This is my second crack at a Forge Guard, which is my only class so far in LE. I’m not much of an arpg player, did D1/D2 and PoE but PoE was so frustrating I wrote off the genre until I saw LE and had to give a crack. Very fun. This toon went through tons of versions, most without any guides. I started out as a manifest armor/forged weapons build, procing Forged Strike and Smite off Multistrike. Very high sustain and it murdered mobs but was garbage single target. I hit the wall at about 220 corruption. Boss fights were just slow af, too slow for avoiding that many 1 shot mechanics. So I respected into this Fire Based Forge Guard Minion Build guide by @dictan and hit 300. 
It paralleled much of my passives and the gear helped survivability. FG needs those defensive layers given you will face tank a lot of hits. You need to brawl allot with this class, especially if you want to max your dps. And IMHO without Forged Weapons + Void Strike, single target damage is really weak sauce. If I could just get a decent drop on a 2 hander with solid stats. I tried giving up some attack speed for shred, but the lost of sustain was harder to manage at about 275 corruption. Maybe my less than stellar skills have something to do with that 
So I stuck with speed + fire pen instead.
Not sure if I’m going to try a Void Knight Bonk build given I have pretty much all the gear in my stash, or if I’m going to try necromancer. I like the idea of summoning kamikaze zombies.
Here’s my build
New Exalted items: [implicits] lvl 88 [soulfire bastion Tier 4]