Ruby Fang FG Theorycrafting

Sentinel
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I’ve wanted to try to make a FG with the Ruby Fang set for a bit now under the premise that we have some fire melee attacks, block synergies, and access to fire res and the less fire damage taken per fire res. I briefly messed around with it on dummies before, but not on an optimized character and I figure now that we can craft better set items, it might be worthwhile to try again.

Some questions I’m considering:

  • Which skill to use? In particular does Forged Weapons make sense? They inherit stats from my weapon, but does that include the set bonus or does that not count? Plus setting aside the set bonus, it won’t get the affix from the shield. What about Manifest Armor? It doesn’t look like it gets the fire tag from it’s fire damage nodes, so maybe not worth? But I could get it to use the shield effect too. Also what damage mods do I need to scale if the forged weapons are applying things? Is it just minion damage and shared pen?
  • If I do go with Forge Weapons, do you think it’s worth using the 2 piece set affixes for the Sunforged Set for +3 Forge strike? Obviously it’s a lot lower opportunity cost now that I can put them on a real item, but it’s not entirely free on some items with pretty strong affixes.
  • Do I just try to scale poison damage? Or do I try to take advantage of using fire skills for doing ignites and then scaling both with damage over time and attack speed?
  • Is it possible that the actual set shield might be the better way to go than crafting it onto an exalted shield? It already has the second highest level base, comes with more block chance in the implicit, and has that Ruby Venom on Block effect to scale more damage. I don’t get that on a crafted shield, but I can get more other stats I might like such as more fire res, block chance/effectiveness, etc. Obviously I also just get to use a better base and an exalted mod.
  • Anything else worth thinking about that I haven’t mentioned?

I’m gonna tinker with the planner more and later I’ll probably post what I end up with, but it would help getting some guidance on at least the skill selection so I don’t waste a lot of time on a dead end because I didn’t understand a mechanic.

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If you’re going for an ailment build then you’d want ailment chance & attack speed on a fast base axe (so you can use the set affix). A Chitin Claw would probably be best as it has chance to poison & poison duration implicits. I’m not sure if the forged weapons would get to use the shield affix, you could probably try in the current version of live by equipping the set though it’d be very difficult to see if they can get Ruby Venom stacks & they don’t have a fire attack, plus you’d have to give them fire resist to benefit from the set bonus but you can easily get that from the Ospryxbane FG passive at least.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Forged Weapons inherit your weapon stats, so they’d get the flat & ~% affixes from the equipped weapon (% increased poison damage, % chance to poison, attack speed) but they wouldn’t double dip from % minion damage, % minion DoT or % minion penetration (& shouldn’t double dip on the shared affixes, but maybe they would :person_shrugging:).

Possibly yes since the Forged Weapon attack isn’t a fire skill so it wouldn’t get the % chance to poison on fire skill.

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That will depend on which affixes get shattered, IMO.

I don’t see why they wouldn’t. Shared affixes usually have lower numbers than “pure” ones. And it’s usually limited. You either get one or the other.
So it would make sense that a shared affix would work, because it’s not actually double-dipping, not really. Each part of the affix only works once for the minions.

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Yes, but the devs tend not to like things being applied twice.

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Vengeance probably with the new fire tech and all phy shred and bleed chance from ALL sources converted to fire. I mean should be super safe has fire more multi.

Although if Forge guard the main reason (I feel only reason) to be that now is 2hand and shield so this rules out this set. I’m not sure there is a good synergy with this set unless I haven’t seen an interacction or gear combo yet.

Nope I was looking at this for my Pally Igniter the set would be good but there are issues with stacking poison on Sent. We have no support. Then damage over time affixes are just straight up worse than elemental over time. So there is no reason to make your ignites worse (which have more multi)

My plan was Pally then maybe reroll to test out the Forgemaster might node and other builds, i’d heavily recommend going either Pally or VK first so you don’t suffer playing FG as the passive tree is really bad and requires the last node to buff all the early nodes because it’s 2 hand doubles many values.

Final thought I question if you will have the ruby venon interaction on the shield. There is no mention of that being transfered over. Here is the set affix crafting list https://www.lastepochtools.com/db/set-affixes

For the shield you get chance to poison on hit and fire res, for the set bonus you get 1% poison chance per uncapped fire res. Sadly I don’t think ruby venon will be there which would kill this set choice honestly. Since you don’t get any bonus fire damage and no way to scale poison.

I’ve got my eye on it and will test it but probably won’t be any good if the above hold true. It’s worth tinkering with and trying though and that could be fun. Just not sure if it will work and if it does work, then you probably won’t want to be FG.

