Forge Guard Feedback Part 1 - General

[dictan]

I’ve been re-familiarizing myself with Forge Guard over the last few months and thought it would be a good time to leave feedback now that most of the 0.9 changes are in. This first part will contain general feedback. Topics to be covered include:

1. Forge Guard Minion Issues

2. Forge Guard Set Bonus is Bad

Minions

Forge Guard minions for the most part are great. They look fantastic, they do a lot of damage, and they can tackle just about anything. The one thing that feels really bad about them at the moment is their survivability super early game and super late game. Because they are so dependent on your gear they fall over to a stiff breeze early game. For example, I am 18 skill points into my Manifest Armor now and I have to recast him every other pack because he dies so much. Boss fights are just a straight no-go as he dies so fast he’s not even worth casting.

Now I know when I get geared this changes drastically, but it feels bad having my minions be fairly useless all the way up to about level 75+. Especially since you can basically fall into the summoner role ( consistent sword and manifest armor summoning) around level 30 or so. Minion power was a step in the right direction to help address minion scaling issues, but maybe minions could get the full defensive benefit of minion power a bit earlier?

Then there is a super late game where my swords have like 6500 health and my manifest armor has like 10k health and they just die instantly to every T4 boss attack. Swords have a 50% damage reduction, paired with a 45% reduction at level 100 yet they can’t sit near Julra for even a second. My manifest armor has stupid high regen, leech, armor, and health and can barely last 3 seconds in a void beam or against Julra’s onslaught of attacks. It’s really jarring to cruise through maps and even T4 dungeons themselves, only to have your main form of the offense be swept away in an instant as soon as you get to the boss. That is a much larger discussion for another thread however.

Mostly minions are fine except early game and late game when your build should be able to keep them alive.

Forge Guard Set

The entire Forge Guard set is bad. Yes, even the helmet. To sum up the 3 pieces. The helmet gives a ton of armor and health regen. The chest gives a ton of armor, fire resistance(forge guard’s don’t need this), and fire damage. Lastly, the Mace gives a bunch of stun chance and flat fire for forge strike. The set bonus gives you a skill point and 3 more swords. No, I didn’t even mention smelter’s wrath as that is the first thing wrong with this set. It tries to buff two skills at once for two skills that are polar opposites.

Weapons

Forge guard minion builds want Swords or Axes as these are the best base types for both passives on the tree and gear implicits for minions. They also aren’t as slow as maces which greatly impacts your summoning speed and QOL when it comes to minion maintenance.

Smelter’s on the other hand wants to funnel as much of their build’s damage into that one big hit. The mace is perfect for this. You don’t particularly care how slow it is and passives net it a combined 240% increased damage.

Chest

Minion builds are mostly physical when it comes to the summoner stats. All of your builder and spender skills used to generate minions are either purely physical or don’t have enough build points to convert to fire efficiently ( even with + skills). Minions can get a large portion of fire damage but since the chest doesn’t buff the actual minions it has 0 effect on the build itself. Smelter’s loves the fire damage but has no way to sustain forged weapons.

Helm

The helm seems great. End game it offers about 10% physical / 7% non-physical hit mitigation and a crap ton of health regen. The problem is Forge Guard has no way to support health regen outside of dumping a ton of health affixes. This is something you don’t want to do because not using a helm with health on it is already putting you in the hole by almost 15% max health. In reality, the helm should read reduce your HP by about 15-25% for 10% hit mitigation and 200-500 regen( after affix investment). Having tested it extensively I can say the trade is not worth it.

Ways to fix it

1. Make the set for one skill or the other instead of giving the worst of both worlds. I personally vote for forge strike being the signature class set. If it is forge strike it should probably use a sword as it translates fairly well into both DOT and direct damage setups.

2. Continue the trend of making bonuses stack up as you get more and more forged weapons. Getting stronger as you assemble your magical armory is something that does feel really good.

3. Get some health in there. It is already a struggle to get Forge Guards at a health threshold that is viable for end-game content. Having the class set handicap this further does it no favors.

4. Lastly, find something to do with all the resistance and armor. There are tons of ways to stack armor and over-cap resistances ( especially fire and physical) but no fun ways to use them.

Conclusion

Minions need help early and late game to keep them alive. They taken longer and require more setup than necro to produce while also being in melee range. They should be able to be more resilient. The Forge Guard set still needs work. I know it is old but hopefully pointing out its flaws will help make it better in the future.