Forge Guard minions build help

Sentinel
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Hello! This is my first time posting a build and asking for help here,. If any of you are bored and would be so kind to help me, it would be appreciated. You can skip to the last paragraph (also skipping the build planner) if you don’t want to read much.

I know my resistances need a lot of sorting (got good items with great resistances without managing the rest of my items). My main hand could be better with an exalted (I was using a legendary Palarus’ Sacred Light while specced into Smite before). I haven’t rolled good blessings yet either… but I think looking into the build planner is not really necessary for you if you want to help.

The biggest problem with my build is it’s theme and skills. As I imagine, the idea of going Forge Guard with minions is keeping a good weapon with which you can still do good damage yourself while your Forge Weapons (and Manifest Armor if you give it a sword) scale off of it. The problem has been finding good skills for that.
So far, I leveled my character with Rive and Smite, having little damage. Then I upgraded a bit with Shield Bash but the mana cost was high while keeping Forged Weapons up. Now I’m trying Sigils of Hope and Healing Hands while I’m at it. All of these felt bad.

Most of the problems surely come from not having good enough stats. Another big problem is that I want to play with Ring of Shields, but the skill is bugged. All in all, I’d like to know your suggestions on where to go with this build, including what skills to use. I’m willing to drop Manifest Armor if you think that’s a good idea, but Forge Strike and its minions have to stay (and preferably Shield Rush too because it’s fun).

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Your main focus seems to be minions for attacking. In that case, you should definitely consider Void Cleave with Molten Blades and Scorching Path (top left). It’s a skill on cooldown, and you want to hit your minions with it to give them huge fire damage boost.

Healing Hands requires stacking lots of Healing Efficiency stat, which would help keep you healed, but won’t be very useful for your minions.
I think you’re better off dropping it, and instead use Multistrike or Warpath as your primary skill. Both these skills have passives that allow you to summon Forged Weapons outside of Forged Strike, so you can keep as many as you can.

Regardless of the Ring of Shields issue, you should pick the Shield Crafter passive at the end of the tree to boost your minions HP and Armor, so that your minions stay alive in empowered monoliths.

Sigils of Hope is useful to you and your minions, but currently it seems you’re manually casting it, which isn’t ideal (and probably eats a lot of mana).

  • You can either find Orian’s Sun Seal and have this ring cast this buff for you automatically (which is awesome as long as your mana never goes below half)
  • OR, you could invest into the Last Wish passive and gain the buff whenever you kill enemies. This way you only have to cast it manually on bosses, when there’s nothing else to kill.

So your skill setup would be:

  • Manifest Armor
  • Forge Strike
  • Sigils of Hope,
  • Void Cleave
  • Warpath/Multistrike

Void Cleave can double as a Traversal skill too :slight_smile:

As for gear, like you said your resistances are a mess.
You have nice mitigation against Hits from Armor and Block, but your Block Chance is low. I’m sure the unique shield helps a bit, but it makes you vulnerable to getting hit multiple times in a row.
However, Damage over Time is a problem. With your current HP and low HP regen, you’ll probably die very quickly in stuff like Heorot’s blizzard or Lagon’s beam. You should raise your HP to 2000, and aim to get to 3000 HP for empowered monoliths.

At the same time, you should either get a source of Damage Leech or boost your HP Regen. If you keep using Sigils of Hope that boosts HP Regen, then getting HP regen is better. I personally prefer HP Regen over Leech, since it lets you run around the boss arena and passively heal :slight_smile:

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Thank you so much for your detailed answer :slight_smile:

I had noticed that Void Cleave is very good for buffing your minions, but it collides with my fantasy of just zooming with Shield Rush around the battlefield.
If my build doesn’t get better trying to do anything else, I’ll consider Void Cleave, although I’ll have to change a lot of stuff around since I’m invested into shields right now.

Yes, I had Rive before which could also summon Forged Weapons and had a 15% hp culling strike, but summoning was very unreliable unless I was hitting rare enemies or bosses. I had considered Multistrike, but did not like that it’s poor against a single target. Which, thinking about it, doesn’t make sense, as most of my single-target dps will come from my minions. I will try Multistrike.
I don’t like Warpath too much, but at least it doesn’t require two-handing, so I might try it too.

Good point about Shield Crafter, I was going to pick it up but forgot with the rest of the nodes and because of the bug.

About casting Sigils of Hope, Last Wish is probably a bad idea since it will be highly unlikely I kill enemies, even if I managed to get good damage. I like the idea of the unique ring, I will try to get it (playing offline, so not guaranteed :crossed_fingers:)

As it always is. I’m praying to get good DoT mitigation gear at some point. I also might go into the DoT reduction passive chain from using potions.
I had a lot of leech before when I autoprocced Smite with that unique sword I mentioned while having the Smite node that makes it cost health, but I didn’t need it anymore. I agree that HP regen is better.

Yes, I have kept it because it has been pretty good so far. I’m trying to go for Thornshell, but this raises an important point I forgot to make. Do you think it is a good idea to keep going for damage reflect? I imagine it gets much less effective as the enemies scale in power, and also it’s not consistent because of using minions.
If it’s not a good idea, I’ll go for a different shield, maybe just settle for an exalted.

