I have about 500+ hrs in so far. I have leveled in order Beastmaster, a LIch, a Falconer, a Spellblade, and finally a Forge guard to late game. I was looking at leaderboards and there is not a single forge guard on it. Anywhere. Not even in the sentinel board. There’s only 3 types of sentinels and 1/3rd of them have no representation in leaderboards. Official build guide sites suck as maxroll only have 2 late game builds, and neither of them actually use the forge guard tree except to get a manifest armor on one of them.
I seen this and created a sentinel to read the skills, and damage ratios, and it seems impossible for there to not be a Smelters Wrath build, or a Forged weapon minion swarm build.
I believe I have locked down some issues holding forgeguard back. I have coined an expression “Anti synergy” for lack of a better word. I have created a list of some of the glaring issues in the forge guard tree.
1: The forged weapons have no strength scaling. They scale with attunement, and the forge guard passive tree have no discernable attunement. You have to go to paladin for that. This means that core ability of the forge guard that you have to roll forge guard to get will scale better if you don’t put a single point in the forge guard tree! The obvious fix for this would be to add strength scaling to the minions damage and health, this would easily make for a viable minion build allowing the minions to actually deal damage, and live long enough to at least attack a mob monster before they die. They’re already temporary minions on a timer, you’d expect them to be a lot tougher haha.
2: All of forge guards attacks are melee fire based, but have no fire damage, unless you use a shield, and no really melee damage multipliers unless you’re using a 2H weapon! So imagine all your skills are melee fire, but you can only buff your melee or your fire damage?
3: The set gear build for forged weapons has a 2handed mace, but talent nodes are gate kept behind shield nodes so you have to waste your talent points to get there. I would love to see the 2 handed mace done away with and a set shield instead. Then you could take advantage of all those juicy tank nodes while your minions do damage. I also just hate the mace, it attacks so slow, and whether you want to use multistrike, or rive as a generator to spawn forged weapons, you want to be attacking FAST to spawn them all. So what if you get the 3 set bonus for extra weapons, when the weapon you’re force to use attacks so slow, you can swing, make a sandwich, and come back in time to see the next attack swing. You’ll never come close to max’ing out your minions even if there werent monsters around you kiling them all faster than you can make them. Set might be useful for a leveling build before monsters are destroying all your minions if not for the fact that the set requires level 74 to put on.
4: So much throwing damage modifiers on the forge guard tree… Half of the tree is dedicated to throwing, and only 4 minion nodes, and 9 throwing nodes, and all of the throwing skills are physical, or lightning, and you have no way to scale those damage types in the tree except +16 flat throwing physical damage in exchange for a whopping 8 talent points, and flat damage is great! So long as you’ve got all the % multipliers to put it through. Since all the forge guard skills are minion or fire melee, id LOVE to see some talent points that let me use a few of those skills… If its not too much to ask.
5: Ring of Shields is a bad skill/minion. 75 base health is very small. And strength scaling is only +5 per. Not a %. so at 100 strength, which is pretty a very high number to hit, it has 500 bonus hp. There are level 52 quest monsters that will very quickly kill that, let alone trying to push monoliths, and/or arenas. You can use it as a buff, like the paladin sigils, and that is a great concept, but unlike sigils every buff on it only lasts for 4 seconds, with a cooldown of 14 whopping seconds. So you pop it, they taunt everything off of manifest armor, then they’re immediately one shot, and you receive buffs almost as good as 1 stack of sigils of hope, but they only last for 4 seconds, instead of 15 seconds, and you can’t stack them.
There is more, this is just what i have found so far. I have tried a forged weapon swarm build, a manifest armor god build which is the only use ive found for shield throw is to make your armor lay waste to the countryside, and ive also tried a warpath ignite build since theres some fire damage over time in a forge guard so long as you’re wearing a shield. Very fun play style, but lackluster damage. I just did a google search on “forge strike builds” and the only result is a build guide on lastepochtools titled “Why forge guard is the worst class” Hahahahaha
Sorry its so long. Thanks for coming to my TedTalk