Tale of Immortal - Breakthroughs and Fates Guide

Breakthroughs and Fates Introduction

Note: Credit goes to Z

You should basically always go for the optimal breakthrough, with the highest rarity items, since it really doesn’t take that much more time usually and the stat boosts add up. Especially on difficulties higher than Normal. You should generally value attack/defense boosts over increases to Vitality etc..

The minor breakthroughs just require a pill, the quality doens’t matter, just buy it in a town/city.

Only cities (the bigger, blue map icon) offer stuff for the second realm tier of a region.

Incidentally, there are only appropriate pills for every second breakthrough tier, this means that in the latter tier of a region, you won’t really have good pills.

Always remember to upgrade your attack skills and your passives after a breakthrough. The increase in stats in tiers is large. Red attack skills are comparable to blue attack skills of the next tier at best.

The later you go, the larger the bonuses for breakthroughs are. Unfortunately this also means that it becomes less and less possible to defeat higher tier NPCs. You can if they’re still Early and you have tavern boosts +an artifact with the defense-reducing spirit, but it may well prove impossible.

Honestly, I find that mildly upsetting since surmounting a realm is a core concept of cultivation novel power fantasies, kinda wish the boosting pills were stronger, but harmed you too or something.

Every breakthrough has a chance to fail. When that happens you get a lightning tribulation. You can savescum this, or you can endure it with Wind movement + pills. It doesn’t even scale up in the later tiers so it actually becomes less threatening over time.

Fates are a difficult topic since some are build-dependent, but the gist is that most are bad. Expect rerolling. Many come in tiers with later ones offering better boosts. When you pick a tier I skill, you are much more likely to see the later tiers.

All flat stat boosts aren’t worth it. Including perception and so on unless you really have free slots in your fates of your build. The summoning types (Jo’s here etc.) don’t seem worth it either. Spirit fruit gift is a joke. The necromancy stuff is not strong at all, don’t bother.

Not all fates are available at all breakthrough tiers, keep that in mind.

Name	Opinion
Energy/Vitality Essence	Good for boosting survivability and you can only pick one of the two. I usually go with Energy Essence since life recovery traits seem more common.
Elixir Recycle	Excellent survivability since it makes your pills go a lot further, at least while pills are still useful.
Jo’s Flying Sword	Exceptionally strong past tier 1. The first level just deals damage, but the second can inflict random status effects. On many bosses. This can be rooting them, but also sealing/freezing them (they can’t attack and skip a phase in their attack cycle). It attacks often enough for this to be extremely powerful. Tier 3 makes it shoot a spread of sword, and if you happen to be near a boss with that, it will deal a lot of damage.
Combat Expertise	Extremely useful. This lets you skip the requirement of building up stacks for ultimates. This lets you open fights with your ultimate and use it on CD, which is really useful. However there are always two ultimates and one requires objects on the field. This skill does not help with those. In practice this means that half of the ultimates are just worse.
Elixir Recycle	Excellent survivability since it makes your pills go a lot further, at least while pills are still useful.
Spiritual Sword 3	Decently powerful if you have an energy recovery setup for bosses, but you need tier 3 for it to matter, that’s 3 different fates you could pick otherwise.
Martial Skill Cooldown	Strong if you use those. There is no equivalent for spiritual skills.
Blood Claw	Hits hard, but requires a lifesteal build to not endanger you.
Power of Blood	A close-range lifesteal. Ideal for blade builds, questionable due to the range limit for most others. You can regain life through skill traits too, keep that in mind.
Old but Strong	Gets better the more you grind, but outside of Chaos you should get to Enlightenment before it becomes all that useful.
Quick Escape	Not as useless as it may seem, since it’s easy to get into fights you can’t win. That said, it has no combat utility to make you win fights.
Warlord’s Phantom	If you use a shield-burst build with Fist skills, this can be used to OHKO bosses even on Chaos. If you have strong life recovery (traits, lifesteal), this can also be used to double your effective health, but you may not need that with strong recovery?
Burning Butt	Improves agility, by a pretty large %. At the highest level it even reduces damage you take to your back. It’s pretty strong.
Fight and Learn	Iffy. It only happens randomly, and you can’t pick the ability. You may think you can get red tier skills from it (and it will even skip the spirit root requirement), but you will mostly get bad passives since NPCs don’t tend to have good ones. You cannot learn skills of a higher realm based on a little testing.
Sword Shadows 2	Deals pretty hefty damage, but takes a lot of time to trigger. Probably decent for boss killing in higher difficulties where the fights take forever or if you have a multi-hit setup.
Lightning Burst	Weak
Following Bug	Weak
Starlight	Funky rainbow. Requires mobs to build up (useless against cultivators). Deals roughly your LMB damage every tick. Seems okay if the build up isn’t an issue.