Azurral's Fury Forge Guard for Update 1.2 Season 2

I was hoping to get some discussion going about the unique Azurral’s Fury. Sentinel got a lot of work done and I missed out on the initial rework of Forge Guard so Season 2 should feel really fresh for me.

I have always been really interested in Azurral’s Fury but the hurdle to build around it always seemed to high. Now with the changes I think it may have a real shot at being a build for Season 2.

My current theorycraft for the build would be this:

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QqZMaGRB

It’s based around capitalizing on the insane amount of attack speed Vengeance can reach along with the new fire and damage nodes it received. If mana on hit works while the Falsewater Fury Mana drain buff is active it should reduce the cost from 20 to 0 mana depends on rolls and affix tiers. This could lead to a fairly long buff of +100 flat fire damage before the mana drain kicks in.

Outside of finding out how to beat the mana drain the build is fairly straight forward now that more auto cast functionality has been built into the skills. Javelin auto casts Smite, Vengeance auto casts Healing Hands, and Symbols stack themselves now. This leads to a lot of flat fire, % damage damage, and flat healing without having to press a bunch of buttons.

Has anyone tried this unique before? Have I gone to crazy on the mana? I don’t think defense will be an issue since Vengeance is supplying a huge damage reduction buff alongside the polished Sentinel suite of defenses. There’s probably some polish needed some where though.

*Update 4/15
New Build optimized around mana regen and Azurral’s Fury uptime:
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Q0azLY3B

After some testing with Azurral’s Fury I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not worth it for the build I have in mind. Some information about Azurral’s Fury and how it interacts with mana to start.

  1. Nothing seems to be able to recover or reduce the cost of mana from the Falsewater fury buff. I’ve tried on hit mana with Vengeance, -9 mana cost to melee skills using the Sentinel relic + Foot of the Mountain, and secondary mana recovery like hammer of want + multiple hammers in the hammer throw tree( a bit clunky).

  2. Melee skills that trigger other melee skills trigger Falsewater Fury per skill. This means if you use healing hands and trigger it with Vengeance you burn 40 mana a hit instead of 20.

  3. Sentinel hits around 480 mana 20 mana regen, and 19 mana on hit in average gear fully geared toward mana and recovery.

What does this all mean? My current build would hit around 6 hits a second fully buffed. The amount of hits is doubled to 12 hits per second because of healing hands. 12 hits per second * 40 mana = 480. Conveniently around the sentinel mana cap.

The recovery period however is 19 * 6 + 20 mana regen = 134 mana regen per second. It takes roughly 4 seconds to fill back up to max mana.

This equates to an uptime of 1 second for every 4 or 25% uptime. 25% of 100 flat damage would mean any fight of length has the belt being only worth around +25 melee fire damage.

Meanwhile I give up almost 200% increases fire damage and 15% attack speed to reach optimized mana and regen. My conclusion being the pay off isn’t worth the sacrifice.

I think a strength and attunement stacking build using the Vengeance mace, Renegade’s Will and the Smite on hit sword Palarus’s Sacred Light will offer a better pay off.

IIRC your mana goes only down and can’t be built up by any means. If you can get mana back with mana on hit you might be golden. Then again you give up a lot to make this work and you need to ask someone who is good with numbers if this is worth it at all ^^.

Yea definitely a cool idea we just don’t know if the wording is correct. Does falsewater fury saying no mana regenerations mean from any source? If mana on hit works then this should be fun.

It could be possible to make this work even if mana on hit doesn’t function during because the belt itself has good mods on it and getting LP 3 shouldn’t be an issue. At least for a short burst. The belt in general is pretty good.

I could see a scenario where you pot attack for a short burst hit 0 mana then fill you mana bar to full in 1-2 secs then pot again for a short burst.

It’s worth testing for sure.

You need a decent source of mana to refill it after false water. Like mana hammer throw
Hammer of Want node
Ballista node 6/6 and orbit them for max hits

I came to the conclusion the belt doesn’t really fit due to buff uptime issues. I edited the OP to reflect my decision and thought process.

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I’d suggest Eye of Reen instead, indirect casts(HH) will proc Eye of Reen again in 1.2 and that’s what I’m planning to do. Just not sure between Paladin and FG.

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If you’re looking for flat fire damage, take a look at FG with the Sunforged set.
with 15 FW and max roll on the damage mod LE tools is giving me 375 flat fire from the set.
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Qdj6nb1o

I feel Vengeance would do poorly as an Eye of Reen skill. It’s crit multi and and crit chance nodes only really prop it up as a semi crit skill at best. It also focuses more on fire hit damage than fire over time. It looks like an excellent fit for 2 hit crit Rive with the ignite branch though.

Palarus’s Sacred Light on the other hand scaling on attunement and strength is going to be rewarding me for what I’ll be doing anyway in stacking strength for fire resist shred and attunement for damage over time damage reduction.

The overall potential armor and fire resistance shred from proccing extra smites, healing hands, and potentially divine bolts doesn’t hurt either when considering vengeance synergy.

I was honestly just trying to fit in the belt as a bonus since I always thought it was neat. All that flat damage does sound good for a forge strike or smelter build though.

Funny enough Azurral probably fits better in a 2 handed build with all that flat since you get maybe 4 or so really big hits out of it with a far more valuable 600% add modifier. It adds another 10 more damage to the crushing blows passive for Forge Guard too.

It is a lot of damage for sure. It. night be more usable in 1.2 as I’m sure I say you can disable auto potion use. One of the issues I encountered with the belt was you’d walk over a potion and then all your mana was gone.