Sephiria Sturdy Combo: The Physical Damage Tag

Sturdy is Sephiria's physical damage tag, and it is the clearest case in the game of two competent players reading the same artifacts and reaching opposite conclusions. One documented Hard Mode clear builds its entire damage half on Sturdy. Another documented build takes exactly one Sturdy artifact and refuses the rest. Both are right, because the tag pays out through your weapon's hit pattern, and those two weapons hit very differently.

This page is the depth version of one row in the combo tags cross-index; the combo system page explains the counting rules that apply to every tag.

Where the threshold sits

Combos activate on a count of tagged artifacts held, anywhere in the bag, with placement irrelevant. The only published threshold figures on this site come from one player's build, and that list covers Guardian, Shadow, Magitech, Ember, Glacier and Elemental at two artifacts each, with Lake at three. Sturdy is not on it. Most tags sit at two, so two is the reasonable working assumption, but treat the exact number as not confirmed until you watch your own Combo Effect panel switch it on.

The two verdicts

The tier 50 evasion tank runs Sturdy as one of its two damage tags, alongside Precision, and sets its Fruit Skewer to bias Sturdy drops before the run starts. Its weapon is the Swift Regret great sword, which converts the great sword combo so that it produces three final attacks rather than one — and the tag's headline artifact rewards final hits specifically. That is the whole argument: a weapon that triples the number of events an artifact keys off turns a mediocre tag into a damage engine.

The fire Blade build reaches the opposite conclusion in one line. It takes the Mystical Pendulum for its normal-attack damage and calls the rest of the tag "too low value for the cost." A katana that spends its damage through charged specials has far fewer ordinary final hits to sell, so the same artifacts pay it much less.

Read those two together and the rule falls out: price Sturdy by how many normal attacks and final hits your weapon actually lands, not by the tag's reputation.

The artifacts, and what each one is for

Effect magnitudes are not published for any of these. The importance marks above are the tier 50 author's, reproduced rather than invented.

The Golden Crown loop

The Crown is not a damage artifact on its own reading — it converts final hits into critical hits. That matters because critical hits are the trigger condition for other tags: the tier 50 build fills a guaranteed-evasion artifact off crits, and the same crits feed the Precision tag's critical damage multipliers. A Sturdy artifact is therefore the switch that turns two other tags on, which is the sort of dependency the Combo Effect panel cannot show you.

The Wrath talent is the other half of that arithmetic. Its per-point line is one percent of critical chance, and its level 5 line adds critical damage. If the Crown is already making your final hits crit, points in Wrath are buying overlap; if it is not, they are buying the trigger.

Eternal Winter is a cold artifact wearing Sturdy's coat

Eternal Winter connects Sturdy and Glacier, and patch 1.0.19 changed what it scales off: its physical coefficient was cut from 72 / 130 / 230 to 40 / 75 / 125 and rebased on 50% of Cold damage, as recorded on the 1.0.19–1.0.24 patch page. A bag with no cold source now gets the reduced physical figures and nothing else. The tier 50 build carries a Frostium Ring in through the Wish Fountain for exactly this reason — one cheap enabler switches on both Eternal Winter's scaling and the Glacier artifacts beside it.

If you are copying a Sturdy list written before launch, this is the single entry most likely to be out of date.

The trap, stated plainly

Vital Touch belongs in the bag late. The tier 50 author took it early across several attempts and lost those runs. The same warning attaches to Bloodstone Earrings, which is not a Sturdy artifact but is the same shape of mistake: both guides that name it warn that taking its large lifesteal before your defence is up gets you killed. Neither guide states the underlying mechanism, so treat the trap itself as documented and any explanation for it as not confirmed.

The underlying rule is about floors 1–3, where high-tier runs are actually lost. Damage artifacts do not save an incomplete build there; defence and bag slots do.

Placement notes that touch this tag

Two grid facts change Sturdy's count. Chalcedony Key grants one of Sturdy, Ember, Glacier or Magitech depending on where you put it, which makes it a free threshold-filler for whichever tag you are one short on — the inventory grid page has the placement rules. And artifacts already in the bag raise the drop chance of their own tag, which the fire Blade guide puts at roughly +100% for the combo bonus, with a Carrot-modified Fruit Skewer adding up to 75% more. Taking one Sturdy artifact early therefore makes the next one likelier, for better or worse.

Breadth pulls the other way. The Ingenuity talent's capstone grants +7% to all damage per active combo type, so a sixth tag at its minimum threshold can beat a fourth Sturdy artifact outright. Deep Sturdy is an early-run answer; wide tags are the late-run one.

Not confirmed

Sturdy's activation threshold is not published anywhere this site can cite, and neither are the per-level values of any artifact above. There is no complete artifact-to-tag mapping in any primary source, so a Sturdy artifact you find in a run may not appear on this page at all. What each combo level grants as it climbs — level 4 versus level 10 — is likewise undocumented.

Sources checked for this page

• This site's combo effects page — tag counting, the observed threshold list, Chalcedony Key and the Ingenuity arithmetic
• This site's tier 50 evasion tank page — the Sturdy pick list, the Swift Regret final-attack change, the Vital Touch and Bloodstone warnings
• This site's fire Blade page — the Pendulum exception and the drop-pool arithmetic
• This site's 1.0.19–1.0.24 patch notes — Eternal Winter's coefficient cut and cold rebase
• This site's combo tags cross-index, inventory grid, talents and run events pages