Season 2 New Sentinel Build - Sunforged Forge Guard

General
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Hello everyone this is Abomb’s Sunforged Forge Guard which I’ve recently been testing in game utilizing the 3 piece Sunforge set. With Season 2 coming I decided to theorycraft a new build using the new Set crafting and buffs/reworks coming to Sentinel.

The core of the build is utilizing the insane buffs you get per Forged weapon. The Set affixes we are focusing on for crafting are.

  • 42% Ignite per Forged Weapon
  • 25% Fire damage per Forged Weapon
  • +5 Health Regen per Forged Weapon
  • (Set bonus gives + 3 Max Forged Weapons)

You can attain 15 Forged Weapon max as of now. Which makes the above affixes sizeable buffs to any build. Even with the badly stated 3 piece set in game my build has over 1,000 ignite chance per hit and 750 regen.

So the goal will be to find either good champion gear or exalted to craft the Set affixes onto giving us these modifiers and 3 set bonus.

Big changes in Season 2 that will make this build shine. With the VR and Sentinel rework we are not not forced to take VR anymore. So they buffed Ignite with more modifiers in the passive tree. They buffed HP and Regen. We can also now use 2 hand weapons and a Shield making Forge Guard a true powerhouse in build options. (This does indirectly significantly buff manifest armor for those enjoyers)

Currently in game I’m using Fire Warpath to generate Forged weapons and for damage but when Season 2 drops both Vengeance and Multistrike have outstanding fire conversion tags and ways to produce Forged weapons.

Personally I’m leaning towards Vengeance because Sentinel has always lacked some defensive layers and finally am excited it’s going to be viable. However they did finally add in some defensive layers with the reworked Symbol of Hope.

Now Symbol of hope won’t cost us mana as they generate freely to buff our fire damage and ignite even more and at 5 symbols we now have our own version of Flam Ward and can consume them for 25% less damage taken. (5% less damage per symbol)

With how Symbols works it might be possible to have an outstanding multistrike build which can shotgun single targets now instead of using Vengeance for defense. Thankfully the Symbol rework gives us options.

Obviously we will spec into Forge Strike to buff our forge weapons and buff our global fire damage. So this kinda works like meteor buffing for Sorc. Ontop of that since they fixed the Forged/Phatom ring bug. They are buffing Forged weapons to compensate so these 15 swords should be doing some heavy lifting in damage as well in helping melee clear speed.

Obviously there is a lot of new gear that we don’t even know about but 3 staple items that probably won’t change are.

  • Falcon fist gloves - Huge attack speed buff with T7 slam can get 50% IAS and also huge flat fire damage for you and your minions. These just offer so much I doubt they will be replaced.

  • Sunwreath ring - Monster ring for any fire melee build with tons of fire damage, flat fire and melee ignite chance. Easy to get 3 LP to slam on T7 Ele DOT and other mods for the build.

  • Phantom ring - Huge buff to minion skills, flat crit, Forged weapons damage and duration.

While we don’t know everything about the passive tree yet, items etc… This build has a core layout with a lot of options. You should be able to attain massive fire damage, ignite and HP regen numbers. Combing that with the defensive layers of 2h with shield, armor cap, flat damage reduction and flat fire damage. Then a small army backing you up.

This could be an overall monster build for your Season 2 starter that should have a plethora of ways to play and build around to fit your play style. I’m pretty hyped for Season 2 and can’t wait to figure out all the new builds to explore.

If you have any ideas or builds you are thinking about let the community know.

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Mm let’s say it would be more accurate to compare with Lighting Aegis💫

But with some unknown debuff. -ias ? -movement?:roll_eyes:

Solid choice for many other fire/minion builds. I’m not surprised to see it here :handshake:

Not now :moyai:but for sure, some set-based stuff will pop up

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You think, why?

Lightning Aegis wears off immediately after what 250 damage is recieved so it’s never up when it matters. It’s not a set duration. Unelss I missed the part where Symbol only aborbs a set amount.

Both Flame Ward and Symbol offer a set duration on demand flat damage reduction. Ontop of that there are ways to increase it’s uptime and can be used again with less Symbols shortly after again.

