Post date: May 08, 2021 12:56:43 PM
The TL;DR version is "get your Resolve to 1060 and Potency to 60K and the rest of the stats will come as you do more advanced instances".
To begin, if you are level 110, you'll get in-game mail that will summon your to Myrist, the Great Library. Once you have worked through the introductory info you get when you are summoned by the Tribunal, you will be delivered to the Myrist Foyer. In the Foyer, next to the Registration Desk, is Tishan's Lockbox, which has upgraded armor. Even if the gear you have on is better, the Lockbox gear is pretty completely adorned, so you will want to grab a set and use Adornment Reclamation to strip all the adorns. Now you have a pile of adorns, adorn every possible slot. You probably should also grab six extra Potency adorns (from the helmet is good) and use those for your mercenary's armor.
If you want to see caps and info about what each stat does, look yourself up on DragonsArmory.com and hover over a stat... the popup will show you soft cap, hard cap, and some info about that stat. If no caps are listed, there is no cap.
The first thing you need to consider is Resolve:
Solo encounters have no resolve requirements
Heroic Tier 1: 1060
Heroic Tier 2: 1334
Raid Tier 1: 1512
Mastercrafted gear comes with 60 resolve. If you have 21 pieces of MC gear, that's a Resolve of 1260, which is more than enough to get you into heroics.
I encourage you to go to the Vegarlson overland zone, and harvest there until you get a bunch of rares. It's pretty easy to harvest there without catching a lot of aggro. You need two rares for each new mastercrafted item (the names of these items all have "Academic" in the title). So, if you wear chain or plate, you need 14 Golden Fleck for armor, 2 for a weapon, you'll get a nice secondary doing the sig line. Leather wearers need 14 Needlescale Hide, cloth wearers need 14 Casiun Root. Everyone will want 18 Azure Sapphires for jewelry. Cloaks either need two Casiun Root or two Needlescale Hide, and I'm pretty sure belts also need two Needlescale Hide (I'm not on my tailor ATM). You also will want to upgrade all your Apprentice or Journeyman spells/combat arts to Expert (made by Sages, Jewelers, and Alchemists, depending on class). The scholars also make a bunch of the Ascension spells, and any that you can upgrade should be upgraded.
You will get the best results with your Academic armor if you make (or have it made for you) out of refined rares, so you will want to harvest about double as many as you think you need, then use the Tradeskill Prestige Tree Salvage spec and refine them. Once you have the crafted Academic gear, switch that tradeskill spec to Experimentation, and experiment everything to Visionary. The wiki has a guide on Experimentation.
The solo overland collections rewards have 40 Resolve. The solo instance collections have 50 Resolve.
The problem is that as you were getting all this Resolve, chances are very good that your other stats, Potency in particular, dropped like a rock. Try to get your Potency back up to 60,000 or better. As you're trying to raise your Resolve, typically the new gear has less Potency. Ways to achieve this goal:
AA lines and Ascension Forms were changed with this xpac to replace Potency buffs with Fervor, so carefully reevaluate your AA.
White Potency Adorns (crafted, or harvested from helmets in Tishan's Lockbox)
Potency Infusers (you can use infusers from from Thalumbra forward, many can be crafted)
Deity Infusing (aka plat infusing)
Better gear that has both the Resolve and Potency values you need (which we probably won't see until we're getting heroic loot)
Other stats to consider. (Note, I'm using cap values that were accurate during PoP, and I won't swear they haven't changed):
Ability Mod should ideally be half of your biggest hit. Reforging, adorns, and infusing can boost ABMod.
Crit Chance 2,500 or better. Crit Chance is how often you will critically hit with spells, CAs, and/or physical attacks. This value is often heavily debuffed based on the specific monster or zone. You need 100%, plus however much is being debuffed, so if the mob is debuffing 2000% crit chance, you need 2100% to get a crit hit every time.
Crit Bonus 4,500 or better. Crit Bonus is a multiplier to the damage done on a critical hit or healing on a critical heal. The hard cap, as far as I know, is ~4266.
Fervor multiplies the total spell/CA values after all other formulas have been applied. The hard cap is 230.
Reuse and Recover Speeds both hard cap at 100.
Casting Speed is how fast you can cast spells/CAs. The soft cap is 100, anything over that adds to Spell Doublecast.
Doublecast caps at 100%, however if you look at the buffs on Named mobs, they often have a buff that increases their Doublecast Avoidance, which means you need 100+that avoidance number vs. that mob. For PoP T1 raid mobs, their Doublecast Avoidance was typically 80, so you'd have needed 180% Doublecast to actually doublecast every time.
DPS Mod affects the damage of physical attacks. It has a soft cap of 600.
Haste affects the speed of physical attacks. The soft cap is 200, anything over that value adds to Flurry.
Flurry affects the chance of hitting multiple times on a physical attack.
Accuracy adds to the contested formula (weapon skills and level vs. defense skills and level) to hit a monster. This is not used against the target's parry, dodge, shield block, or deflection. There is no cap.
Strikethrough is the chance to prevent a monster from parrying or dodging an attack.
Multi Attack affects the number of weapon swings per physical attack. It has a soft cap of 200.AE Autoattack (AE Auto) is the chance for physical attacks to hit multiple monsters. It has a hard cap of 100.
Weapon Damage Bonus is bonus damage applied to all weapon autoattacks including melee, ranged, and spell weapons. It has a hard cap of 300.