FG is all about 2hand and shield now it’s the only scaling it’s got. Can wear titan heart too, or the new 2hand vengeance unique etc. or Sunforged set. Also the new minion armor Mantle of the pale Ox will be OP with Manifest armor and redirects up too 24% of damage taken to Manifest armor.

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Yeah that is my main concern. I’m just not sure exactly who this set is intended to be used on. FG has the best access and use for fire res and has melee fire skills, but no poison scaling.

Spellblade has fire melee but no poison scaling and while it can get fire res it it’s tree, it doesn’t get to take advantage of over stacking it like with FG.

Primalist has poison scaling but no fire melee and no access or use for fire res.

Acolyte has some poison scaling but no fire res or fire melee attacks.

Now that I’m looking through everything, maybe rogue is actually an option? The fire res isn’t really there and the poison passives are only for daggers outside of the one late in Falconer, but Cinder Strike is a melee fire skill and it has a node that converts all poison chance to ignite chance. Oh and it has some block passives, although one of them just turns block into glancing blow, so it wouldn’t work if I wanted to use the actual set shield’s Ruby Venom thing, but if I’m just crafting the set affix that’s fine. I haven’t really played much rogue and zero falconer, so idk. I guess the question at some point is whether or not the fire res → poison chance → Ignite chance makes more sense than just putting poison/ignite chance on gear by default. If it doesn’t do anything special with it then what is the point? I guess you just get to make more of the mods of your gear poison/ignite chance.

EDIT: Oh, I just realized Cinder Strikes also gives fire res from oil coating. Maybe this is a thing. Still like the idea less than FG, but it might just be the more reasonable option.

Maybe I’ll look at it. I still feel like there’s some kind of idea with the FG. Outside of the poison scaling issue way too many things line up nicely. At least the idea is more interesting.

This is something I was worried about when they talked about the set crafting but hadn’t actually shown full examples of it. There are so many lines on some of these set items and while some are filler stats, there are cases like this where there are multiple interesting parts of the set and it’s a shame that they just decided to leave out parts of it.

I was also theorycrafting something for the veng weapon. Trying to make a full on retaliation build work again and this time things are maybe clicking into place with the new weapon and passive. This is the current rough draft of that: (The gear is all over the place outside of the weapon and shield) https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/B4Ewk9Lo

Idea is we get to scale up veng + shield throw + jav on some overlapping scaling. Jav/Veng get melee damage, thornmail makes our armor give more retaliation damage for shield throw, and strength can give us both damage for all 3 and armor. As usual I need help on the nitty gritty, but I think there’s some idea there.

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Quick update:

Just for the sake of getting a really rough idea of what it would look like, I slapped together the Ruby Fangs FG on my current character with whatever shitty fire res gear I could find. There’s stuff missing from it like Vengeance doesn’t have it’s fire conversion or Forged Weapons spawning yet so I tested with Rive instead, which also isn’t fire but does summon forged weapons, and obviously I can’t put on better bases without set crafting. But considering all that plus my shit gear, it… wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever played. I took it to an empowered mono at over 300 corruption and it was slow and scary but it worked. I actually had really terrible defenses. No crit avoid/reduction. Not capped resists. Bad block and armor. Only ~1500 HP. Not even remotely optimized regen since the shield bash build was using leech and this probably has to be regen based. Still somehow managed to clear a few echoes without dying. There MIGHT be something to this. But really hard to say, especially how it’ll fair at earlier levels.

Here is the very very very rough build planner:

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ApD3WVxA

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Question why do you want to be FG? I understand the idea of wanting to make some cool set tech work. I do believe this set will have builds and it will do well I’m just not following the FG idea.

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The main thought just has to do with the fire res. You can get it from the tree and Osprixbane makes overcapping the resistance less wasteful. It has access to fire melee attacks for the extra poison chance affixes. Block stuff will make better use of the shield than a class that didn’t have that and if I end up using the regular set shield instead of a crafted version it will help get the Ruby Venom stacks.

I also had the idea that maybe I could apply it with Forged Weapons, but after looking into it some more that doesn’t actually work. Forge Strike itself has some potentially interesting things going on with the node that increases ailment damage based on stun chance though.

I mentioned it above, but while I was looking at stuff I realized that the actual way this is probably supposed to be used is Cinder Strike converting poison to ignite and Falconer gets some block chance. But… that seems like kind of a cop out right? The set makes this weird setup asking you to use fire to poison things only for you to just arbitrarily turn the poison back into fire? Doesn’t seem in the spirit of the design even if maybe this is the only actually sensible use case. This is what I mocked up for that, but I’m not sure I’m gonna bother with that version even if it is better. https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Q925MRZB

(I actually haven’t even filled out any of the other skills lol. I guess I lost interest after filling out Cinder Strike.)

idk. Maybe I’m over focusing on the melee and fire thing. That’s just a bit of flat poison chance on top of the massive amount you get from fire res stacking. But even if I loosened the restriction, none of the other classes either get access to a lot of fire res or have a use for it.

