- Template Guide -

 

What is a Template?

A template is items (jewelry/armor/weapons/etc.) which are used to cap out all the relevant stats for your class or are coming very close to it. Making your character the best it can be.

 

There are multiple ways to achieve a temp that will meet all the needs of the character. On Phoenix Server players can use named drops from mobs or buy from merchants, use crafted items, and/or use ROG to maximize the stats needed. It is easier to replicate a temp using named items, but the drawback is the expense and difficulties obtaining  those items. It would be possible, but way more hard to obtain, thus the alternative ROG drops method of making a temp is good/easy/cheap.

 

ROG stands for "random object generator" and it does exactly that - creating random items. On Phoenix, every mob you kill has a chance of dropping these, even multiple. The higher level the mob you kill, the higher chance you have of getting higher utility ROG items.

 

Utility on items is a measuring unit to quickly determine how effective/how high stats/how good the item is ONLY CONSIDERING the bonus stats on it (disregarding anything else like for example armor factor value on armor items), you can check the utility value of an item by right clicking it and pressing on Info.

 

Some rough estimations on utility/mobs:

50-60 utility is VERY easy to get, the mobs you grind from level 45+ should already have a low chance of dropping these

60-70 utility requires some deep purple to lvl 50 mobs, good example being the Named Boss in Loop Runs

70-80 is mostly dropping of even higher Named (Princes “DF”, Epic Dungeon, Named, etc)

80+ utility usually comes of High-End PvE Bosses(Dragons, Beliathan, TG/Sidi/Galla End bosses)

 

We now know some of the important terms and what they mean . Now, let's get to it and make a temp!

 

1. Deciding on set-in-stone items

As a starting point, I would strongly recommend planning your template around at least the Chestpiece from your realms Epic Dungeon Raids (TG/Sidi/Galla). It costs 20k phoenix feathers at the Vendor which you should be able to reach in only 2 active participations. The stats on it are very good and it got a very useful and strong reactive proc (more on "procs" later). As a beginner in DAoC, you most likely don't desperately need other stuff from the vendors. 

 

Another Item that gets used by 90% of all temps is the Necklace from "The Lost Seed" Quest Part 4. Its last reward is a Necklace that has 80 Utility on it for an amazing head start in building up resist values. 

 

Important Note for caster-classes: At the end of Part 3 of the questline the NPC lets you choose an ADDITIONAL, OPTIONAL, reward in form of a quite powerful staff. Make very sure you marked it for a taking before hitting "finish quest". There will not be another way of getting it except buying of others and although it has very bad utility it has a very Good DD-Charge (330 dmg charge, more on "charges" later) on it and gets used in maybe like 50% of caster temps because of the option to set up a dmg burst with it. 

 

2. Jewelry 

Jewelry refers to ALL the item slots that are not Armor/Weapons/Instruments. So, your cloak is also called jewelry from now on. Next you want to fill all the other jewelry slots with RoG Drops. You might already have acquired some through exping. Generally speaking you need better utility on these when playing a hybrid or stealther or melee since you have more stats to cap AND, especially, more completely different skill lines to cap out. Pure casters/healers just go +all magic, while melees would need +all melee weapons AND +shield since +melee weapons does not raise shields/dual wield/envenom/stealth etc.. You can either buy these jewelry items at the auctioneer in housing or go farm them - the list above hopefully helps you getting an idea on where to farm them.

 

When putting the jewelry all together, you should try to not overcap too hard on a single stat just by jewelry alone. It will likely happen, but you really want to reduce it to a minimum. It will (literally) pay out in the end when avoiding it.

 

3. Crafted Armor/Weapons 

This one's quick - buy the remaining 4 or 5 armor parts and your weapon(s)/shield/instrument (considering you bought the Chestpiece for feathers and none of the other options from vendor).

 

Make sure the part you are about to buy is

a.) 99% Quality! (more on % Quality later)

b.) 51 Armor Factor for Cloth, 102 for the others armors or 16.5 dps for weapons

c.) Completely clean of any bonus stat (you can't do it yourself anymore then)

 

Buy from an auctioneer in housing or get in touch with a crafter. When playing a hybrid class, you might need some 100% Quality Armor pieces instead of 99%, keep on reading for now before you instantly buy away after reading these last lines.

