Era 1 Memory Tree Guide

The Era 1's Memory Tree's minor memory nodes do give some... sorta-useful modifiers, and I organized them, on the Memory Tree page, in descending order, by the quantity that are available; and, within each group of like-quantities of nodes, I organized them in also-descending order, by what I thought would be the most impactful stats.

Emboldened, below, are the nodes I consider the most valuable to strive for (major Trait nodes, taking precedence and priority over minor nodes).

Please view the Memory Tree page, for full descriptions of how the Traits work, and the quantities/effects of the minor nodes, if you're still unclear about their usefulness, after reading my assessments of them.

1. **Wealth nodes for Gold multipliers, which lets you buy more Researches, so you can get a higher Staff of Knowledge XP rate Research level (and Enchanting Discount, so your Enchanting level can grow higher, feeding back in a loop as Enchanting levels reduce your Research costs further).**
2. **Soul nodes to get higher Enchantments in general, and more Power (well, more Gold for researches empowers you, too, to be fair, which is why I consider Gold a higher priority).**
3. **Damage nodes (effective, but unremarkable).**
4. Health nodes. Pretty unremarkable
5. **Enchanting Discount nodes, for the same reasons that other sources of Enchanting Discount being useful, were mentioned above.**
6. In my opinion, Research Rate is.. mehhh... not a big sweat, the runs take a bit anyways, and Researches complete when they complete.
7. Movement Speed nodes (helpful for running away from enemies, picking up collectibles faster, that sort of benefit), and helps with the FAST Achievement.
8. Lastly, Offline Gains (does not affect Timeshard earnings).

The major nodes/Traits, are listed in no particular order, but emboldened to reflect upon those that may be potentially-best, to worst:

1. **I'd say Overachiever's a hugely helpful Trait (just for automating the Researching components of your runs, if you tend to be a bit more hands-off with the game).**
2. **Status Fiend can serve as a useful Trait, if you rely on Spell Perks that either interact with hitting enemies afflicted with (Elemental) Status Effects/Status Affinity perks.**
3. *Arcane Surge is situational (and the condition requiring you be at low health, for it to activate, is a bit... risky), but may be helpful to DPS, for its Cast Speed bonus... that's up to you, to decide if it's valuable.*
4. *Retribution has a fairly long cooldown, compared to its active time, so it's probably not justified to take it unless you have the spare Mirrors of Remembrance to purchase it.*
5. **Magical Absorption is considered Era 1's bread and butter, by some. That Cast Speed buff, just, phew; you can still take the Tempered Casting Spell Perk on your favorite damaging Spell, and it'll still be pumping out casts, if you get hit by projectiles often enough.**
6. **Primordial Boost is... well, it's a utility. It takes the pre-existent special effects (not the damage over time components, though) of Elemental Status Effects, should you ever apply those to enemies, and empowers them more (multiplicatively, by 1.2x their base effect). So, for example, if Burning enemies normally take 1.1x damage from all sources, they'll suddenly start taking 1.32x Damage [if I'm not mistaken]... so... ehh, it's worth considering, if you use the Status Fiend Trait simultaneously, or an Elemental Empowerment Spell Perk on any Spell, to apply Elemental Status Effects.**
7. *Acrobatics is helpful to accomplish the "Can't Touch This" Achievement requirement of dodging 10 attacks in a row, and the chance to dodge is 'rolled' separately, I believe, from the Q2+ Evasion Runes (+10% chance to dodge damage); note that the Evasion rune doesn't have a cooldown to its dodge effect, while the Acrobatics trait does.*
	1. *(Also, Acrobatics provides a temporary x1.40 Movement Speed buff, which can eventually assist you in completing the FAST Achievement, requiring you gain 1,000% [1e3%] Movement Speed bonus). In general, of course, dodging means you're surviving even that little bit more, so... that's a benefit, too.*
8. **Preparation is a very simple Trait, just randomly rewarding you with two levels' worth of Spell Perks, (which Spell Perks you get is random, and of courses, it's a Spell Perk for any of the upwards of 6 unique Spells in your Class' Spellbook)... some people like it, and you can always use the Feather Duster if you just started a run, to roll for new Spell Perks, if you're dissatisfied with the ones Preparation gave you.**
9. **Elemental Neutrality is a fine DPS-buffing trait, if you you don't take any Elemental Empowerment Spell Perks on Spells you use.**
10. *Fleet Footed provides you with a Movement Speed bonus; again, helpful to kite enemies, collect loot faster, and to complete the FAST Achievement, eventually.*
11. **Status Frenzy is a decent DPS buff, if you either use the Status Fiend Trait, and/or Elemental Empowerment Spell Perks.**
12. **Thick Headed is fine, if you don't have Researches active when you need your DPS boost (which tends to happen if you're pushing high Waves, and haven't Enchanted recently), amongst in other scenarios.**
13. *Totem Whisperer is.. somewhat helpful, as Totems can help you push a couple waves higher, though you might not have many Totems in early-game, and the spawn rate increase might not make a very-noticeable difference, so...it's an honorable mention, at best.*
14. **Golden Envy is a pretty consistent, albeit slightly-small Damage buff, if you're slow to collect Troves that spawn on the battlefield.**
15. Encouragement, as a Trait, is probably best-used, in tandem with the Totem Whisperer Trait, so you're at least maximizing your Totem uptime, and thus Encouragement provides you with more healing; the fact that Totems have an average base spawn rate, of one spawning, per 6 minutes... means that 10%-of-total-health-healing will be a bit infrequent... but...
16. Obliteration is just... an extremely underwhelming Trait. I wouldn't generally recommend that you get it.

