I have been enjoying the thorns build with Forge Guard. While there are not a lot of items with this mechanic in mind I was thinking would a unique weapon built around thorns be to much to make use of thorns or would that be too strong?
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Right now I think what holds back thorns is some way to do damage directly with thorns.
Because some bosses just dont attack you enough or with mechanics you cant tank, so you never get to apply your thorns.
But it needs to be a mechanic that does not scale. My current dream would be either a chest or weapon that causes your thorns to be dealt to nearby enemies once every second, with no way to scale. This means you essentially gets thorns damage as dps. 30k thorns means you have 30k dps, its not great dps, but it lets you atleast deal damage to most bosses and slower enemies without issue and still feels thematic to the archetype. perhaps it explodes 1 per second if you have been hit in the past 6-10 seconds with a range or something, so you still need to actually get hit.
A mechanic that adds thorns damage to hits imo just causes it to become an alternative normal build where you just use it as resistance and armor ignoring damage and just scale attack speed which sounds off brand for thorns.
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If that was flat damage returned, that would actually be amazing DPS. Flat damage returned is applied directly without mob mitigation. Only % damage returned has mitigation.
So if you had 32k flat damage returned, you’d be killing Aby in 1s.
Nah 32k damage per 1 second isnt enough to delete abby, I was doing like 20k hits with storm totem several times a second and he still took a bit to be killed.
getting 30k thorns isnt impossible, so by your posts logic, so abby hitting you would 1 shot himself, which isnt really the case. but 30k thorns also isnt possible while just… standing still. thats mostly only doable on spriggan form where you spam thorn shield and it restricts your movement.
10-20k is more realistic I think. Dreads latest video has him htting the dummy for 3.5m every 2-3 seconds, at 95% reduced damage, thats him doing 175k to enemies every few seconds. And thats on a less then steller build, the damage people do these days is frankly… obscene. So letting thorns do 15k a second isnt anything lol.
For reference my storm totem build did like 400k a hit to the dummy 3-4x a second. So if DR at end game is 95%, then its doing around 80k dps. So 2-3x the most broken thorns build.
but either way, im willing to accept even like half of thorns damage, anything that makes it so you dont have to be hit, while also not scaling with hit rate.
like for example abby has probably well over 1m hp probably several million.
a maxed to the teeth thorn build with like 30k thorns, assuming they can FACETANK every hit, has to be hit 34 times to do 1m damage, like the majority of abbys attacks are DoT and he hits extremely infrequently. if he has something like 3-4m hp, its just not feasible because you likely cant face tank half the hit attacks…
hell its not just abby, lagons only hits are the moon beam charge hit, and his claws. The waves, the bolts, and eye sweep dont trigger cause 2 are the arena, and the eye sweep is a DoT.
So thorns builds just sit in lagon for 10 minutes as they slowly kill him off claw reflect… like its just miserable, thorn builds are unplayable for anything other then spire monos for the meme.
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I don’t think this is accurate.
In Aaron’s video of his spriggan thorns build, it shows Lagon tentacle attacks do trigger the reflect damage. Also, it doesn’t show him tanking any of Lagon’s eye sweep, but later in the Harbinger fight, he tanks the eye sweep ability it inherits from Lagon, and it sure triggers the reflect, making the life bar melt, so I assume it’s not a DoT ability, and it would be just the same for Lagon.
Check here: https://youtu.be/hQWuKYp5-EI?si=AFtt1OLOq3WzLYpo&t=136
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It might have changed since I last played, because last time I tried the build lagon didnt even have the tentacles yet, and the eye sweep for sure didnt count.
also watching that video, he specifically does not get hit by lagons own sweep, just the harbingers, I dont think they are the same attack exactly.
Since he has spriggan I also assume that his spriggan has reflect thanks to its own passive point that gives the spriggan and you flat reflect per vit. His spriggan stands in the sweep from lagon and does not trigger any reflect… the harbinger for whatever reason uses a hit based version.
edit: atleast one thing is clear, atleast the tentacles seem to make that fight much less ass for the build.
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That will depend on what you simply mean by 32k flat damage. Aaron did a pure reflect Spriggan build that almost killed Aby in a few minutes (he died in the last phase when he couldn’t avoid the beams). He had about 1.5k flat damage added to his gear, which is already pretty much the highest you can get. It’s the number that LETools shows.
It then got multiplied by the bonus from Thornshell, which was very significant and shot it somewhere in the 150k range.
So if you simply mean getting 30k effective flat damage reflected (which, again, isn’t the same as % flat damage reflected), then yes, that’s not too much.
But if you mean adding 32k flat damage to attackers on gear/skills, then that would be huge, since that would be multiplied by 900% from thornshell, which would definitely kill Aby in 1-2 hits.
You’re not fighting Lagon, you’re fighting the tentacles. They are the ones taking damage. So no attack from Lagon reflects anything at all. Only the tentacle attacks do.
I did test this before 1.0 with a FG minion reflect build and there was no change to this since then.
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I mean 32k after thornshell. not 32k raw added that would be crazy indeed.
All the item would do is cause you to do a burst aoe around you every 1 second doing thorns damage. 150k thorns sounds crazy tho, I usually saw in the 30k~ range for spriggan form builds, though I guess with enough investment 100k+ isnt impossible, but honestly if you get 100k thorns you should be able to kill stuff lol.
but yeah 100 attunement max rolled thornshell is 900% inc flat reflect, or 10x baseline. if you have 1.5k from gear, then you have 30 stacks of thorn shield, which is 200 per stack when maxed invested passively, thats 6000 flat, grab another 500 from spriggan minion and you are at around 8000 flat before thornshell which bumps it up to 80k. So 100k might be possible with the most obscene crazy wild gear.
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That would explain why Aaron’s spriggan didn’t trigger the reflect from Lagon’s beam, but the Harbinger gets melted.
Ok, I had understood that as simply adding 32k before thornshell. That would definitely be broken, hence my reply.
Yes. Lagon is the most annoying fight for reflect builds. The minion reflect FG I had only dealth % damage and fight were usually all really long, but Lagon was the longest by far, usually requiring 20+ minutes to kill, because the tentacles themselves don’t deal much damage.
It’s easier with flat damage reflect, but it’s still annoying.
While I agree with somethings. You all seem to miss that thorns is not just damage to attackers. When using both forms of reflect you get more dps than just focusing only one. Percent damage reflect trigger on dots and attack mechanics. Druid is nice for one form of thorns, but Forge Guard is more active in that you can attack as well. So with that in mind would having a unique item that had damage reflect them on hit or ability be too much? With mountain items, bleed chalice with reflect and shield that scale on hit thorns would having a weapon or other slot item work to make this more active be better?
Just adding some examples of this in the wild. https://www.lastepochtools.com/build-guides/the-immovable-object-retaliation-forge-guard
I used to have that build (dead now in 1.0). That build was just % damage reflect for minions and was very very very slow. Like, 20-30 minutes to kill a 100c mono boss kinda slow. It was fun, though.
Aaron’s reflect spriggan, though, uses both, even if it focuses more on flat reflect. It’s more effective. But this is something barely any class can achieve. At least for a working build.
While effective in a passive sense I think the mechanic should have a least two way to engage with thorns/retaliation. Making at least a weapon version would do a lot for it.