 

4. Spellcrafting 

Next and probably most important step is to put the bonus stats on the crafted gear you just bought. We need a spellcrafter (sc, a player profession) for that, and the spellcrafter will ask you to send over the template/build as it will instruct him on what to craft exactly. That means you are expected to calculate it by yourself and file a craft report for the spellcrafter. I have used and found much success using ZenkCraft. 

 

Link for download here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1joot--zUVPqMmq5-urhaU4gTW9751iQb 

Video tutorial here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tTqhV3GDnA 

 

Now, to some core mechanics of spellcrafting:

Spellcrafters make Gems, one Gem has one bonus stat to it. Bonuses are

+Base Stat like Strength, Intelligence etc. (cap +75)

+Hitpoints (cap +200)

+Powerpool (cap +25)

+Resistances physical and magical (cap +26%)

+Skill line, like Blades, Stealth, Magic lines etc. (cap +11 skill)

+Focus Magic Skill Line, only for pure cloth-casters (cap +50 focus)

Note: Spellcrafters CANNOT make +All magic focus/+All magic skills/+All melee weapon skills/+All dual wield skills, these boni are limited to dropped Gear (including feather items, rog's, non-rog's like dragon staff etc) on Phoenix/older patches.

 

Crafted armor/weapons can only be enchanted with 4 Gems max. The Gem boni come in 10 different tiers, for resistances for example tier 1 would be +1% resist, tier 5 would be +7% resist, tier 10 would be +17% resist. We can't just put 4 Gems of tier 10 on an armorpart. Each crafted piece has a pool of how much stuff you can put into it. This pool is called "Imbue points" (IP) in DAoC. The +1% resist would cost up 1 IP, +7% resist would cost up 12 IP and the +17% resist would cost up 32 IP.

 

How much Imbue Points a crafted piece got is determined by the level (AF 51/102, 16.5 dps is level 51) and the % Quality of the piece.

 

Lvl 51, 99% Quality is 28 Imbue Points/33.5 Overcharge Imbue Points

Lvl 51, 100% Quality (MP = masterpiece, expensive) is 32 Imbue Points/37.5 Overcharge Imbue Points

 

As you can see, putting up +17% resist would only be possible on a 100% qual, lvl 51 item and would eat every single available IP for it. Maybe you guessed it, it would not be worth it since you also can see the IP costs of different Gem tiers going up exponentially. It is way more efficient to try and balance out as much with mid-tier gems as possible as a rule of thumb. You can also see that +17% resist would NOT be possible on a 99% qual, Lvl 51 item, right? Wrong - there is a mechanic named "Overcharge" in place.

 

Overcharging allows a high enough level spellcrafter to add another 5.5 Imbue points (other values on other patches) on top of your usual IP - Pool. It comes at a risk, too: There is a very small chance (2%) that your item you want to see overcharged literally BLOWS up and gets deleted at once. On other servers/patches, the spellcrafter himself will blow up along with the item and straight up die. Still, it is worth planning to overcharging every single one of your crafted gears, preferably at the maximum 5.5 extra IP. Keeping that in mind, it will leave us with these two numbers - 33.5 IP (28+5.5) for 99% quality items, 37.5 IP (32+5.5) for 100% items. Pure casters on phoenix might even get away with some 98% quality items I would imagine, otherwise everything below 99% just gives us too few room to juggle with, so don't bother with it.

 

5. Calculating 

Now you know the core mechanics regarding Spellcrafting. Just with that info alone you could start away trying to do your first template. 

 

There are some stats I would very very strongly recommend to always cap out, and others you might be ok with just bringing it close to the cap or maybe even completely ditching it. Always cap out your relevant base stats, HP and resists. You can completely ditch the power pool if it's stopping you from capping everything else. It's really only adding 26 power to your powerpool. Look up any of your main spells and look how much power that costs, most likely more than 26. Nice to have for sure, but not needed at all costs. When you're a caster, of course you want to cap out all your focus on at least the relevant/most used skill lines. Better try to go for all so respeccing eventually won't require you to change your weapon or anything.

