Fellowship Tariq Hero Guide

Tariq is a Strength-based melee DPS that uses his power to calls upon lightning to enhance his attacks. He generates Fury, using it to unleash devastating blows to obliterate his enemies.

This guide will teach you the basics of playing Tariq in Fellowship, how to use his abilities, and which talents to use for the best build.

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Tanks

DPS

Healers

Tariq’s Abilities

Ability/Icon	Name	Cast / Recast	Range / Radius	Effect
	Heavy Strike	Instant	↔ 5yd	When Heavy Strike is queued up, your next Auto Attack deals 3,492 – 4,268 physical damage. Thunder Call Heavy Strike also charges the ground in front of you with lightning, dealing 1,746 – 2,134 lightning damage to the target and nearby enemies. Generates Fury relative to damage dealt. Can be queued during Global Cooldown. Swing Timer Your swing timer is displayed as a bar to the right of your hero. When you see the red area light up on the swing timer it is time to queue your Heavy Strike and wait for it to finish. Queueing Heavy Strike Heavy Strike’s queue is displayed as a golden border around the ability icon on your action bar. The queue is canceled when you use any other ability, so make sure the last button you press before the swing timer reaches the end of the red area is Heavy Strike.
	Wild Swing	GCD 9.0s	↔ 5yd	Swing your hammer in a wide arc toward target enemy dealing 972 – 1,188 physical damage to it and any nearby enemies. Recklessness – Enemies have an increased chance to Dodge Wild Swing. – Wild Swing cannot Critically Strike. – Damage of Wild Swing is increased by an amount equal to your Critical Strike chance percentage. Generates Fury relative to damage dealt
	Face Breaker	Instant	↔ 5yd	Instantly attack target enemy dealing 2,448 – 2,992 physical damage. Face Breaker can only be used after one of your attacks Misses or is Dodged by an enemy. Generates Fury relative to damage dealt Can be used during Global Cooldown.
	Skull Crusher	GCD	↔ 5yd	Instantly deal 4,086 – 4,994 physical damage to target enemy. Skull Crusher resets the Swing Timer. Thunder Call Skull Crusher beckons a thunder bolt to strike the target from above, dealing 2,043 – 2,497 lightning damage.
	Hammer Storm	Instant	Self	Spin with your Hammer up to 4 times, dealing 684 – 836 physical damage to all nearby enemies every 0.7 seconds. Hammer Storm has an initial cost of 26 Fury, and an additional 8 Fury every 0.7 seconds until you have spent a maximum of 50 Fury per use. Hammer Storm resets the Swing Timer. Thunder Call Hammer Storm causes lightning to strike you as you spin, shocking enemies for an additional 342 – 418 lightning damage each time they are hit.
	Leap Smash	Instant 30.0s	↔ 30yd	Instantly Leap to target area and smash the ground, dealing 3,177 – 3,883 physical damage to all nearby enemies. Generates 25 Fury. Can be used during Global Cooldown.
	Pummel	Instant 16.0s	↔ 5yd	Instantly interrupt target enemy’s spell cast, and silence them for 4 seconds. Can be used during Global Cooldown.
	Thunder Call	Instant 45.0s	Self	Call on Thunder to charge your hammer with immense power, enhancing your abilities for 20 seconds. Can be used during Global Cooldown.
	Chain Lightning	GCD 8.0s	↔ 30yd	Conjure an arc of lightning onto target enemy that chains between you and other enemies until it has dealt damage a total of 5 times. Each hit of Chain Lightning deals 1,809 – 2,211 lightning damage. Chain Lightning does not deal damage to you. Thunder Call You can only cast Chain Lightning while Thunder Call is active. Generates Fury relative to damage dealt.
	Culling Strike	GCD 5.0s	↔ 5yd	Instantly deal 1,800 – 2,200 physical damage to target enemy. Culling Strike spends up to 20 Fury, increasing the damage it deals by up to 400%. The more Fury it consumes, the higher the damage it deals. Culling Strike has no effect on the Swing Timer. Execution Can only be used against enemies that have 30% or less health.
	Focused Wrath	Instant 90.0s	Self	Your next two casts of Skull Crusher or Hammer Storm cost 50% less Fury and deal 50% increased damage. Can be used during Global Cooldown
	Intimidating Roar	Instant	Self	Instantly intimidate up to 8 enemies around you for 10 seconds. If an Intimidated enemy takes damage equal to 2000% of your Strength, they will break out of the effect. Can be used during Global Cooldown.
	Unbreakable Will	Instant 30.0s	Self	You take 40% reduced damage for 4 seconds. Can be used during Global Cooldown.
	Raging Tempest	SPIRIT ABILITY	Self	Instantly Leap to target area and smash the ground, dealing 9,054 – 11,066 lightning damage to all nearby enemies.You also gain an Enhanced Thunder Call for 20 seconds that causes you to release Raging Currents at enemies over time. Raging Currents Strike a random nearby enemy every 1 seconds with lightning, dealing 1,539 – 1,881 lightning damage with each strike. Each time Raging Currents hits an enemy your Expertise is increased by 1%, stacking up to 20 times. Spirit Ability When you activate your Spirit ability you gain Spirit of Heroism, granting +30% haste for 20 seconds. Can be used during Global Cooldown

