Gear
Life and resists are important, cap your elemental resist at 150 total resist because in endgame maps you will have -60 to elemental resists normally and -15% from curse mod on some map. You can check what your current resist by going to Act 1 normal difficulty.
Runes
Ideally you do not want resists runes in your gear because getting more evasion from Iron Runes is good.
Body Armor
Our body armor is a massive contributor to our spirit thanks to the Ascendancy
Lead me through Grace... which provides more spirit than anything else. I currently have a 1889 Evasion chest that is giving me 125 Spirit. This Evasion also is really important for
Beastial Skin which will add that Evasion to our total. Consider getting a Ev/Ev/Ev prefix chest if you have strong life rolls on the rest of your gear.
Evasion > ALL
We focus Evasion gear exclusively because we will take
Acrobatics and this will allow us to Evade basically everything. This will also lower our Evasion by a lot so we need to stack it to the moon!
Spectral Ward will also give us some Energy Shield to play with for
Ghost Dance to take advantage of.
Weapon
Here we are looking primarily for Physical Damage prefixes! Flat Elemental damage is not as impactful as physical damage modifiers since they all multiply together.
Expert Slicing Quarterstaff or
Expert Barrier Quarterstaff are the best bases. Slicing for more damage Barrier for a bit more defenses.
Note: If you have a base w/ #Phys and % Phys (non-hybrids) then %elemental damage with attacks is an okay 3rd prefix, you must have big physical on the weapon though.
For suffixes Critical Strike Damage >> Attack Speed > Critical Strike Chance >>> Everything Else.
Crit Damage on weapons appears to perhaps be bugged to MULTIPLY your total crit damage and is very powerful.
Note that ideally all 6 affixes would be damage related but this can also be a good spot to get mana leech or mana on kill.
ALWAYS use an Iron Rune in weapons!
Amulet
There are a lot of great stats you can get on amulet, like Life, % Evasion, # Energy Shield, Resists. I recommend anointing
Overwhelming Strike or
Stormcharged or
Vulgar Methods depending on what you need. Stormcharged is likely the most raw damage but it is rather expensive. Vulgar Methods is a bit less damage but it also provides some help with strength.
Rings
Rings are the go-to place to get resists. Ideally you would be able to get most of your cold resist from 1 ring here:
Cold Resist Base | Life / % Cold Damage / Flat Cold Damage | Cold Resist / All Resists / more resist...
You can use Catalysts to boost the effectiveness of certain tags such as Cold up to 20%. This would allow you to take the Cold Resist base from 30% to 36% for example, but also the cold damage mods, the cold resist, and the all resist. Now this type of ring is rather rare but is worth looking for.
Belts
Belts are in a somewhat awkward spot with itemization. For prefixes Life is great but then there are not many good options. For Suffixes resistances are great and you could potentially even get 1-2 Charm Slots.
Ultra endgame is probably getting a
Ingenuity because this can make our rings up to 80% more effective.
Gloves
Gloves are a tricky piece of gear because you will want to balance offenses and defenses here depending on what your other equipment has. Perfect world gloves would probably be:
Life, Flat Evasion, Physical Damage || Attack Speed
and then add either "Leech #% of Physical attack damage as Life"/Mana or Mana on Kill.
Resists are also an option here if you need them.
Boots
Movement speed is most important here! 30% or better is ideal with life. Use Evasion boot base and additional Evasion rating is nice here but Movement Speed and Life Should be priority!
For Suffixes: you can get resistances and/or "Reduced Freeze Duration".
Helmet
Best Helmet will always have Life/# Evasion/% Evasion || Crit Chance / Resists. Crit chance is less important here though and can be skipped in favor of better prefixes/resists.
You can also pickup stats here on the suffixes if you want but helmets are a good place to stack up over 1,000 Evasion rating.
Jewels
Here we want basically any stats that give us defenses or damage.
Evasion Rating, dmg with Quarterstaves, crit damage, crit chance, melee damage, etc.
Notably you can get +1 Rage on Melee hit on jewels which can stack up to 30% more damage!
Charm
I recommend using a
Thawing Charm to help you not get frozen. Freeze is somewhat rare but it is incredibly deadly. If you get a second charm slot you can use
Stone Charm for stuns but this will have a harder time staying up since you will get afflicted by a lot of 'micro-stuns' when getting hit by enemies.
Golden Charm is a decent option for magic finding. You should not need any of the elemental resist charms since your resists should be capped.
Polcirkeln Ring
This ring ->
Polcirkeln is INCREDIBLE for Breach content and other content where there are a LOT of enemies together. It causes Herald of Ice to effectively chain explode the map which is great! I swap this in for Breaches but remove it otherwise because it messes up my resists.