supports and buffs, the break effect will be very strong.

Today I'm going to give you an updated version on how to target farm specific unique items in Diablo 4, but also double your unique drop chance and sometimes even triple it. So there are four components to this article with the last one speed farming being the most important, ideally you should be doing two of these at the same time.

Concept Of Monster Families

I'm going to start off with Monster Families. I know a lot of you are already familiar with the concept, but I'll briefly go over it. Different monsters in the game have a higher chance of dropping certain Diablo 4 Items. For example, if you are a Druid and you're trying to find Tempest Roar, you should be targeting Cultists and Cannibals, because they have a higher chance of dropping Helms.

Let's say you were going to chase Greatstaff of the Crone, well then you would be farming Goatman. Now I know a lot of you in the previous season would rerun the same dungeon, even though it was not a Nightmare Dungeon in Diablo 4. So like Cultist Refuge without opening up a Sigil, you do not want to do that this season.

The reason is that massively increase the chance of a unique item dropping from the rewards at the end of your dungeon, so previously it was one legendary and I think two rare items, now there's a very high chance you can drop two legendaries, but those legendaries can actually convert to unique items as well.

How To Reset Nightmare Dungeons?

This is not only important for Target farming certain uniques in Diablo 4, but you should be doing this anyway just for the experience game, because of how good some dungeons are compared to the others. So to reset the dungeon, obviously open up the dungeon that you want to do first.

Now accept the dungeon like usual when you are in a group, now you want to promote your teammate to party leader, or it might be the other way around, they might promote you. It doesn't matter either way, but you have to exchange party leadership. So in my case, I from loading my friend wolf to party leader. Now he has to decline the party leader invitation or this will not work.

Once this is done, we're going to teleport to the dungeon you can also do this at the start of the dungeon too by the way. Now in Diablo 4, we're going to finish the dungeon you can get your Cliff Awards everything, leave back into town, now whoever was the party leader has to leave the group. Once they've left that group, whoever was party leader, they have to invite you to a brand new group. So you're jumping into their world now, now the dungeon has been reset, so we're going to teleport to the entrance using the open world map and rinse and repeat.

In Diablo 4, there are two more factors that you need to add into this as well, the chances are between 1 to 100 you are going to find at least one of every single unique in the game for your class. I know that's not the case for everyone, it's RNG, some people cannot get say a Tempest Roar and be level 100 and still trying to find this item. So what you want to do is try and farm dungeons that have a way higher drop chance for items in general, and you can get more Diablo 4 Gold too.

Farming Uldurs Is A Good Choice

A really great example that my clan and I have been using, we've been farming Uldurs, the quantity of items that drop is almost double even triple than some of the other dungeons. In fact it's around about two full inventories of just items that can drop on the ground, there is a chance that each item can roll into a unique. So this is just as effective as Target farming certain dungeons, just the sheer quantity makes up the difference.

Speed Farming Is The Most Important

The last which is the most important in my opinion, you should be speed farming. You have to fight the temptation to be pushing dungeons way higher than yourself, so you want to make sure that the monster level is the exact same level as your character in Diablo 4. Because you're farming enemies at the same level as you, they're going to be super super easy, so you don't have to worry about things like damage reduction, too heavily investing in defensive stats, you just want to go completely Glass Cannon.

One of the stats that I've been playing around with that I think is absolutely fantastic that was not good in the previous season, but is now really important for Speed farming and that is the bonus effects after killing an Elite, so it might be x amount of movement speed for 4 seconds after killing an Elite or x amount of damage after killing an Elite.

They can only roll on three specific item slots. So the amulet can roll movement speed after killing an Elite and damage, now your boots can only roll movement speed after killing an Elite and then your pants can run the extra damage after killing an Elite.

Only those three spots make sure that you keep in mind that the movement speed in the game is capped at 100% I believe. Technically you could get 230% movement speed with all of your gear, it's going to hard cap at 100%, so you want to be kind of keeping that in mind.