Fury and Swing Timer Mechanic

For all damage made apart from Tariq’s Fury spenders, he generates Fury. More damage means more Fury generated. Accumulated Fury is used to activate his Fury spending abilities: Hammer Storm and Skull Crusher. Tariq’s Fury caps at 100.

Tariq’s Swing Timer is represented by the white bar to the right of Tariq. It has a thicker section near the top and a white line, representing the countdown, that runs perpendicular to the bar. The thicker section of the bar will turn from grey to red when the white line gets closer to it. An auto attack will be executed when the white line reaches the end of the red section of the bar. You can enhance your auto attack with your Heavy Strike ability.

How to Play Tariq — Basic Ability Guide

You do not need to time your Heavy Strike within the red portion of the Swing Timer. Instead, try to see it more as a warning sign to queue up the ability. Any actions taken (including movement) while Heavy Strike is queued up will dequeue the ability. If you are too quick when queuing up your next action while Heavy Strike is about to hit (in-between the red portion and the actual top of the bar), you will end up canceling your Heavy Strike and auto attack entirely. Try to avoid this.

Your Fury spending abilities, Hammer Storm and Skull Crusher, will reset your Swing Timer on use. Despite costing up to 20 Fury on use, Culling Strike will not. Both Hammer Storm and Skull Crusher will consume 50 Fury.

When in doubt, it is a good idea to use the Fury you have before it can overcap. The only time to be holding onto Fury is when you’re looking to pool your Fury resource into buffs, such are your Thunder Call or Focused Wrath.

Notable cooldowns to manage include Thunder Call, Focused Wrath, Pummel, and Unbreakable Will.

• While you have the Thunder Call buff active, your Heavy Strike, Skull Crusher, and Hammer Storm abilities deal Lightning damage.
• Focused Wrath is a buff to two of our Fury spending abilities, Skull Crusher and Hammer Storm, causing them to deal more damage and cost less Fury.
• Pummel is our kick ability and will be vital to interrupting potentially deadly casts that our enemies make.
• Unbreakable Will is our defensive skill and is a survival tool. In some instances, there will be unavoidable damage. This is one of the best times to use Unbreakable Will.

When things get dicey, you can utilize your Intimidating Roar to Fear all enemies within its radius. This skill can help you buy time for your party to stabilize.

Tariq Talents and Build Progression

Tariq has a few builds that he can utilize, but this guide will focus on his most consistent and well-rounded talent build: Lightning Build. This guide will refer to the talents by their name and the row/column that they are located in.

• Blood & Thunder (1c) gives us a chance to cast a free Chain Lightning on our target when we land a Heavy Strike. This talent scales well with Haste as Haste increases your auto attack speed as well as lower your global cooldown (GCD). The more Haste we have, the more often we’ll be able to use our Heavy Strike.
• Ride the Lightning (2c) adds Fury generation during Thunder Call, allowing you to cast more of your Fury spenders Skull Crusher and Hammer Storm.
• Kill ‘Em All (3b) increases the damage dealt by your Hammer Storm with each spin, which also affects the Thunder Call enhanced version.
• Thunderstruck (3c) increases the amount of times that your Chain Lightning bounces. This also affects the Chain Lightning that comes from Blood & Thunder (1c).
• Far Beyond Driven (4b) increases our Spirit by 2% for each stack we gain from hitting our Heavy Strike up to 10%. This talent allows us to put the secondary stat Spirit on lower priority, in favor of more damage through stacking Critical Strike and Expertise.
• Mouth for War (5a) enhances our Leap Smash ability, granting us 1 charge of Focused Wrath when we deal damage with Leap Smash.
• Crack the Sky (6c) increases the Critical Strike chance of your lightning damage, meaning that it’ll increase our DPS while Thunder Call is active.
• Spit It Out (6a) increases your Critical Strike power, meaning that your Critical hits will deal increased damage.

