AoV Fist of the Heavens Crusader Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. Gather the full Aegis of Valor set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. The full Aegis of Valor set
2. Khassett's Cord of Righteousness and Goldwrap
3. Shield of the Steed
4. Nemesis Bracers

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Flails to get Darklight
2. Two-Handed Flails to get Flail of the Charge
3. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship (for your follower)
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Act 5: Pandemonium Loop
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny

6. All the remaining items such as for example Squirt's Necklace are not critical for the build so it's better to just wait for them to drop and spend your mats to get set items with better rolls, ancient weapon etc.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Flail of the Charge
• Squirt's Necklace
• Focus or Restraint

• Zei's Stone of Vengeance is our main DPS gem, giving up to 80% extra damage vs far away targets.
• Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard is necessary to protect your Squirt's Necklace buff from stray projectiles.
• The third gem is either Boon of the Hoarder for Nephalem Rifts or Gogok of Swiftness for Greater Rifts and Bounties.

• Fist of the Heavens is the main source of DPS as well as necessary skill to activate Aegis of Valor (4) Bonus.
• Iron Skin Flash is one of the most used Crusader skills which provides both 50% damage reduction and large Movement Speed boost.
• Steed Charge Nightmare is used for mobility and to activate Norvald's Fervor damage bonus as well as different on-hit effects such as Rechel's Ring of Larceny, Warzechian Armguards and Gogok of Swiftness.
• Akarat's Champion Prophet is a staple in every single crusader build. One skill providing 35% DPS, more than double toughness, CC-immunity, Wrath regeneration and full heal on "death" is just too good to pass up.
• One of the remaining skill slots is occupied by Law skill, which is either Laws of Hope Wings of Angels for mobility or Laws of Valor Unstoppable Force for defense.
• Finally the last skill slot is free, except for variants of the build that run Bastions of Will, which use Justice Hammer of Pursuit. For other variants this skill slot can be either Provoke Flee Fool to activate Rechel's Ring of Larceny or Falling Sword to jump over walls.

• Heavenly Strength is mandatory to equip both pieces of Norvald's Fervor.
• Indestructible is used to prevent random oneshots when Akarat's Champion and/or Goldwrap buff falls off.
• Long Arm of the Law for increased uptime on our Law skill.
• The last passive is usually Finery, the strongest generic crusader passive, which provides about 15% DPS and 12% toughness boost. The bounty version uses Lord Commander for 100% Steed Charge uptime.

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25.000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10.000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

T16 Enchantress

Speed GR Enchantress

• T16 Enchantress
• Speed GR Enchantress

For T16 we recommend this Enchantress setup because she is the only follower that gives Cooldown Reduction, allowing you to spam your abilities more. Since this is T16 content, she’ll stay alive with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard and use Hand of the Prophet to gain all skills. This will give us Cooldown Reduction, Elemental Damage, Reduced Damage from Ranged Attacks, Armor, Attack Speed, and a Cheat Death.

Stat Priorities:Since we do not have the immortality focus, we need to stack survivability on our Enchantress.

Intelligence > Vitality > Life % > Armor > All Resistance > Life Per Hit > Attack Speed.

Key Items:

• The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
• Nemesis Bracers: For extra Elites, Death’s Breaths and In-geom procs.
• Avarice Band: For the insane pickup radius.
• Ring of Royal Grandeur: To complete our sets.
• Gloves of Worship: For 10 Minute Shrine Buffs.
• Sage’s Journey: For double Death’s Breaths.
• Cain’s Destiny: For 25% more Greater Rift Keystones.

For speed Greater Rifts we recommend this Enchantress setup because she is the only follower that gives Cooldown Reduction, allowing you to spam your abilities more. Since this is speed content, she’ll stay alive with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard and use Hand of the Prophet to gain all skills. This will give us Cooldown Reduction, Elemental Damage, Reduced Damage from Ranged Attacks, Armor, Attack Speed, and a Cheat Death.

Stat Priorities:Since we do not have the immortality focus, we need to stack survivability on our Enchantress.

Intelligence > Vitality > Life % > Armor > All Resistance > Life Per Hit > Attack Speed.

Key Items:

• The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
• Nemesis Bracers: For more progression from Elites.
• Oculus Ring: For 85% increased damage.
• Ice Climbers: To make your follower immune to Freeze and Immobilize effects.
• Hellfire Ring, Leoric's Crown and Cain's Destiny: For more Experience and Attack Speed.

Fist of the Heavens is the main damage skill, its resource cost is completely negated by Aegis of Valor (4) Bonus, so you can just cast it on everything that moves.

Akarat's Champion, Iron Skin and your chosen Law skill should be spammed as much as cooldown allows in order to maximize the uptime on defensive and Movement Speed buffs.

Steed Charge is used when you need to move, or in the middle of the fight when Norvald's Fervor buff is about to fall off you use it to quickly move away from the mobs and refresh the buff.

This build is not very hardcore-friendly due to being dependent on toughness buffs which do not have 100% uptime. As a result you can often find yourself to be way squishier than expected, and if an unlucky attack happens to come your way, you just proc your Indestructible without any warning. One way you could remedy this would be by including Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac and Captain Crimson's Trimmings for 100% uptime on the Law and Akarat's Champion. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• Produces an extra explosion with each cast of Fist of the Heavens, instead of having on explosion directly under the cursor, two are spawned to the left and to the right of it.
• Both explosions can damage the same target.
• Both explosions can proc Area Damage.

• Provides a Movement Speed buff every time you take damage while the effect is active.
• Duration of the buff is refreshed by every new damage instance.
• Buff is provided even if all the damage is shielded.
• Buff is not provided if damage is negated e.g. by dodge or by Indestructible.

• Affected enemies flee in fear for 3 seconds.
• Stacks multiplicatively from different pieces of gear.
• Fear is applied after the damage, meaning that it can never proc when the target dies in one hit.

• Provides a 150% Movement Speed buff for the duration.
• For 0.4 seconds after activation, blocks all the skill casts.
• Using any skill while the buff is active will remove the buff. This includes Steed Charge itself even if its cooldown is shorter than its duration.

Mechanics

• Fist of the Heavens is cast on a random nearby enemy every 2 seconds.
• It can proc Area Damage and deals the same damage than your own Fist of the Heavens.
• After casting Steed Charge, this effect occurs more rapidly for 5 seconds.