## Additional Tips and Tricks

* Typically, try your best to determine the most cost-inexpensive, shortest paths to the major nodes that you want, most, if possible.
	+ Remember, you'll end up, at your max Awakening Rank 10, having at least a total of 40 Mirrors of Remembrance to purchase with, which gives you some amount of leverage in reaching for a number of those major Traits, even though there's a total of 170 nodes on the tree.
* Just learn about how the blue node connections work (typically, roughly, they function such that "You can buy one node connected to a blue connection, but not another node also connected to the blue connection, unless you can circle around through all the normal collections, to get the node you were cut off from/didn't choose, first").
	+ It's a bit confusing, though, so I recommend that you don't confirm purchases of nodes right away, if you can alternatively first play around with the Mirrors of Remembrance you can spend (undoing unwanted selected purchases), to learn how the blue connections work.
* Pretty much, don't worry too much about deliberately getting the minor nodes (except for the Offline Gain nodes, if you spend the majority of your time Offline, or the Movement Speed nodes, if you're working on the FAST Achievement); otherwise, they just kinda get purchased, on the way to pathing into bigger (major/Trait) nodes.
	+ Be advised that, for what it's worth, typically, minor stat nodes tend to be more valuable, in the outer-edges of the tree, than those closer to the middle of the tree
	+ To be clear, minor nodes basically end up functioning as a stat multiplier (albeit that each node of a kind, adds up with others of the same kind). So, don't worry about them being -completely- underwhelming; each little bit counts.
		- For example, if you had all 29 Gold nodes, albeit that they might be worth as little as... say, +5% gold each, they add up to an overall Gold value modifier of 346% Gold/x4.46.
		- If you end up with your Memory Tree looking a bit like this:   Where you arrive at a fork in the road, where picking "path A" or "path B" provides different types of minor nodes, respectively, as long as it takes the same amount of Mirrors of Remembrance spent, to reach your target destination, just pick whichever path's minor node stats you'd prefer more. In my screenshot's example, I took the left path's (this example, to be clear, though, is made of the Era (Stage) 2's Memory Tree, in the picture, which is why it provides) Cast Speed nodes, rather than the Dodge Chance nodes.

So, yeah, that's just a few recommendations for Traits, and how they might synergize with whatever build you want to use, to get the most multipliers/bang for your buck (err, Mirrors of Remembrance)! Good luck, and have fun!

In the worst-case scenario, you can ask the community, here, in the page comments/Discussion pages, for help; or, joining the official Discord server; you can ask for help, there, too, by just naming what Traits you think you want, from what you see above/on the Memory Trees page, and we might be able to help you figure out the best pathing to get them!