Renewal of Ro Guide for Beginners (or Returning Players)

Initial Gear-Up
When you reach Raj'Dur Plateaus, look over Tishan's Lockbox (231, -60, 467). Compare each piece to your current gear.

Adorn Notes
When comparing your current adornments to the new adornments, look carefully at the Examine window to see where exactly that adorn should work. If an adorn is more than one expansion old, it won't work in RoR, pretty much. That means things like Heart of Luclin or the Brawl Runes are not useful anymore.

In Renewal of Ro, all the new adornments are going to be tiered. Tier I will be overland and Solo instances, Tier II should be Heroic I, and so on. That means you will need to be super proactive about upgrading your adorns as you gain Resolve and start tackling harder content.

Fixing Adornments
If you don't already have it, you will need the Adornment Reclamation ability. The class trainer in your hometown has that for 1 copper.

Purchase one of everything (0 copper), because you won't be able to see the adorns in the gear until it's in your inventory.

Pop all the adorns off the weapons. Discard the white adorns and turquoise adorns. Even if you have blue weapon adorns from past expansions, you will want to update them with the blue adorns off the weapons in Tishan's Lockbox. Look through the blue adorns: you need one each of Embers, Insight, and Mystery, discard the rest.

You will notice that you have several red weapon adorns that have things on them like Arcane Rendering and so forth. Save one of each in your bags where you can find them, later you will be getting weapons with two red adorn slots, and you'll start off using these.

Pop the adorns off the rest of the gear. Discard the white adorns. For now, save the red adorns from the armor and jewelry.

Better Your Adorns
Now, travel to Sundered Frontier via Wizard Spire. Near the spires, you will find Yun Zi and his panda cohorts. If you haven't already, do all the panda quests. They're quick little "find a location" quests.

Now you can go to Pas Yu and purchase some things, again for 0 copper. Put "Hua Collector" in the search box.

Blue Adorns
You will want the best version you can get on these three blue runes for your weapons, because they give Fervor and Fervor Overcap, among other stats:

• Embers
• Mystery
• Insight

Go to Forlorn Gist and do Vikana's quest, Contract Termination, to obtain the blue adorn Nature of the Archaeologianto boost your Crit Bonus and Potency. (You must complete enough of the Visions of Vetrovia sig line to have access to Forlorn Gist).

White Adorns

1. You want the four Tol'Ren white adorns on Chest, Shoulders, Forearms, and Feet.

2. Your next priority on white adorns are Extra Attacks on your Hands and Neck.

3. After that, you want Increased Criticals on Primary, Fingers, Ears, and Ranged.

4. Put Raw Power on Secondary, Head, and Legs.

5. Put the adorn with combat stats on Wrists and Charms.

6. Put Health on your Waist.

As adorning recipe books become available, you will want crafted adorns in many of these slots.

Red Adorns

1. Get one each of the following from Tishan's Lockbox. You will switch these out on your belt depending on what your foes are doing. I usually run with Defiance, because stuns are what I usually run into, but when you have a name that uses other effects, swap out the belt rune as needed.

• Adamant Defiance
• Adamant Resolve
• Astral Dominion
• Blinding Gleam.

2. Here's what I do with the next four runes. There is some flexibility here, you may end up customizing:

• Championship - Finger
• Glory - Wrist
• Juxtaposition - Ear
• Witness - Wrist

3. I put Chorus of Night or Symphony of the Void (assuming you have a red one) on a Charm.

4. The rest of the red runes go on Primary, Secondary, and Ranged, and you have to read what they each do, then decide which three you want:

Evaluate and Adorn Your Gear
Now compare the gear from Tishan's Lockbox to whatever you have already. Keep whatever pieces are best, and adorn them.