Both Spit It Out (6a) & Crack the Sky (6c) scales well as you progress later into the game since they both have an effect on your Critical Strike and offer a fair amount of DPS for their cost of 1 talent point.

Later on when survivability becomes more important (Champion+), you may want to drop the Kill ‘Em All (3b) talent for two of the following 1 point defensive talents: Pneuma (4a), Spirited Fortitude (6b), and/or Magic Ward (4c).

Quick Reference Talent Table

Talent Points Total	Talent Tree (Row + Column)
2 Points	1c
3 Points	1c, 2c
4 Points	1c, 2c, 2a
5 Points	1c, 2c, 3b
6 Points	1c, 2c, 3b, 4b
7 Points (Contender)	1c, 2c, 3b, 6c, 2a/6a
8 Points	1c, 2c, 3b, 6c, 3c
9 Points (Adept)	1c, 2a, 2c, 3b, 3c, 6c
10 Points	1c, 2c, 3b, 3c, 4b, 6a, 6c
11 Points (Champion)	1c, 2c, 3b, 3c, 4b, 6a, 6c, 2a
12 Points	1c, 2c, 3b, 3c, 4b, 6c, 5a
13 Points (Paragon)	1c, 2c, 3b, 3c, 4b, 5a, 6a, 6c

When choosing the remaining talent at 7 pts, keep the following in mind:

• Bloodline (2a) is a solid choice that is very efficient for its 1 talent cost. It allows you to constantly be gaining Fury, even while out of combat.
• Spit It Out (6a) increased your Critical Strike damage dealt. I would choose this if you have high Critical Strike, but it’s more likely that you will be able to better utilize this talent later on in your progression (approximately once you’re attempting the Adept capstone, Heart of Tuzari).

Ability Rotations

Tariq’s rotations cycle between building his Fury and spending it.

Please keep in-mind that these rotations may change based on your talents and if you have a legendary equipped. These rotations are based on the talent build mentioned above.

Builder

This Builder rotation is going to focus on building up our Fury resource so that we can cycle to our Spender rotation.

1. Thunder Call
2. Chain Lightning
3. Culling Strike when you have more than 20 Fury.
4. Wild Swing
5. Leap Smash if you have less than 75 Fury.
6. Use Face Breaker when it’s available.
7. Heavy Strike
8. Repeat 2-6 until you have enough Fury where doing another Fury Builder rotation would overcap your Fury.

Important note about Heavy Strike, as described in the Basic Ability Guide above: Any actions taken (including movement) while Heavy Strike is queued up will de-queue the ability. Please be cautious about using any other abilities while you’re near the end of the Swing Timer bar to avoid missing Heavy Strike.

Keep in mind that, if you take the Concatenation (1b) talent, your auto attack will be fast enough where you can only fit 2 GCD into your rotation. Prioritize casting Chain Lightning off cooldown then fill the rest with Wild Swings. When Wild Swing misses, you will have the opportunity to use Face Breaker, an off-GCD ability.

Typically, it is best to use your off-GCD abilities whenever they are available. However, there will be situations where it’s better to hold onto these abilities instead of using them if using them would overcap your Fury.

Spender

Once you have enough Fury built up to cast your Fury spenders, transition into your Spender rotation.

1. Raging Tempest/Thunder Call if you’re on the boss pull or doing a big pull.
2. Leap Smash if you have less than 75 Fury.
3. Groups 3+: Hammer Storm. Single Target: Skull Crusher.
4. Focused Wrath
5. Groups 3+: Hammer Storm x2. Single Target: Skull Crusher x2.
6. Additional Hammer Storm/Skull Crusher if above 50 Fury.
7. Repeat 6 until you run out of Fury, using Leap Smash off CD to enhance our spenders.