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You could try using Healing Hands with the traversal node… It gives almost the same feeling as Shield Rush and it also makes you invulnerable during travel time.

Also, if your main focus is the Forged Weapons, you should definitely stick to a Two-hander, because the summoned weapons scale off the stats of your weapon and are not naturally affected by shields at all…

Finally, this is most definitely mandatory in a Forged Weapons build… you need a way to reliably generate weapons, or you fall off immensely during the weapons down time.

I don’t like Warpath also, and I think it needs too much investment for it to be a reliable Forged Weapons generator… Rive…? No, just not viable… Multistrike doesn’t feel so great either, but I like it much better than Warpath… Just make sure you get the Heated Forge node if you’re willing to try it.

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I haven’t had problems with keeping up with generating forged weapons, especially when I still used Rive. When there’s a bunch of enemies, Forge Strike hits them all and calculates the chance to spawn a weapon for each enemy. When there’s a boss, hitting them with Rive had a chance to spawn a weapon.

But… but my Shield Rush :cry:. Although I guess I could keep it with the Dark Rush node.

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I think thematically ailments with minions works and I’m working on an Immortal FG Bleed spec atm.

Beast Cleave axe works very well thematically as it’s a Minion Axe. You get 75% bleed from the very first node in FG (weapon master) just from using an Axe. It’s extremely easy to scale bleeds, attack speed and ramp up Forged Weapons, Manifest armor to scale.

Yea you really have nothing enabling anything in your build. It’s really lacking some Uniques and everything would change. So this is the good news as you can drastically improve.

Phantom grip ring will go a very long way. If Bleed build Blood of exile boots and Flayers pride shield.

Overall I’d say you got some good ideas but maybe drop Shield Rush and use Healing hands for movement skill. Also the immune in Healing hands movement is amazing for Boss fights to immune mechanics like Lagon beam.

Then after you get rid of Shield Rush you can pick a melee talent and attack healing hands too it. So you get 2 for 1. This would kinda start to bring everything together with synergy.

I’m actually going Vengeance but there is a mechanic interaction I plan on using there latter.

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Yes, I have a few of those ready to craft. That’s why I have a few measly points in the FG Passive Bleed/Ignite nodes

Thank you for reminding me about Phantom Grip, I forgot.

You completely lost me there. Talent? Also, do you mean attach? Even so I don’t get what you mean.

What I really, really like about Shield Rush is the movement not stopping unless coliding with a wall or releasing the key. Healing Hands doesn’t provide that, nor any other skill.

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This ring is absolutely enourmous for Forged weapons. Not just the plus skills, but flat damage and most importantly they get up too 100% of your gloves stats.

I’d despecialize Shield rush. In healing hands you can use it as movement and you are immune to damage during that movement. So it’s really great.

The best part of Healing hands is you can attach it to your melee attacks by taking the talents 4/4 Clerics hammer and Seraph blade. This means every time you attack with a melee attack Healing hands will also attack. So it’s fully automated.

I’ve attached Healing hands to my Shield Bash build and it’s very good to attach too Rive/Vengeance etc. It’s also great for ailment builds since you are attacking 2 times each attack. Once with your melee attack and once with healing hands.

Yea it’s fun and really good for fast mapping and leveling. It’s not good for difficult content, bosses which is where the Healing hands movement shines.

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The zooming part will come with just movement speed, you can have legendary boots with three movement speed affixes and add a source of Haste, for example Experimental Haste Effect on boots.

Rive is very different. You only get a chance to summon a Forged Weapon on kills or boss hits.
With Multistrike, you get a chance to summon Forged Weapon on hit. But more importantly, you hit the boss 2-3 times, then Forge Strike the boss, and you will guaranteed summon 3-4 Forged Weapons instead of 1.

Not sure what gave you the idea :slight_smile:

In that case, you could also spec into the Instant Cast passive. It removes the casting animation, so you can refresh the buff even while attacking. You can watch Aaron use it while spinning with Warpath at 1:00

No, reflect is weak and slow, and you don’t wanna get hit by a boss for example :slight_smile: And it also collides with Void Cleave, since you need a 2-hander to use Void Cleave.

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I think the build is just better with void cleave and the 2 new rings, phantom grip. Void cleave adds like 187 fire damage to the forged weapons and the rings are kinda op right now. Get ones with as high of a conversion as possible, the other stats don’t matter nearly as much on them. After that get some minion health, melee damage (not minion dmg), and enough crit chance to hit crit cap. With a 2h sword warpath will spawn minions with base crit but I run an apathy’s maw since it’s easy to get. It’s really easy to hit crit cap with 2 good rings. The weapon, rings, idols, and blessings can be used for selfish stats like crit dmg reduction and healing effectivness(I run healing hands), The other slots, including shields if you want one (but will lose void cleave) are for the forged weapons.You want stuff like melee dmg, +skills if they provide melee dmg, crit multiplier, melee attack speed, crit chance, and defensive stats on those. Passives are a mess, half the nodes don’t affect weapons.

I’m around 300 corruption, arena would put me around rank 22 on the leaderboards at wave 180 among forge guard but I’m on legacy.

Like others said it’s impossible to build for your damage as well as the weapons dmg so choose weapons. There’s 12 of them and 1 of you. And void cleave is great.