I am about to tear my hair off. My highest leveled character is a forge guard using a 2Hander, lv 70-ish, with 1.2k HP and resistances significantly above cap. Offense-wise, there’s no issue, withCleave giving a monstruous damage boost to my flying weapons. But as for the defense…
I’m trying my first Orobyss boss at corruption lv0, and his black meteor simply one-shot me. Even after a dozen attempts, I still don’t manage to evade his meteor. I can’t evade or move away fast enough.
Disappointed, I decide to do the other monoliths and get more defensive blessings before trying again. Fast forward to Lagon, and… I can’t get past his sweeping breath with evade or a movement skill. One shot. Again, with resistances in the 90-110 range, and my HP pool shouldn’t be too bad. It’s not like I didn’t invest a lot of passive points in HP nodes.
So I come to you. Just how in tarnation do you guys do it?
I always find the transition to empowered a bit difficult.
'That said:
1.2HP is very low
try to farm DoT mitigation gear (Amulet, Chest, Gloves), FG also has a passive node for that
Try to get CritAvoidance on gear
Learn the mechanics of the bosses and how to avoid them, you cannot face tank everything. Often what is needed is patience and concentration on avoidance.
Aim for 3000 HP as you progress into empowered monoliths.
2) Pushing resistances over the cap is usually not worth it, unless you plan to stand in pools of poison and void etc. Get 75% and try to remove any extra, we can surely use those slots for something else (like health).
3) You didn’t say which damage mitigation you’re using, but minion FG commonly uses a 2-hander, so most likely it’ll be Armor. Your Armor should provide at minimum 40% mitigation for non-physical, which means we’re aiming for 4000 Armor.
Look for high level base items like Solarum Plate, Augury Helm, Praetorian Belt, Crusader Gauntlets and Solarum Greaves with lots of Armor.
Craft on them the affixes you want. You’ll eventually drop them just by running monoliths, but be sure to check the vendors too, sometimes you can find a good item there.
Sentinels have Armor related passives in their class tree, so be sure to pick up some of them:
Armour Clad in Sentinel tree
Battle Hardened in Forge Guard tree
Iron Attunement in Forge Guard tree
Thornmail in Forge Guard tree
4) You also didn’t say how are you replenishing your HP when you get damaged. Common mistake players make is to not have any form of sustain. There are multiple options:
Health Regen
Ward per Second
Damage Leech
Healing from skills
I would recommend using HP Regen, because it’s automatic and it will also counter player mistakes like standing in bad effects.
You can find flat amounts of HP regen on some items like Coral Ring or as Health Regen Per Second affix on Helmets, Gloves and Amulet.
You can also get % Increased Health Regeneration on multiple items. These occupy the same slots as your HP affixes, so having one +HP and one “HP Regen” affix is usually the solution.
5) You mentioned that you cannot evade fast enough.
First off, you should absolutely have boots with +% Movement Speed, as high tier affix as you can find. Aim for 30-38% Movement Speed bonus.
If you play Merchant’s Guild faction, you can visit the Bazaar and buy some good unique boots, for example Fiery Dragon Shoes would cover both the Movement Speed as well as the Critical Avoidance that R1nG0 mentioned.
Make sure to use the newly added Evade mechanic, normally pressing Spacebar to “shove” your character to the side, which might be just enough to move out of the harm’s way.
6) Finally, you should absolutely have a Traversal skill. It’s a term used for movement skills of any kind. Forge Guard has these skills available:
Lunge (can only travel to enemies)
Shield Rush (high mana cost, requires shield or specializing in the skill to use without shield)
Javelin (requires specializing in the skill)
Healing Hands (requires specializing in the skill)
These skills can be used to quickly move your character, which is important for avoiding skills like that meteor.
Many of these fights are about learning the cues that telegraph a dangerous attack. I can’t remember the specifics of the void/purple Orobyss, but you definitely get some warning that the big black ball is about to shoot from the side of the arena. I think it happens just after he starts channelling a black-hole-like thing? Sorry I can’t help there specifically. I did survive getting hit by that meteor a couple of times, so you can definitely tank it with the right res + HP + armour.
Lagon is about having sufficient defences (particularly lightning, physical and cold resistances plus a decent HP pool) and learning the cues. The sweeping beam is preceded by an animation of Lagon swinging his head to one side and his eye turning red. Note that at this point, he will sweep towards wherever you were when the head swing started. So you can pre-empt it by moving to the other side of his eye before the beam starts.