Outro

This is even more effective now because of the monster density bonus, so just to recap, find a dungeon in Diablo 4 with the specific item type that you're trying to look for, dude dungeon resets with your friend. If you do not have a friend to play with, then go for a higher drop quantity dungeon, which has a higher chance. Because of the sheer number of items and lastly make sure you're speed farming monsters at the same level as you. This is not just for uniques, this is for your experience gain as well.

Dendro completely changed the way we look at Kokomi’s teams and builds. So, today we’ll cover everything you need to know from her best artifacts and weapons to general playstyle and team compositions.

The Jellyfish That Does It All

Kokomi’s biggest strength revolves around her elemental skill.

Her skill simply summons a jellyfish to heal surrounding allies and deal hydro damage to surrounding enemies. The hydro damage is very weak, but more importantly, the jellyfish will apply hydro onto enemies with every tick of damage it deals.

Since the jellyfish lasts for 12 seconds and hits with 2 second intervals, that means you get a total of 6 hydro applications and 6 heals, not including the initial cast, which is extremely strong.

Even though Kokomi’s elemental skill has an 18 second cooldown, you can actually have 100% uptime on her jellyfish thanks to her first ascension talent.

After using her elemental burst, the 12 second timer on her jellyfish will immediately refresh and allow its uptime to extend all the way past the 18 second skill cooldown.

Other things that Kokomi’s burst does is give her attacks and elemental skill max HP scaling, as well as extra healing for the party every time you normal or charge attack an enemy, similar to the way that Barbara functions.

With all that information in mind, I’m sure you can envision two different playstyles for Kokomi. The first playstyle is an off-field support where Kokomi only swaps in to place her jellyfish and refreshes its timer with her elemental burst to support your main DPS. The second playstyle is an on-field driver where Kokomi spends time on-field with the effects from her elemental burst to apply extra hydro to enemies to support reactions for characters off-field, and even deal some of her own damage with an invested build.

These two different ways of playing Kokomi have clear differences in build options, so let’s walk you through how to build your Kokomi for the situation that fits your team.

Off-Field Kokomi Build

Kokomi’s supportive build is very cheap and accessible to all players.

For artifacts, you’re almost always going to want the 4-set Tenacity of Millelith because her elemental skill can keep 100% uptime on the 20% attack buff for the team.

In the cases where you’re running a bloom team that’s not dependent on ATK%, such as using Thoma for burgeon or Kuki Shinobu for hyperbloom. You can also choose the 4-set Deepwood Memories for dendro resistance shred, which increases the damage from bloom-related reactions.

Artifact stats are always energy recharge or HP% in the sands, HP% in the goblet, and healing bonus in the circlet to maximize her burst uptime and her healing potential.

Since this Kokomi playstyle, I usually have her off-field most of the time. Her energy recharge requirements are high. Getting as close to 200% energy recharge is recommended, so usually the sands slot will run an energy recharge sands without extremely efficient artifact substats.

Aside from as much energy recharge as possible, other substats to focus for Kokomi are just HP%, flat HP, and elemental mastery if you run her with Nilou Bloom teams. So, she ends up being an extremely cheap character to build for off-field support.

To hammer that nail even further, Kokomi’s best weapon for off-field support happens to be a 3 star catalyst that all players can easily get to R5.

That catalyst is, of course, the Thrilling Tales of Dragon Slayers. Not only does it provide a good HP% stat for Kokomi’s healing, but the passive provides a 48% attack buff to the character switching in after Kokomi, which is an absolutely insane damage buff for ATK scaling characters.

There’s really no other reason to run any other catalyst with an off-field Kokomi. The only exceptions are if your team cannot utilize attack buffs, or if you really prefer to rely on having 100% uptime with Kokomi’s burst, then an R5 craftable Prototype Amber is also a viable option for the extra energy it gives to Kokomi.

Regardless, both options are completely F2P friendly and players should have no issues with building Kokomi for off-field support.

On-Field Kokomi Build

Kokomi’s damage build is a bit more expensive in terms of investment, but still simple to understand.

Unlike the off-field build, Kokomi’s best artifact set is now the 4-set Ocean Hued Clam. This set will convert all of Kokomi’s healing into a bubble that deals physical damage every 3 seconds, where an invested on-field Kokomi can easily hit the 30,000 damage cap per bubble before resistances.

