How to Play as Azar
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The best advice I can give you is something I learned from playing Gloomhaven: damage is the best kind of block, because dead enemies don’t deal damage. I just finished a run on Mutation 2 with Azar where I had almost zero block. What carried me this run was the Lifesteal ritual + absurd damage from scaling Power on multistrike attacks. You can see the build here:
The idea with glass cannon builds like this is generally to burst down enemies before they can touch you, especially if you’re using your health as a resource. Azar doesn’t have access to great blocking, which tells me it’s not really intended to play him that way.
You might consider relying on Weaken as your defensive option of choice instead. The upgraded Suspension from my build is a great roleplayer in that regard. If you pick it up late, you can upgrade into the empowered single target version (+2 weaken, +1 block), or you might not even need the upgrade at all (it was an error on my part that I upgraded it to the AoE version after the last elite battle).
Looking at (starting) relics, you primarily want ones that make you better at killing (for instance giving you power scaling) or that add to your survivability, especially in the early rounds of combat (for instance the starting relic that gives enemies 2 Daze).
During this run what carried me from act 2 onward was the Lifesteal ritual, however. It allowed me to afford taking damage on turns 1+2, because I could reliably heal for 20+ health on turn three by comboing Chaos Bolts with Inner Rage and Power Scaling from turns 1-2.
This didn’t necessarily work out every fight, but I was able to build a buffer of Max HP from using pretty much every rest site to sacrifice a spell for 8 Max HP (which effectively heals you for 8 which makes it far superior to the free heal for 10, and you should always go for it, if you can).
The final boss just died in a matter of turns – I think he got to attack 3-4 times against my 80+ life total. I one hit KO’d his third phase with Chaos Bolts for 240 damage, at full health with all three of my potions left.
To summarize, when approaching a run with Azar you should really try to end fights quickly, sometimes taking a hit instead of blocking so you can kill next turn, and avoid taking damage again. Try to get some bursty options like Hurt for the early game, and pivot into some form of increasingly fast scaling for acts 2 and 3. Act 1 is really important in that regard: Take as many fights as possible so you get spells you can sacrifice at the rest sites for max HP (instead of healing for 25), fight the elites, and try to leverage that setup in the later parts of the run.
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