Defiance Archon

Updated for v1.44. Please hand feedback over on discord if anything bothers you.

With Defiance, unless you are rushing through exiles at the beginning of your realm you will build up enough AC's and pet levels that Dom 150 can be worth it. If you want to use it, you will want to get Dominance 150 (after accounting for the AP you get from Innate aptitude, attribute buff, and commissars). You want to spend exactly though, as extra points that could have gone to Versatility will make it a net loss quickly.
At long exiles with extremely high memes and mysts (e1600+), Dom 250 can become worth it as well.

## Startup

Get some casts on Employ Celestial Countermeasures and then get some void entities with Synthetic Entity before you spend much time pet leveling.

## VE Stacking

Here you can stack VE's super quickly with Nightfall and .

The effect of extra evo efficiency on Synthetic Entity is minor, so you don't need all these pieces if you don't have enough edust or want to keep items like .

### Items

If you can't keep your cast rate maxed, can switch some PAP enchant items for evo items, like Hollow Eye Pendant. Important to keep JMS on the right. If you want to maximize VE's badly, can put another evo like LB or MM to increase your Synthetic Entity cast rate. Likely not going to be worth lost JMS passive though.

## Pet Exp Stacking

### Items

Since Unclean Knowledge scales with incantation efficiency, you can get substantially more pet exp using pieces that have incant enchants. You'll want to sit on this phase initially until pet leveling slows down, then switch to spell stacking where you'll also level UK some more. Incantation efficiency enchant pieces only beat pet exp items at high enchants, so you'll want to respec your edust items to max these out during this phase. Because it's short, it's also worth respeccing your build mems to lose some Unending Resource for more Forbidden Might. You can also respec your red catalysts all the way into the char exp source meme

Note gear swaps: Anointed Ashes only beats Heart of The Storm with very high enchant levels. Rich Bands might be competitive with Nomadic Wrists at some exp ranges with high level enchants. Architectural databelt may beat Endless Pouches with enough catalysts income/power and character exp source memes.

## Counterspell Stacking

### Spells

Your main goal here is to stack counterspell enough that you can afford shard spending. You can drop other spells if you want to do that faster, or come back here from shard spending if you end up needing more counterspells

### Items

Because significant pet exp only happens in pet exp stacking, you want to maximize PAP for the most Autoclicks here. Batstick, Fin-wing also provides good bonuses. For weapons, alternatives are Cataclysm or Enchanting Membrane. Note that for TW's, you'll also want to use PAP items over char/pet exp.

Alternatively, you can do shard stacking phase the whole exile instead of TA stacking. The increased shards spent from doing Debilitate all exile may be more profit than the lost JMS passive casts.

## Shard Spending

### Spells

This is the bulk of your exile. The lost JMS passives on Debilitate are outweighed by the profit of extra time shard spending. You have more spells to stack than spell slots here, so you'll need to rearrange your spells (ratios provided).
For longer exiles, once you've got substantially more Unclean Knowledge casts or mysts, you'll want to go back to pet exp until pet leveling slows down again.
If you want to do super stacking, it may be more efficient to stack TA with Ritual Disc or some other modified spellbar for some time before this.

Cast ratios. These exclude spell meme bonus casts, so you'll have to adjust them with your bonus casts. Also excludes Unclean Knowledge which isn't 100% calculated. My rule of thumb for UK is about 1/5 casts of my smallest spell, which is ECC with my spell memes.

ECC: 16.12383102% of casts

Radiant Pools: 13.06030313% of casts

Nullzone: 14.54369558% of casts

Syphon Power: 19.18735892% of casts

Tempered Arcanomancy: 37.08481135% of casts

For example if ECC has 2.5e11 casts, Radiant pools would have 1.01e12, Nullzone 1.34e12, Syphon Power 1.76e12 and TA 3.41e12.

If for some reason you aren't getting max casts here (which you absolutely want), you can add more PAP items (PAP enchants will help with shard pool) or stack counterspell more.

### Items

If a char XP item isn't going to change your char level (like Artificer's), you can replace it with an enchanted PAP item.

Depending on your catalysts and meme levels, Architectural Databelt may give more Char XP than Endless Pouches.

If you have all your enchants at 41/42+, depending on your items here, Companionship ring may be more total PAP than Resonator Ring. If so, you should use Companionship ring in this set because Char XP (to boost debilitate shard cost) and PAP (for higher shard pool capacity for easier casting, and AC's for Char exp) are all that matter here.

If you're not doing this for a long portion of your exile and you're capped rate, you can use Concealing Shroud, but you should aim to do this phase at least 20% so you should have the shard pool capacity to cap it without shroud to not lose too much profit.

## Burst

### Items

You should have some Obscure Talents by this point, which in combination with Unclean Knowledge will push Commissar's and Bite Sleeves to be worthwhile. When rushing, it's possible another offhand could beat Commissar's. Lucky Amulet will beat Miniaturized Accelerator early in the realm at low catalyst levels. Following enchant priority at enchant 25+5 LA and 24+5 MA below 6.97e7 catalysts LA will win, at 40+5 LA and 39+5 MA LA will win below 5.87e10 catalysts, and 40+5 both LA will win below 2.98e10 catalysts.

Once you have all the Obscure Talents and especially if you have Ingot Shortage upgrade, you may want to start looking at getting Dominance 150 in long exiles (your last exile, if you're following the current long realm meta). The break even point is

1.0324^(150-10-sleeveAP)/dom150

where sleeveAP is the AP you will get from Commissar's, and dom150 is 1+(dominance 150 perk tooltip bonus)/100. If this is greater than 1, enough Dominance to get the 150 perk in burst with sleeve wins over Versatility.

## Enchant Priority

Forbidden Might is not as expensive these days until the very high levels. If you have the edust, you'll want to compare the edust scaling (profit) of Defiance archon and the memory cost vs the profit from Forlorn Greatness/Majesty and the mem cost of those. First few levels you almost certainly want, then it takes some balancing with Forlorns.

Priority

Highest

Highest -1

Highest -2

Highest -3

Highest -4

Highest -5

Highest -6

Source Memetics: Use TA Archon source memes if you have trouble getting to Ascensions still. There are two ways you can improve source memetics once they are leveled high.

The best way is to move incant eff to gems and char exp to nexii. You can then add Gem Resonance to VM phase. If you do this, optionally you can get an all incant efficiency enchant set (similar to pet exp) which you use to snap GR. Only increments of enough gems to get you another tier of source memetic bonus matter, so it doesn't need to be fully enchanted and is very minor (single digit %) bonuses at max enchants anyway.

When focusing catalysts, my rule of thumb is to put about 87.5% of reds on Arcanasprings, then you want to put the rest on your other memetics as PAP/Incant>>>evo/CAP>exp (leaving Anti Magic Domes with none). There may be a better spread, if you find better profit with something else feel free to give feedback on discord.