Tier 2 & Tier 3

[Hsage]

This guide focuses primarily on what one must do to build and get your POTA armor, once the t1 trials are completed.

Why Pota?

The questline/grind for POTA gets you 6 pieces of armor: Chest, Legs, Helm, Shoulders, Gloves, Boots. These are essentially the best pieces of armor you can currently get, save for a couple of very top-end items or very rare mythic drops from a few places. Ultimately, you can also get your 'epic weapon', which really is an epic attachment for certain weapons.

The various names throughout pota also can drop other armor and jewelry pieces (no questing required beyond ability to access their location), most notably a belt, arms, wrist piece which are part of a set. The set bonuses on these pieces are, frankly, ridiculously overpowered for the majority of classes and even the worst ones are extremely useful.

Click the 'Loot' tab for drops off names, 'Armor Sets' tab for the quested/built armor pieces. Note that the base stats (but not the set bonuses) for each class within the archetypes of tank, light fighter, and caster are all the same. Only healers have separate stats for each class.

Selecting a Side

Before you can do anything, you will first need to get a group to kill the sentry guarding the t2 area. This is more or less identical to killing sentries you did earlier for access and into the order and chaos side. The t2 area is more or less identical to the t1 area, but directly above it.

You will now have to make a sacrifice of your blood and some animal fat to either the order or chaos side. (Note: You will need 3 Clumps of Animal Fat that drop frequently from random mobs to do this) Essentially this comes down to choosing between going Order or Chaos. Here is what your choice will affect:

- You will become KoS (Kill on Sight) on the opposite side after completing the next quest.
- Your set bonuses will be *SLIGHTLY* different. For example, I believe the difference in t3 is something like +5 str, dex, int, +5% accuracy for chaos vs. +5 con, wis, vit, +100 ac for order for the 2 piece set bonus. The 3 piece bonus is different too, a slightly different proc depending on your class. Personally think the Chaos one is better but it's relatively insignificant.
- You will only be offered t2 trials (more on these later) from your side.
- You will only be able to dedicate yourself to a god on your side (more on this later).
- You gain extra faction for certain faction kill quests and less for others depending on your side. In other words, some targets are order, some are chaos, and you'll get more faction for killing targets of your side. May sound confusing but honestly this is very insignificant as this is a poor and unnecessary way of gaining faction.
- Your mount will be either a Nightmare if Chaos or a Pegacorn if Order. Same stats, much different graphics obviously.
- You have a different vault kill quest and sister's trial, though note that you can help on these quests regardless of affiliation. Of note here is that the Sister's trial is extremely difficult, but the Order side is generally considered easier.
- You are only able to activate the rift to kill the chicken on the opposite side. So if you go Chaos, you can only activate the rift to damage the Order chicken. Since these are 12 man raids and only 1 person has to activate the rift, you only need 1 person of the opposite side with the ability to activate the rift to do the chickens. (More on this later)

Your choice will NOT have an affect on the following:

- Base stats of your armor (only set bonuses different, and only the first 2 for t3; the last, and best bonus is the same regardless of side) and cost, materials, etc. to build your armor.
- Ability to farm slivers, souls, offerings from mobs. They all come from the same mobs and quests at the same rate regardless of side.
- Ability to assist on t1 trials. You can still help with trials that take place on the opposite side, but you are KOS over there so care must be taken. For the most part, we have the ability to avoid these problems for most trials.

Farm 100 Souls

You will now be asked to harvest and offer 100 souls of the opposite side. For chaos, this means you must kill 100 mobs on the order side of the pantheon and vice versa for order.

In general, the easiest and quickest way to accomplish this is to group with a psi, pull a xerklin from the ramp just off the middle area with Ini-Herat, wait for it to spawn peons, taking care not to stun or counter its spell, then mez the xerklin and kill the peons. You will get souls for each peon kill, then can release the xerklin, which is back at full health and will attempt to spawn more peons when below 50%. It's dull and sadly peons do not give EXP but this is for the most part the quickest way to farm 100 souls.

