Increasing DPA without Spending Money Parrt III

Mounts, Servants, Glyphs, and Sockets.

1) Mounts: Only 2 real choices here, the Frost Ram or the Bonewyrm Vanquisher, both available in R3. The Frost Ram has to be crafted using Frost Ram summoning manuals, and the Bonewyrm is available for 3000 BB. Both mounts come with ice-themed procs (Freeze 2 for the Frost Ram and Coldsnap 3 for the Bonewyrm), the Bonewyrm has a superior servant eliminating proc (Crush vs the Frost Ram's Trample), but the Frost Ram is superior in Heroism and Tenacity (3/3 vs 2/2).

(N.B. The servants that your opponent employs can drastically reduce the damage that you do, as an intercepted attack means that procs like Bersek, Fireball, Penance, and Discharge et al. have no chance of activating. In other words, you're down to a damage-over-time proc to do damage in that round and those procs generally do less damage than the ones listed above. Therefore, eliminating your opponent's servants is a good thing! You can do this by equipping items with Trample and/or increase the odds of getting Trample--physical build players rejoice, as the Horns of Madness do both--or you can invest in the Trample Talent available in the Champion's path of the Talent Tree. And yes. You can get Trample multiple times before a fight if you have multiple Trample procs. Crush is a rarer proc and it takes out 2 servants instead of Trample's one, but do not neglect Trample if you get Crush, as both can activate in the same round of combat and take out all 3 servants for you!)

Which to get then? I think its down to personal choice, as both mounts have their good points. If you have the BB and need a quick boost to DPA, why not go for the Bonewyrm while you wait for those pesky Frost Ram summon items to drop? Those Frost Ram manuals do not drop easily but fortunately, you can get them from any Epic Boss in R1-R10. As you will all be hanging around the lower-level regions farming for items to disenchant anyway, why not beat-up on a couple of wimpy Bosses while you are at it? If you are doing the appropriate PvB quest at the same time, this would mean Megalomania scrolls too!

(N.B. Its worth saving a separate Save Slot for a "Boss Loot" setup, to increase your odds of PvB and PvCB loot. More on this in a later post.)

2) Servants: The only 2 servants I use to increase DPA are the Traveller, and the Coffincracker Droid from R9. The Traveller is in there because I like to maximize my critical damage when and if I hit for crit damage in a fight. If you have a good weapon equipped, combined with items that increase crit chance and a Traveller and/or Blacksmith's Blessing, you will see your DPA increase dramatically.

(N.B. Al high level weapons will increase crit chance, but if you look closely at the descriptions of the accessories available, items like the Nightshades from R4 increase crit chance too! Other nice items include the Blob-in-a-jar (for Toxin or Shadow Builds) and the Target System from R9. Purple sockets can also take gems that increase crit chance by 2% but they cost 100 Blood Sapphires or 1000 Blood Rubies each; attainable, but by no means cheap.)

With the opening of the Underground Market, its not that hard to get the 60 WoC's you need for the Traveller now. Keep an eye on the market, as you will see someone try and unload 10 or more Traveller WoC's that they don't need. If you are hitting the Epic Portal Bosses for weapons or parts of the Dimensional Drifter set, you will occasionally get a Traveller WoC as loot too.

The best way to get the Coffincracker if you are not a PvB player, is to hit LvL 90 Coven Bosses. If you keep an eye on the main CoB wall or ENN Coven Boss list, you are bound to find one or two every day. Now, althought the Epic Bosses in R9 do drop the Coffincracker Droid WoC, as a non-PvB player, you might not get enough summoning items to drop and/or not have points in Invocation of the Old Ones and those make a big difference to how many bosses you can summon! This is why I think its best for non-PvB centered players to hit the Coven Bosses. Just remember to do at least 75% as that really increases your loot odds or better yet, 150%, as that really does help in increasing the odds for a good drop (i.e. more than just credits and blood rubies).

3) Glyphs: Glyph of Old Legend. Enough said. Just kidding. The Glyph of Old Legend can be had for 1000 BB from Coraline. If BB are hard to come by (and it might, because of low DPA) and you have to choose between a good weapon and this Glyph, I would go for the weapon first, but only because this glyph needs to be powered up to be useful.

But once you do, this glyph should be in most, if not all, your PvB/PvCB setups. Like all dynamic glyphs, there are 3 power levels to this Glyph, and you can unlock each level by defeating 100, 250, and 500 Epic OR Coven Bosses. Each power level grants you Heroism 1 and Tenacity 1 (so 3/3 at level 3) and as a welcome bonus, you get +1% to get PvB loot at Level 3.

