AoV Heaven’s Fury 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. Bracer of Fury
3. Shield of the Steed and Shield of Fury
4. Nemesis Bracers
5. Goldwrap

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

1. Two-Handed Flails to get Flail of the Charge and Fate of the Fell
2. Rings to get Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac
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
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Cain's Destiny and Sage's Journey

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. It's better to spend your materials improving your set pieces, getting 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:

• Fate of the Fell
• Shield of Fury
• Flail of the Charge

• Bane of the Trapped is the most common DPS gem, the bonus is always active thanks to Judgment.
• Bane of the Stricken is necessary to kill the Rift Guardian.
• The third gem is usually Pain Enhancer for extra Attack Speed or Gogok of Swiftness for RGK and CDR-dependent variants of the build.

• Heaven's Fury Fires of Heaven is the main source of damage, thanks to Aegis of Valor (4) Bonus we can spam this skill despite its heavy Wrath cost.
• Fist of the Heavens Fissure is necessary to activate Aegis of Valor (2 and 4) Bonus. Fissure is used as both fissures and lightning arcs provide Wrath each time they deal damage, making it unnecessary to cast Fist of the Heavens too often.
• Judgment is used to activate Bracer of Fury bonus damage. Alternatively Shield Glare can be used to the same effect, but Judgment's longer duration and more convenient area of effect make it an overall better choice.
• Laws of Valor Unstoppable Force provides 50% Resource Cost Reduction which lets us spam Heavens Fury even against single targets where Wrath generation is low. And at the same time it provides 50% damage reduction thanks to Captain Crimson's Trimmings. 15% Attack Speed from the base skill is just icing on the cake.
• 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.
• Finally the last skill slot is free; 90% it's Iron Skin Flash for free movement and damage reduction, but in some cases where speed is needed above everything else Steed Charge can take its place.

• Heavenly Strength is mandatory for 2h variants, for the 1h ones Fervor is used instead for its massive CDR boost.
• Holy Cause is the main source of recovery as well as a nice damage boost.
• Long Arm of the Law lets us have easy 100% uptime on Laws of Valor Unstoppable Force.
• Finery is the strongest generic crusader passive, provides about 15% DPS and 12% toughness boost.

¹ Add a bit of Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 750,000 Life is recommended).
² Avoid any source of Area Damage for RGK variants as this is useless and it can lag the game.

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

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

Fist of the Heavens needs to be used at least once every 5 seconds to maintain Aegis of Valor (2) Bonus. With Fissure it will also be enough to keep your Wrath maxed out in the rift, although during the bossfight more fissures might be necessary.

Heavens Fury is your main attack skill and it should be spammed as much as possible to deal damage, apply Shield of Fury stacks, heal via Holy Cause, and to generate Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac procs.

Akarat's Champion, Laws of Valor and Iron Skin are three toughness buffs that you want to keep up all the time. It's important to only cast each skill when the buff is about to run out, to avoid wasting any Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac procs. For the build variations which don't use Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, the Akarat's Champion is used exactly at the start of every other Holy cycle of Convention of Elements, Laws of Valor is used on cooldown and Iron Skin is used when extra toughness or Movement Speed is needed.

Finally the CC skill, Judgment or Shield Glare, is only used right before the Holy cycle. Using it at any other time will reduce your overall DPS due to Crowd Control Resistance mechanics.

The build is quite tanky already so the only change for hardcore is swapping Finery for Indestructible, the strongest cheat death passive in the game. 5s long invulnerability combined with Akarat's Champion CC-immunity lets you use Town Portal no matter how perilous your current circumstances are. Be aware however, that if you "die" due to being stuck, using Iron Skin Flash after the passive procs will not give you any Movement Speed and you will still be stuck until the invulnerability runs out. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• Applies a stack every time Heaven's Fury deals damage. Cannot apply stacks to the same target more often than once every 0.9/APS seconds.
• Stacks are lost when the target leaves combat. Normal mobs and Elites lose stacks when you move too far away or change zones. Bosses never lose stacks. Additionally, some mobs can dispell stacks even when you are fighting them: Terror Demons lose stacks when entering invisibility, Morlu Legionaries lose stacks when they enter their stone form.
• Damage bonus from stacks doesn't interact with Area Damage in any way. AD procs from debuffed targets deal unbuffed damage, same for AD procs versus debuffed targets.

• Adds two extra beams to Fires of Heaven in a shotgun pattern.
• Hitting the same target with more than 1 beam deals extra damage.
• The beams' hurtbox extends inside and slightly behind crusader.

• The damage bonus is only active while the target is crowd controlled. All the normal CC-related considerations apply.
• Some Rift Guardians can ignore your crowd controls, reducing your damage by a factor of 5 (Vesalius is immune to blinds, Erethon breaks Judgment whenever it dashes).
• Check out this post by Chewingnom for more informations about Crowd Control!

The important question that needs to be answered to determine the value of Attack Speed is "How many times can I cast Heaven's Fury during my Holy Convention of Elements cycle?". For answer refer to the following table:

Window refers to how close to the start of Holy your first attack must be. For example with 30 frames breakpoint you attack exactly 2 times per second, meaning that in 4s you can attack 8 times, and if your first attack lands anywhere in the first 29 frames of Holy, then the 8th will land before Holy is over. As you can see, some breakpoints actually increase your DPS by adding extra attacks, while others only make it easier to perform a DPS rotation correctly. To convert in-game Attack Speed into FPA values, refer to d3planner or read the full Attack Speed Mechanics Guide.

• Fires of Heaven are shot in the direction your character is facing.
• Fires of Heaven shot by this item have no proc coefficient, they don't proc Area Damage, don't heal with Holy Cause and don't apply Shield of Fury stacks.
• Can only fire a shot once every 12 frames (5 times per second). If 2 attacks are blocked in the same 12 frame interval, then the next proc will deal double damage. If 3 or more attacks are blocked, the damage is increased to 250% of the base. Blocking more attacks will not increase the damage further.
• Blocking an attack with Punish Fury active immediately consumes the Critical Chance buff.
• Fire Chains Champions Packs will be your best friends when playing Ivory Tower builds as Fire Chains have a tickrate of 10 times per second. Also, the Rift Guardian Orlash with its Lightning Breath throwing 20 projectiles in quick succession as a beam is the best Rift Guardian for Ivory Tower.