After collecting 100 souls, approach the little sacrificial bowl thing in front of your t2 avatar (Kaerellun or Alurad) and place your souls down. Go through all the dialogue thats offered. One of the options you click is necessary to collect slivers as a reward from KDQ quests which you will need to build your armor. You will be explained (poorly) on how to make your armor but I'll explain in detail here.

Note that after turning in your souls quest you can FINALLY pick up your t1 chest piece from Ini-Herat.

Building Your T2 Armor

Upgrading your t1 armor piece to t2 essentially requires 2 things: Enough faction to be offered the piece by your t2 avatar, and an appropriate number of corresponding sealers. You will need 5 sealers each for the boots and gloves, 7 each for shoulders and helm, 9 for the legs, and 12 for the chest. This comes to 45 sealers total. Sounds simple, but it's a bit more complicated than it sounds. Also note that when you upgrade your armor (from t1 to t2, or t2 to t3) you will lose anything socketed in it. I wouldn't bother socketing anything in t1 or t2 armor unless its something cheap that you don't mind losing, unless you have a bunch of money lying around to retrieve it before upgrading... which, by the way, you will need a fair amount of to make your armor.

Gaining T2 Faction

I don't have the exact amount of faction needed to max your faction, but it's in the neighborhood of 27k or so. T2 has a variety of ways in which you can gain faction and I'll outline each of them and discuss how efficient each method is.

Money
You can straight up offer money in return for t2 faction. In short, don't do it. It doesn't give you much and it's not worth it as faction isn't terribly hard to get and you'll want your money to make your armor and fill its augs.

T2 Trials

You can take trials that are basically the same as their t1 counterparts from the same place as the t1 trials. You can repeat these trials once per day I believe. These ARE separate from the t1 trials despite their similarities, meaning helping someone on a t1 trial will NOT give you credit or faction. Nor will someone helping you do your trial get credit as a t1 trial. One advantage to going Order is that you can solo the Valus trial with the godwalk bug. Invis and godwalk to the back of the chaos t2 side after taking the trial then simple select anything as you will never spawn a mob if you choose wrong. Each trial is worth 600 faction.

Farming Souls

Souls will drop similar to the ones you needed for the quest to get to t2, but from different mobs. The souls basically can drop from any SoD (KDQ) mob. They are automatically added to your inventory, no looting required and are worth 30 faction each. Might not sound like much but the key here is that you need to go to SoD anyway to get slivers, so you'll be getting two things done at once.

A sorc thats kiting in SoD can easily gain a bunch of souls for himself/herself and anyone in their group.

Note that you can still get souls even if you are in a raid. You also only need to be within 100m to get a soul, you do not have to even be on the aggro list, meaning you can be afk and get souls. However, you won't get SoD faction so you need to get on the aggro list if you want that.

Diplomacy

Another solid way of getting faction. Very highly recommended because t3 faction is a lot harder to get, but diplomacy remains its potency. In t2 you can parley one avatar on your side per day (Every 20 hours actually... you will see a message saying something like 'You receive Scarred Belt' or some crap like that when it resets and you can parley again. Make sure to do the lvl 50 parley) and will receive 600 faction for completing it. As a lvl 50 parley, you must be at least lvl 45 to access the parley. There is also a 2000 outsider presence requirement, but if you kept up with your gear, this shouldn't be a problem as you need 2500 to push levers by 10.

Of note here is that diplo in POTA is a LOT harder than civic parleys. There are a lot of strategies that work here but you do need a solid set of cards that work well together and you need certain answer cards for some of the really nasty cards that the NPCs like to use in POTA. Attempting at lvl 45 without a good deck will likely result in loss; however it's certainly possible to win with the right deck. POTA diplo will easily get you to lvl 50 so once you hit 45 it may be worthwhile to either take time to build a good POTA deck or ask for advice on building one.

Faction Requirements

I no longer have the exact amount of faction required, but it roughly works out that every 4500-5000 faction a new piece is unlocked. The pieces are unlocked in the following order: Boots, Gloves, Shoulders, Helm, Legs, Chest. They will be offered in your t2 avatar's merchant wares and require sealers to purchase which I will discuss now.