Get All The Buffs!
There are three really helpful buffs you can purchase that really improve the stats for your mercenary, mount, and familiar:

• Jubilant Familiar Infusion
• Monolithic Mercenary Infusion
• Tolan's Darkwood Mount Infusion

Depending on what coin you already have and how easily you can obtain coin in either VoV or RoR, see:

• Thadampos, the VoV Currency Merchant in Svarni Expanse at (117, 6, 463) charges 10 Vetrovian Dres'Arg coins, 5,000 Status Points, and 50p each for these very useful buffs
• Sadiqe, the Currency Merchant in Hopewell Harbor, Raj'Dur Plateaus, at (12, -60, 523) charges 10 Renewal Talent coins, 5,000 Status Points, and 50p each for these very useful buffs.
• EDIT: These are now in Tishan's Lockbox! Look for them there!

But I Need More Potency!
First off, you will need at least 1 million POT. But keep in mind that Crit Bonus is king this expansion, and you will be struggling to not only get Crit and Crit Bonus, but you will really need Crit Bonus Overcap.

I hope you are a crafter, because if you do the fairly short RoR Tradeskill Sig Line, followed by 15 Researcher Missions, you will be able to fly everywhere, which is a big help doing the VoV Adventure Sig Line. Researcher missions are every three hours, and you can pick up one in each of the three new overland zones and do them all at the same time.

The Researcher Missions are the primary means for getting crafting recipe books. You will also get scads of "nail" adorns for crafters. Depending on your pocketbook and patience, you may have to resort to buying recipes from the broker.

I suggest asking in the Crafting channel for someone who has the recipe for Plateaus Barding of the Potent (assuming you don't have it yet). Each of these bardings provides 2,558.9 POT. Get 11 of them made. Most crafters will happily make these for you if you provide materials, fuel, and a tip. Some will provide the ingredients for a larger fee. Once you are at 1 million Potency, start switching to bardings that provide Crit or Crit Bonus as you can.

Don't have the locked barding slots open? Do the Overseer Heritage Crate mission every day to get the unlockers. Speak to Arabella F'arquharson in the Black Market area in either Qeynos or Freeport to "purchase" for free the Heritage Hunt [Daily] mission.

Don't have the regular slots unlocked on your current mount? Do Overseer missions, including all the old Charged Missions possible, every single day to get training potions for not just mounts, but also mercs, familiars, and spell research. "Purchase" them for free from Administrator Agent Stanley Parnem in either Qeynos or Freeport (click link to get exact locs). You may use a maximum of 10 Charged Overseer Quests at a time, and 10 charges per. Also, be sure to visit Arabella F'arquharson in either Qeynos or Freeport and purchase the daily Overseer Heritage Crate mission!

I Need More Blue Stats!
Get RoR "scroll snacks". They aren't actually snacks, but rather Sage-crafted scrolls that give you a temporary buff. You can ask for a Sage to craft them for you in the Crafting channel. There are 10 minute versions, and 30 minute versions. You can't stack a 10 with a 30, and for my money, the 10 minute are better because although they don't last as long, the stats are double that of the 30 minute scrolls.

Note that the Mastercrafted version of these "scroll snacks" are extremely rare-intensive. Just ask your Sage what materials are needed.

Getting Better Gear
As you begin adventuring through the signature questline in Renewal of Ro, you will be getting dropped loot that ranges from 390 Resolve to 400 Resolve. Evaluate these carefully against whatever you are wearing, and relace current gear with anything better that drops.

Mastercrafted Gear
Renewal of Ro has made Mastercrafted armor and jewelry useful again as a bridge to Heroic content, with each piece sporting 410 Resolve. You need 8,910 resolve for Heroic I instances.

Your cheapest route to obtaining this gear is to harvest A LOT. You will need two rares for each piece:

• Plate and Chain Armor, Metal Weapons: Chromite Ore
• Leather Armor: Armapine Hide
• Cloth Armor: Echeveria Root
• Jewelry, Belts, Charms: Taelosian Sphene
• Wooden Weapons, Ammo: Yucca Wood

Refined Rares
To get the very best results, you will want to use REFINED rares for your Mastercrafted gear, since it boosts your Primary Stats and Stamina a good bit.

