After a few more weeks playing forge guard I wanted to give some feedback and suggestions regarding passives and skill trees I’ve tested. I won’t be doing every passive or skill, but will try to go in depth with skills I’ve used extensively along with passives I feel need tweaking or discussion.
Sentinel Tree Passives
Retribution + Banish: 9 points to clear low health trash slightly faster, with varying success when you consider mob type and density is a high ask compared to other passives on the tree. At low levels it is outclassed by the need for resistance and HP passives. At higher levels it is far less valuable than the generic damage or defense offered by other nodes in the sentinel tree. To enhance its competitiveness with other nodes I would suggest it be condensed into a 5 point passive giving 20% retribution chance and 20% critical strike chance chance per point, while also adding a 1 second cooldown to the retribution attack.
Iron Mastery: Good buff with terrible uptime. The 5% chance just simply isn’t enough. I usually go entire quadrants of a monolith map without ever seeing this buff go off. Its downtime was so high I eventually just took it off my character entirely. I would suggest at least doubling the proc chance to 10% if not 20% chance so it actually has a decent uptime for clearing trash.
Axe Thrower: I like the ability to proc axes. It allows a lot of throwing attack based passives to be used with melee attacks. I hope these hybrid enabling synergies stay in place and get expanded upon.
Blade Master: I don’t particularly like sword and axe having their weapon mastery blended together. Attack speed is sword’s thing. Axe should have another mastery that deals with damage over time to further differentiate itself. Different weapons should represent different gameplay. Its one of the reason I enjoy Last Epoch’s weapon system so much in the first place.
Overall Feedback:
The sentinel tree is overall good. It offers just the right amount of generic while slightly branching out to get you ready for mastery classes. Retribution is a bit point heavy though. With more overall thorns/retribution support and a point squish it could become more competitive. Weapon paths also need to be more distinct.
Forge Guard Tree Passives
Fresh From the Forge: I like this passive. It has a unique mechanic that favors slower hitting moves by adding up to 80 base damage every 3 seconds to an attack. That being said it feels like a lot of skills favor high attack speed over a slow hitting playstyle. Hopefully more can be added to make big slow hits more desirable.
Shield Breaker: Works with axes procced by Axe Thrower passive. Does a lot of shred and feels worth the point investment. Much like hammer and anvil stance, it also offers up a neat hybrid option while being solid on its own. If ranged attacks could be turned into mana generators I would be more inclined to try just that.
Iron Attunement: Fairly underwhelming passive. The flat armor is far to low for the player character and the forge guard minions don’t particularly need armor to begin with. My Manifest Amour minion already gets tons of health and armor from its passive tree and my forged weapons don’t stick around long enough to benefit from armor either. Both types of minions have proven to be more than tanky enough without this talent in empowered timelines.
Then there is the attunement which I have found to be useless on forge guard. The minor skill scaling benefits have not even come close to the power of other affixes. I also haven’t found a need for the extra mana. Without an actual pay off for stacking attunement coupled with my minions not needing armor I have found no use for this passive.
Crushing Blows: I like this passive a lot. Its a unique way to scale damage and I wish I saw more of it throughout the tree. I feel its a good example of how a passive can go from boring generic to interesting and build defining. More mana manipulation and payoffs like this could also mean attunement and mana affixes start to matter all of a sudden as well.
Thornmail: The flat armor on this node is actually pretty good. The thorns are a bit disappointing though. They don’t seem to scale and there aren’t enough passives to build on a retribution type play style. It feels like more needs to be done with these retribution type passives for them to really feel impactful.
Infinite Bulwark + Liquid iron: I always disliked on potion use passives, but these two nodes changed my mind. My survivability received a noticeable increase after investing into these nodes. I feel the big selling point for this node combo is that not only does it provide you far more potions than regular, but it also gives you some of the benefit while not using a potion. This really feels like the golden standard for these type of effects.
Molded by the Forge: Shouldn’t there be polearms? It feels weird having a 2 handed mastery without each type of 2 handed martial weapon represented.
Overall Feedback:
I feel like forge guard could be a bit more specialized. Masteries should be about living an overall class fantasy, and at the moment current mastery trees aren’t pushing that aspect hard enough. To many play styles are being provided for in each tree which winds up stretching the whole tree to thin. Instead sharpen what each mastery enhances by limiting what they are good at. I would align their specialties as such:
Forge guard - 2handed melee, minion, and throwing weapons.