Gathering Sealers

Sealers are crafted items which require 3 pieces: A purchased item from your avatar, something called a cord, created from slivers and echoes, and finally a harvestable resource. You require 1 of each for every sealer to be crafted.

Energy Sealer

This is simply a bought item from your avatar that becomes available roughly around the time your first piece of armor is available from faction. They cost 10g each, which means your cost for these alone will come to 4.5 plat for t2. Ouch!

Cords

This is the most complex item to make. Each cord is composed of 100 slivers and 1 echo. Note that there are t2 slivers and t3 echoes. t3 slivers won't become available until you finish t2 faction, but t3 echoes come from the same place as t2 echoes.

Slivers

Slivers come as a reward from KDQ quests once you unlock t2 and go through the dialogue. You should now notice them in the rewards along with the crates. The primary method of getting this is through SoD quests, but you can get them for the repeatable BoD quests as well, though only at a t1 SoD rate. Here are the amount of slivers you get:

T1 collects/names: 10/11
T2 collects/names: 13/14
T3 collects/names: 16/17
T4 collects/names: 24/25

Quick Breakdown of SoD

Since SoD is a major part of your POTA armor, I'll give a quick breakdown of SoD. There are four tiers of SoD as broken down by faction you have as follows:
T1: 0 faction
T2: 500 faction
T3: 3000 faction
T4: 11000 faction
Max Faction: 27.5k (unsure if thats exact)

Every quest can be reset once per 20 hours by a skill to be repeated. This skill requires an item bought in the tent in the middle for 1 plat but can be sold for 1 plat and rebought when needed if money is tight.

As you first unlock each tier, you are offered 5 collect quests. These simply require you to kill a certain mob and collect 10 of an item it drops. It will always drop 1 or 2 of them per group.

After you complete each collects quest at least once, you will unlock the named quests. These are basically a named version of each of the mobs you just killed. Some are vastly different from the regular mob and have certain strategies required to kill them. Those of us who have done this before are now quite familiar with this so feel free to ask any of us for help.

Note that since everyone in the group gets credit for the names, they are generally the most efficient method of gathering slivers and gaining KDQ faction. Naturally you still have to do the collects to unlock them, and chilling while a sorc kites is always good too

Anyway, you'll need 4500 slivers total to completely upgrade your t2 armor, so you're gonna spend quite some time in SoD.

Echoes and Harvestable Mats

T2 requires 1 t6 Ultra Rare mat per combine. The requirements depend on the type of crafter you have making your sealers (note that regardless of your crafter type, you can make sealers for any adventuring class):

Outfitter- Mature Steelweave Bale
Blacksmith- Wyrmsteel Ore
Artificer- Ancient Timber

Echoes come from two places: harvesting surplus bonuses and from crates as rewards from KDQ quests. They come rather rarely from crates so that is an unreliable source. Echoes come as a surplus bonus ONLY from mining; hence it is quite common to use Wyrmsteel Ore for your t2 sealers and a blacksmith since you need to mine or assist someone mining (you get way more echoes in groups) in order to get echoes anyway. Because of this, ores are usually more abundant and cheaper on the AH as well. Also, since t2 echoes are generally easier to get than t3 echoes (both come from the same place), people further along on their pota armor may have surplus t2 echoes so ask around!

Crafting Sealers

To get the crafting quest, you must get POTA access and do the crafting quest line inside POTA. Doing so will result give you recipes to make the POTA things. Obviously you don't need to make your own sealers; we have crafters of more less all types who can do the combine for you.

The combine can sometimes be difficult depending your level, gear, stats, luck, etc. and since there's a decent amount of resources devoted into them (especially at t3), you may want to take every measure possible (i.e. diplo buffs, potions, etc.) on your first combine until you are comfortable you can safely make them.



