Forge Guard: my opinion after 330h and 1k corruption

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hello, after playing more than 330 hours with the least played (and also the least powerful) Forge Guard class, I feel confident in offering my suggestions. Small adjustments to talents and passives that can revitalize and bring powerful and fun builds to this class.
I fell in love with the “fantasy” of the class, its design as a mastery is really good. The problem, in my humble opinion, is that it seems that some small details were missing to enable the mastery to reach the levels that other masteries reach much more easily. I can guarantee that from the beginning I tried to create my own builds and on this journey I was able to notice details that would make all the difference.
So, without further ado and being more objective, I will put these details into topics:

  1. The first and most important change would be in the defense of minions.
    I can guarantee you that it is impossible to make a build with Manifest Armor that can have good DPS and survive mechanics and damage (especially from BOSS) after 1000 corruption. It will take a one shot every time. To be able to hold out, you need items and talents that offer defense and when you seek this, you give up items and talents that offer attack. Once you increase the defenses (armor, resistance and life) of the minions, I’m sure it will open up a range of possibilities.

  2. Still on the Forge Armor skill: another good possibility for change would be to change the number of points needed to go from the “redistribute steel” skill to the titan sword. Needing to put 3 points and then putting 1 point so that the minion can use its weapon really makes you lose some adjustments that would perhaps make the minion have more ways to survive while still being able to give good DPS. Putting the required points into one would help a lot, or even swapping the talents around. First you get the Titan Sword and then you can get “Redistribute Steel”. Following the same objective, bring the “Bulwark” skill to before the “Self-Repair” skill or even rework the “Self-Repair” skill since life regeneration is useless if you constantly receive “one-shots”.

  3. About the Healing Hands skill, which is a skill taken from the paladin skill but which we all know has been very popular and effective due to the large amount of protection provided: adjust the “hand of aurelus” talent so that instead of activating Healing Hands with direct use of Smite, activate it with direct use of spells or throw attack. I can guarantee that just this slight change would make a lot of difference in creating effective builds using, for example, “shield throw”.

  4. Many people want to play with the “warpath” skill since it is a signature skill of “warrior” lovers in games. Allowing the Healing Hands proc during every Warpath channel would also open up this possibility. This can be done with a simple adjustment to the “cleric’s hands” and “unbroken prayer” skills.

  5. The “smelter’s wrath” ability is simply unusable at the moment. However, the idea of charging time so that it uses a high DPS attack is a great idea for the class’s fantasy. However, this needs to be really effective. The impact of the ability needs to be greater for it to be worth pressing this button.
    My suggestions would be to rework the talent tree, increasing its damage even further and adding the possibility of proc the “Rebuke” skill while charging. This would probably make it a viable skill.

  6. Forge Strike costs a lot of mana.

  7. Understanding the more “tank” side of the forge guard mastery, I miss a little more utility. A small rework of the “shield ring” skill so that it generates buffs for allies or grants protection instead of healing would also make all the difference for high group corruption progressions. Decreasing your CD a little more would also make it much more viable. I love playing as a tank class in all games and I can guarantee that for RPG lovers, having the possibility of playing Tank in an ARPG would be a huge difference when playing with friends. This skill has great potential for this, as shields provoke nearby enemies and forge guard has a lot of defense potential with its passives.

  8. Would be great to have a passive on Forge Guard allowing you to use Void Cleave with any weapon equiped since you have talents to buff Minions with it.

Well, those are my opinions on this class. Again, I’m not talking after playing 1 day with the class. I played every day for many hours since launch and these are the things that I could see that would make a big difference in bringing viability and fun to the wonderful fantasy that this class represents. After all, he is the Guard of that Forge that we all use to make items. :slight_smile:

If you support these suggestions, please help reach developers so they can think about it.

See you in Last Epoch,

Songx.

4 Likes
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good post, thanks. I think one of the reasons why forge guard is weak is because manifest armor and all the summoned weapons aren’t benefiting from unique stats. That’s the gist I got from the live dev stream on friday. kudos for sticking with it. I got to 100 corruption and it took too long to do anything fun so I just made a runemaster. :smiley:

2 Likes
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Yeah it would be amazing to have that change as well, the Manifest Armor conception is amazing, just seems not to work how it should be. I got to corruption 700 running a build with Manifest Armor. It was a bit trick tho… i needed to walk with 2 sets, 1 for me and 1 for whenever i’d summon the minion. (Minion retain stats when you summon, then you can equip whatever you want to defense and they will keep their stats how it was when summoned). After 700 i started to struggle with the one shots. I tried many times to improve my minion survival, but i aways ended missing a lot of dps. That’s the point. 700 to 1k corruption i used a build i called “Cleaving Hands” using Healing Hands channeled melee + Void Cleave for debuff enemies fire resistences and put “critical buff”. The damage is not amazing, tho. Good survival, but the damage is not that great. Also, i can’t use a shield (wich i really need now to bit shades bosses) 'cause Void Cleave is only usable with 2h swords and axes). So that’s the point: everytime i tried to make a Forge Guard good build i couldn’t find a good balance between defenses and DPS. It’s aways a really good defense with really low dps or a really good dps but very low survival. Never an “ok dps” with an “ok defense” so you can go trough high corruption.

A quick note i forgot: the build using Shield Throw in the minion has a very high damage but the area is reaaaaaally slamm for aoe, thats what makes the build unvaliable for high corruption, you kill fast, but you cant kill the entire pack, so your minion end up being one shoted. It’s even worse on boss fights. The best thing that could happen to forge guard is improve minions health and armor base, make his AOE a little bit bigger, dont need to be the entire screen like other op classes, and also the healing hands talent change to make you proc healing hands when you use Shield Trhow. I can garantee this would make Forge Guard a really amazing class and its just soooooo fun to play!

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One of Forge Guard’s theme is weapon expert. So I think it makes sense for Forge Guard to have a passive that ignore skill weapon restrictions.

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Exactly!

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Wait, isn’t this exactly what Cleric’s Hammer in the Healing Hands skill tree already does?

“Healing Hands Chance on Melee Hit: xx%”

To me that reads that points in Cleric’s Hammer should result in Healing Hands being indirectly cast as a result of Warpath hits on enemies. But I’ll admit that while I have specced into both Warpath and Cleric’s Hammer I have not directly tested if that is actually true. (I’m not sure how I would even test it with my high-level build since that character is a Paladin and has a lot of different healing sources.)

1 Like
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Great and detailed post. Although I personally don’t have nearly as much experience with this class, it was interesting to stumble across and read.

I always love to see valid and detailed posts can be rather than just someone barely playing and running their opinions. Just holds so much value so kudos to you with all those hours committed and pushing 1k+ before posting.

It does sound promising and I do hope pushes such as this opens up more ways for variety of classes to be able to compete in the race eventually.

I hope to be able to play a more hybrid build such as this and actually tank in the future for my mates and/or solo when i need to.

1 Like
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It should work that way, but in fact it doesn’t. It only procs Healing Hands on the first hit of the channeling, it doesnt procs on every hit.
It could work either allowing every hit on channel or make the other talent procs on every smite (not only the direct cast) so you can talent warpath into smite procs, to proc healing hands.
Those minimal details are making a lot of difference.

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Thank you very much!

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