Artifact stats to focus for an on-field Kokomi also have slight changes, where now you always want to run an HP% sands, a hydro damage bonus goblet, and a healing bonus circlet. Because Kokomi is on-field with this playstyle, she’ll directly absorb energy particles and naturally have a lower energy requirement.

Instead of the 200% that I described for the off-field build, 160% energy recharge is the sweet spot for any on-field Kokomi, which is a lot more attainable with an HP% sands.

Hydro damage and healing bonus are mandatory for Kokomi’s damage. Hydro damage in the goblet is pretty self explanatory. But the healing bonus also increases Kokomi’s damage while she’s empowered by her burst thanks to her other ascension talent, which grants extra scaling on her enhanced attacks based off her healing bonus.

This extra bonus scales much better than HP%, meaning you’ll always lose both damage and healing power by running an HP% circlet over a healing bonus circlet.

The usual energy recharge, HP%, flat HP, and EM for electro-charged or Nilou Bloom teams is the standard substat focus.

While the Thrilling Tales of Dragons Slayers catalyst can be good for an on-field Kokomi as well, it’s usually outclassed by two weapons. The best weapon for an on-field Kokomi is, of course, her signature weapon Everlasting Moonglow. But generally, this catalyst is not worth your primogems unless you’re a whale or a diehard Kokomi fan like I am who has R5 Moonglow just to flex on the haters.

Moonglow is usually not worth your primogems because Prototype Amber is more than enough for Kokomi, and usually only gets 5-10% less personal damage compared to Moonglow depending on the refinement situation. Not only is this craftable your best F2P option for on-field Kokomi, but its energy passive allows you to ease your energy recharge substat requirements if you have some pretty garbage artifacts.

To summarize, the weapon order for an on-field Kokomi is Moonglow if you have it, and if not just run Prototype Amber. If you’re also out of catalyst billets, then Thrilling Tales is also a viable option for those looking to stay stingy and build the cheapest on-field Kokomi possible.

Freeze Support

Kokomi is such a flexible and universal healer with the utility that she brings to the table that she can practically be used in any team.

However, just to get you started, if you don’t know where to begin, I’ll outline a few teams where she shines in. Of course, it's even better if you have five-star weapons suitable for Kokomi. The way to get it is actually very simple. You just need to buy a Genshin Impact Account.

The first of a few teams that we’re going to talk about today is a freeze team. Off-field Kokomi support is a backbone of many freeze teams. Because she provides outstanding hydro application and her build with both Tenacity of the Millelith and Thrilling Tales can buff your cryo DPS.

Running Kokomi allows you to run two offensive cryo characters as opposed to running a defensive cryo character, like Layla or Diona. So, a team usually has double cryo damage dealers, Kokomi, and an anemo support.

For the cryo slots, you can pick any of the two between Rosaria, Kaeya, Shenhe, Ganyu, and Ayaka as these characters either deal a ton of cryo damage, buff the cryo damage of your team, or do both at the same time.

The anemo support can technically be most anemo characters as long as they have the 4-set Viridescent Venerer equipped. The best option by far is Kazuha, for his elemental damage buffs. But other options, like Venti and Sucrose for grouping, or Jean and Sayu for even more healing, also exist.

Hyperbloom & Burgeon

While freeze teams are strictly for an off-field Kokomi, both an off-field and on-field Kokomi can function in a hyperbloom or burgeon team.

For the on-field Kokomi variants, the team consists of Kokomi, a dendro applicator, and either Kuki Shinobu or Raiden Shogun for hyperbloom or Thoma for burgeon.

The dendro applicator needs to be a consistent off-field option to allow Kokomi the freedom to stay on-field. So, your best options are Nahida for players who have her, or Dendro MC, for the best F2P option.

Collei and Yaoyao also work in this slot. But their abilities don’t last nearly as long as the Dendro MC’s burst. So, they are like tier 2 options if Nahida and Dendro MC are considered tier 1 options.

The final slot can be either Xingqiu or Yelan for powerful single target hydro damage, or a second dendro character from the ones listed before.

