How AA Actually Works

AA and regular experience share the same kills

AA experience comes in at the same time as regular experience. Same kills, same pull, and there is no slider to flip between the two. What decides how fast the points arrive is the con color of what you are killing. A yellow or red con pays a lot, a blue pays a little, and a grey pays nothing. That single fact drives the rest of this guide.

Level 50 is the worst place to farm AA

Here is the trap most people fall into. At the cap, AA trickles in at roughly a fifth of the rate you saw on the way up, and almost nothing still cons yellow to you. Unless you are farming undead well above your level in the Hole or grinding raid targets on a loop, the points crawl.

Levels 10 to 25 are the exact opposite. Everything is red and yellow, kills are fast, and AA pours in. Motes drop most freely in that same bracket, so it is the sweet spot for both at once. Most players clear it in an afternoon.

The loadout trick

The Unbound AAs are free, and automatic

A set announced days before launch, one per class, is handed to you automatically. You do not spend points and you do not unlock them, they are simply on. Do not waste points trying to buy something the Unbound line already gives you. Ranks below run low to high.

• Rogue, Unbound LethalityPoison duration up 10/15/20%, and enemy poison resistance down 25/50/75. Both halves matter, because a rogue's damage and self-healing both run through poison. This is the biggest of the set for the class it lands on.
• Monk, Unbound AlacrityCurrent and maximum attack speed up 3/6/10%. The maximum half is the useful part: haste caps at 75% and a bard or a haste item gets you there fast, so raising the ceiling lets the rest of your haste keep working.
• Beastlord, Unbound FerocityA 3/6/9% chance for your pet to flurry. It pairs with the improved warder mana regeneration also landing at launch.
• Bard, Unbound VersatilityA 5/10/15% chance to keep casting through a stun. Chain-stunning is what breaks casters at higher difficulty, so a bard who keeps singing keeps the whole trio's slow, buffs, and damage shield running.
• Paladin, Unbound LifeDirect healing up 2/4/6%.
• Shadow Knight, Unbound DrainLifetap damage up 2/4/6%. Alongside it, Leech Touch folds Harm Touch into a lifetap instead of a separate button, and Harm Touch picks up a damage-over-time that also leeches.
• Enchanter, not finalizedEarly dev notes describe an activated ability that stops your charm being broken or dispelled, plus one that drops a decoy on the first hit you take and dumps 99% of your aggro onto it. Both were labeled unfinished, so treat them as direction, not fact.

Not an AA, but worth knowing while you plan: Frenzy and Cleave now cut Rampage's cooldown, so Warriors and Berserkers loop back into their big hit faster.

How the pool works

One pool, character-wide. Buy an AA while running a class and it works in every loadout that includes that class. The general and archetype lines follow you no matter what you are running. Nobody has confirmed a respec or reset, so spend on purpose. And check the tabs every few levels: some AAs are gated behind a level and do not appear until you are high enough, so a line that looked empty at 20 may have something in it by 30.

What to buy first

For a solo trio, the early points that pay for themselves fastest:

• Stun resistanceGetting stunned interrupts your cast, freezes your movement, and stops your damage, and dungeon mobs stun constantly and from every angle. Four ranks gets you to about a 60% chance to shrug off a stunning melee hit from any direction. One launch caveat: the devs confirmed a diminishing-returns system for stuns, mezzes, and fears was in the game but not working, and that it ships fixed, so repeated stuns of one type should get shorter and eventually stop within a fight. That does not make the line useless, but it may make the first ranks feel less urgent than they did in beta.
• Extra spell gemsEvery rank is another memorized slot. A trio with a priest class or a bard runs out of room fast, since buffs, heals, heal-over-times, dots, resists, mez, and damage all want to be up at once. Start buying midway through leveling and max it eventually.
• Quick BuffReapplies your whole buff set on a ten-minute cooldown. Pair it with saved spell sets, one for buffing and one for fighting, and the rebuff cycle stops eating your session.
• Crit linesMelee crit and the defensive lines are cheap and always on. For casters, the supercrit ranks scale the bonus from 60% up to 100%, and a crit on a proc or a lifetap returns full value.
• TravelOrigin drops you at your starting city on about an 18-minute cooldown. Gather Party teleports your group to you roughly every six hours, which is how you get everyone into the same dungeon.

The AAs that change how a build plays

• Improved MendTakes a monk's Mend to about 30% of your health bar, and it crits for around 60%. A few points in first aid gets you there.
• AmbidexterityRaises your dual wield rate by about 32%. On anything swinging two weapons it is one of the biggest raw damage increases in the tree.
• Crit healsThe healing boon and gift lines let heals crit, and they pair with the Spellblade invocation.
• Symphonic AuraAuto-plays songs from your bottom gem slots, five at full ranks, with no twisting a melody by hand and no fizzling mid-fight. Bards save for this first.
• Pet AffinityLets your pet take your group buffs. On a pet build the pet stops dying.
• Slay UndeadProcs constantly, and undead zones cover most of the good leveling dungeons.
• PackratCuts the weight of everything you carry by 30%. That matters most for monks, whose armor class bonus scales with how little they are hauling.
• Bane StrikeUnlocks through a monster family's slayer achievement instead of a straight purchase. After that, everything from that family takes an extra hit automatically. Grind the families you are already killing.
• Skip Life BurnIt looks big and sits behind a four-hour cooldown.

And do not spend on anything the Unbound line already covers. Those are free.

The ogre question

The AA potion