If you are not a crafter and don't have the Tradeskill AAs that allow you to refine materials, you will need to find a crafter who can refine for you. If you will be using refined rares, plan on harvesting about double the number of rares you need, because refining isn't perfect and you will lose a bunch of rares in the refining process.

Experimentation
Once you have obtained your Mastercrafted gear, the next step is to Experiment that gear five times per piece to the Visionary quality level. This primarily allows you to add Potency and Crit Bonus, although other stats are also available, depending on the piece.

If you are not a crafter and don't have the Tradeskill AAs that allow you to do Experimentation, check the Crafting channel for someone who will do it for you. Experimentation is a big timesink for a crafter, because each piece takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes to experiment fully, depending on the Experimenter's skill and methods. If you fail at Experimentation, it DESTROYS the piece of crafted gear, so caution is indicated.

The wiki has a good writeup on how to do Experimentation and what gear helps boost your experimentation chances. The RoR Researcher Missions can reward nail adornment that boost experimentation as well.

Music Box Gear
Once you have finished the RoR Adventure Signature Questline, you can start on the Music Box quests. These reward gear with 410 Resolve. The Music Box quests can also drop a Cloth, Leather, Chain, or Plate box, which will allow you to choose one of three Forearm pieces with 415 Resolve.

The Mastercrafted would be better than the Music Box options, except for that 415 Resolve. You'll have to decide whether you need the Resolve more or not. I saved the Mastercrafted forearms in my bags and equipped the 415 Resolve forearms.



Useful Collection Rewards
The following solo overland collections from Sandstone Delta are known to reward a pattern for a piece of Mastercrafted mount tack, which you can have made into an upgrade for your mount:

• A Bug's Life -- Pattern: Hizite Shoes of Fervor (+11.2 Fervor)
• Delving in the Delta -- Pattern: Hizite Saddle of Fervor (+11.2 Fervor)
• Desert Glass -- Pattern: Hizite Breeching of Ability (+2,578,783 Ability Mod)
• Deadly Waterworks -- Pattern: Hizite Barding of the Potent (+2841.4 Potency)

The collection What One Eye Sees (from Sandstone Delta solo instances) rewards a 410 Resolve earring, The Other Eye.

Epic Spells
Renewal of Ro includes a questline for a new Epic Spell for your class that you can do after you finish the main adventuring signature questline and Music Box quests. We're still learning more about what's required to get the Apprentice spell and upgrade it. The link goes to Taled's write up thus far, and when we know a little more the wiki will have information as well.

Non-Gear Upgrades that Help
Are your spells and/or combat arts upgraded to Expert or better? How about your Ascensions? Fighters get their Experts made by Alchemists. Scouts' Experts come from Jewelers. Priests and Mages should talk to a Sage for their Experts. A Sage can help with Ascension upgrades for all but the new Ascensions introduced with RoR.

Our spells and combat arts (I'm just gonna call them spells after this) come in differing levels and in spell "strengths"... you automatically get the Apprentice versions of your spells. A Scholar (Alchemist/Jeweler/Sage, depending on your archetype) can craft Journeyman spells. Adept is the next level, and are mob drops and often available on the broker. Scholars can craft Expert spells for you from rare harvests, and this is your best bet while you are leveling... harvest everything, find out which rares can be made into what, and ask in the Crafting chat channel for a crafter to make things for you. After Expert spells, we have Masters, Grandmasters, Ancient, and Celestial. If you happen upon one of these as you are leveling, that's great, but don't worry about them until end game

Are you using the best AA build for your class? One trick I use is to ask in General chat who is the best {name_of_class} on the server. Usually you will get a couple of suggestions. Go to EQ2U and look up their AA specs and see what they are doing. You can even download their specs and then use them for your own toon if desired.