The one thing I hope EHG stops. For instance Dual wielding shouldn’t have a negative since it already has a negative becuase you lose mitigation from wearing no shield. It’s frustrating.

I feel like this is the only ARPG that does this. PoE 2 doesn’t. Personally I never dual wield because I just can’t bring myself to take more damage when I already take more damage because of no shield. (it’s bad design.)

It just hurts build diversity. Let builds open up and get rid of silly debuffs just to try something new.

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Really? I thought that line “consume them for” was exactly about one hit dmg reduction

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I saw them say consume them for X mana for 5% damage reduction per symbol for 3 secs. Maybe the consume them for was the mana since they don’t cost mana anymore to cast only on the consumption? I’ll try to look again but they were compared to flame ward.

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Yeah, that’s right, mana cost should be on activation. Probably need the full skill tree tho to see how best to utilize it (if there is increased sigil generation or increased duration).

I just hope the skill doesn’t become another mandatory defensive pick like flame ward. That is extremely boring design imo.

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Thanks for the image they did mention increase generation in place of the old duration nodes I believe. Not sure if you can extend the consumption duration that reduces damage.

Well at least we don’t have to pick VR anymore. Sigils was a big pick for most Sentinel builds before because they needed the damage and other buffs anyways. At least as Symbols it’s buffed and has great QoL now. I’ll take a step in the right direction but I hear ya. Be nice to see some big defensive passive tree ideas.

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The damage reduction will be the skill effect so if the skill has it’s active duration increased you get the DR for longer.

Not that you’ll see this 'cause you’ve blocked me because I’m not a part of your echo chamber.

But you’ve said before that any Sentinel build that doesn’t pick VR is an F-tier build, so unless you’re going to start making F-tier builds, you’ll still be picking VR.

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-20% dmg for you and minions
-10% cast and atk speed for you and minions
This is the cost of 2h+shield
Haste replaced with +10% block chance

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Thanks for the info.

I wish EHG would get better with this. PoE 2 is perfect want to wear a 2H just triples the stat requirement. Want to Dual wield there is no negative because you already have a negative from not using a shield.

EHG basically adds an additional negative which isn’t great design. People would actually dual wield if there wasn’t an additional pointless increase damage taken negative.

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The downside seems pretty rough since its a global less damage and also for minions. I think you will need a large amount of damage multipliers to counter it. I was thinking what could effectively use it.

I think bleed/dot manifest armor could handle it as it has solid damage multipliers. Tho idk if it’ll be worth over 1h+shield.

Maybe Event Horizon could handle it too? One idea is Event horizon and shield bash since the less attack speed doesn’t matter to shield bash but the main prob with Event Horizon is its reduced movement speed…

Smelter’s Wrath has strong dmg multipliers, it should be fine with this downside but the main problem with it is the clunkiness of playing it and I doubt Forged weapons will be much help with the downside of this node.

Void Cleave could also be good with it, if you can manage Vorpal blows + Entropic blows and using Eternal Eclipse.

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Again there shouldn’t be additional negative damage downsides but oh well EHG will hopefully figure that out. (there is a reason why other games don’t do it) It’s like 2 steps forward 3 steps back. There are a lot more multipliers though in the tree because of the VR rework which was most of Sentinels damage.

Well Manifest armor would now have a 2hand and shield so should be hitting significantly harder. It’s possible he just ends up being a tank in the new patch especially with some leech.

It will be nice to use Void Cleave though with a shield and not needing the unique.

We haven’t seen all the new Uniques but there should be a lot of options. Not to mention just champion crafted gear with set affixes. Best 2h will likely be a rare drop and crafting affixes on it. Champion affixes are sealed. Get a great champion roll, then a T7 damage roll and craft on the set affix you need. It’s gonna be a crazy weapon.

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Well, no, you’d only need 1 additional 25% more modifier to be back at the same place, but you’d have a 2h weapon (with the significant damage increase that that entails) and the defense of a shield!

Yes, lets just keep on giving out more more damage modifiers, that wouldn’t cause any problems at all!