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Tier 3 POTA


Once you max your t2 faction, your avatar will tell you some crap about choosing a god. Note that the ONLY requirement for unlocking Tier 3 is maxing Tier 2 faction; You do NOT have to upgrade all your armor to tier 2. Tier 3 revolves around building faction with a chosen god. Choosing your god has ONLY the following affects:

- Cosmetic differences in your armor appearence
- The name of your t3 armor pieces
- You can ONLY parley your chosen avatar for faction

Since choosing your god has essentially no effect on your character's performance, some of us who don't care about appearances or lore and such like me simply choose who they found the easiest avatar to parley

Tier 3 basically works exactly like Tier 2: Pieces become available as you gain faction. You upgrade your pieces (Tier 2 piece required) with sealers made from cords, harvest mats, and bought parts. Here are the essential differences:

Offerings

You still get souls which is annoying since you no longer need them, but you need offerings for your god to actually gain t3 faction. The easiest way to think of the way offerings work is that they are more or less identical to city faction coins. You have a chance of getting an offering killing ANYTHING that grants you exp, including 2 dots like certain magi hold mobs, and the elementals in SoK and SS. You are guaranteed at least 1 offering from any ALL CAPS name that you can get exp from, and generally get more if you are out of combat when the mob dies (stupid bug). Unfortunately, offerings give a measly 12 faction per turn in, so it is a bit difficult to gain significant exp here.

Note that you can only get offerings in a raid from raid mobs. So, unlike t2 souls, you cannot get offerings from kites in SoD unless you are in a group.

Kill Random Dude Quest

There are quests to kill various special named mobs throughout telon that will grant you faction. They are different for Chaos and Order, but you can do both regardless of side; You will simply get less faction for doing the opposite side's quests. They are daily quests like the t2 trials which you can no longer do for faction (They still are available but will only give you t2 faction, which you have now maxed). Sadly, they are rarely attempted as they aren't really necessary due to diplomacy, and apparently difficulty/time vs. faction gain.

Diplomacy

Same as t2, except you can only parley your avatar. A third parley will now be open, make sure to choose the correct one. It will still give 600 faction per parley, once per day. By far your easiest way to gain faction... so yeah, this is why we say you need to diplo for POTA


Faction in general roughly works like t2, with new items appearing at various levels of faction, roughly every 4500-5000 faction. One difference is that at around 11k faction or so you'll see a message that the rift warden wants to talk to you or some crap. He'll say stuff about going into the vault, which is basically the t3 area of pota. The sentry is in the very back of the t1 area. Kill it like the other sentries and go inside to get the God Warrior quests, a quest you must do before you can get on to the Sister's and epic weapon grinding. This will also let you click the rift to damage the chicken on the opposite side.

Cords, Echoes, Slivers, and Sealers

Cords: Exactly the same as t2, except with their t3 equivalents.
Slivers: Anywhere you previously got t2 slivers you now have the option to choose between getting the t2 slivers or getting fewer t3 slivers. Breakdown for t3 slivers is as follows:
T1 Collects/Names: 7/8
T2 Collects/Names: 10/11
T3 Collects/Names: 12/13
T4 Collects/Names: 20/21

Big thing to notice is the massive difference difference between yields for t4 quests and basically everything else. By this point you'll have faction for SoD t4 though so it shouldn't be an issue.

Echoes: T3 echoes are echoes of wild energy which come from mining surplus bonuses, and are annoying to get unless you're group harvesting.

Cords: 1 Echo + 100 Slivers = 1 Cord, same as t2.

Sealers: Sadly they now cost 20 gold each rather than 10 for t2.

Harvest Mat: T6 Ultra Rares. Can be expensive, but the cost is eased by the Magi Hold raid mobs which always drop some T6 URs, so the guild has some supply of them.

Blacksmith: Haelifurite Ore
Artificer: Petrified Timber
Outfitter: Prime Steelweave Bale

Especially here, Haelifurite and blacksmithing is generally the cheapest and easiest method to getting your parts crafted.

Vault Access and Beyond

In the neighborhood of 10k full faction with your God (~17k dynamic) you will see a red message saying the Rift Warden would like to talk to you. After some dialogue he'll tell you to go into the vault. The vault is in the back of the t1 sections and is guarded by a Sentry, much like the t1 and t2 areas were. You must take the quest and kill them to get access. Note that you can access the opposite side vault as well, and eventually will need to, but you likely need to be summoned to it.

