Ironsoul guide and run down e200-250

This guide will go over some Ironsoul basics as well as a helpful little run down of how the character works and stacks.

## Character Basics

As you cast more incantation spells your stance bonuses will increase so generally speaking you want to split your play time into 3 phases. A **levelling phase**, a **spam out all them incantations phase** and a **burst phase** which will generate mana. You will have to trade between the last 2 stages as charges are rather important and during the spam incantations stage it is rather easy to stack charges while spam casting.

Using Temper The Steel without Furious Strike equipped will still generate furious strike charges. Furious strike when cast will use a % of its total charges so if you have 2500, your casts will cost 250 per cast and give a significant boost to the amount of mana gained.

1. The first stance is **Meditation** granting you charges on any non spell shard bound spell, this can be used to stack synthetic entity as well as the majority of the class spells the Ironsoul's spells can hold a lot of charges so don't worry about casting them the second they hit 4 charges.
2. The second stance is **Defence** it decreases the duration of incantation spells allowing you burn off excess stacks and increase the effectiveness of the Ironsoul's stances (because they stack with the amount of incantations cast).
3. The third stance is **Berserk** which increases the effectiveness of evocation spells and should be enabled every time you go to burst for mana.

### Recommended Stats

* Intelligence 100 - It's just a good mana booster and most equipment requires some level of int. Having 100 will make it so you can wear most of it.
* Insight 75+ - In this instance we are going over using Voidterror as a way to stack up some void mana, insight will help.
* Spellcraft 75+ - Ironsoul depends on evocations to ultimately earn him that sweet sweet mana so putting some points in this will act as a multiplier for the amount of mana generated.
* Wisdom 0 - The majority of your spells cast will be using charges not mana shards so you don't get much benefit, and you have force of will to generate shards when you need it to.
* Dominance 0 - There are only the standard apprentice summons available and there are no special click mechanics so Dominance doesn't really serve a role.
* Patience 150+ - The idle bonus and the 150 point perk work rather well at increasing mana profits, you won't be clicking to break idle so it's worth taking.
* Mastery 150+ - Increasing the scaling of the characters abilities means the build will accelerate quicker.
* Empathy 150+ - We will be using the Voidterror to stack mana and this just buffs the pets so overall it's a good take.

Depending on what equipment you want to use you can modify this slightly if you have extra points i recommend throwing them onto patience, empathy or mastery.

### Recommended Equipment

I used the falconer set with collar of obedience as my belt and Legacy as my boots. I used self reflection as my research, Anima core, and anomalous essence as my trophies, morbid loop as my ring and left my neck and other ring slot empty as i had no appropriate gear. Really for gear you want anything that is going to buff either your pet, your character or your void mana. I prioritized the pet but it may be better to go character or void mana if you got the gear for it. Collar of obedience bumps the mastery requirement to 175 but also shortens the levelling phase by allowing your simulacrum to produce sources faster. I took it from empathy but I think the increase in empathy provides a better build overall.

## **Levelling Phase**

Stance: **Meditation** / **Berserk**

The Ironsoul can't use all of its abilities until it hits level 135 or so (depending on level reduction but at e200 masteries somewhere with challenges completed it becomes closer to 125 or so). It is important to note that Synthetic Entity can be charged by the Ironsoul's meditation stance, by flipping to the berserk stance right before casting it grants a rather high amount of EXP and can get you to the needed level quick.

Pet:  or

For this stage you want Synthetic Entity, Furious Strike, Ritual Of Power, Empower, Conjure Manabeast, and Temper The Steel equipped as your spells.

After a cast or 2 of Furious Strike, trade it out for Force Of Will.

Using Collar Of Obedience will speed up how fast Simulacrum can earn sources and will save some time in this stage. The point of swapping our furious strike is that the first few casts of furious strike will give you a quick mana boost to make it so the Simulacrum doesn't take forever to stack up sources. Buying 400 sources saves you a few minutes of idle time. But because of how efficient temper the steel is at generating furious strike charges we don't need to be stacking it either. So use it a few times to get the quick boost then dump it for force of will which will help you stack empower and ritual of power.

Ritual of power, Empower, and Force Of Will can be set to reckless cast and to help stack up the amount of incantations stacked during the early stage so that you can start generating charges on your spells. Mana beast is there mainly to auto click and earn some EXP from clicking, when enough EXP has been earned from it dropping it for enhanced strength is recommended.

## **Incantation Spam Phase**

Stance: **Meditation** / **Defence**

For the pet i recommend Voidterror as it is a good mana multiplier without being directly detrimental to the incantation spam phase (archivist is also a good mana multiplier for Ironsoul but the increase in incantation duration makes him a pain and you end up swapping him out to stack then swapping him back in to burst limiting his level) with the Voidterror you don't need to swap him out. Someone was recommending using the Arcanawarg for the spam phase but i didn't notice a mana problem as long as force of will was equipped.By spamming incantations we increase the effectiveness of the incantations as many of the ones we are spamming have a power increase based on the amount of times cast this exile, we also increase the effectiveness of the Ironsoul as his abilities scale with the amount of incantations cast.

Pet:

**Spell load-out**

Force of will, empower, ritual of power, enhanced strength, Iron blood, and temper the steel

All but temper the steel can be set to reckless. While in meditation stance it should be generating extra charges of our incantations so you can flick to defence stance once in a while to burn off extra charges occasionally flicking back to meditate to generate enough charges to cast force of will again so we can continue to cast ritual of power and empower (or you can save up some charges on force of will and manual cast it while in defence stance to keep all your incantations casting as fast as possible).

Using Temper the Steel without furious strike equipped will generate furious strike charges though you want to be in Berserk mode when you do it so many charges are generated. I haven't really found a use for this as you still need Temper the Steel equipped when you go into burst mode as its passive is rather nice. If there were a way to take advantage i feel like it would have something to do with using mass synthetic entity charges.

The reason you don't have Temper the steel set to auto cast is that it is generating charges and has a much greater effect while berserk is on. If you are feeling lazy you can set it to auto cast too, it scales with the amount of times it is cast so AFKing and leaving it on cast is perfectly fine.

## **Burst Phase**

Stance: **Berserk**

Swap out Force of will for Furious strike and set your stance to berserk, set all spells to reckless auto cast.

Temper the steel will provide you the stacks of Furious Strike, though if your stacks of furious strike are hitting 0 then un-auto cast your incantations and let Temper The Steel build up a few stacks for you then resume auto casting everything.

When you burn out of Temper The Steel charges go back to **Incantation Spam Phase** until your stacks are back up.

**END**

**Thanks for reading, here is some random rambling.**

With this build i managed to start increasing my mysteries rather quickly from e200 though when i got to +2 e200 mysteries i thought i could make it faster by adapting it for the Anima Construct because of the incantation bonus might stack with the mana boost it provides to outperform Voidterror, i was wrong so very very wrong.

I also did some messing around with the archivist but it was so slow with the incantation duration buff that i started to manually drop the spells after they were cast so i could re-equip and recast, overall it was a huge pain and wasn't worth it.

If people have better ideas just say so, so far this is like a meh level of mystery generation and it definitely could be better, but like something explaining this character needed to be posted because a few people were complaining about the Ironsoul saying that it was taking days just to stack incantations enough to get it producing a single +1 e of mysteries which does not seem to be the case for me at least. The other reason i made this guide was that the only other posted guide for the Ironsoul was super complicated, so i made a simpler one that takes less gear and makes less bank.