Why would I get instinct?
Instinct gives a bonus on top of your existing percentage for certain skills and spells. This bonus isn’t linear – an extra 100 points may give 20% total bonus, while an extra 200 points may only give a 30% total bonus.
There’s a common set of “instinctable” skills/spells, and then unique ones based on your pclass:
Available to everyone:
- Incomplete healing
- Toxic Cloud
- Restore Life
- Renew
- Fourth Attack
- Heal
- Sanctuary
- Vitality
- Third Attack
- Fast Healing
- Haste
- Dual Wield
- Second Attack
- Protection Good
- Protection Evil
- Meditation
- Enhanced Damage
- Dodge
Class-specific:
Mage:
- Miasma
- Toxic Cloud
- Immolate
- Air Skewer (Elementalist only)
- Earthen Hammer (Elementalist only)
- Ice Daggers (Elementalist only)
- Spear of Odin (Sorceror only)
Ranger:
- Gaia’s Revenge
- Eruption
Psionicist:
- Desolation
- Mindflay (Mentalist only)
- Necrocide (Necromancer only)
Cleric:
- Regeneration
- Voice of God
Warrior:
- Hammering blow
- Ironfist (Barbarian only)
- Precision (Soldier only)
Paladin:
- Heavenly Balance
- Test of Faith
- Apocalypse
- Holy Reprisal (Avenger only)
Thief:
- Knife Fighting
- Spiral
- Scorpion Strike (Ninja/Venomist only)
When should I get instinct?
There’s no hard and fast rule, but in general, “when you can afford it.” Your initial trains will probably be better spent on maxing out your stats first.
What should I get instinct in?
There’s a few choices here. Whether you go for offense or defense first depends on your playstyle. For example, someone heavily into epics may want to focus on defensive abilities first to increase survivability, whereas someone into questing and powerups may wish to focus on offensive abilities to kill targets more quickly.
As a general rule, offense is going to be more effective than defense – this is similar to the argument for using dual wield vs. weapon + shield. More (and/or stronger) attacks means you kill mobs faster, which means you spend less time in combat and take less damage overall. Defensive instinct is typically only going to be useful at SH level.
Initially dropping a single point into multiple useful instincts could also be valuable, because it gives you a chance (however small) to gain a benefit from it, and single points are (relatively) cheap.
As a general rule, 25 points in two similar or related skills/spells will be better than 50 points in a single one due to the diminishing returns on instinct points. Also note that 50 points in a single instinct are more expensive than 25 points in two, due to how instinct costs scale – spreading your instinct around will tend to allow you to get more of it overall. For example, 25 instinct in a single skill/spell is ~11k trains, while 50 instinct in a single skill/spell is ~60k trains. You can get 25 instinct in 4 skills/spells for what you’d spend on a single one at 50.
What instinct is best to get?
First and foremost – the best instinct is one that you’ll actually use. Don’t get instinct for a skill/spell you never actually utilize, or it’s just wasted trains (and money.)
- Sanctuary is roughly equivalent to Dodge, though Dodge is going to tend to be better if you’re fighting mobs with lots of attacks or lots of mobs at once. Sanctuary is a flat percentage damage reduction, whereas Dodge gives an extra chance for 100% damage reduction on each attack. Dodge is going to shine if there’s a lot of attacks incoming, while Sanctuary is going to tend to be overall more reliable (albeit to a lower degree.)
- For melee, Fourth Attack is going to be better than the other attacks, since it’s more rare in the first place – you’re going to tend to get more benefit out of 10% extra in Fourth attack vs. Third or Second.
- Also for melee, dual wield and haste are going to be roughly equivalent – but remember that spreading the points around is going to tend to give a better return than focusing on just one.
- For a spellcaster, your best spell at higher levels is going to tend to be what you use instinct on. It may be worth putting some points into a lower spell that you get faster though, if you do a lot of leveling and less sitting at SH.
- Example: for a mage, putting instinct into Miasma would give you more damage in the long run than putting it into Immolate, since you get the Miasma spell 20 levels earlier.
- On the flip side, putting instinct into Immolate may be better if you don’t get dragged or you do want to sit at SH – the extra damage is more useful at the higher levels.
- Fast healing and meditation are underrated instinctable abilities – fast healing can equal up to 1k hp in a tick simply while standing around, and meditation can massively improve mana regeneration when brewing potions (and you don’t need to spend money on mana pots that way.)
- Enhanced Damage is an overrated instinct – because it doesn’t always trigger, it’s going to tend to give you less overall damage than fourth attack. An extra 10% chance at +100% extra weapon damage (i.e. that fourth attack) is better than three extra 10% chances of +10% damage (i.e. enhanced damage triggering on a strike when it may not have otherwise done so.)
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to Xaeris for providing most of the actual useful content for this guide, and Saraid and Blunt for giving it a sanity check.