God Warriors

After getting vault access, walk through the vault looking for a shadowy yellow NPC. Go through his dialogue and he will give you the god warrior quest. This quest requires you to kill 4 fairly difficult group mobs in various locations throughout the world. You also can only get credit for one kill every 20 hours (right clicking the rune he gives you will tell you whether or not you can currently get credit for one). Each of these are a 'Mysterious Essence' in a dungeon that you can talk to and will become the god warrior. This quest is exactly the same for both Order and Chaos.

Graystone

This is located in the third blessing area cave, in the middle down the steps with the glove thingy. This God Warrior is a druid and it always has a certain infusion... but I cannot remember which one it is, as it isn't one of the more annoying ones. Safest group build: 1 well geared tank, 2 healers, at least one counter-speller. Has some weak AEs, a dot he'll throw on a random member in the party that can kill squishies reasonably fast if not healed, and has minions and pets he summons. The minions have very low hp and can be easily one shotted by many classes. The pet takes a bit more time to kill but none are particular dangerous. The only real issue with this fight is starfall, a very quick cast with a high damage. While it won't kill the tank by itself usually, an attack shortly after can kill your tank, or if he isn't at full hp to begin with. Beyond that, this is fairly straight forward.

Sunset Pointe

This is through the portal in the crazy purple plane, on a hill in that area. You must have 1 person who can enter the portal, have a healer summon everyone to the portal then go through it. This is a Warrior. Again, I don't remember what infusion he has as it's not a particularly dangerous one. The only thing that really causes an issue here is an AE dot he will put on everyone within 10m or so of him. It does enough damage to occupy your healers, which may cause your tank to die since they have so many other people to heal. While he doesn't have any crazy high damage attacks, he still can hit fairly hard at times so it may be best to have a disciple to worry about group heals while a cleric or shaman focuses more on the tank. Obviously having ranged DPS will lighten the burden on the healers as well.

Hegnarian

Right behind where Hegnarian spawns. This one is a rogue with the Finch infusion. So you can imagine the issues here. He will constantly stun and knock his target out of combat, which means he'll switch aggro a ton. Short of crazy buffs/heals/etc., by far the safest way to do this is to bring 2 tanks and at least 2 healers. The tanks can do their best to rebuild aggro as needed and it should remain on them for a reasonable amount of the time. It will still switch to others and it may help to back out of it switches to a dps class. Recommended for disciples to keep hp buff on themselves. Non-tank classes should spam any defensive abilities they have if they get aggro. He doesn't hit particularly hard, but he strikes fast, so you have to act fairly quickly.

Vi'Rak

In the throne room, on the far side of the pyramidish stairs thingy. Bring a disc and have a druid use the 30 second invul to run over there, then FD. Wait for pather to run by, summon group over, and kill pather when it comes back. This one sucks. A lot. This is a cleric with the +hp/regen infusion. It has a lot of hp, a lot of mitigation, a ton of buffs, and heals himself. He doesn't hit particularly hard. He also despawns after 10 minutes if you do not kill him. There's essentially two ways to kill him. The first is to bring a massive DPS group and out damage his heals. This is not easy without epic bards available, and may only be possible with the maximum possible DPS group currently available to us. The other method is to counter a certain spell he casts and get lucky. We're told its the all-in-one cleric buff (Favor of the Benevolent or w/e the cleric one is called), a black dude flexing on a yellow background. However it may be something else, or there may be other factors involved. Either way, attempting it this way leaves a lot up to luck and can be rather frustrating. But yeah, this one is just a pain.

Vault Kills

This quest requires you to kill the opposite side chicken, a bunch of mobs in the opposite side vault, and collect vases in the opposite side vault. It helps immensely to have a healer of the opposite side help you. The vases can be done with invis and summoning around the vault. The chicken is a chicken. The mobs are annoying. Luckily, if you went chaos, you only require 10 kills of each type, while order requires 20. After each kill, you must loot an item of it then right click it in your inventory. This quest is just annoying, though fairly straightforward.