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Ok so why not Paladin? You got all res as well and holy aura for all res/endurance. Not to mention attack speed/fire dmg, ignite and pen. (Pally node covenant of light then increases holy aura/symbols by another 20%)

Pally also has mastery bonus of 15% more dmg at full HP and access to healing effectiveness if you want to scale healing hands. You can even add in new divine bolt tech for another fire hit for more ignite stacks.

Then at end of tree activating holy aura gives 50% more ignite damage. I think Ruby fang is a Pally ignite/fire build and the set is too compliment it. You have more abilities to scale without detracting from the set with FG/minions.

This is where I wasn’t following you. FG will 100% be broken OP but you have to use a 2 hand weapon to scale Forged Weapons it’s just not even close going 1 hand. Then FG 2 hand means all the nodes like Smelter’s might, Master of arms, Champion of the forge will all be doubled with 2h.

Basically FG is now a 2hand spec, there is even a 2h vegeance unique and will scale crazy with 2h with more modifiers. Not to mention Manifest armor will be a god with 2hand and shield. Then you can wear other 2hand exclusive uniques for synergies, titan heart etc.

FG 2 hand vengeance will be super broken with Forged weapons and Manifest armor and think where the main synergy is for 1.2.

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But that’s all ignite stuff. What does that have to do with poison? It doesn’t really have a lot of generic damage over time increases. The only thing I see just quickly skimming is that Judgement has Anointed for more damage over time.

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Also drop the rings for Double Sunreath implicit fire res/dmg then melee ignite, flat fire and fire over time. Can easily get 3 lp slam more ele over time etc and be a Dot king.

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Nothing on sentinel will scale poison. Going damage over time to scale poison is choosing a weaker affix to scale posion which is a weaker dot. It’s double weak.

At T7 Ele over time is way stronger than T7 Damage over time. Sentinel has more multi for fire/ignite and fire pen.

I was looking at making a strong build using what has synergy then scaling resist to also add in poison stacks and make the set work.

The only interesting thing is if Ruby venom stacks would work to further scale ignite and poison dots. I love the idea of the set and will test it on my pally igniter but the set would be to compliment that not detract from it. If you try to scale poison instead it’s just going to be significantly weaker.

I guess the real question is instead of using this set what if you replaced it with something else would the build be stronger?

I guess my vision for the set would be Pally/Ignite having 1k+ ignite stacks and 500 poison stacks. The focus is still ignite/fire then trying to use the set for overall more damage over time by adding in another ailment.

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I guess I just want some reason for a dumb build to exist. The fire res capping was that reason. Using it in an already good build with no synergy just seems like making a good build worse.

If the poison damage isn’t going to be that much anyway and we’re not getting serious benefit from the fire res, are we really going to waste pretty valuable mods on it? The suffixes where you can get fire res are all competing with health, health regen, armor, other resists, etc. If the fire res to poison isn’t the main focus of the build I can’t imagine that being better than just using real weapons/shields and having like 1000 more health. (number out of my ass, you get my point.)

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It’s not a dumb build it’s just there is no synergy for damage over time or poison in Sentinel. However my Pally Igniter will have probably 300+ fire resist naturally. It’s already part of the build without trying to stack it. So since it’s already there why not add in Ruby fang was where I was going with it. At least I’m not detracting much from the build and trying to build ontop of it.

Where FG you were robbing peter to pay paul.

Think this is just where it is. The posion damage won’t be much and it won’t benefit much from the fire res. It’s a shame it’s a cool set with ways to scale it just there aren’t any builds that work for it. Now if they changed the set to any hit instead of melee we would be able to cook more.

Likely this still a dead set sadly. Especially when looking at new items and synergy of new tech. Who knows many something will change a champion affix we didn’t see or something else with weaver. It’s a long reach though.

I’m probably just gonna play something really broken and try to break the game in new ways and any set shield affix will compete with the new super broken Majasa shield.

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Huh. I wasn’t sure exactly what you meant by that so I took a look and I get it now. There is just a lot of random fire res or elemental res you incidentally take if only to get your other resists capped.

I wish I knew what they were thinking when they made items like these. Like some of the cool looking uniques and sets are SO specific that they must have had some idea for how they’d be used and then you actually go looking for them and you come up empty, or you try what seems like THE way to make it work and it turns out to just suck like with the Bee Druid thing I tried. So did they test anything just to see if what they were putting in the game had some use or do they just throw out random ideas and hope someone else figures something out with them?

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