Leveling Guide

This guide will teach you when to use your AOE skills while you are engaged in leveling content. You should generally follow these rules:

• You should be using No Mercy off cooldown while in combat, unless doing so would waste most of it’s active duration (e.g. mobs during a dungeon pull have almost died.)
• You should be using all of your damaging off-GCD cooldowns such as Blasting Zone and Bow Shock on any number of enemies.
• You should be positioning yourself to strike as many targets as possible.
  • You can manipulate enemies into stacking closer together by walking a short distance away to cause them to follow you. This will help you and your team during dungeon pulls.
  • Consider pulling enemy mobs into your party member’s negative effects, such as Ninja’s Doton.

Acquiring Gear

Always equip the highest item level gear you own as it will scale Vitality and Defense, increasing your maximum HP and natural damage mitigation which will make you and your healer’s life easier inside leveling content.

The main scenario questline will often give you gear coffers that will be fairly decent for your current place in the story. There are a few other ways of obtaining gear that will be better, however.

You can often source better gear from the market board or a friend for your current level, but ensure it is high-quality, as normal-quality crafted gear has overall stat values that are lower than normal for that item level. It is not necessary to upgrade your gear every time you level up or unlock a new dungeon, but you should avoid wearing gear that is several levels out of date when leveling.

The best source of gear at a level cap (e.g. level 60) is poetic tomestone gear from certain vendors across the main cities in each expansion. They will offer maximum item level gear for that level cap (e.g. level 60 gear that is item level 270 in Foundation), which will serve you very well for at least halfway through the next level bracket going towards level 70.

Tank Responsibility

During dungeon encounters, it is generally preferred to pull as many of the mobs as possible that your group can handle. If you are properly geared, you should not have trouble pulling to the “wall”, or forced stopping point typically before a boss room. Some following guidelines:

• Keep Royal Guard active at all times during a dungeon encounter. This may be turned off or unnecessary in raids or trials if you are not main-tanking or required to tank a specific enemy.
• Hold enmity on every enemy during dungeon pulls. If you lose hate (aggro) on mobs while pulling, it is fine to continue walking forward towards the wall, but attempt to Lightning Shot or Provoke the enemy that you lost hate on if possible. At minimum, make sure to collect the lost enemy mob when reaching the wall.
• When all enemies in a dungeon pull have been gathered, keep them in the same general area, and attempt to position them within your party’s beneficial and negative effects, like NIN’s Doton, or AST’s Earthen Star. Your party will often have beneficial effects or ground-based effects that damage enemies, and continuously or slowly dragging them away will often hinder your party’s damage and healing.
• Do not be afraid to use multiple mitigation tools together at once. Most of the damage that you will take in a dungeon is while you are fighting trash (non-boss) mobs, and you want to mitigate heavily while most of them are alive.
• Your party mitigation such as Heart of Light and Reprisal are still valuable mitigation tools for yourself to mitigate incoming damage from dungeon trash mobs. Arm’s Length also contains a secondary effect that applies Slow to enemy trash mobs, which reduces their attack rate by 20%.

Leveling Rotation

Levels 1-25

• Use Demon Slice at 2+ targets.

Levels 26-39

Unlocks Solid Barrel and Burst Strike.

Your powder gauge and full single-target combo will finally be usable here, and ideally you want to hold onto your resources in order to use Burst Strike within No Mercy. This means that you will typically not use Burst Strike unless your next combo action will overfill the powder gauge, or No Mercy is active.

• Use Demon Slice at 3+ targets.
• Stop using Burst Strike at 3 targets.

Levels 40-59

Unlocks Demon Slaughter and Sonic Break.

* With Sonic Break, it is important to evaluate that this action becomes increasingly worse to use if a target dies before it’s full value applies to a target. Keep this in mind when considering using it during a multi-target pull, as it may no longer be worth using. Some basic rules of thumb for it’s usage that have been derived from uptime simulations in multi-target scenarios are located at the bottom of the page.

• Use Demon Slaughter combo at 2+ targets.
• Stop using Burst Strike at 3 targets.
• Stop using Sonic Break* at 7 targets (when it unlocks).

Levels 60-71

Unlocks Gnashing Fang and Continuation.

Gnashing Fang is a powerful single-target combo that should be used off-cooldown and one usage per minute should always be inside No Mercy. Make sure to have gauge resources available for this whenever it becomes ready.

• Stop using Gnashing Fang at 4 targets from level 60-69.
• Stop using Gnashing Fang at 6 targets at level 70.
• Same rules regarding Demon Slaughter, Burst Strike, and Sonic Break.

Levels 72-83

Unlocks Fated Circle and Bloodfest.

Bloodfest should only be used when the gauge is empty. Bloodfest is typically used inside No Mercy.

• Use Demon Slaughter combo at 2+ targets.
• Use Fated Circle at 2+ targets.
• Stop using Gnashing Fang at 4 targets.
• Stop using Sonic Break* at 5 targets.

Levels 84-100

Unlocks multiple potency-modifying traits, Hypervelocity, Double Down, Fated Brand, and Reign of Beasts.

Double Down and Reign of Beasts should always be used within No Mercy both as part of your single-target and multi-target rotation. This completes your single-target burst phase with Gnashing Fang, Double Down, Reign of Beasts, and Sonic Break, which leads to interesting optimization at level 100 due to Fated Circle becoming more powerful than Gnashing Fang and Sonic Break within No Mercy beyond 2 and 3 targets respectively.

• Prioritize Double Down when it unlocks.
• Prioritize Reign of Beasts when it unlocks.
• Use Demon Slaughter combo at 3+ targets.
• Use Fated Circle at 2+ targets.
• Same rules regarding Gnashing Fang and Sonic Break*.
  • At level 100 and 2 targets, it can potentially be a gain while No Mercy is active to hold Gnashing Fang and replace it with 3 Fated Circle casts if you will have Bloodfest.
  • At level 100 and 3 targets, the same is true for Sonic Break.

At level 100, Gnashing Fang technically becomes a small loss at 3 targets (instead of 4 targets like previous levels) when running an AOE-only rotation to a purely infinite duration, but there are a high number of dynamic AOE scenarios that can exist (uneven add health reducing target count on death, thrown off cooldown alignment by moving this action around resulting in future loss, etc.) that would show this action being a gain when used off cooldown on up to 3 targets, so this is what we feel should be the average recommendation for most short encounters around 30 seconds in length or anytime one of the 3 targets is nearly dead.

• A good time to consider using Fated Circle(s) in place of Gnashing Fang at 3 targets is whenever the 3-target AOE encounter will last for more than 30 seconds, or at minimum, whenever skipping or holding a usage would not negatively impact Gnashing Fang’s alignment throughout the rest of the fight and cause lost usages (or some form of loss within No Mercy).

With Sonic Break, you should consider how close the target is to dying when deciding on how important it is to apply the action. At level 100, the following bullet list applies for multi-target scenarios, but it is going to depend at lower levels. This advice will still be a generally good rule of thumb for any level, however.

• At 4 targets, do NOT use this if you suspect Sonic Break will not last for it’s entire duration.
• At 3 targets, do NOT use this if you suspect Sonic Break will not last for at least half of it’s duration.
• At 3 targets, it is a gain to hold and then use Sonic Break out of No Mercy if it will let you use another Fated Circle in it’s place, as long as no DoT time is lost.