 

Most Skill lines like Blades, Mana Magic, Buff Lines cap at 51. So far a bard that regularly runs 43 Nurture for the Speed/Endusongs, that would only require +8 on Nurture from the temp to cap it. Also, consider in your temp that you will get +1 on ALL of your skills for gaining Realm Ranks (up to max +5 at Realm Rank 6) and you will basically be RR2 (+1) and RR3 (+2) in literally no time.

 

Every Calculator has some sort of option to create a file called "craft report" or something likely. When done with everything, make your calculator create that file and send it over to your spellcrafter of choice (mostly done by discord or Email).

 

After being done with Spellcrafting and not blowing up, you are safe to bring your crafted and SC'ed pieces to a NPC-Enchanter (drag and drop every piece from inventory into him). There are several in your realms capital. It will greatly help with your to-hit chance for weapons and your getting-hit chance for armor (since everybody is doing it, you don't want to be at a disadvantage).

 

6. Alchemy 

So now got your full itemization, all your Stats, Resist, Skills are (ideally) capped - what else should there be to do? We’re coming back to "procs" and "charges" now. Also, we could need some of these very helpful potions. We will get all of that of an Alchemist (another player profession).

 

"Procs" are effects that are passive most of the time and can trigger at certain events. There are reactive (armor) procs and proactive (weapon) procs. Armor procs on an armor part have a chance to trigger when the armor part is hit by a melee weapon/arrow. Weapon procs on weapons have a chance to trigger when the weapon hits something. Weapon procs can be a pure instant Dmg spell or a DoT landing on the same target the weapon just did. There are several buffings Armor procs, but the relevant ones for starting out are Ablative procs and Healing procs for Armor. Ablative buff being a buff that creates a shield pool which is drained by every melee attack by 50% up to set value. Healing procs are pretty self explanatory. On phoenix, the standard is to put 3 Ablative and 3 Healing procs on your Armor. You will need 1 less Healing proc, because you hopefully put the Chestpiece for 20.000 feathers in your template which already comes with a built-in Healing proc (and also the strongest one). Note that there are 2 version of each the Ablative and the Healing procs on phoenix. There are the "regular" ones, Ablative creating 100 shield pool and Healing healing for 75. And there are the "Epic" ones, Ablative creating 150 shieldpool and Healing healing for 100. Of course the "Epic" ones are way more costly. The regular ones would/could be fine. If you want to push the template to the limit, aim for the Epic ones!

 

"Charges" are on-use-spells on your crafted armor/weapons. The variety is pretty big here - debuffs, life drains, damage add, damage shield, haste. dot, acuity, ablative, spec AF buff.

The % Quality of the item will determine how much charges of the spell there will be before it is depleted. When it is, you can visit a NPC-Recharger to load it up again.

 

You basically want a Lvl 5, 100% quality item for putting buff charges on it, since 100% quality will mean a maximum of 10 max charges and Lvl 5 100%s can be crafted by anyone and cost nothing. These items basically just sit in your inventory, you can put their spells on your Hotbars and use them without putting them actually on.

 

The ones you really want depend a bit on your class and realm. Hibs do not have any class that can buff spec AF, so a lot of people want to carry around 1 item with spec AF charge. Some people also take an ablative buff charge item so they Start off a fight with it already Active instead of hoping for an early/proc when needed. Melees might want to consider carrying a dmg-add buff charge with them, everyone could theoretically make use of debuff charges or even DD-charges for an instant interrupt every 2 minutes (which is the cooldown on use for the charges).

 

Note: On phoenix, you could make a lvl 1 alchemist and would be able to put these charges and procs on your armor yourself, which is why they are also sold via auctioneer/housing. This is not possible for spellcrafting tho.

 

Now, just grab the occasional but mandatory buff potions/draughts. Draughts have 100 charges, so that's more comfortable than carrying around lots of potions/elixirs. On Phoenix, everybody runs Endu-Buff potions together with the realm abilities Long Wind and Tireless so they can perma sprint. So you always want at least a Draught of endu-buff and obviously a Power healing potion/draught on a casting class.

 

If you wanna push it here you could also grab a PoM-Buff potion, HP-Reg-Buff potion and HP heal potion and so on. Or carrying around buff potions when solo/smallman.

 

I hope this guide helps anyone who is wanting to build their own temp or wants to learn where to start.