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Not really? You have 20% less damage, but you do have a weapon that is twice as strong as a 1h one while you still have a shield.

I don’t think a 2h vs a 1h weapon is always an immediate 20% more damage, but in many cases it can be and even way more than that.
Most 2h prefixes have almost double the value of 1h ones. Especially in rarer affixes like penetration, which often you have only on your weapon, this would be an immediate increase in damage, even close to 100%, which would then be offset by the 20%.
Not to mention that forged weapons take stats from your weapon, so for them it’s a huge damage increase based on that alone.

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I was thinking about it. My first FG was Smelter Wrath with Event Horizon. Slow, but screen wide. Shield should be helpful to sustain charging, but entire build will become even worse vs bosses.

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ol2OPmJQ

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For a comparable weapon & affixes it’s always more than 20% more. A Dawn Blade (lvl 75) with a T5 melee crit & T5 flat melee damage affix gives 80 flat damage & +5% crit chance at 1.2 attack rate, a Hollow Blade (lvl 77) with the same affixes gives 156 flat melee damage & +9% crit chance at 1.06 attack rate. Even taking the relative attack rates into account, the 2h weapon does significantly more damage than the 1h, ~72% more infact.

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Multiplicative less damage multipliers are much worse than they seem in my experience (Lightning Disintegrate). Also the less attack speed on 2 handers that already have a lower base attack speed is rough.
Keep in mind Sentinels are also losing a damage multiplier from VR and they weren’t really breaking damage records even with it anyway.

Max block with a Titan heart on the other hand is insane defense on its own that could definitely be worth it (I highly suspect there may be a change to Titan heart saying not when you are using a shield tho).

Doubt penetration is doing that much. Flat damage could on high damage effectiveness skills but even then I am skeptical on skills like Forge strike. Void Cleave on the other hand with its massive multipliers maybe.

They get a 20% less damage and 10% less attack speed too.

Ah yes, I think I have seen your video. Main issue I had when testing Event horizon(with other skills) is movement speed while maintaining stacks tho. Very clunky.

Yeah, we will need to see how damage multipliers have been redistributed for other skills as well to know how good or bad this node can be.

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Yes, that’s why you’d need an additional 25% more modifier to “get back” to where you were if you didn’t have the 20% less modifier.

Yes, but if you have a look at the numbers I gave, even with the 1.2 AR on a Dawn Blade versus 1.06 on a Hollow Blade, the 2h is still more than 70% more flat damage than the 1h & that’s without taking the much higher flat crit modifier into account which would make hitting crit cap significantly easier.

Penetration is a separate modifier in the damage calc so if you only have 1 instance of it then it’s a more modifier. Same as “increased damage taken” on some effects.

Which is equivalent to 28% less.

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I meant that for most affixes you have multiple sources, usually. At least for important ones. So simply doubling the value of the affix on your weapon won’t be double damage most of the times. But it will for some instances.

As Llama pointed out, penetration is a separate multiplier. You tend to have very few sources of it, often only having one affix on your weapon. In these cases, it’s an effective ~100% increase, then offset by the 20%.

They do. And again, it would depend on where they get all the stats overall. Having twice the base melee can be huge, but if you have many sources of flat damage to your forged weapons already, than the increase isn’t as noticeable and might end up being a nerf.
But if you have less sources then it makes up for it.

You can also put something else in place of those external sources now, since it can be compensated by the weapon itself, meaning you can change some passives around, etc.

I don’t mean that it will always be an increase, just that there are many ways you can make this work to your advantage.
I’d assume they tested this (and will further tweak the numbers if necessary) so that it’s an overall bonus if you play into it properly, while not being completely out of control as it would be if it had no penalty.

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Yeah I this is one of the things I think EHG isn’t great on. They’re too conservative with fun stuff. They pre-nerf potentially cool uniques and interactions before anyone has a chance to play with them then nobody does. I’m so sad about all the uniques that are kind of just useless because they slapped an unnecessary CD on them that can’t even be reduced by CDR.

Meanwhile there are classes that are just OP with just their basic skills and passives.

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