After completing this, you will have access to the chamber of life which unlocks your 3 piece t3 bonus and also allows you to participate in the sisters event. Note that you will get debuffed if you are wearing under 5 pieces of t3 armor while in the chamber of life.

Cost Overview

Tier 2:
45 Sealers: 4.5 plat
4500 Slivers: Lots of SoD grinding.
45 T6 Rares: Decent amount of harvesting
45 Echoes of Resonant Energy: Group mining, or surplus from other people
Max Faction: Diplo, SoD grinding, kiting, abusing t2 trials

Tier 3:
45 Sealers: 9 plat
4500 Slivers: Even more SoD grinding
45 T6 Ultra Rares: Potentially expensive
45 Echoes of Wild Energy: Fair amount of group mining
Max Faction: Diplo, killing things

All 6 t3 pieces have an etherence and a primal slot, plus a third slot. The Chest, Gloves, and Shoulders all have a Rune slot, The Helm and Boots have an Infuse slot, and the Legs have an Imbued slot (currently no Imbued attachments available).

Belt, Bracers, Arms

These drop from various names throughout POTA as follows:
Tier 1 Arms: Kirin, lower chaos side
Tier 1 Bracers: Nirik, lower order side
Tier 1 Belt: Paladin Han'tahl, lower order side
Tier 2 Arms: Titanon the Immovable, upper order(?) side
Tier 2 Bracers: Mammon the Bulwark, upper chaos(?) side (I may have these two backwards)
Tier 2 Belt: Archivist Ishnara, order vault
Tier 3 Arms, Bracers, Belt: Zaseh the Wise or Ataraxis the Devourer (chickens), depending on class
Tier 4 Bracers: Karax, lul!

Their stats by themselves may seem a bit underwhelming but they all have a set bonus, even for 1 piece, that makes them extremely powerful (probably overpowered). For example, the healer pieces give the following bonuses:
1 Piece: 5% Healing Effectiveness, +50 Damage, +1% Crit Heal Chance
2 Piece: 10% Healing Effectiveness, +50 Damage, +2% Crit Heal Chance
3 Piece: 15% Healing Effectiveness, +50 Damage, +3% Crit Heal Chance

The key here is that the set bonus is a buff, which means it adds these stats regardless of item caps from gear. Healing effectiveness, for example, is capped at 10% from gear, which is extremely easy to get. 3 Piece set bonus here will push that up to 25%, which is extremely useful. +50 damage is almost like a permanent frenzied symbiote. Set bonuses for other archetypes are similarly useful. Note that you get the same set bonus regardless of the tier of the item you have, meaning you could use a t1 bracer from Nirik, who is one of the easiest mobs to kill in the game (but rarely up), and you'll get the same set bonus as the bracers from the chicken.



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Sisters

The Sisters are essentially a 12 man trial. You need to be wearing at least 5 pieces of t3 armor to avoid being debuffed while in the chamber of life. You only get access to this area after completing the vault kills quest. Regardless of the side you chose, you can still help with the trial of the other side. In other words, people who went Chaos can still help on the Order Sisters and vice versa.

Not going to go into lengthy detail on the strats here, but as a brief overview, Chaos sisters requires 2 psis to complete, period, no questions asked. Beyond that, at least two tanks and three healers. There is also a sort of DPS check at the end to kill the mob before time runs out. One of the more involved encounters, this will require coordination and communication in addition to proper gruop make up.

Order sisters is relatively straightforward. This is simply a DPS check; beyond minor adjustments to timing and such, pretty much either you have enough DPS to complete this trial, or you don't. Realistically, you could probably do this with 1 tank, 1 healer, and everything else DPS.

Epic Grind

After completing the sisters trial, make sure your pota mount is in your inventory and go talk to your god avatar. You will receive the upgraded (flying) mount and the avatar will make some big announcement about how awesome you are.

