Ok, first of all I tend to play summoners on most games, and LE does a great job at giving each class a diferent spin in the archetype, but FG feels weirdly inuintuitive, even if its my favorite archetype. Also, this is feedback from a semi casual player, so it may be garbage since I don’t reach C300 in most characters (mostly because its a very long process)
First, the way I see it, each summoner has a way to scale damage and survivabiliry, and usually these systems instersect, but not for FG. For example
- Necro: Damage can be scaled by number of replaceable minions. Their deaths can be used to fuel skills or give ward. Ward and minion damage is dictated by int, so scaling int, and having an army of replaceable minions is useful to sustain damage/ward.
- Beastmaster: Not very familiar with the class, but the way I see it, you have a set number of companions that benefits from your damaging melee skills, so you have to constantly deal melee damage, giving them more damage. Your melee attacks scale with Str, minions scale with Str, and you can use that Str to boost life leech damage in the frontline.
- Ent Druid: Multiple spellcasting minions with vines, using few companions to keep other minions alive and yourself alive. Healing efficency and shared spell damage are useful, so as HP and mana to keep your Spriggan form and casting a limited number of totems/vines.
- Falconeer: Single minion that scales with your dex mostly, so you can glasscannon entire packs. Not very used to it, but the scaling of dex and evasion is the first thing to upgrade.
So in each case you have a stat that helps you survive and build damage, by casting and killing minions, buffing melee minions wihle leeching to survive, keeping healer/caster minions by investing in health efficency or just yolo dex. At least at first sight.
FG is very weird, because you are presented with armor and block as means to stay alive, but neither strenght or blocking helps his minions in any way. The best you can do is either boost equipment directly and increasing attunnement, but these are not related with each other or surviving. Therefore the passive tree should have more synergies besides the attunement to add armor to DoT mitigation. For example:
- When you block your minions gain frenzy for X seconds
- Your armor mitigation increses minion damage to a cap
- 20% of you block change value adds to minion critical
Second, forged weapons and manifested armor have diferent melee damge types, but the tree only gives them physicial melee,. So you are inclined to increase phys damage because the huge boost from the passive tree, but their skill tree favors fire skills. So, in my opinion, the FG passive tree should be agnostic in their melee bonus damage, so you can build a more phys minion build (with the manifested armor and the bonus damage from the armor), fire damage (with manifested weapons and the more damage node from manifested armor) or void experimenting with VK equipment.
Now, the minions in general have issues. Forge Strike is a skill that is not usually used to summon weapons, since the cooldown, speed and damage are suboptimal compared to warpath, rive or multistrike. Then, the weapons are used in mass, so the damage from the skill is very inconsistent, ramping wildly because weapon generation/weapon deaths, feeling more like a chore to upkeep. They are autoattack minions, that clumps in single enemies, wating their limited lives in useless attacks a lot of time. A few ideas I have:
- Nodes in the tree to make weapons self refresh, either from killing, granting reset timer on nearby wepon death or by other conditions.
- A node to make less weapons, but more durable and using a larger cleaving attack
- A node to make the weapon autoattack with your rive skill, or using periodically void cleave, benefiting from your skill tree.
An example could be a new node, that changes forge strike to a void strike that manifest greatswords/greataxes with void conversion, very long duration but limited to 25% of your maximum number of weapons, and use their own version of void cleave each X seconds
Manifest Armor is very fun skill, but have the problem of feeling clunky in the way it deals damage, since it haves a wonky pathfind AI, and its attacks are very unimpactful unless you spend 4 skill points to give it whirlwind, 3 for thornmail and 3 for titan sword, and just then it feel it does some mele damage. If you go the spell route, most of your gear would be wasted, since no other FG skills uses spell damage, and then you have to spend like 14 points to have a slow, somewhat poor spell. Then, you have to sacrifice attunement/vitality from equipment since is useless to the Manifested armor even if it’s useful for the class. Finally, there is no integration with void damage, unlike paladin or sentinel skills. A few ideas I have:
- Less nodes that increses effects from equipment (like 3 points that give 80%) so you can spend more on other nodes
- Nodes that grant the MArmor attacks from your skills, like shield throw from shield node, rive from sword node, warpath from boots node
- Nodes in each armor slot that gives some benefit from atrribute (for example: atrribute points in the helmet counts as giving 1% increased AoE per point)
- A void conversion node (fire and phys from the skill tree to void), so you can benefit from the multple +voidspell damage from VK uniques.
Ring of shield feels extremely weird and lacks synergy from stat or skills.
- The healing should be an aura passive with an active pulse and both it and the damage aura should benefit from more normal shield stats, like incresing damage/ healing efficency from resist, regen, block chance/ efficency, or similar.
- Their behaviour should be affected by blocking, like shield bash or healing pulse on block.
- The buffs should last the same as the pulses cooldown, so you don’t feel each 4 seconds you are more vulnerable for 2 seconds, feels weird.
- A fun node could be give your MArmor it’s own mini ring
you still want Cast Speed and flat spell damage, only your overall stats will be different and more minion oriented.
The video clearly shows they can.