So how to power up this Glyph? You should either have the Glyph of Old Legend equipped when you deathblow an Epic Boss, or when you loot a Coven Boss. Both types of Boss work, and if you are part of an active Guild, looting 5-10 Coven Bosses a day should not be a problem. Toss in the odd Epic Boss or so that you might summon yourself fulfilling quests and trying to get those Megalomania scrolls, and you will find yourself with a Level 1 Glyph in almost no time!

That's not all there is to maximizing DPA using your glyphs though. As many of your notice, Glyphs are a part of many sets in the game. I would like to highlight the Gpyphs from the Basilisk's Raiments and Rising Sun Armor set to use as examples for the next portion of this post.

As you level up, you will naturally want to replace inferior pieces of armor or equipment for stuff with better stats. However, its worth looking at the stats of lower-level equipment that you want to replace to see if equipping just 1 piece of the set + its glyph will give you a Heroism bonus! Going back to the Basilisk's Raiments and Rising Sun Armor sets, you will notice that having just 2 pieces of each set equipped gives you a +1 Heroism bonus.

Personally, the Rising Sun Suneate (with Heroism Gem in Purple Socket) + Glyph of the Rising Sun was a favorite of mine as those 2 items combined gave me Heroism 3. Therefore, don't just discard pieces of armor that you would not use because they are low-level stuff or they modify damage that you don't use, as the right glyph here or there might give you a Heroism boost that you might have missed.

(N.B. Using the example above, its possible to have Heroism 9 just by equipping the items from the Rising Sun Armor set mentioned above, having 3 points in the Against all Odds talent, and having your Glyph of Old Legends at Level 3. That's + 45% damage to Bosses already! Add in the other damage modifiers from the other pieces of equipment you have, and having Heroism 20-30 is possible without spending a cent! Sprinkle in the right bane for the correct boss here and there, and you should regularly be doing damage in the 10K-20K range with ease.)

4) Sockets: You're looking for weapons, armor, and accessories with purple sockets here. Put purple gems that give you Herosim 1 (the Heroic Amethyst) here early in the game, and switch to gems that modify your primary damage type (e.g. Cruel Amethyst for Physcial Builds or a Blessed Amethyst for Holy Builds) late in the game.

Using a Heroic or damage-specific Amethyst is up to you, and most players would tell you to use a damage-specific Amethyst as you can use that same piece of equipment for PvE. I chose to use a Heroic Amethyst in the early game because I upgraded my weapons frequently, so a setup that maxed Holy damage this week might be useless because I picked up a far-superior Physical weapon the next. However, you should definitely switch to using a damage-specific Amethyst late in the game when you find a good weapon you want to keep, as you can use that bad boy (or girl) for PvE as well as PvB/PvCB!

These gems are relatively cheap, as each costs 5 Blood Sapphires or 50 Blood Rubies. Well worth getting and stuffing every single purple socket in your build with one.

And that's it for now! I hope these suggestions have been useful, and feel free to add corrections or offer your own strategies that work, as this guide was based mostly on my style or play and I am sure there are other successful strategies out there that I have not tried.

Thank you for reading, and check back again soon as I will continue to share my confusion with the world as often as I can.

Nice work, Gwen!

Just a little addition.

I use only herosim and damage-specific gems for purple slots, too. Like Gwen worte above.

But I have seen a lot of people, spending 100 or 400 BD for gems like trample, attunement, execute and so on.

I have tested those gems only in the twenties but my guess was, the proc rate of those gems is terrible. Like 1 in 20 fights. If you compare this to the damage increasing gems (heroism and damage-specific gems) which proc every battle, you can do you own math, whats better for you.

And by the way:
All items, gems and powers have a hidden (and secret) percentage chance for their proc rate.

Example:
You equip the Worldenders breastplate and plug an execute gem into the purple slot. Now you have 2 seperate execute procs. But while the breastplates proc has a decent proc rate (maybe in every 2nd battle), the gem won't help much. But you still realize an execute every now and then. And maybe you conclude ... wow, that execute gem is nice, I'll use them for all my slots!

So, if you play around with differnt builds and check your procs think of this and do not conclude that your execute gem works well. Because you have diffwerent sources and all items have different proc rates. Hope you understand what I mean.