We open with Leap Strike to gain the charge of Focused Wrath to use on our spenders. Depending on how many enemies we are facing, we will either use Hammer Storm (3+) or Skull Crusher (1-2). Using Hammer Storm on less than 3 targets will do less damage than Skull Crusher would.

Use your Fury spenders until you are below the threshold required to cast it. Avoid casting Hammer Storm when you’re below 50 Fury as you will lose out on the final spin. Losing your final spin is a huge loss in DPS.

If the enemies are still alive, cycle back to the beginning of the Builder Rotation.

Gearing and Stat Priority

• Critical Strike – Chance for damage and healing effects to crit, doubling their effect.
• Expertise – Increases all damage, healing and absorption effects done by Tariq.
• Haste – Increases attack speed (aka, how fast your Swing Timer is), casting speed and the tick rate of damage and healing effects. It also reduces your global cooldown (GCD), allowing you to cast more frequently.
• Spirit – Increases the rate you charge your spirit ability. Every 1% of Spirit gives 0.5% chance to refund Fury when using one of your Fury spenders.

Champion league is when you will want to be prioritizing obtaining gear that have the secondary stats you’re looking for. Legendaries and purple tiered weapons that can be augmented at the Weapon Master will also begin to drop from Champion onward. Obtaining these will be another huge power boost for Tariq. Prior to that, item level is the main priority.

Higher item level is king, having greater effect on your damage and survivability than any secondary stat will on its own.

Crit is our #1 priority for secondary stats for Tariq in this build. Crack the Sky (6c) increases our Critical Strike chance when dealing lightning damage and Spit It Out (6a) increases our Critical Strike power.

Expertise increases all damage by a flat percent. Crit is calculated after the extra damage from Expertise is added, meaning that more Expertise will mean higher Crit damage. Expertise is tied with Haste as our second priority for secondary stats in this build.

Haste will enable us to Heavy Strike more often, increasing our overall DPS by giving us more opportunities to proc our Blood & Thunder (1c) talent.

Spirit is our lowest priority and, potentially, dump stat. Yes, it’s nice to get refunds for our Fury spenders, but Far Beyond Driven (4b) should get us enough Spirit to work with while in combat. We shouldn’t need to much more Spirit in our build.

Weapons & Relics:

Once you pass Cithrel’s Ascent and get into the Adept league, you’ll have access to Weapons and Relics with active abilities.

• Wildstone Crusher is great for AoE damage and crowd control (CC). Its Earthbreaker ability can enable your group to make larger pulls with less risk and acts as another way to kick an enemy that might be casting a deadly ability.
• Void-Touched Hammer is a great choice for single-target damage, helping ensure that your target is taken down quickly by storing 20% of all the damage you deal until the effect expires. On expiration, it detonates on the target dealing up to 85,000 damage.
• Sahril’s Reckoning is an option for if you need more AoE damage potential, the drawback being that it’s extremely ineffective against single targets.
• Fateful Basher has some single-target damage with a cleave effect as well as some mobility by charging at your target if you cast this weapon at a range. It also applies a buff to you, increasing you 20% Expertise and granting 200% increased Cooldown Recovery for 6 seconds. This is decent, well-rounded weapon that is versatile in its use.
  Cooldown Recovery only affects the cooldown timers for any skill with a cooldown.

Relic choice at this stage will be mostly based on preference, but two reliable options would be the Grimoire of Resurrection and the Saltwater Elixir. The Grimoire of Resurrection is a combat resurrection that has a 5 minute cooldown. This will resurrect a target party member in your line-of-sight at the location that you activate the relic at. Saltwater Elixir is a heal that recovers 40% of your max health. This relic has a 2 minute cooldown.

Gearing Priority

1. Purple+ Weapon Tree
2. Legendary Item
3. Item Level
4. Completed Set Bonus
5. Substat Priorities

Substat Priorities

1. Crit
2. Haste
3. Expertise
4. Spirit

Wishlist Fellowship

If you enjoyed your time with Fellowship during the open beta, or if you’re at all interested in playing, be sure to wishlist the game on Steam. The game launches into Early Access on October 16th.