Options like C4 Kirara and Baizhu are also viable in the last slot for a second dendro option. But keep in mind that they lack AoE dendro application and cannot be used as solo dendro characters to create dendro cores.

For the off-field Kokomi variants of hyperbloom and burgeon teams, a dendro character, like Nahida or Alhaitham are fantastic for operating as solo dendro characters and easily allow you to run the usual Xingqiu or Yelan in the final slot for a team maximized for damage.

Also Read: Genshin Impact: How To Create The Best Yelan Build? - Artifacts, Weapons & Teams

Taser

The one team that is usually limited to the on-field Kokomi build is a taser team.

This is Kokomi’s classic team composition before dendro took the teambuilding scene by storm, and got significantly better with the introduction of the Ocean Hued Clam set. The team consists of Kokomi with two off-field electro damage dealers, and then either Sucrose to buff the EM of the team, or Kazuha to buff the elemental damage of the team.

For the two electro damage dealers, you can pick any off-field character between Fischl, Beidou, Raiden Shogun, or Yae Miko. The premise of the team is extremely simple, so nothing much really needs to be said about the team.

Kokomi, in particular, not only provides the ability to run two off-field electro characters, but she also consolidates the role of healing and hydro application.

Prior to Kokomi’s release, your only options to use were Barbara for healing, who does significantly less damage compared to Kokomi, or to use Xingqiu and live with the fact that sometimes his rainswords aren’t enough to sustain the entire team’s health bars.

Nilou Bloom & An Entirely New Build

Last but not least, the final team that Kokomi really shines into is a Nilou bloom team.

The introduction of dendro survivability options, like Yaoyao, Baizhu, and Kirara, definitely brought more flexibility to Nilou bloom teams. But Kokomi still remains a staple partner for Nilou.

As an off-field healer, Kokomi can keep her cheap build and sustain the team while Nahida, Alhaitham, or Kirara bear the burden of providing on-field dendro.

For the last slot, usually with Nahida and Alhaitham you want to run triple hydro characters, meaning Xingqiu or Yelan are again the options for the final slot.

In the case of on-fielding Kirara, you cannot use Xingqiu or Yelan while she runs around as a package. So, a second dendro character that applies dendro off-field like Dendro MC, Nahida, Yaoyao, or Collei can go in the final slot.

While the off-field playstyle is a little unassuming, Nilou really changed the way we can build Kokomi as a driver for bloom teams. If you want to play Kokomi on-field within a Nilou team, then an entirely new build path opens up.

Building Kokomi with the 4-set Gilded Dreams or the 4-set Flowers of Paradise Lost and triple EM in the sands, goblet, and circlet actually becomes viable, since Kokomi can become the “owner” of bloom reactions.

In hyperbloom and burgeon teams, Kokomi never focuses on elemental mastery because the reaction damage always depends on the EM of your electro or pyro characters that turn the dendro cores into hyperbloom or burgeon reactions.

However, Nilou’s Bountiful Cores do scale off Kokomi’s EM if she creates them with her attacks or elemental skill. So, that’s why building full elemental mastery is viable on Kokomi.

Not only does Nilou allow you to switch your artifact set, but new catalysts like A Thousand Floating Dreams, Sacrificial Fragments, and Fruit of Fulfillment can be used if you don’t need a catalyst focused on healing.

Of course, if players want to keep their Kokomi build flexible for other teams, you can still on-field Kokomi with Ocean Hued Clam and elemental mastery substats in a Nilou team, or off-field Kokomi with the 4-set Deepwood Memories.

Although you won’t be seeing a flurry of huge green numbers with just elemental mastery substats compared to the triple EM build, Kokomi will still retain solid personal damage with her Ocean Hued Clam numbers.

If you’re on-fielding Kokomi with Nilou, then you’re going to need to pick two dendro characters between Nahida, Dendro MC, Yaoyao, and Collei for the final two slots since all these characters have some sort of AoE dendro application.

Since Kokomi is so flexible, there are definitely other teams, such as a general on-field Kokomi, to drive vaporize, or even specialized teams, like the “Sukokomon” team.