What kind of food and drink are you using? If it's not at least VoV player crafted stuff with stats, get some.

Are your mercenary and mount trained? Are they geared out? Is the mercenary old, or from VoV or newer? The better the quality of the merc (CELESTIAL, FABLED, TREASURED, etc.) the more of your stats the mercenary will share and thus perform better.

Once you have a merc summoned, check your Maintained window for the Mercenary Battalion Buff (it will look like a coin) to see what "season" it's from. If you are soloing, no matter what your class, you will probably want a healer merc, and you want it from the "Visions of Vetrovia" season, which doesn't necessarily include all the mercs from last expansion (the seasons aren't aligned properly with expansions, don't ask me why).

Find Your Best Casting Order
Spell casting order is not a fixed monolithic thing here. It will vary based on your stats (which are affected by your AA and gear).

You'll want to cast your spells in order of decreasing efficiency. "Efficiency" is based on how much direct damage a spell does, any detriment damage that "ticks", the duration of the spell, and how long it takes to cast a spell. I figure this out in Excel, personally.

You can look at a sample Excel Spell Efficiency Calculation (Dropbox link). You can use this in Excel, or in something like the free Google Sheets online, etc. by downloading the file, then uploading it to Sheets.

To use, buff yourself up. At the top of the spreadsheet, fill in your crit bonus, potency, and fervor. Only fill in stuff in the green boxes: the yellow areas are where the sheet has calculations set up to do the hard work for you.

Then open your Journal (press J), go to the Spells or Combat Arts tab, then open each spell one by one and use the values show in the Examine window to fill in the spreadsheet with the name of the spell, the minimum and maximum damage, if the spell ticks then add in the min/max values for that, the duration, and the number of seconds per tick. If the spell is an AOE, in the AOE column, enter either a 4 for a green AOE, or a 5 for a blue AOE.

Some things can't be determined this way, as for instance dumbfire pets, so for those I find a guildhall that has a Training Dummy chest, set up a group of about 8 training dummies and make them immortal, turn on Advanced Combat Tracker, and throw whatever spell it is over and over at the dummies, then figure out the average damage from ACT. Once you have all the spells filled in, sort by Efficiency from highest to lowest, and that's your casting order.

Caveat: There will always be exceptions on casting orders. There will be some things you want to cast immediately as a mob is pulled, there will be situational spells that you only cast sometimes, there are buffs and debuffs to work in. But the efficiency list is the basis.

Why Can't I Use all My AA Points?
Another item new or returning folks might not know is that some while back, DBG introduced a special kind of AA points that aren't actually usable until you "unlock" them by earning something called "Bonus Prestige Points".

There's a list on the wiki of what rewards Bonus Prestige Points. There are a couple of collections, but mostly you get these by completing old achievements.

There are only two achievements in Renewal of Ro that I have located that award these Bonus Prestige Points, so prepare to backtrack and do a bit of old content to get your AA points all unlocked... Fortunately, there are some fairly simple Exploration and solo quest achievements you can use to do this.

What!? You mean I am missing MORE out of my AA from old content??
Sadly, yes. You have to go back to VOV and ROR and do the various weekly missions until you have enough of these Trackers to buy the buffs from Kelaci Vol'Luissa in Savage Weald (/way 16, 110, -719)

[At this point, I guess you have to have excellent telepathic abilities to even figure all of this out! ]

What Other Buffs Am I Missing?

