Phalanx Needs Adjustment

Feedback and Suggestions
1

After playing around with this unique across the past season and this one, i’ve come to the conclusion that this item is far too lackluster at its intended build and definitely needs adjustment.

The issue comes down to this pulls your build in far too many directions to compensate for various shortcomings of the build.

Firstly this weapon is very clearly intended to be used as a forge guard with forgemaster’s might. While in theory the weapon itself can provide some block chance and you can pick some up via the tree, th node that grants “more damage with vengeance per 10% block chance” makes it clear you want your block higher.
The issue is to do that you need to take forgemaster’s might so you can grab a shield, which eats 20% of your damage, and 10% of your attack speed, and nerfs haste to only grant you 10% block chance.

This runs into the first problem that baseline vengeance isn’t a hard hitting move, and many times its not even the focus, its more a durability filler skill that also works as a vehicle for healing hands. The extra damage per block seems high but once you shake out all these detriments you’re really not gaining much in overall DPS on vengeance itself.
This is then compounded because the attack speed loss is a loss of healing hands procs which is also a loss of general durability compared to someone not taking this debuff.
This is further compounded that by its very nature the phalanx is not a fast hitting weapon compared to just using a one-handed sword like Palarus.

The secondary part of phalanx, which is the real focus is the fact you cast javelin anytime you riposte, and when that works it works great. The issue is this makes you painfully aware how inconsistent ripostes can be. There’s just alot of bosses/enemies that barely proc this which makes this create incredibly bad luls in damage.
This is made all the worse by the fact vengeance in itself is incredibly lackluster and trying to supplement your damage with something like healing hands isn’t great.
Even worse this creates such an amazing split of focus.

You’re looking at healing hands doing either spell or melee damage, both fire,. Even worse is your access and synergy on healing effectiveness is alot of investment to make one skill good as opposed to multiple as a paladin with judgement+this.
Javelin doing physical and being a thrown attack, not melee which means alot of nodes aren’t going to align there. And its only conversion option is in the tree is lightning.
Vengeance can stay physical or convert to fire.
And thanks to this being thrown the obvious shoe-in would be smite as yet another supplement because lets face it there’s not many more rider options avaialble to make this stronger.
its this weird place where you don’t have enough support for bleed, lightning isn’t anywhere in the forge guard tree so you’re going to need to grab the few nodes in paladin if you wanna do that, and the most synergy is with fire and ignite but the issue is that your hardest hitting move is javelin when its procced as a riposte and thats pure physical.

I thought maybe the Onslaught of Cerata could fix this but I found the biggest issue was not only did the proc having a 12s cooldown make that contribution pretty light, the extra block not really equaling out to enough damage to make vengeance carry itself when the ripostes don’t proc.

This build seems really solid at first with some weird luls but your durability can carry you pretty far. The issue is once you hit the altered timelines with 100 base corruption you start to lose some of those wars of attrition, and those enemies that don’t proc vengeance very often really turn into some insanely slow fights.

I feel like the biggest issue is forge guard seems to be in a somewhat lackluster spot compared to paladin for everything this build wants to use.

At this point the only real fix i believe is to somehow make riposte more consistent, or add something to phalanx that allows for some sort of condition to force a riposte so that way the actual DPS of the build of javelin. I’m not even against it forcing you into a physical+bleed playstyle just to incentivize using vengeance+javelin without healing hands + smite just to squeeze out that tiny bit extra, because then making vengeance better for this specific instance would keep vengenace in a more reasonable spot to prevent too much abuse for the paladin builds that use it.

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2

How far have you pushed your phalanx build?

3

I got into 100 corruption and for the first time on a build i legit hit a brick wall and fights were taking 10+minutes for most champions. 99% of it was just the fact that the ripostes wouldn’t go off.
I even tried doing a complete pivot into bleed using the new bleed gloves and was getting 500+stacks of bleed on them, and just watched it do nothing.

The biggest issue is despite the fact i was barely hanging on in fights at this point (which was also new as paladin/void knight survivability is just very inherent to their builds) I had very little flexibility to drop any more survival into damage passives. So with heavy tinkering is about a million gold in market purchases and respecs I just hit this insane brick wall with it.

