Early Archon

This has been (mostly) updated for v1.44. Offer all feedback through Discord.

## How Early?

This  guide is for e300 to approximately e350-360 mysteries. Many players believe that Archon is useless before unlocking , but with a little know-how, and a bit of running , he can be an incredible powerhouse well before that. This guide will take you all the way to unlocking .

* *Note: Please read the full guide before charging ahead. There are relevant notes throughout to help you understand why certain things are being done, so you can make the best out of your time with Archon.*

## What You'll Need

The most important difference between  and  is . First of all, Archon doesn't have a spell such as , so Summoning Efficiency is no longer relevant. Instead, Soulstealer levels based on character XP. And as Spazou has proven, this relationship scales rapidly. Since Soulstealer has effects unlocking all the way to level 300, this makes character XP your most important stat to maximize early. The charXP setup for  levelling at this myst range is , , , , and . So start by upgrading those.

* *Note:  and  should be upgraded first, as they give the largest bonus. Also notable is that  gives the full XP bonus at the Epic level, so you should wait until later to make them Legendary.  gives almost no bonus until Legendary, so you should probably upgrade it last.*

### **Attributes**

Attributes for  can be complicated, because there are so many effects at play, and "optimal" options vary wildly based on how many attributes you have. To that end, I've split this section into 2 parts. "Starting Attributes" show your starting values for items and to make this run work. Then in "Attributes to upgrade later", I explain where you can put additional attribute points and why, so you can decide what's best for how many points you have, and make adjustments as you earn more.

#### **Starting Attributes**

* Intelligence: 150
* Insight: 50, or 65-125 depending on your  and  levels with a goal of 125. **If and only if** you have  and  at legendary quality. If you do not have both at legendary, consider these free points and read the section below for assignment ideas.
* Spellcraft: 150
* Wisdom: 100-150, depending on your  and  levels. Go for a total after gear of either 150 or (ideally) 200 Wisdom, whichever you can budget for.
* Dominance: 0
* Patience: 50
* Mastery: 175
* Empathy: 100, or 100-175 **if and only if** your  is at epic quality. Adjust for your level accordingly. Take points from Mastery if pursuing 175.

* *Note: Fill can give you too much Insight because it will omit the bonus from  if you don't have the attributes to equip it when you click "Fill".*

#### **Attributes to upgrade later**

* Intelligence: The 175 INT bonus nearly doubles profits for only 25 additional attribute points. 200 INT in the early-game should be a 600% boost to profit. Later mysts gives up to 1000% profit.
* Insight: If you're running 65 INS and have 10 attribute points left over, the 75 INS bonus is worth picking up, but I wouldn't add any more than that. That said, the 200 perk is the second-best perk for Archon, so if you have enough free points to get 180 (if you use legendary ), or 140 (if you use  with it), it's worth it. This perk should be the third 200 perk you get after MAS.
* Spellcraft: Since a lot of our items require this attribute, 150 SPC is highly recommended. The 175 SPC bonus is also great because most of our spells are incantations. Finally, 200 SPC is the fourth-best 200 perk for Archon.
* Wisdom: Wisdom's 150 and 200 perks are the best in their tier for Archon. ***However,*** keep in mind we will wear  during burst, so adjust your investment accordingly.
* Dominance: Never upgrade Dominance. There's nothing worth getting here.
* Mastery: This should be what your first 25 extra goes to. Mastery's 200 perk is the third-best 200 perk for Archon.

## Abolisher Phase

*Note: You're only going to spend an hour max in this phase. Any more than that is simply not worth it compared to an hour in Archon. Take this section with a grain of salt, and don't worry if you can't get the Doppelganger close to 160 in the hour window. Hit either 1e4 Void Entities or 1 hour played, whichever comes first, and move on to Archon!*

Since we don't yet have , we have to run  to use  in order to take full advantage of our Class Ability. Since we aren't actually using Abolisher to profit, this greatly changes how we use the class. Our primary goal is to gather shards, so we'll cast  and  to ensure we're spending shards as quickly as possible, and use  to earn the shards we need. After that, our secondary goal is actually to build experience. To this end we'll take advantage of  and  during the downtime. Here's the spellset we'll run as Abolisher:

For this phase, our items aren't that significant. I wouldn't recommend upgrading any items specifically for this phase. *Ideally* you'll want to reach 160 on  during this time, but it's far from necessary and certainly not practical to do so at low gear levels. That said, let's look at what we can equip:

* *Note: You should use your previous Doppelganger leveling set from playing Abolisher to quickly level him to 160 for the bonus to incantation efficiency, allowing you to gather shards and VEs faster. Focus on Summoning Efficiency and Pet XP to level the Doppelganger quickly. At 160, switch to a set better suited to the remainder of this phase:*

 and  are both accumulated spells, so we can boost them with anything that improves accumulated spells. Improving incantation efficiency helps as well, on top of speeding up . Pet ability power indirectly helps, as  increases incantation efficiency (at 160) and spell shards gain himself. Just assemble whatever you have to raise these stats while avoiding reduced spell costs like the plague. For fun, I've tried my hand at assembling an "optimal" set for this phase:

* *Note: For weapons,  shard cost increasing effect increases with rarity, so it's an important item to upgrade.*

### **How long should I run Abolisher?**

This phase should last for one hour at most. Reason being that the exp you get from Void Entities scale logarithmic, and shards spend scale with ^0.85, so less then linear, meaning if you double your time as Abolisher it will only give 1.8 times the profit! Archon scales much better, so it's preferable to change to Archon as soon as you're satisfied with your Void Entities count. Aim for around 1e4 Void Entities if you're using VA to collect VEs.

* *Note: Early on you will almost certainly hit 1e4 Void Entities before 160 Doppelganger - don't worry about it, and proceed to Archon.*

## Archon Build-Up

Time to play the class we're here for! By now, you've levelled your character up to around level 160, collected a lot of spell shards, and you're ready to see what's next. In this phase, we'll work on building up Archon's accumulated spells, getting a lot of spells cast, and levelling  as high as possible. To do this, we'll cast all the spells that scale on "times cast", and use to cast  as fast as possible:

* *Note: At first glance, you may wonder why we aren't stacking , since it also scales on "times cast". The reason is that Archon includes so many spells we can stack this way, that  bonus is simply outclassed! With this set of spells, we're also incidentally stacking , which scales off of spell shard income and is therefore bolstered by , and stacking , which scales off the **total** spells cast. Thus we don't need to cast these spells during build-up, but they're still scaling powerfully for our burst later.*

For this phase, we'll equip our items for levelling , along with some items to help cast  more quickly. Here's my recommendation:

As you can see, it's essentially all of our character XP gear, combined with every part of the Falconer's set that gives pet XP multipliers (and doesn't share a slot with character XP). Also, if you're not going to be watching it for a while, you can switch your weapon to  to collect enchanting dust.

* *Note:*  gives more PetXP than , but, it's a small difference. This is more to serve as an easier slide into TA Archon. If you aren't planning on using Archon after e360, use  and . If you can't get 175emp with , then using  will be better.

## Archon Pre-Burst

Like most classes, Archon builds Void Mana best by using . So let's add that to our casting:

* You may want to stack  here to make  stronger.

## Archon Burst

Alright, time for the main event. Now we take advantage of all the spells we've been stacking with , and this is our burst:

Note: Notice how every spell scales off spells cast? We've been stacking , , and  all run, and now  scales off total casts, and  gains its power from . Even  increases it's missile count the more its cast! This is why Archon scales so well, and why  casts are so important.

That aside, let's look at the BiS for our burst:

*Notes:*

* You'll likely want to use  instead of the current back item, this is to reach 200 WIS. This is a huge profit boost.
* If you have legendary , use it instead of .
* If you're doing short runs and got high enough catalysts, then  can become better.
* If you have all equipment legendary, and haven't been stacking  for very long in the run,  may give you more profits. This may be worth checking on your first few quick runs, but  will always win out in the long run, so you should still focus on upgrading these items anyway.

It's important to know that, when bursting with Archon, you can actually burst multiple times! After your first burst, you've probably raised your total mana earned by a large amount, and this raises the cap for how many buildings  can buy. Switch back to Pre-Burst, and then let Soulstealer buy buildings until you stop seeing the "Bought Mana Sources" number stop increasing in the Statistics tab (You can equip  and  to speed this up). You can repeat this burst over and over again until Soulstealer stops buying at least 25 Arcanasprings each time. Through this process, you can often make out many more mysteries, and the more mysteries you'd earn, the more effect it has! This helps keep Archon reasonably efficient all the way to unlocking .

Once you unlock , switch to the TA Archon Guide. You'll want to finish your current run starting with the TA Build-Up phase, to earn enough profits to ensure you can unlock  again without having to use the Abolisher phase from this guide. Congratulations, and thanks for using this guide!