Your next job is to locate and hail the "Eye of Rin". This is located in the hilly area in Riftseeker's Torrent. This is in the Tursh chunk, southeast corner. When you enter the cave, it'll ask you for a password by the portal. The password is "utaalk ataraav utkin", simply say that in /say. Once inside, you'll pass through some doors, hang a right, go down some stairs, and eventually find yourself in a room with another portal. Stand in the middle of the portal and /say utaalk ataraav utkin one more time and it will port you to the hilly area whose name escapes me. The Eye spawns and wanders in this area, though it's not always up. It will spawn up the rocky ledges and wanders in a fairly large path around the area. Simply hail it and it will disappear.

Now, head back to Ini-Herat. He will have some new dialogue for you about all sorts of random crap. Eventually he will tell you about recreating the souls of some lost warriors or some crap. He offers to show you how to do this for the low, low price of just 10 pp. Seriously. What a deal! If you have the money, you can pay him and it will allow you to begin farming for your epic. And I do mean farm.

Epic Slivers

Each epic requires 500 slivers. How many epics you have depends on your class; Disciples and Dread Knights have just one, Paladins have three...? and every other class has two. If you think back to your days of getting souls for t2 faction, everything that you killed for souls can now drop slivers. This is essentially any SoD mob, and any BoD mob. And possibly IoG, unsure. This is NOT like t3 offerings where you can get it from stuff like APW mobs, SoK, etc. Also, unlike souls and offerings, these slivers will NOT auto-populate your bags. You must manually check every corpse to see if there is one on it.

The drop rate on these is bad. Pretty much the only way to somewhat efficiently collect these is to sit in kite groups while a sorc kites something in SoD, then go pick up slivers off their corpses. You do not need to attack or be on the aggro list to get slivers, merely be within 100m when they die.

Shining Souls

Shining souls are essentially the equivalent of an echo for your epic. Combine a shining soul with 100 slivers and get a tranquil spirit shard, which is basically an epic cord. These drop from depletion bonuses of skinning mobs. Any t6 skinnable mob (i.e. t1 or t4 sod mobs) can drop these for you, much like echoes from mining. Note that there is also a 'epic 2.0' soul called a shimmering soul that has no use in the game. Unless they release HoSS at some point.

Crafting Your Epic

By now, you should be familiar with the pattern for crafting sealers and what not for PotA. The Tranquil Spirit Shards are cords. You will need 1 for each combine, and 5 total for each epic. Each combine also requires harvested mats and a purchased item, just like t2 and t3.

Essence Revitalizer is the equivalent of the Energy Sealers from your armor. Of course, you knew it wasn't going to get any cheaper and you're right... these cost 60g each. You purchase these from Ini-Herat.

The harvested mats are the same type that you need for t3 (haelifurite/prime steelweave/petrified timber), but in higher quantities. Each combine requires 5 of these, unlike 1 for your armor.

So in total, each epic will require:

500 Tranquil Spirit Slivers
5 Shining Souls
5 Essence Revitalizers - 3 plat
25 t6 UR mats

Epic Weapon?

Epics are really just attachments that can fit into soul slots. There are a couple kind of soul slots:

Soul: Regular, standard soul. This is most likely what you have.
Reinforced Soul: Soul slots for a two-handed weapon
Assassin's Soul: Soul slot for daggers and rogues

The difference is what type of weapon you can put your epic in. For example, a disciple gets a Reinforced Soul and a monk gets a regular soul. This means Monks must use 1-handers like claws, ulaks, etc. for their epics, while disciples can only put it in a 2-handed weapon. Rogues can only put their weapons in daggers, and no other class can put souls in daggers.

Each soul also goes in a specific place. For most classes which get two epics, one is a primary hand and one is a secondary hand. Seems like a moot point but once you put your primary hand epic in an item, you can only equip that item in your primary hand, even if it was either hand before. Note that some items with soul slots are specific to a certain hand, such as the Whitewind Blade and Varking's Bulwark, and can only receive a certain epic. So be aware of what you can and cannot put into your weapons.

Finally, some classes get epics in places you might not expect. Clerics, shamans, and paladins get one in their shield; rangers get one in their bow; and blood mages get one in their gloves. Blood Mage t3 gloves have a soul slot, so you must use that piece if you want to use that epic.