• The French Slobberer is a nice Potency buff with an animation of a French bulldog. It's from completing all the RoR Solo Instance collections.
• Ascension buff
  Each of the Ascensions has a "form", and the highest level of the form gives you a little Fervor and Ability Doublecast buff (Elemental Amalgamation, Etherlord, Union of Stone, Sanguine Embrace). Go do the Panda quests in Sundered Frontier,and then you can "buy" for 0c the Ascension level boosters. Once you have the level 10 form, you will want to level that Ascension spell as high as you can. A sage can help you by crafting the spell upgrades. Some levels will require an Illegible Scroll Page, and you have to scribe each level in order.
• VoV Flawless Buff from killing all VoV H1 and H2 Names Flawlessly
  Happily, I've noticed many groups in LFG pulling together to run these last-expansion heroic zones. This buff is a big help. The replacement buff in RoR comes from raiding.
• Paid in Their Own Coin buff from Den2 challenge
  I have also seen groups forming to run The Merchant's Den Challenge Mode. It takes a bunch of runs to get the final coins.
• Monolith buff - level10
  The Monolith adorn is in the "nice if ya got it" category. The Hua Collector's Star Shard is just about as good.

Other Thoughts
As I learn more, I'll update. Be sure to read posts down the thread!

do you recommend doing the tradeskill line before the signature line?

p.s. even with full MC gears with celestial mount that only amounts to 8898 resolve which is 20 resolve below what's needed for h1

Very nice writeup.

I'd suggest adding a mention of the Mount/Merc/Familiar infusion buffs. You can get them for 10 coins in either VoV or RoR from the status merchant. Very little effort for large stat bonusses.

I did do the tradeskill sig line to get flight first. In between running missions for the Researchers, I worked on the adventure sig line afoot. It took me two days to get flight unlocked everywhere, and I'd say it was worth it.

Also, if you want Mastercrafted gear, you need to be either plat-wealthy so you can buy recipe books on the broker, or else you will have to run Researcher Missions to get the books. Even if you aren't a crafter, you can either trade a book to the crafter in return for them making your stuff, or sell it on the broker at nutso prices right now at the start of the expansion.

Added currency merchant buffs and Music Box quest rewards to the OP.

Appreciate all your hard work!

.....

Any chance you could post the different resolve requirements here so it’s in a place that everyone reads and don’t have to go searching different threads for it?

I don't know all of them yet.The wiki will have the Resolve requirements as we discover what they are.

Heroic 1: 8910 (8930 final named)
Heroic 2: 9225 (9245 final named)
Heroic 3: 9455 (9475 final named)

Raid 1: 9455, I think?

Gninja said 9355 when I asked him in Beta for Raid 1. We'll see!

@Sigrdrifa

Good blue gem for your neck from Merchants Den quest line https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Nature_of_the_Archaeologian
Not huge but fairly easy to do to fill an empty gem slot.

Sigrdrifa,

Thank you so very much for this guide, it was exactly what I was looking for in my 1807659424th return to this game. Maybe now I can go toe-to-toe with the sand-critters and survive!!!

Does a character have to craft to get flight?

Npo. As you progress through the adventure sig line, you will unlock flying. It's just faster to tradeskill first to get flight, is all. Assuming that you come into the zone as a 125 crafter.

Thank you for the clarification, that makes me feel a bit better. I haven't crafted anything on any character, so that would have been a bummer

will there be an equivalent to thadampos in ror?

There already is.

There currently no gear crates though, no.

will there be crates is what i meant

I added a few collection rewards to the original post. It will be a few more weeks before we know what all the collection rewards for soloable content are, and if there's more good stuff, I'll update.

Here's what I added today:

Useful Collection Rewards
The following solo overland collections from Sandstone Delta are known to reward a pattern for a piece of Mastercrafted mount tack, which you can have made into an upgrade for your mount:

• A Bug's Life -- Pattern: Hizite Shoes of Fervor (+11.2 Fervor)
• Delving in the Delta -- Pattern: Hizite Saddle of Fervor (+11.2 Fervor)
• Desert Glass -- Pattern: Hizite Breeching of Ability (+2,578,783 Ability Mod)
• Deadly Waterworks -- Pattern: Hizite Barding of the Potent (+2841.4 Potency)

The collection What One Eye Sees (from Sandstone Delta solo instances) rewards a 410 Resolve earring, The Other Eye.