Now I might have had more luck if i pivoted into using forged weapons and leaned on those for survivability with the one chest unique and spawned them in via the vengeance skill. But i had two problems with that approach; firstly why am i even bothering with the phalanx then if i’m just going to pivot into a minion build, there’s better slotted items for that, and two it just shifts me into needing minion passives/affixes which just kinda further compounds the “lack of focus” this pushes.

4

I should add i’ve usually gotten to 500+ corruption on builds (usually not going further due to general burnout rather than any sort of build issues though so i haven’t tested further), so I was legit shocked just how i could not squeeze anything more out of this build just due to how inconsistent the focus of it was.

5

Gonna add a little more context as well after trying out a little more.

Firstly adding on the shield that casts shield throw on block does help a little but i’m still back at the major issue that i could’ve dropped this phalanx and just focused on shield throw or something similar, like throwing on a monument of protection instead of this. But it made me realize a bigger problem as to why multiple parts of this build clash with being a forge guard.

I feel like another big issue is throwing has some pretty strong idol options like smite on throw, but smite in itself doesn’t mesh the best with forge guard just because they don’t have a ton of spell damage increases for it unlike the additives that void knight and paladin have. Even worse is the ones that boost vengeance+smite as part of the same affix, which in itself you can ignore the smite part but obviously if you’re doing a build that does both you’ll get more out of it.

At this point i’m half wondering if just being a paladin with the phalanx and ignoring a shield build isn’t more optimal just because its javelin on riposte and not block, the block is only to make vengeance itself a little stronger. But even with this it feels incredibly roundabout and i’m back to the original problem that I’d be far more optimal just casting javelin directly then.

I don’t want to say vengeance is bad, its really solid, but most builds don’t use it as the centerpiece of their damage, its usually a filler like using it between judgements on paladin. The issue is the phalanx puts all the heavy lifting for DPS onto vengeance while locking you into both skills, and unfortunately due to consistency issues and previously stated problems much of what this unique wants to do is just overshadowed by doing…anything else.

6

Well I’ve used phalanx for jevelin and pushed FG easily to ~1200cc. From your writing I know that you want to utilise the other side of this item, more melee side… vengeance is just… too clunky for me. I’ve been trying to play with it but always coming to the conclusion that jevelin is just so much better :slight_smile:

7

Yeah the issue is without vengeance the weapon has no purpose, and if you’re going to focus Javelin just grab any of the other uniques for it.
Its why i’m asking for some sort of adjustment on the item because even making a special interaction to make vengenace go off more often would be huge.

I’ll admit the brick wall was one of the woven echoes with the champion rift beasts, where with overcapped poison resistances I was dying to them because their poison pools would just sometimes do over 2,400 damage to me in one hit. I think the problem is that some of them get stronger over time and this weapon is just awful at damage consistency and every single fight would take 10+minutesn to do. Even going into different timelines/echoes I just found myself getting swarmed, and the worst part is I can’t really find much method to up the durability here beyond maybe pivoting into ring of shields and grabbing pale ox to divy some of the damage to them while also utilizing some of the blocking buffs, because without that it feels like forge guard is oddly lacking defensively, because even with a shield+the node for the 10% damage reduction, and the titan heart for the extra 15% reduction, so i’m a bit shocked that with that plus the damage reduction vengeance adds that a tick from one of these pools, is doing 2k+ damage, which unfortunately the best answer to that is a larger HP pool, which paladin (with ward) and void knight can achieve alot easier.

But end of the day only tickling them for very mild amounts of damage making the fights extremely long is definitely a big factor here.

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8

The problem with every ‘when hit’ (and riposte damage is basically that) is that you actually have to get hit.

Better would be: While you prepare to riposte, you throw a javelin at a nearby enemy ever .5 seconds or something like that.

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9

Also, many bosses/champions have lots of attacks that never hit you. They’re DoTs.
This is true, for example, of Immortal Eyes, which never ever hit you and both attacks are DoTs. It was a pain for reflect builds before the new chest.

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