For this specific fight, though, consider skilling up Lunge and selecting the “invulnerability while lunging” node. This will allow you to lunge through the beam safely, and you always have two targets for Lunge in Lagon’s tentacles. That should make it much more doable for you.
Evade will not save him. Decent movement speed + swiftness instead of evade is much better
And yes. He must learn boss animations. Standing in Lagon’s beam is a bad idea )
Lunge w/o Paranoia helm is only ‘to target’ and it will be too clumsy. ‘To ally’ node want work too, as his weapons, I guess, all at the same point as tentacle
Hi. I’m just returning from almost two days without internet access.
First, thank you to the answers, espescially Psojed.
Some tihngs I hadn’t thought to mention in my first post. I hae about 80hp/sec passive regen, 6% leech from the void knight three, and 40% DR from armor.
Sustain isn’t an issue when my Hp goes from something like 20% to full in two seconds. It really is burst damage mitigation that does me in.
I am going to make an attempt by cramming my old slots full of resists idols tailored for the boss in question, and I’ll see how it goes.
Adding Health or hybrid health isn’t that simple when most of my items are uniques. But I’ll work on that.
About transversal skills, I of course have one. I tried with Shield Rush and Cleave.
You have enough when actively hitting something, however you’re not always hitting something, and there’s only one boss compared to multiple enemies you leech from in the monoliths. Leeching can feel deceptively safe
This can also be deceptive.
You see, Armor works differently for physical and non-physical damage. If your character screen says 40%, then it’s 40% against physical hits, but only 28% reduction against that meteor from Orobyss, because he deals Void damage.
And it’s 0% damage reduction for Lagon’s sweeping breath, because that’s a Damage over Time and Armor normally does nothing against DoT. You need to have items like Eternal Gauntlets or Iron Attunement passive from Forge Guard tree to have any mitigation from Armor against DoTs.
You still get damaged in Shield Rush and Cleave, and given that your 0% mitigation against DoTs and low HP, you die almost instantly if you try to move through enemy attacks like Lagon’s.
You CAN move through Lagon’s sweeping attack, but you need to use Lunge or Healing Hands to do it. The difference is that these two skills have passives that grant invulnerability while moving.
The meteor thing is pretty tough regardless of your hp level, best thing is when you see it, know that it’ll be coming and run far away and dodge it until the rock goes away.
“Aim for 3k HP” means it’s a goal, not a requirement to enter
That being said… I myself went into Empowered monoliths at roughly ~1200 Health and ~3500 Ward, so about 4,7k HP?
Ward is a completely different mechanic, if you meant ward, you should have specified that. HP on the otherhand, you were asking for 3k hp, which is moving into getting T6-7 hp gear at the least on most slots just to get into monos. That’s outrageous.
I’ve listed what options I still have available, so feel free to play around with the planner. Set your level to 70. Remove the idols.
It doesn’t change my point - you can get health before empowered mono
Have you really ever tried crafting on blues and yellows to get t5 affixes with 15-25 fp? Not to mention you’re asking for a lot of hybrid health which is a rare affix to begin with and nobody is going to have enough of that to start empowered monos to craft a t5 affix on something. Let alone all the health mods you have or “potentially” have on your other gear.
Regarding this planner, I would cover 3x t5 Fortification (armor and - crit damage) suffix first (gloves, helmet, body, belt, boots). That removes a few flat health rolls. Also pure hp idols are both rare and usually affordable later in the game, when you don’t need resist idols. I wouldn’t start with them.
I do not doubt, Sentinel can hit 3k hp rather early in his journey.
@OP:
There’s another Sentinel skill that could save you: Rebuke. I used that a lot on my first Sentinel to cheese mechanics. Simply hold down the button whenever something dangerous is about to happen. Spec for duration and defensive bonuses.
Again, 3k HP is a goal, not a requirement.
You can farm normal monos (or empowered monos without already having 3k HP). Your ideas about the difficulty of obtaining HP are just plain wrong.
That was actually coming from my CoF playthrough in Cycle 1.0, where I had a self-found stash tab full of resistance and HP idols to swap in
If we’re thinking with Bazaar in mind, then it’s even easier, because it solves the problem of having hybrid health affixes, and I can just buy a Titan Heart.
PS:
Alright, I’ve added crit avoidance to helmet and rings on the lvl 70 planner, one flat health affix was lost
Bazaar solution could be buying Fiery Dragon Shoes for example.
PPS: I reposted the previous planner link by mistake. New planner:
lvl 70, no idols, crit avoidance capped, 3k HP, no exalted gear. Hopefully that satisfied everyone
Get 75% and try to remove any extra, we can surely use those slots for something else (like health).