Paladin - 1 hand and shield, spells, and throwing weapons.
Void Knight - dual wield, spells, and throwing weapons.
With shields out of the way I’d like to see more attention brought to minion based passives and weapon based gameplay. Minions could use some shred and utility passives to spice them up. Right now you’d have to squint really hard to find the minion support on the tree since there is so little of it. Weapons choice could also be built up a bit more.
Personally I’d like to see the Idol effect, manifest weapon, incorporated into the tree as an on-hit option for high attack speed sword builds. Maces have Fresh From the Forge + Champion of the Forge. Polearms have Duelist + Lethal Strikes. Axes have Smelter’s Might( could probably use a dot duration or effectiveness tie in). Sword kind of just piggy backs on one of them.
Skills
Vengeance - I like the shred and extra riposte portions of the tree. They add strong utility onto an already interesting hybridized skill.The iron blade nodes however are lacking. They do almost no damage per proc (70 damage in level 100 monoliths with no defensive modifiers), have to many nodes dedicated to their proc chance, and offer little to no utility.
First I would suggest an increase in base damage or at least a cluster of nodes to do so. Secondly I would suggest combining the on kill nodes with the on hit nodes. The on hit nodes produce a reasonable amount of procs but the on kill nodes produce next to none. By combining them they can add a useful mix of procs without adding so much dead weight. The riposte on-hit chance could also be condensed. With the iron blade section reigned in the actual clear speed (deflection node chaining blades) and utility could be expanded upon.
Rebuke - Rebuke it an amazing defensive skill. It really helps cover the sentinel’s lack of mobility, and offers some interesting utility options that help offset the clunkiness of channeling in place for several seconds. That being said the mana regen nodes for rebuke could use a boost. Mana on hit from vengeance/rive heavily outpace rebuke’s ability to recover mana. It would be nice to have rebuke as another way to recover mana but it just isn’t there yet.
Ring of Shields - I don’t like this skill. I couldn’t find a single time I would want this skill over any of the other defensive or utility skills. The projectile block is novel, but rebuke does defense better. As a damage based utility forgestrike does more damage and gives stronger modifiers. Maybe this is just a build issue since I didn’t use a shield for any of my testing, but this skill just didn’t feel like it did enough of anything to use it over another skill.
Manifest Armour - This minion was very good when built for hit damage. Building him for Damage over time or hybrid gave less than desired results. The Blast Forge cluster is confusing. The tree is 99% melee and then there is this off shoot node that wants spell scaling. Forge Guard has nothing that support spells or spell casting minions. It is no surprise that when speccing into this node it performed poorly. The skill itself looks cool but I would rather see it converted to melee or axed from the tree.
Forge Strike- Both the hit damage and utility build options of the forge strike tree are very good. The minion portion is not so good. The clear speed of 20-30 swords is on par with other hit builds but winds up suffering much more in single target. Meanwhile on hit variations of the skill produce far more single target. This leaves a section of the tree that doesn’t really excel at anything, while also doing worse in other areas.
The skill really needs a node dedicated to producing more swords on a single target. It would also be nice if the forged weapons themselves expanded upon the different weapon types giving different modifiers like the current great axe node. Right now they are mostly just swords that hit things and it is a little boring.
The shrapnel node looks like a start at giving the minion section a little more flavor, but its scaling is all out of wack. I have 200% increased in all minion damage types, 300% minion melee damage , 300% in minion damage over time (display error currently shows less and may actually be giving less than intended), and 35% minion power yet shrapnel does 26 damage per explosion. Delving even further into utility nodes we look towards the Arcane Welding and Rewarding Craft.
I’ll start by saying these two nodes confuse me. Forge guard is currently designed as a Strength/Attunement or Strength / Dexterity class. Intelligence is a dead stat that scales nothing Forge Gard has access to. There is also 0 ward/ ward retention support in its gearing, skills, or passives. Its main defenses are comprised of blocking and armor. Even if it didn’t step on the toes of other classes that actually use ward and support it as one of their main defenses, I don’t think I could support it because of the reasons mentioned above. That being said I like the whole utility aura idea. It should just be more in line with class’s identity and strengths.
Well That’s about it. I know it seemed like I pointed out a lot of the negatives in the trees, but what works on current Forge Guard does work well. These are just some personal pain points I feel the overall class design could touch on to make the class more fun to play.
